Russia is known to have loads of trolls on the government payroll. I am under the impression that western governments don't do this but who knows...

The US has the 4th and 8th Psychological Operations Groups stationed at Ft. Bragg, and that’s just what’s acknowledged publicly.

Slides from the Snowden leaks described ways of disrupting online communities. So The US and its allies has possible done it for decades.

https://theintercept.com/2014/02/24/jtrig-manipulation/

this kind of stuff is OLD. much older that you think... it's been getting more and more sophisticated since (at least) the romans, and surely in medieval times.

they only different thing is now it happens online, hence it's all much closer to 'real time' unlike the historical versions

The U.S. and the U.K., through their collective media empires, AKA Operation Mockingbird, control the most influential PSYOP armies in the world.

Also, there are PR companies. They have their trolls and bots as well.

Yes, such as Black Cube

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Cube

From my experiences on Twitter with various anonymous accounts parroting the state department line, and US military doctrine for total domination of the battle space, I am absolutely sure they are doing this either via a contractor, ally, or inside cyber command or DIA etc. The 2012 NDAA removed the ban on US domestic influence operations.

> I am absolutely sure they are doing this either via a contractor, ally, or inside cyber command or DIA etc

Or they use AI. Would be very easy actually.

It's not a good look for us to be promoting international adoption of the internet while being caught using it to commit subterfuge abroad.

I've never heard of any such domestic department myself. Like the rest of our intelligence work, I assume we outsource that job to the Israelis.

You can see exactly who is performing the work based on defense contractor job postings matching sock puppet programs.

Spoiler: a lot of agencies have a program need for this type of thing

Can you elaborate? That's so interesting.

Last month, The DOJ filed charges against 44 members of the Chinese MPS troll army.

My poor sweet summer child...

Feinted. This sort of naivety requires effort

The British government does this through the JTRIG unit of GCHQ:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Threat_Research_Intellig...

Of course they do. On one hand Twitter was known to have FBI and CIA working inside them.

But here's Israel explaining[0] their troll army operations explicitly (see former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett directing the organization at 3:28 in video)

https://youtu.be/4xl30Re1EUI?t=208

Why wouldn't any powerful state do this? It is effective, and other countries do it so you can't abandon that "battlefield".

> On one hand Twitter was known to have FBI and CIA working inside them.

{{By whom}}

An ex-employee of the FBI or the CIA isn't the FBI or the CIA. Are you still working for your previous employer?

"Dozens of former national security officials have gone to work for Facebook and Twitter after leaving government service, raising concerns about the influence of their onetime agencies over the social media giants. [0]

At Twitter alone, at least eight former FBI agents work at the company’s so-called “trust” and “security” divisions — including its product policy manager Greg Anderson, who previously worked on “psychological operations” at the National Security Council, The Post has learned. Another is Matthew Williams, the company’s co-lead of its Trust and Safety department who spent more that 15 years in intelligence with the agency.

The discovery of the DC-to-Silicon Valley pipeline comes amid an outcry over revelations that the FBI influenced Twitter to suppress The Post’s account over its reporting on Hunter Biden’s overseas business interests in October 2020 and has regularly demanded specific accounts and tweets be banned.

Multiple releases of internal company documents since Dec. 2 show Twitter developed a close working relationship with the intelligence community, which frequently leaned on them to censor political speech."

Meta’s top policy manager for “misinformation,” Aaron Berman, is a former CIA senior analytics manager.

The migration from the intelligence services is particularly pronounced at Facebook’s parent company, Meta, where at least nine former CIA agents and six former intelligence employees at other federal agencies are or have been employed.

Jim Hanson, president of information warfare analysis and consulting firm WorldStrat, told The Post Meta took a particular interest in bringing G-men and woman on board after the 2016 presidential election.

Meta’s top policy manager for “misinformation,” Aaron Berman, is a former CIA senior analytics manager who spent 15 years with “The Company” — even writing the president’s daily briefings.

Others include Scott Stern, Meta’s senior manager for trust and safety risk intelligence, who spent more than seven years with the FBI leading “high-stakes operational determinations for complex and ambiguous overseas counterterrorism operations,” according to his LinkedIn page.

