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Re:The Vietnamese military has an actual troll army and Face... by somenameforme on Monday May 08, 2023 @12:49PM (#35863883)
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...

Re:The Vietnamese military has an actual troll army and Face... by 2OEH8eoCRo0 on Monday May 08, 2023 @02:22PM (#35865169)
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.
Re:The Vietnamese military has an actual troll army and Face... by tormeh on Monday May 08, 2023 @11:06PM (#35869753)
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?
Re:The Vietnamese military has an actual troll army and Face... by somenameforme on Tuesday May 09, 2023 @12:50AM (#35870279)
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...