• Hot Saucerman@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    a coordinated attack from state sponsored troll farms seeking, among other things, to destabilise Western democracies

    If you don’t think state sponsored troll farms exist in the “West,” I’ve got a bridge to sell you.


    From 2011: US government working on Persona Management “sock puppet” software to flood forums with pro-US talking points

    https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-operation-social-networks


    From 2013: US ally Israel pays Israeli college students to defend Israeli government online

    https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2013/08/14/israel-students-social-media/2651715/


    From 2014: Reddit lists Eglin Air Force base as the most “Reddit Addicted City”

    https://old.reddit.com/r/Blackout2015/comments/4ylml3/reddit_has_removed_their_blog_post_identifying/


    From 2014: Research done at Eglin Air Force Base in 2014 about influence of opinions through “a decentralized potential field-based influence algorithm is developed in this work to ensure that all individuals’ states achieve consensus asymptotically to a desired convex hull spanned by the stationary leaders’ states, while maintaining consistent influence between individuals (i.e., network connectivity).”

    https://arxiv.org/pdf/1402.5644.pdf


    From 2018: Facebook works with Cambridge Analytica to undermine US elections

    https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/04/us/politics/cambridge-analytica-scandal-fallout.html


    Can we stop acting like we’re the fucking good guys in this? It’s absolutely fair that there are Russian troll-farms pushing disinformation, but to act like there are only Russian troll farms and they only exist to destabilize western democracies is a fucking joke.

    Last I checked, there are plenty of US conservatives and rich people who want to dismantle democracy and these people own fucking news organizations, we don’t even need to go to Russian troll farms for that horseshit. It’s fucking home-grown. (I mean Musk and Murdoch weren’t even born in America and these two dipshits control some of the biggest names in US media I can think of, and both of these motherfuckers hate democracy. Reddit’s Steve Huffman literally looks up to Musk. Facebook is MAGA central because of Mark Zuckerberg.)

    So let’s stop acting like the phone call isn’t coming from inside the house. When the state-actors show up, it’s gonna be all of them not just some of them.

    • Serinus@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      The US government as a whole, comparatively, are the good guys in this. The US government is pretty cautious and tends to shy away from spreading propaganda to its own people.

      There are a lot of caveats there, absolutely. I’ll get into some of those. But let’s not pretend the US government is on par with the Russian or Chinese governments when it comes to social media propaganda.

      The GOP being in bed with the Russians and collaboratively pushing narratives is not being done on behalf of the government. And I doubt whatever is happening at Elgin is targeting Americans.