Stern joined Meta in January 2020 to help develop algorithms to combat “misinformation,” as well as more traditional FBI bailiwicks like child safety and counterterrorism."

[0] https://nypost.com/2022/12/22/facebook-twitter-stocked-with-...

"Zuckerberg tells Rogan FBI warning prompted Biden laptop story censorship" [1]

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-62688532

Maybe it's cognitive dissonance. Maybe it's simply that you support what they are doing, who they are censoring, the propaganda they promote, or you feel this deep-state apparatus is aligned with your interests and your worldview, but it's very obvious what this is.

I'm going to assume you're an intelligent person, just being disingenuous. They explicitly admit they are in these positions to counter "misinformation".

How can I assume you're intelligent if you've completely ignored that they are no longer employed by the CIA or the FBI? Once again, do you still perform work for your former employer?

These people were hired by Twitter and Facebook because of skills obtained from their previous education and employment. Twitter and Facebook aren't going to pay them to work for the FBI or the CIA any more than your current employer will pay you to work for your previous employer.

Being overrun with misinformation hurts their profits. They hire people who are familiar with state-sponsored misinformation programs in order to design mitigations. Simple as that.

One might consider that the FBI and CIA are the kind of organizations to have people on their payroll who are actually told to go to Facebook and lie to a hiring manager, saying, "I used to work for the CIA." Whose record is it that the person no longer works for the CIA? Only if I blindly trust the word of an organization which is opaque by design do I believe it to be as simple as you profess.

To believe that, you must believe that the people who hired them at Facebook and Twitter are stupid. When these people are told to work for drug dealers or terrorists, they don't put the CIA or the FBI on their resume. Here, their former employment is out in the open. If they really wanted to get away with doing work for their former employer at their new employer, they wouldn't put their former employer on their resume.

You think feds & spies openly advertise their allegiances on LinkedIn or something?

>if you've completely ignored that they are no longer employed by the CIA

Once a nazi, always a nazi. Same with CIA.

We absolutely do. This is literally what psychological operations [1] are. In the US each branch of the military even has their own distinct psyop divisions with mottos like "Never Seen, Always Heard." Here's [2] a recruitment video from the Army's 4th Psyop Group [3], entitled "Ghosts in the Machine." It's really well done and, more importantly, not at all subtle about what they do.

And now add LLMs into the picture.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_operations_(Unit...

[2] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VA4e0NqyYMw

[3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4th_Psychological_Operations_G...

I see a slick and effective recruitment video. You're going to have to provide more evidence, the scope of these supposed operations, and what limits there are. The requirement for evidence isn't waived by the difficulty of gathering such evidence.

Yes, but are they actually forum trolls of the kind Russia employs? Do American soldiers have keyword alerts on Twitter and crowd out certain topics with inane bullshit?

Yip. 'Psychological Operations' makes it all sounds sophisticated and high brow, but in the end it's all just poo peddling parades. Recently there were a bunch of news stories about some US psyops accounts that were "discovered" and removed from Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and then publicly analyzed. You can find that analysis here. [1] Here's a random media report on the accounts being removed. [2]

The report is very readable, entertaining, and includes pics of the memes, posts, and other things. It also provides some degree of insight into the messaging that the US military psyops teams believe are most effective on an array of topics, including Ukraine. In general though it also really emphasizes the hamfisted nature of propaganda and psyops.

The accounts averaged 2051 tweets per account, with an average of 0.49 likes, and 0.02 retweets. 19% had more than 1,000 followers. The accounts, regardless of where they were feigning to be from, primarily posted from 1200-1800GMT, or 8am-2pm EDT. They also tended to share US propaganda that was translated word-for-word into foreign languages. There were also amusing tells with things like the scripts they were using. The majority of posts were made within the first second of a new minute.

All those accounts also went into overdrive on March 2022.

[1] - https://stacks.stanford.edu/file/druid:nj914nx9540/unheard-v...

[2] - https://www.theverge.com/2022/8/25/23322214/us-government-pr...

