Fake News

ilwrath said:
Simultaneously, both positions can be correct, though. There were problems with TLJ. No one has said otherwise. But that doesn't mean negative buzz wasn't also amplified by trolls. It's a long slow boil strategy. Amplify division to seed public dissent and destabilize the US. If you *DON'T* believe the Russians (and others) are doing that, you're nuts. And, in hindsight, they've been doing it a long time. Maybe a decade or more, now. They are just now starting to see the payoff of it.

The interesting part is there's nothing illegal about what they're doing, and not much can be done about it. At least not without some major 1st Amendment problems. Getting people to chill out and look at things rationally is basically impossible. Just look at these message boards. And we're a lot more civilized and enlightened than most. That's the damn scary thought.

Identifying that there IS an information war being waged is a useful step.
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I need proof. Do you have any idea how ridiculous this assumption is? That "Russian Bots" are the reason that people like me did not like TLJ? There are very large and very active anti-Disney Star Wars communities. The linked article provided zero proof. I have proof of anti-Disney Star Wars people.

The same so-called Russian bots responsible for voting for Trump? Come on man...
 
This ruins your theory IMO.


o0ouuw.jpg


Read the comments in reply. These aren't bots.

-Edit-
Some people take my disagreement as a slam, don't take it as such. I'm just speaking frank.
 
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ilwrath said:
If you *DON'T* believe the Russians (and others) are doing that, you're nuts. And, in hindsight, they've been doing it a long time. Maybe a decade or more, now. They are just now starting to see the payoff of it.
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Reports of Russian trolls are being amplified by Russian trolls.
 
FluffyMcDeath said:
Reports of Russian trolls are being amplified by Russian trolls.
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Heh. While that is a pretty good chuckle, and sounds almost par for the course... I'd urge you to check out the actual Ph.D. paper that all this was based on. It's linked to from the article, and is downloadable as a free PDF. You don't even have to register, even though it displays a registration page. It's got some pretty sound evidence that the maze of twitter hype farming definitely latched onto this topic.

Now Twitter is such a damn mess it's some speculation and educated guesses as to who is pulling which strings. There are certainly real people who are genuinely upset about the direction of their childhood favorite Star Wars. (No one is saying they aren't, red. Proving there are genuine people who hate this direction doesn't disprove the rest.)

But within Twitter, there are also US media groups hired to game Twitter into trending messages for major media corporations. (Same as the "Search Engine Optimization" groups do to Google. They have hundreds of accounts to bounce and echo messages around.) Pew Internet Report has an interesting piece on corporate owned twitter bots, and their impact on "news" cycles.

http://www.pewinternet.org/2018/04/09/bots-in-the-twittersphere-methodology/

Now, as far as I can tell, none of the bots involved with media corporations appeared to have a hand in any of this Star Wars stuff, though. There are nearly as many political bots out there as the corporate ones discussed above, though. These don't seem to follow a pattern of being owned by a US company or SEO group. And they game Twitter into trending all sorts of odd and seemingly meaningless nonsense topics. Including, in this case, Star Wars TLJ.

As we've gone over before, it really doesn't take much of a nudge to start something trending. Saying it is Russian is pure speculation. It could be Chinese, Iranian, Libyan, or even just a few bored American anarchists. Or, likely, some combination of all of the above. It's incredibly difficult to piece together who. But the why increasingly appears to be to spread dissent among the US population. That looks like the intended end game to this. The US has done this to other countries, it's not unlikely they're doing it back.
 
ilwrath said:
As we've gone over before, it really doesn't take much of a nudge to start something trending. Saying it is Russian is pure speculation. It could be Chinese, Iranian, Libyan, or even just a few bored American anarchists. Or, likely, some combination of all of the above. It's incredibly difficult to piece together who. But the why increasingly appears to be to spread dissent among the US population. That looks like the intended end game to this. The US has done this to other countries, it's not unlikely they're doing it back.
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I'm not saying they aren't putting a nudge in here and there but, as you point out, who isn't? The Russians may be stirring mud in to derail talking points. If you wanted to cause disruption you could throw in more extremist crazy voices - but that could also be a waste of time as extremist crazies are the ones that care enough to amplify themselves and outrage sells clicks. Twitter has been rumoured to be an attack vector in the creation of Maidan, unrest in Cuba and Syria. It could be. Other countries would doubtless find it a way of spreading their propaganda just as they did with radio (radio free europe for e.g.) so I don't doubt that various players have their hand in.

However, some of the players are interested in amplifying the importance of Russian bots too. That has to be viewed with circumspection also. Remember the Sony data leak that got played up as a North Korean hack to promote a movie? Stories get spun by those with interests so even if there is nothing there they will use the cover of there being something somewhere else.

