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.