> I am under the impression that western governments don't do this

A testament to their staggering effectiveness.

This is a very good point.

It's a crap argument. We have evidence that certain states -- China, Russia, Israel, Vietnamn, etc. -- employs state-sponsored troll groups. We don't have evidence that most countries use such strategies. It's like claiming that Japan has the worst ninjas since good ninjas don't expose themselves and we haven't heard anything about other countries' ninjas.

you literally just scrolled past several comments with evidence to make this reply. not to mention how naive one's priors must be to think no western actors engage in these activities, given everything else we know about the US espionage apparatus and foreign propaganda efforts

Watch out for correlation versus causation though.

If you employ hundreds of forum trolls at minimum wage it tends to get out eventually. Of course the US does psyops. It’s the trolling part that’s the question.

You put words in my mouth by changing the quantifier from "western governments" to "no western actors". And yes we do know a lot about how the US conducts espionage, yet we don't have evidence of state-backed troll armies.

>We don't have evidence

>we haven't heard anything

Who is "we"?

>Forced teaming: establishes premature trust by association. Examples: "We're some team." and "How are we going to handle this?"

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/forced_teaming

https://archive.is/zWnZf

> It's a crap argument. We have evidence that certain states -- China, Russia, Israel, Vietnamn, etc. -- employs state-sponsored troll groups.

Whether they do it is orthogonal to the particular point in this subthread: "I am under the impression that western governments don't do this."

> We have evidence that certain states -- China, Russia, Israel, Vietnamn, etc. -- employs state-sponsored troll groups.

We seem to have knowledge that it occurs more than zero. What we do not have is evidence for most of the specific claims in the media, which tend to provide either zero evidence, or link to the "wild card" single case where Russia "was" caught engaging in it.

> We don't have evidence that most countries use such strategies.

You are describing your opinion about what evidence "we" have.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-phrase-no-evidence...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proving_a_negative

> It's like claiming that Japan has the worst ninjas since good ninjas don't expose themselves and we haven't heard anything about other countries' ninjas.

In what way do you believe that it is like this?

For example, it is also like having ham and cheese sandwiches for brunch, in that it involves human beings.

>I am under the impression that western governments don't do this but who knows...

Is this sarcasm?

We know the US absolutely does, and targets USAmericans as well.

https://foreignpolicy.com/2013/07/14/u-s-repeals-propaganda-...

https://northwesternlawreview.org/issues/apple-pie-propagand...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smith%E2%80%93Mundt_Act

The US undoubtedly engages in widespread propaganda, but I think they use more "open" methods. They won't clandestinely pretend to be your local neighbor on a Facebook group, but they will gladly plaster enticing high production quality recruitment ads on every surface and openly foot the bill for the American tanks and fighter jets in the next action movie.

The funny thing about propaganda is that it is still largely effective even when openly disclosed as such. The human brain is a sucker.

I think the main vehicle is closeness to journalists, who get certain benefits regarding their profession and who are groomed to report in a certain way.

You could really see it working before the Iraq war in the US. It was unpopular until media really hammered it in with weapons of mass destruction and the allegedly imminent danger.

Not exclusive to the US, but western countries tend to keep key figures in the media very close aside from the more naive reporters.

>They won't clandestinely pretend to be your local neighbor on a Facebook group

Of course they will, and do. They do both. And it's not "pretending" — your neighbor could very well be one, and truly believe in The Cause.

Yeah, I wonder what conversations of society would have looked like in an alternative universe without any distractors. I would assume a lot different.

I once read is that if an activist movement rises they prop a flawed individual, find as much as info as they can, and at an opportune moment they ‘out’ the leader.

Apparently this happened with the Occupy movement.

The occupy movement had a leader?

I have been trying to get a hold of the article, and since it’s been a while, I hope I am right. That said, I do think the principle is not weird or outrageous for nation stations.

Probably several well-funded ones. We just never got to know them. That whole event wasn't even remotely spontaneous.

Thing is, a leader needs followers. But if the very existence of a leader is secret, as well as his identity, doesn't that make it rather hard for the sheep to know who to follow?

