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Government Trolls Are Using "Psychology-Based Influence Techniques" On YouTube, Facebook And Twitter
Submitted by Michael Snyder via The End of The American Dream blog,
Have you ever come across someone on the Internet that you suspected was a paid government troll? Well, there is a very good chance that you were not imagining things. Thanks to Edward Snowden, we now have solid proof that paid government trolls are using “psychology-based influence techniques” on social media websites such as YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. Documents leaked by Snowden also reveal that government agents have been conducting denial-of-service attacks, flooding social media websites with thinly veiled propaganda and have been purposely attempting to warp public discourse online. If we do not stand up and object to this kind of Orwellian behavior, it is only going to get worse and worse.
In the UK, the Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group (JTRIG) is a specialized unit within the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ). If it wasn’t for Edward Snowden, we probably still would never have heard of them. This particular specialized unit is engaged in some very “questionable” online activities. The following is an excerpt from a recent piece by Glenn Greenwald and Andrew Fishman…
Though its existence was secret until last year, JTRIG quickly developed a distinctive profile in the public understanding, after documents from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed that the unit had engaged in “dirty tricks” like deploying sexual “honey traps” designed to discredit targets, launching denial-of-service attacks to shut down Internet chat rooms, pushing veiled propaganda onto social networks and generally warping discourse online.
We are told that JTRIG only uses these techniques to go after the “bad guys”.
But precisely who are the “bad guys”?
It turns out that their definition of who the “bad guys” are is quite broad. Here is more from Glenn Greenwald and Andrew Fishman…
JTRIG’s domestic and law enforcement operations are made clear. The report states that the controversial unit “currently collaborates with other agencies” including the Metropolitan police, Security Service (MI5), Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA), Border Agency, Revenue and Customs (HMRC), and National Public Order and Intelligence Unit (NPOIU). The document highlights that key JTRIG objectives include “providing intelligence for judicial outcomes”; monitoring “domestic extremist groups such as the English Defence League by conducting online HUMINT”; “denying, deterring or dissuading” criminals and “hacktivists”; and “deterring, disrupting or degrading online consumerism of stolen data or child porn.”
Particularly disturbing to me is the phrase “domestic extremist groups”. What does someone have to say or do to be considered an “extremist”? For example, the English Defence League is a non-violent street protest movement in the UK that is strongly against the spread of radical Islam and sharia law in the UK. So if they are “extremists”, how many millions upon millions of ordinary citizens in the United States would fit that definition?
When conducting operations against “extremists”, psychology-based influence techniques are among the tools that JTRIG uses to combat them online. The following comes from one of the documents that was posted by Greenwald and Fishman…
In other words, these government trolls try to mess with people’s minds.
And here is another document that was posted by Greenwald and Fishman that talks about how JTRIG uses YouTube, Facebook and Twitter to accomplish their goals…
It is very disturbing to think that some of the people that we may be interacting with on YouTube, Facebook and Twitter are actually paid government agents that are purposely trying to feed us propaganda and misinformation.
And of course this kind of thing does not just happen in the United Kingdom. In Canada, it has been publicly admitted that the government uses paid trolls to warp Internet discourse. The following comes from Natural News…
You’ve probably run into them before — those seemingly random antagonizers who always end up diverting the conversation in an online chat room or article comment section away from the issue at hand, and towards a much different agenda. Hot-button issues like illegal immigration, the two-party political system, the “war on terror” and even alternative medicine are among the most common targets of such attackers, known as internet “trolls” or “shills,” who in many cases are nothing more than paid lackeys hired by the federal government and other international organizations to sway and ultimately control public opinion.
Several years ago, Canada’s CTV News aired a short segment about how its own government had been exposed for hiring secret agents to monitor social media and track online conversations, as well as the activities of certain dissenting individuals. This report, which in obvious whitewashing language referred to such activities as the government simply “weighing in and correcting” allegedly false information posted online, basically admitted that the Canadian government had assumed the role of secret online police.
You can actually watch a video news report about what is happening up in Canada right here.
