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Disinformation campaign |
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NewbSaibot United States. Jul 14 2014 17:51. Posts 4943 | | |
You are probably well aware of politicians to outright PR firms who specialize in "disinformation campaigns" to help push a certain agenda. But how often did you think regular Joe Nobody engages in this activity? Some people suspect a lot of "Joe Nobody's" are really plants by the aforementioned groups meant to blend in with the general public, but all too often such suspects have extensive online histories on a given forum that it's hard to imagine they suddenly converted to the dark side.
Today I was arguing with someone about the efficacy of EV cars and started to notice a trend in their posts. What I observed was a certain speech pattern, i.e. they went from speaking in a very casual forum sense to extremely well written grammatically punctuated responses. I got suspicious that someone else was doing the writing and did some string searches for their responses, and came up mostly empty handed. So then I decided to do a more broad keyword search and after clicking through a few links I hit jackpot. I positively identified the source of their statements coming from another author discussing the same topic. The disgusting part was that the user I was dealing with had made obvious efforts to manipulate the wording so his plagiarism would be obscured, but it was all there.
Besides manipulating the sentence structure ever so slightly to avoid detection, they also manipulated the context of everything by sourcing their information from sites that actually conflicted with their own point of view! For instance, this certain poser used an article that was actually supportive of EV's but cherry picked some of the short-comings they mentioned to paint an overall picture of why EV's are so bad. It would be like if I tried to convince you that sunlight is entirely bad for your health because it contains gamma rays. I'm failing to mention the benefits of sunlight and thus leaving you with the impression that it is all bad. I finally caught what was bugging me so much about this user; they were completely full of shit, and so heavily invested in such that they would do anything to misrepresent the facts to fulfill their agenda. They were on their own little personal disinformation campaign volunteering information nobody was even arguing about.
I'm still bugged by this because I cant imagine why someone would do it. It also bugs me because the efforts were so subtle that I'm sure this person poses for a normal every day walking guy in real life, which means he blends in with the public, which means his words can do damage because people will not have an immediate distrust for him. Why should they afterall? What does he have to gain? It's sick, when people volunteer themselves for evil for no purpose whatsoever. I guess he feels he has some kind of vested interest to "do his part" to sway history.
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mnj United States. Jul 14 2014 23:22. Posts 3848 | | |
u realize me and you could google "cars" and we'd be shown 2 different page results right? |
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Gnarly United States. Jul 15 2014 00:06. Posts 1723 | | |
you realize when you google "white american couple" you get only blacks? |
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Santafairy Korea (South). Jul 15 2014 03:19. Posts 2225 | | |
| | On July 14 2014 22:22 mnj wrote:
u realize me and you could google "cars" and we'd be shown 2 different page results right? |
what does that have to do with astroturfing |
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| It seems to be not very profitable in the long run to play those kind of hands. - Gus Hansen | |
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goose58 United States. Jul 16 2014 10:27. Posts 871 | | | |
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