Then there's the issue of whether the issue is important - like the DMC leak/hack. Did it really matter who leaked/hacked in light of the what? If there was a hostile data breach, that still doesn't count against what was leaked? Instead you have two separate issues.

I also recall now watching old videos on youtube that look like they were either community channel cable or private tapes passed around within groups that would talk about feminism as a Soviet plot to undermine America - and now we are hearing that anti-feminism is a Russian plot to undermine America and maybe both or neither of those things are right.

Personally, as far as the star wars goes, people have been complaining about it since forever. They hated what Lucas did to the originals when he "remastered" them, they hated the prequels, they hated Disney taking it over ... you're messing with something that was such a huge phenomenon (like Ghostbusters in a much smaller way) that defined a cultural moment for a lot of people at a stage in their lives when it stamped them very profoundly so there will naturaly be a fair number of people that are going to be bent out of shape.

Much more egregious and irksome is the self-righteous virtue-signalling strutting the writers and producers seem to do wherein they go out of their way to draw attention to how noble they are to be handing franchises over to the women and when you find that sort of foppery patronising (to fans and to women in general) and it makes the story so much less watchable. Hollywood loves to have a boogie man to hang that sort of rejection on (and imply further that if you don't like it you are an enemy of the state).

If Russia is involved in efforts to get Hollywood to make fewer preachy shitty reboots - can't we all get behind Putin on this?
 
FluffyMcDeath said:
Personally, as far as the star wars goes, people have been complaining about it since forever. They hated what Lucas did to the originals when he "remastered" them, they hated the prequels, they hated Disney taking it over ... you're messing with something that was such a huge phenomenon (like Ghostbusters in a much smaller way) that defined a cultural moment for a lot of people at a stage in their lives when it stamped them very profoundly so there will naturaly be a fair number of people that are going to be bent out of shape.

Much more egregious and irksome is the self-righteous virtue-signalling strutting the writers and producers seem to do wherein they go out of their way to draw attention to how noble they are to be handing franchises over to the women and when you find that sort of foppery patronising (to fans and to women in general) and it makes the story so much less watchable. Hollywood loves to have a boogie man to hang that sort of rejection on (and imply further that if you don't like it you are an enemy of the state).
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I find the idea that "Russian bots" had any large influence on anti-Star Wars sentiment to be one of the most ludicrous concepts imaginable. As you state people were getting upset with the direction of Star Wars before there was the technology for a "Russian Bot". The damn hadn't burst yet until The Last Jedi, when it didn't just crack but rather collapsed entirely. There aren't just individuals like me ranting how terrible it is, there are HUGE groups of people. There are organized movements of people. Some figureheads are selling shirts like "Soylo" and "The Fandom Menace" well in the thousands and possibly 10s of thousands. There are Youtube channels who do live streams of nothing but bashing Disney Star Wars and I've seen them literally make $10s of thousands of dollars per live stream in super chats, with many thousands of viewers from around the world per live stream. Russian bots don't do paid "super chats"

There were cracks in the dam before TLJ with all the virtue signalling and SJW pandering. That scared a lot of fans, and TLJ itself was a disaster on every level. From Youtube voting ever since you can see anything Star Wars related since TLJ has seen massive down-vote ratio-ing between 80 and 92 percent down. I remember articles claiming that negative sentiment towards the Solo movie was "Russian Bots", then Solo proved to be a historic bomb that cost Disney over $200M in losses. I don't think Russian bots killed off movie goers to keep Solo ticket sales down.

"Russian bots" are the new boogeyman. It is beyond ridiculous.
 
redrumloa said:
I find the idea that "Russian bots" had any large influence on anti-Star Wars sentiment to be one of the most ludicrous concepts imaginable.
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You're totally missing the point, though. That article is pure bunk. The research paper that someone wrote that piece of drivel article on, though... That research paper is interesting and well documented. Personally, I agree -- the Twitter bots had no influence on the movie or movie sentiment, whatsoever. Nothing in the research paper ever said they did.

The actual paper is about politicizing pop culture. The end game of which is using twitter to amplify deep seated opinions to seed dissent. Make both sides angrier and more entrenched. And, apparently, they did a good job of it.

"Russian bots" are the new boogeyman. It is beyond ridiculous.
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It's the other side of the fake media problem, though. The mainstream media is manipulated by known entities. The" grassroots" media is just as manipulated. Only through actors we don't know as well, yet. That's my problem with just dismissing it out of hand.

I'll throw you a quote from the conclusions since it seems painfully obvious you won't bother to read anything that challenges your viewpoint.