Needless to say, the U.S. government is also engaged in this kind of activity as well. For instance, the U.S. government has actually been caught manipulating discourse on Reddit and editing Wikipedia. When it comes to spying, there is nobody that is off limits for our spooks. It just came out recently that we even spied on three French presidents, and they are supposed to be our “friends”.
And just like the UK, the U.S. government has a very broad definition of “extremists”. This has especially been true since Barack Obama has been in the White House. If you doubt this, please see my previous article entitled “72 Types Of Americans That Are Considered ‘Potential Terrorists’ In Official Government Documents“.
All of this is very disturbing. Why can’t they just leave us alone and let us talk to one another? Why do they have to spy on everything that we do and purposely try to manipulate public discourse? Why do they have to be such control freaks?
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Not surprising, more Big Brother news.
For another snapshot of how corrupt the United States is, look at the story of the recent history of colchicine, a thousand year old gout medication. In 2010, the FDA granted URL Pharma three year exclusivity on the sale of its branded version of colchicines. URL Pharma’s majority owner since 1997 was Elliott Associates L.P., a hedge fund run by Paul Singer. The FDA based this exclusivity on a one week study URL did on 185 subjects in 2009, some of whom received a placebo. That study was a scam, as the FDA well knew. Once URL Pharma got its exclusivity based on smoke, mirrors and payoffs, it raised the cost of the colchicine from about a dime to $5.00. The FDA threatened legal action against the other generic makers of colchicines, forcing them to stop selling their low cost versions of the drug.
In 2012, Takeda Pharmaceuticals paid $800 million for URL Pharma, just to get control of its brand name of colchicines, Colcrys. Also in 2012, U.S. Senator Orrin Hatch received a campaign contributions of $38,750 from Elliott Management, the first time Paul Singer gave Hatch campaign money on the books. Singer made another contribution of the same amount for the 2014 election cycle, making him one of Hatch’s top 20 donors. Senator Hatch was co-sponsor of the Hatch-Waxman amendments that allowed the FDA to create the three year exclusivity program [racket] in 2006.
Having pocketed his massive profits on URL Pharma, thanks to buying off the government and Paul Singer went on his merry way, occasionally posting online his opinions on the world economic affairs at the Zero Hedge website. For Takeda, the outlook is not so rosy. West Ward, a former generic manufacturer of colchicine, is again selling its generic version of the drug. Takeda filed suit in the Federal Circuit last year to block the sale, as did Elliott Associates LP. The latest legal news: “The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit issued an order Jan. 9 [2015] that essentially allows West-Ward Pharmaceuticals Corp., an Eatontown, N.J.-based generic-drug manufacturer, to begin selling a new branded version of colchicine.”
So, thanks to the corrupt FDA, bought and paid for, a gout medication went up in price from a dime to $5 a pill, patients using the drug were price gouged, Paul Singer made hundreds of millions of dollars and Takeda Pharmaceuticals got taken to the cleaners.
This story can be entitled “The American Way.”
This is old news. They are using AI / chatterbots to disseminate their propaganda in mass now. It's a very sophisticated network of fake accounts and aliases, which spans the Internet and much of it is automated. For BS issues the bots think and act randomly, but for real issues they are given their orders to act in a certain way and speak the talking points verbatim. Of course, this is just a conspiracy theory which will be proven correct sooner or later.
You should never depend on the government.
Just thought I would throw that out there.
Heres a good rundown: http://www.thetruthseeker.co.uk/?p=64853
Don't douche-out on your own trolls. Teh government they ain't the only ones.
BOOOOOOOOOOOOOSSHHHH
There are many government trolls all over the internet. But what are they going to do? I'm certainly not losing sleep over it.
"providing intelligence for judicial outcomes"
So, compromising judges then...
dup
[got a little overexcited there]
Gov trolls surely present at ZH.
Tehy are the ones talking shit about Bitcoin and Satoshi the Great.
Bitcoin is an experiement prior to digital currency:
http://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/1r7iks/bitcoin_was_created_by_darpa_xpost_rbitcoin
You mean that idiot in Canada isn't getting paid?
Anyone who owns a gold - is an extremist.
Anyone who owns a gold and silver - it is a terrorist.
It is very disturbing to think that some of the people that we may be interacting with on YouTube, Facebook and Twitter are actually paid government agents that are purposely trying to feed us propaganda and misinformation.