>Apparently this happened with the Occupy movement.

So who ended up being propped up? Who became the leader? I cannot find any solid information about your claim, but I did find lots of vague essays mostly from right-wing blogs/outrage outlets.

> it would shock me if Vietnam was a leader in this space

Don't be too shocked. Vietnam is little China in the region. People are still ok with it because Vietnam has been seeing tremendous growth in the last couple of decades… sounds familiar? Lots of tech companies are also setting up shop there… it's a 100% dejavu. I just hope it won't suffer the same fate in 20 years.

My general model on the world: when the system is the same, but with different humans, you get the same results.

That's UGLY bags of mostly water to you!

>average commenters

Average commenters hasn't been worth the effort, at least pre chatgpt.

Everytime one of these foreign (non English country) programs gets revealed, the underlying pattern is concentrated effort coordinated against visible voices on public platforms with high dissemination potential (not HN). There's a reason they're spamming reporting to silence instead of just drown out with counter content is because it takes a lot of effort, disproportionate amount, to disrupt even one voice. Especially by non English speaking countries where English fluency is much better allocated and rewarded for other sectors. Up until now, coordinated groups are limited / busy with a few dozen/hundred state enemies, not yhour average commenter, and even then they don't have time/energy/resources to "particpate" in discussions. Even PRC, with all their resources, coordiated campaigns was mostly limited to twitter size responses, most of the time splamming pro PRC platitudes instead of engaging in topic, because ROI of genuinely exchanging paragraphs of discussion with some nobody on HN or reddit is terrible.

Of course this is pre LLM.

Nightmarish

It's quite wide spread. There were reports about Israel doing it, Russia doing it and now Vietnam. I'm sure it's done by many many more.

In Turkey Erdoğan's presidential communications office has budget of 100 million dollars and 30 story building. He has also 11 million registered members and the word on the street is that they are granting jobs based on social media trolling performance and pay for tweets. When Musk announced the Twitter Blue subscription, Erdogan said he will ask him for discount and regional pricing.

You think you can catch trolls by IP or geolocation? Nope, those people work from home or wherever they are. You think you can catch them by requiring government ID or payment? Nope, they have the budget and they are real people.

The content created by these people is nor organic but it's not a bot generated crap too. They do utilise bots to manipulate trending topics but the wast majority is real people following orders.

Maybe large scale monitoring over trends can be helpful to identify inorganic campaigns nut the lines are very blurry. After all, arguably, marching behind a leader with agenda is an organic behaviour.

Humans are simply not equipped with defense mechanisms for the era of mass communications. Tiny issues can be easily amplified to push an agenda. If you look at the social media you would think that half of the youngsters are trans, the other are fascists or something.

It gets unhealthier and unhealthier as the in person relationships are breaking down, people start living in imaginary worlds where the life is about culture wars.

Techies like to imagine that they are going to "defeat the government with tech" but they are wrong, the governments can have the tech because they have the money and the power to design the landscape. For example, here is the Turkish interior minister boosting to a Youtuber about this special app which has total overview of the social media and takes a photo of him to run face recognition in seconds: https://twitter.com/Darkwebhaber/status/1655561171900964865?

>Techies like to imagine that they are going to "defeat the government with tech" but they are wrong, the governments can have the tech because they have the money and the power to design the landscape.

IMO some of the most effective government propaganda is stuff that portrays government as inherently bumbling and clueless, unable to engage in effective repression due to sheer incompetence, and effortlessly bested by scrappy kids/activists/etc.

>It's quite wide spread. There were reports about Israel doing it, Russia doing it and now Vietnam.

And of course leaving out USA doesn't make you a shill, right?

You got me, I usually write comprehensive lists when giving examples but this time I was paid to leave out the USA.

It's a very lucrative business, I can write hundreds of lists a day and for each list I'm getting paid by the governments who would like to stay out of my lists.

It is not cost effective or politically savy at least in the US Region to employ hordes of wumaos, but it could be done through bots or media campaigns, in what we call now the "culture war"

The culture war was always there, you just see it now because your media can no longer be censored by capital like they used to.