Yet, even considering the limitations of the data set, there are enough indications that pop culture debates on social media are being politicized, sometimes for strategic purposes that have nothing to do with the subject under debate. As the debate on misinformation, political communication and regulation of social media continues, researchers studying these matters may find it beneficial to turn their attention to pop culture and how political messaging is propagated in its fandoms.
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ilwrath said:
That research paper is interesting and well documented.
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I'm having trouble swallowing much of the paper so far but I've only got to page 8, but when it throws out words like "heteronormativity" as if hetero wasn't the norm, it seems to be casting a wide net to include woo. It also talks of fan toxicity as if the consumers of a product should be happy to consume whatever the producers chose to feed them with graciousness. When the games industry decided to denigrate the game buyers they were like kings complaining that their subjects were a bunch of savages for not appreciating their glorious majesty.

The mention of work indicating that messing with things people care about can mess with their own sense of identity and place in society is somewhat interesting and makes sense according to the intuitive ideas I hold about this myself but again puts the blame on an entertainment industry full of ideologues cramming their morality down everyone else's throat and who cares who gets unmoored by it, we'll just attack them if they don't like it.

Anyway - I'm into the methodology now. Still a long way to go.
 
FluffyMcDeath said:
I'm having trouble swallowing much of the paper so far but I've only got to page 8, but when it throws out words like "heteronormativity" as if hetero wasn't the norm
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Right, it is still in the Hollywood/Academia echo chamber.
 
ilwrath said:
I'd urge you to check out the actual Ph.D. paper that all this was based on. It's linked to from the article, and is downloadable as a free PDF.
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Hmm. Well, I've managed to get through it. It seems like a pretty ... garbagey paper IMO. It's got lots of citations sprinkled through it from names I'm not familiar with but the citations are mostly backing up what look like fairly lightweight assertions. I disagree with the definitions of troll and sock account - and the phrase Russain troll or Russian bot seems to get used a lot where "presumed" should precede it.

Also, when you see something like this:

On July 11, @MarcoSo94862885 tweeted: “So, now explain why Mark Hamil didn't like Luje in TLJ?”. The simplicity and brevity of the language, as well as the fact that this purported Star Wars fan doesn’t spell “Hamill” or “Luke” correctly, are all indicators that raises suspicions.

with j next to k on the keyboard? This is suggestive?

The characteristics of what makes an account a troll or a bot or a sock (and Russian) seem somewhat weak too. And the fact that more men than women shouted at Rian is unsurprising because more men than women shout about anything online.
 
FluffyMcDeath said:
Hmm. Well, I've managed to get through it. It seems like a pretty ... garbagey paper IMO. It's got lots of citations sprinkled through it from names I'm not familiar with but the citations are mostly backing up what look like fairly lightweight assertions. I disagree with the definitions of troll and sock account - and the phrase Russain troll or Russian bot seems to get used a lot where "presumed" should precede it.
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Agreed on "presumed" certainly. I thought the citations were fairly strong, though.

Also, when you see something like this:

On July 11, @MarcoSo94862885 tweeted: “So, now explain why Mark Hamil didn't like Luje in TLJ?”. The simplicity and brevity of the language, as well as the fact that this purported Star Wars fan doesn’t spell “Hamill” or “Luke” correctly, are all indicators that raises suspicions.

with j next to k on the keyboard? This is suggestive?
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I should have known you'd key in on that. I did too. Hamil is a totally believable mistake. But even poor typists glance at their screen and would see and fix "Luje". A j looks nothing like a k, even at a half glance, you'd see and fix it. It feels like an artificially introduced typo. That would be the argument for it being a suspicious typo. But I agree with you that it is a flimsy guess, at best. And when you consider that perhaps someone was on a crappy old a phone and the OSK covers so much of the text that it scrolled away before they glanced at it....? Extremely flimsy. But that is one small bot consideration among many documented. IMHO, a poor example, and a waste of a couple paragraphs, though. (Although fraudulent car ads on Craigslist also sometimes exhibit similar patterns of odd typos.)

I notice, in absence of mention, your failure to address that those accounts were also identified by Botometer, had names changed multiple times, had been reset on similar or same dates multiple times, etc. Those arguments are much stronger than a really odd typo.

The characteristics of what makes an account a troll or a bot or a sock (and Russian) seem somewhat weak too.
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The characteristics that make it Russian are very weak. But as mentioned, the identifying which accounts are bots is pretty strong. And the argument that a lot of bots jumped in the fray on this one is quite well documented. And that is really the meat of it, right? There are a large number of unaccounted for bots out there, and they're jumping into places you wouldn't expect to see them. Particularly poking politics into culture arguments.

If not to seed dissent, what else could anyone possibly gain from all the hassle of setting this up?