What's really disturbing is that they're using our money to do it. We had a "volunteer" photographer in our tea Party group who was, I am almost certain, an FBI agent. At any such meeting, one in three of the major participants is a paid informant. Also paid with our money.
I thought I read Barry's pal Cass Sunstein admitted publicly he was in charge of the Brainwarsh/Propaganda Camaign?
He describes some of his techniques in his books.
The salient points of Cass Sunstein's "Cognitive Infiltration" program, described in a paper he wrote in 2008.
http://www.salon.com/2010/01/15/sunstein_2/
Michael Snyder shows up so often - who pays this guy's bills? Is Mr Michael Snyder is a lone voice in the wilderness trying to steer us away from danger? Or is he a tool of the globalists and on their payroll?
Ok I checked. I have wondered about him for a while. Snyder is most certainly a globalist mouthpiece douchecbag. He is Mr Collapse-O-Rama. One sided blamer seems to be his MO. His MO is to blame it on the west. The west that is turn being manipulated into doom by the bad guys (i.e. the west).
One day the world wil have had enough of the corruption and will turn to? The Wise East! Controlled and managed by the same globalist douchbags. Hey Mr Rothschild! Fancy meeting you here.
Michael Snyder - caveat douchebaglio emptor.
Nice trolling.
Pussy
Well, I remember all the good posters like you guys.....fuck all these trolls and assholes.
You know alll those stupid profile games on FB? The ones that ask you 10-20 questions and then profile some aspect of your personality? There are many examples, like "What decade fits you best?" or "What movie character are you?". My $$ says that these are not mere games, but Government-backed data mining exercises to seperate the trouble-makers from the sheeple.
And, of course, who knows what evil lurks on ZH?
And, of course, who what evil lurks on ZH?
that was my first thought..... there are a few obvious topic changers "off topic, but" and "I make billions sucking Dick, you can too" stand out, but I think most here are just people expressing their views....
So they've managed my perceptions, how about yours?
Whatever evil lurks on ZH, who fucking cares. It's the last place you speak your peice and why hide your identity? Is it worth living in the fucking shadows?
I always said, my idea of a social network for Liberty minded people, where you actually state who are, where you live and what you think. Our only chance (and we have very little) would be for enough people to use it that there realized their were outnumbered and back off. This shit is NOT going to unwind, we are clearly headed for complete tyranny, may as well pipe up while you can.
The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. Thomas Jefferson
From Patrick Henry's "Liberty or Death" speech;
Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!
http://libertyonline.hypermall.com/henry-liberty.html
The gov. ALWAYS uses fear tactics. They may even kill a few, now and then, to bully us. Death is their main bargaining chip.
Dont know if I ever told anyone here but Bob Dabolina gave me a phone number to call him once and it was the White House. He said he had seven different handles here at ZH too. They are all gone now.
I smell trolls in my sleep...
No need for conspiracy theories. The bastards openly advertised the contracts on the fed contracting site fbo.gov.
Meh...they can't even control the narrative about controlling the narrative.
It can deceive the weak minded or the weak willed.
We've been playing Whack-a-Mole with these Moles/Trolls for years now on ZH.
Of course "Social Engineering" is a two-edged sword. :-)
Politicians used to suggest debate clubs were the best way to sharpen your tongue. Forum raids, ZOG nutjobs and sockpuppet accounts will train an entire generation in critical thinking that would have made Churchill moist.
Takeda makes the new generation sleep drug Rozerm. It is overpriced junk. There is generic anti depressant drug that is far more effective for sleep and very safe and mild. .
And so is Quora !!
www.quora.com
"There is generic anti depressant drug that is far more effective for sleep and very safe and mild"
Yes, and it is called marijuana.
I've found that Melatonin knocks my ass out pretty quick. 200 tabs is pretty cheap. No prescription needed. And that drug your talking about is from the 60's...known as Valium.
There's a better one than that and it's free if you put it in your garden.
It's called Cannabis Sativa sub. Indica. Good for many other ailments as well as a superior relaxant.
Bad for Twinkies.
Ha, Ha, Ha!
Trolls in ZeroHedge?
Yes, there are many!
I am Brazilian, I know Argentines, Indians, Spaniards, Russians etc. just the way of writing.
Against us, people who see the Empire out, there's no call "troll".
Trolls are subtle like a pachyderm in that space or a monkey in china shop.
Anyone with half a brain who can comment here identifies trolls.
Kkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk!
Another thing:
Trolls walk on herd, five or six one supporting the other by entering "+" in stupid comments that do not relate to the text.
hehe.
Not necessarily Karaio.
Some have 5 or 6 different names and avatars, and just by using different e-mail accounts, can clone themselves into a virtual army of trolls.
You can identify them by sentence structure, syntax, and times of day they post, if not from the lockstep agreement of their political and social views.
Uno commentor. Bot (many) voters and agreers.
Edit: "commentor", really?
Commentator.
I'm just a little government bot,
paid with cash from a never ending pot,
I hope one day when I do grow, to see the blank faces I helped sow,
and help big pharma take all your dough!
disqus is 99.999999999% paid government trolls
Join me there and make it 99.999999998%
Make that 99.999999997%.
Easiest way to recognize a tool on disqus is to check their profile page. Most trolls keep their profile pages private.
Depends on the site which engages through disqus. I know conservatives call them out and put them in their place quickly on the sites I read.
Newsbusters(used to be CNS, I think) gets hit alot by govtrolls. So does Breitbart(yea the one who died after saying he had damaging info on the sock puppet). I'm really surprised it's still around. I'm guessing it's been taken over by 'them'.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Breitbart
i thought hope and change (we could believe in) would change all this...
No. That was propaganda from the Troll in Chief......
What they said: Hope and change
What they meant: Bend over and keep quiet. No lube.
The God Father of this program is Hasbara, thanks again for showing us the way to hate an manipulation.
To my dear government,
Why do you need to manipulate and spy on the very population you're supposed to SERVE? Your actions indicate that you're being criminal and tyrannical. To that I say FUCK YOU!
Fix your ways or be replaced.
Signed,
Every honest, awake, and patriotic American
We need to spy on everything you do to keep you safe. Everything you know about that we do is perfectly legal. We just had our secret court re-authorize our meta data collection program. And you wouldn't want that new data center in Utah to go to waste after we spent all your money on it, would you?
War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength.
Your loving government.
If they bother to pay attention (if) they laugh at you (and me).
No one is going to be replaced, just yet. They will keep on, keeping on.
To do it, we gotta roll up heavy...no one is willing to go there, just yet.
It's gotta include the niggers, and the crackers, and the fags, and the kikes, and the chinks, and the entitled babies, and the old fuckers, and the hos, and the trannies, and, well, just everybody.
We are so far off...
Hard day?
Channeling Samuel Jackson......
I thought if was the secretary from Ferris Bueller.
wrong MsCreant----its only gotta be 5% or so---more than enough to do the job--any more is over kill and just gums up the works--IMHO
Not necessarily, takes a lot of people in the background to put enough on the front lines. Logistics, strategy, planning and alternative planning...tertiary planning, holy fuck planning, finance, care and feeding...
It'll take a shitload people behind that 5%.
Sad thing is, Americans by and large are asleep, asleep to the manipulation these trolls actually do.
Americans need to learn the powers that be, above all else with to divide us.
So, these trolls (American, and zionist) go onto liberal web sites and call people who question immigration and "equal pay" amendments, racist or sexist. these these same trolls go onto conservative web sites and stoke the fires of hate, against Muslims, gays, and anyone who does not pull the party line.
They seem to have finally given up on this site and have Million Dollar Douchebag trolling somewhere else.
Not quite, MDB has been on here these last couple days, at his "Civic Spirited" best.
You've been here long enough to understand MDB's game. Haven't you? You do realize MDB writes satire, don't you? He shows his hand once in a while. Not a troll.
Dry dry dry comedian! He hits them out of the park like no other. And boy does he get the bites, a true master baiter.
I wondered if MDB was Tylers alter ego posting.