I don't see a way that there is any legal profit in it... You could maybe try to use it for blackmail? Pay us off or your brand will have a culture war on it's hands? But that seems really abstract... Just for the joy of being loud on the internet? Possibly, but who cares about it that much? What else adds up?
 
ilwrath said:
But even poor typists glance at their screen and would see and fix "Luje". A j looks nothing like a k, even at a half glance, you'd see and fix it.
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Could be a deliberate mistake, could be a mistake. I find that the shorter my tweets the more certain I am that I typed them right, and the more mistakes I post. That's more on mobile than on desktop I find for some reason.

I notice, in absence of mention, your failure to address that those accounts were also identified by Botometer, had names changed multiple times, had been reset on similar or same dates multiple times, etc. Those arguments are much stronger than a really odd typo.
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Identifying bots may be effective but the bot count is low and most bots are that I see are pretty simple link and tweet retweeters. Any nerd who hates the new star wars could create a bot to annoy Rian. Sock accounts are people, trolls are people and star wars is a nerd space. All of the other nerd spaces have been attacked by SJWs (and maybe SJWs are really Russian accounts) but nerds have been socking and trolling for ever so their presence in this subject matter doesn't surprise me.

I don't see a way that there is any legal profit in it... You could maybe try to use it for blackmail? Pay us off or your brand will have a culture war on it's hands? But that seems really abstract... Just for the joy of being loud on the internet? Possibly, but who cares about it that much? What else adds up?
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Who cares enough to invest a couple of minutes creating a fake account and shooting off a few obnoxious tweets? Who would make a throw away account just to vent? I suspect that would be millions of people.Heck, they'll vent on their own accounts then have to delete tweets. Actually determining which accounts are humans being angry and creating fake accounts and socks to yell through and humans who are calculating and doing exactly the same ... and determining national objectives? What about all those nerds who have formed casual associations in fora and chats to "get" someone for some reason or other or "punish China" or all the other non-national loose organisations?

The times when you get a finger print that leads you to an identifiable source are instructive but thinking that the majority of negative comments are Russian just leads to increased paranoia and accusation and more social destabilisation. It's not that people don't do these sorts of attacks - we know they do - and that article is from 2011, mentions specifically that the user agents are made to look as much like normal users as possible and presumably foreign actors will be as sophisticated now so maybe the intelligence actors are the ones that DON'T show up as obviously bots/socks/trolls which are more likely to be run by angsty script-kiddies.

Obviously I don't really know, but the paper didn't really convince that it does either.
 
I'm reading this paper at the moment - about the discovery of a large Star Wars twitter bot net back at the start of 2017.

As to whether anyone is working to fracture the nation along gender and ideological lines you couldn't do better than the current Democrat strategy to derail a Supreme Court appointment. BLM has balkanised the police brutality debate so that what was a movement against police violence in general just a few years ago has been split into a race issue. Intersectionality is a great way of splitting people into warring tribes and and post-modernism is a great way of undermining reason and the resultant reliance on emotion is a great way to move mobs. If this is a foreign power doing this it also benefits the ruling classes. I think it's actually a locally grown phenomenon which looks similar to what the CIA has done in the past but now they are just working on their own population to gain further power - and blaming the Russians for it is convenient cover and convenient propaganda at the same time.
 
Could go in a few other threads too.

Elle Magazine Apologizes for Fake News Tweet About Kanye: ‘We Made a Bad Joke’

Elle apologized for spreading literal fake news about Kanye West and his wife Kim Kardashian West in a now-deleted tweet Thursday.

“We made a bad joke. Our passion for voter registration clouded our judgement and we are sincerely sorry,” Elle’s official Twitter account wrote Thursday.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1053035651245969413

This apology comes after Elle sent a tweet that spread fake news about Kanye West and Kim Kardashian West in an attempt to direct people to a voter registration site.

“Kim Kardashian and Kanye West are splitting up,” the tweet read, directing readers to a link to a site for the group “When We All Vote.”

The tweet was deleted Friday.

Screen-Shot-2018-10-19-at-12.04.39-PM-300x269.png


“So far in the primaries, women have beat long-time incumbents and created historic races, all while redefining what it looks like to be a woman in politics,” the site reads in part. “And now you have the opportunity to vote for them, or whomever you choose, in the midterm elections. No matter your party or your state, it’s more essential than ever to make your voice heard. Take a few minutes to complete the form below, and be sure to cast your vote on Nov. 6.”
 
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Silverman, who claims to be a rabid feminist, recently got herself in trouble — even with her left-wing fans — when she admitted that she gave disgraced comedian Louis C.K. “permission” to masturbate in front of her. The one-time stand-up powerhouse lost his status as America’s top comic after it was revealed that he had harassed a number of female comedians over the years and had an admitted history of lewd behavior in front of women.
 
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