MDB is/was a parody troll. That's not what we're talking about. We're talking about sophisticated actors who desire to deceive, not entertain.
http://accredited-times.com/
yep... like James Cole or anyone with an avatar of a black guy holding a white baby
Ah yes, James Cole the paid Gov. troll
The cyber-psyops, chairborne rangers are having more fun with the push-button witch-hunts they orchestrate on FarceBook.
It would be funny if it started a trend on ZH of NOT dissing the jews, for fear of being labelled a gov troll.
^^^
Do not fuck with the Jews?
You are kidding?
For me all of them would be in Israel, not around the world.
Fucking everyone.
Damn diaspora, damn Hitler who left a living.
Kkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk!
Freedom of expression, be damned politically correct!
hehe.
Karaio,
Be careful! You will get kicked out like Francis Sawyer and Trav7777. In spite of you being a crazy Brazilian geologist dude, some of us enjoy your comments.
The CheesePopes... long live Francis !
Not only that, but I get the impression that he was saying it just to say it.
Sociopaths gravitate towards positions of power and influence.
Being financially compensated for such behavior is just an added bonus.
That's why a career in law enforcement or public office is so appealing for sociopaths. It's the perfect cover for their illness.
So very true! My limited government and military service brought me into contact with the very type you describe. Indeed, government service is like sugar to an ant for the type. The behavior that government promotes makes life for the Sociopath both easy and fun. I have seen supervisors and senior officers who are so evil it still makes my skin crawl.
my first contact with the sociopath personalities were hall moniters in the various schools I was sentenced to. Public and private schools alike promote the sociopath while repressing sanity.
We ought to do what the Spartans did to their public officials. After their term of office was up, they were automatically put on trial, no matter how good or bad of a job that the person did.
AND ZERO HEDGE!
Remember that damned Dr Paul Krugman?
:)
Anyone who followed anonymous' hack of hbgary knows how deep this rabbit hole goes, and how many governmental agencies are involved. It was pure twilight zone shit, and it got ZERO main stream media attention, of course. Simply disgusting.
Should be easy enough to find the chat room text they had with the owners of hbgary, as well as what the hacked e-mails revealed. George Orwell had nothing on our modern day real big brothers.
You tease.
Got links to anything good? Not that I doubt you at all. But a smoking gun you can show others is always a plus.
I actually commented on this very topic just yesterday.
Here's a couple HBGary Federal links:
http://www.computerworld.com/article/2470594/endpoint-security/army-of-f...
http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2011/02/28/hbgary-federals-aar...
http://www.wired.com/2011/02/anonymous-hacks-hbgary/
Note that there's email from the hack that proves HBGary was hacking in violation of federal law themselves, on behalf of the Feds, presumably.
Read the small print
Steven Harper is an ex-CSIS agent. CANADA could not survive without paid government trolls IMHO. And Steven Harper would not know how to govern if the government was not corrupt. The CIA would never have installed Harper if they did not have paid government trolls to prop his leadership up in bad times.
I have no doubt the Harper Regime is illegal and simply propped up by CSIS, 5 Eyes nations intel, and presstitutes. Elected in a democracy my ass. Watch him win this fall again, even with so many people seeing him for the jackass traitor to his country that he is.
Harper is going to the same place Prentice did.
Interesting. And now his Economic Action Plan is funneling money back into CSIS.
Pipeline construction and posting as multiple people on cbc.gov.ca is the economic plan I guess.
You may also be interested in the medication adherence scoring that's going on. 300 indexes that have nothing to do with taking your prescription medications are being used to predict for a year on what your "score" will be. This is total garbage and another way the pharmacy benefit managers make money, selling your puffed up scores.
http://ducknetweb.blogspot.com/2015/06/medication-adherence-predictions-enter.html
Keep in mind, health insurers use these bogus scores to help determine what you will pay for health insurance premiums. CMS is all into this bunk as well so be aware. It never stops. Pharma companies promote this as well so they can scream it's the patients not taking their medications to justify the hight costs of their drugs...
my doctor explained the scheme to me when i objected to being labled as a non compliant patient for refusing to take the drugs she prescribed for me. i managed to cure myself without drugs. i reduced my a1c from 7+ to less than 6, brought my blood pressure and cholesterol count back to normaland lowered my heart rate. she said she cannot remove the noncompliant designation from my chart because it only applies to my medication regime and technically i am noncompliant even though i am cured without drugs. the result is a constant threat from my insurance company to raise my rates if i remain noncompliant even though i have no need for drugs.
-1, you go to a doctor. -2, your doctor is a woman.
I have had really good experiences with lady doctors and would tend to recommend them over their male counterparts.
troll
LOL
Shut up you troll.
hehe
Makes the prostate exam more interesting, too!
I had a hot lady urologist fondle me. I even got to flirt it up, pervert that I am. Wouldn't trade that experience for a bespectacled cheesepope with lousy manners.
Government trolls. Do they have a government too? When do I get a government damn it.
the confederate flag op is the perfect example of the effectiveness of the special ops. the target is the bottom half of the class because nothing constructive to fix the usa can occur without their support. the funny thing about a con is you have to know when to quit because the mark will catch on if the con is drawn out too long. once a mark catches on, the con is done and the punishment will be severe. these short sighted dumbasses are sowing the seeds of their own demise.
But but but...what about the Tawana Brawley case, the Duke lacrosse team, the pure nnocence of Michael Brown cut down in his prime and that razzzist Zimmerman for crissakes!
Its all true! ;-)
They only need to manipulate 51%
Thus they target the First Deviation thinkers on the Bell Curve.
If you are Second Deviation or more advanced then you will be in the minority, guaranteed.
Remember folks. One half of the people out there have Double Digit IQs. That is by definition.
It is far too easy.
"pushing veiled propaganda..."
Apparently, trolls mix in some in-your-face bullshit as well...if Zh is any indication.
"Particularly disturbing to me is the phrase “domestic extremist groups”. What does someone have to say or do to be considered an “extremist”? For example, the English Defence League is a non-violent street protest movement in the UK that is strongly against the spread of radical Islam and sharia law in the UK. So if they are “extremists”, how many millions upon millions of ordinary citizens in the United States would fit that definition?"
Every person who answered a poll giving the President and Congress a low approval rating?
And for good reason, seems the statists have their work cut out for them, its them against everyone else ;-)
The statists have declared war on the people. The people either don't know or don't care.
Me, I want the tax dollars back. I am incensed at paying for trolls. If you were doing something good for us, you would not have to "sell us" with a troll, you would not need to dis the alternative. They should not be using our money to campaign for their evil. It should be shut down on that basis alone--don't use our money to influence us about anything that is in your interests only.
Fuck, some of these trolls ain't even funny. If you are gonna be a troll, ya gots to be funny!
I wouldn't mind paying taxes so much if there was a checklist so I could select the programs my money funds. I guess the government wouldn't be able to fund all of the illegal, immoral shit then. So....
lololil where are those geniuses : newsoutlet from latvia , Augustus aka mrikan patriot , turtle sucker , elementthe coal shoveller from Down Under (australia ) and new recruit from Japan Dindu Nuffins pretending to be chinese . he got caughtyesterday only when on nsa leak thread he quoted japanese news source being a chinese . must be a flipino or whale-eater from pacific .
Yeah...Dindu was too easy. I doubt he was a foreigner, just a recent American HS graduate with a 6th-grade education. Should have called himself Jethro.
Credible ... and pretty funny too ... coming from a Putin govt dick-sucker ... who showed up ... when?
haha funny isnt it ?Well some of your posts are informative and knowledgeble but you are just a turd usaa military pr nutjob commenting shit saying how usa had ussr on its toes and they were not even aqare about it . should have bombed s.union etc . well little do you know they had their boomers around usa coast everytime to level them to ashes . sadly you cant prove nything and keep reprugiating shit .
oh and not to forget your military info is false moat of the times and how you keep beating the american weapons and its tech is superior drum but the truth is it isnt . lol i love reading your claims on usa military and what are they making like others know nothing and they arent working on it .
i know murikan weapons avid reader cant stomach the facts about their boondoggles and pathetic weapons . But whatever helps you sleep coalman .
The troll reacts, not thinks. Ad hominem attacks or diversion are their common M.O's. Government is a lie, trolls are the agents of lies.
I think, therefore I am. A troll reacts, therefore he's a tool. A tool is used.
newsoutlet- you've been outed
" Documents leaked by Snowden also reveal that government agents have been conducting denial-of-service attacks, flooding social media websites with thinly veiled propaganda and have been purposely attempting to warp public discourse online. If we do not stand up and object to this kind of Orwellian behavior, it is only going to get worse and worse."
Here is the big objection. They are doing this with our tax money! We are paying to be trolled, by people who are unable to work in the private economy, these failures in life can work for the government trolling us using our money.
A court case should be brought. This can not be constitutional. Make the fucking Spreme Court rule on it. Make Fedear Judges rule on it!
The SCOTUS is corrupt so fuck that idea , you are going to have to get dirty if you want the constitution to matter again.
They are not doing it with "our tax money". They are simply printing what they need. The only purpose of tax is directly modify income to suit political ends. Tax is not an indirect mechanism. It's a fudge factor on your success.
Seems it's out in the open in some countries.
The Abbott government has created a hub of 37 communication and social media specialists to monitor social media and offer strategic communications advice costing taxpayers almost $4.3 million a year.
I'm sure all they do is "monitor" LOL
http://www.idiottax.net/2014/09/astroturfing-on-internet-forums.html
Mother fuckers should be fucked up .
I R NT TRL, I BOT
I applied for a government troll job but the bastards said I wasn't funny enough.
Funny you mention humor.
In my experience the control freak ass wipes have NO sense of humor. You can pick out the NWO believers and torch bearers by telling a joke or making a pithy wisecrack and noticing who is forcing a laugh or not even smiling. …..
‘Tis a dead give-away.
~ DC
Trolls are also human beings
Except the bots, but would be surprised if a bot could manage the complexity here
at least ZH only keeps about 30 days of all our comments..........at least online...I'm sure they are all deleted and destroyed beyond that time....
Eh, you might want to revisit that 30 day thing. It's just recently that the index here doesn't go back further, and I think it was just a technical/compute load limitation, not an access limitation as you see.
In case you weren't being sarcastic, that is...
I Googled my name and Zerohedge.
It only returned about 22,600 hits.
I think Zero Hedge hired an over-eager intern a few months back. All of a sudden articles were archived, ALL articles were archived...some only hours old. There was no way to go back to see if one had pissed off enough people or not. A week or so later it happened again. I think spankings were applied because archiving isn't as extreme now. Before the intern it was possible to look up comments going back a long time.
Facebook and twitter are just spying devices for the government anyways. People should guard their information. There is a supercomputer at the university of Illinois that analyzes everything. All data. Not surprisingly, it predicts civil unrest. People are stupid enough to willingly participate in zombie apocalypse training. Reminds me of Solylent green!
What are we talking about; FB, YT, TW run thousands of trolls daily on their payroll including human in Asian/African troll shops for dollar a day as well as robotic. Most of their accounts are fake impossible to independently verify.
Traffic on corporate sites is artificially generated for SEC reporting. All out psychological war is going on, on the net if you missed it, your are blind.
The whole system of primitive notions of likes, dislikes, voting up or down is widely used by trolls to discourage and intimidate instead of polling independent opinion.
The troll comments are of vicious, personal nature, directed to participant of discussion, completely out of context of discussion, often disclosing private, off the net, details to instill fear in people, to shut them up.
Their extremism is always compatible with official propaganda of fake patriotism redirecting emotions away from core of the problem, no matter how outraged they seem.
Most of them are easy to spot but some are more insidious, slowly building up authority on the blog first and then controls the conversation, steering it into dead end.
That’s why we all should reject any external authority of anyone on the blog and always filter out everything thought our own off the net knowledge and experience.
The sites such as Ars T. and many others, run by MSM are simply run by trolls themselves; company of self-adoring trolls, aiming in absurd exaltation, narcissism and reinforcing stringent hierarchy of “ratings" or achievements that determine wisdom and validity of an argument rather than it’s content.
Troll army have been deployed in the FB experiment to drive people, to desperation or suicide by faking their peer response, cruel and unusual punishment for nothing but human trust, playing with young peoples lives.
The whole mess with Ukraine unlashed thousands of fascist trolls on CIA payroll, including here on ZH funded by Vicki N. that instigated fake stories mindlessly picked up by MSM zombies.
What’s is most important to fighting the trolls and preventing disruption is the response of blog community that should enforce blog manifesto and for ZH it means daring, rare, suppressed, contrarian and independent from corporate and government views, data analysis and conclusions wherever they may lead us, no limits no taboos, may be with exception to recognize individual humanity even in lowest of low life trolls, Fausts that sold their soul to Mephisto and lived to regret it.
Great comment.........Some of the worst hide behind a female persona . unless women really are that obvious or that stupid. Also see them on military blogs.. They make very good attemtps to change the subject or throw in the strawman or red herring here and there and push the govt. line .. .. most of the regulars catch on pretty quick .. a lot of the 'news' outlets on FB are run by trolls .. Mediaite .. Wuff Po . aka WaPo .. RedState ...EU Times .. and a couple others .. names like Sorcha Faal .. David Booth and Rick Light .. all some kind of govt. troll . talk about disinfo .. they throw in enough red meat to sound real .. then they go overboard .. a lot of people fall for the bait .. and any rational discussion ends.. if you point them out .. believe me .. FB will come after you before they go after them. The system wants to keep the US against THEM wars going . .it gives the two sides involved a sense of moral superiority to one up the other .. few realize they are being directed and baited to go on and on about BS .. flag issue and gay crap being two instances of manipulation.
Who are the trolls on ZH?
newsoutlet=troll and douchebag
The other thing to notice is that commenting is no longer allowed on most MSN sites, around the world. It used to be that you'd see a bullshit story and you could call it out. Not any more.
Interesting to note that Edward Snowdon revealed that the UK was keeping tabs on Argentina and her mythical Malvinas claim. Google: 'Argentina's Illegitimate Sovereignty Claims' to see the Malvinas fairy tale debunked.
Ya sure.
It makes a lot of sense that those islands belong to the 'crown'.
All Hail Empire!
LISTEN!
Can you hear the 'noise'?
It sounds like something big grinding to a halt.
It's the sound of a large old machine, with clockwork cogs and gears,
now all rusted and chipped and worn through.
You can hear the whining through the smoke, as this relic teeters
to collapse.
The grinding is deafening as the sparks fly, gasping for all it can consume.
LISTEN!
I enjoyed your picturesque comment.
Ever read a short story by Harlan Ellison, "Repent Harlequin, Said The Tick Tock Man"?
A future dystopia with an amusing prankster/rebel is described. Not an entirely happy ending but better than most dystopian stories.
No, I have not. I just did a search. Looks interesting.
I made that comment up out of nowhere, kind of like money?
Ha... Well, one interesting word popped out looking at a description of: "Repent Harlequin, Said The Tick Tock Man", was the word: Draconian. You see, I equate 'draconian' with archons and those reptillians coming from the Draco constellation, so I can see how it all ties together.
The source of my comment was inspired by a metal worker friend that was hired to fix the machines used in a Heinz factory. He said when he was being given a walk-through, he could hear the 'grinding-whining' noises in one location. He said the 'noise' was so loud, it "...sounded like something really big coming to its end..." He said it was smoking, and he could see sparks. Then it quit.
I had this visual the whole time.
There is this thing called discernment. The ticker guy had a very nice piece on it. Its like a BS filter. That and some time in front of a mirror will keep you up to speed on all these silly tricks.
After getting my future and my sperms future written off last week forless then the price of suppressed silver or coinstar money. im not going to be very cordial or inviting to any "personality" that may be online, no offense. Maybe youre yoda, but well you know.
The subtext im getting from our "betters"
"What was it you told me last time, oh if you save your breath i feel a man like you can manage it."
I just hope i catch your wives all drunk, pissed at some government ego fag, super pissed and drippin for attention. Ill send you the star wars trilogy of boning, ill send it you during christmas in a favorite kids video, like fuckin barney
Hey its barney kids, then pow "me doing brutal gutbusters on your wife" and then ill find your daughters, im thinking of hooking them on drugs because im so angry, and i dont even like drugs. The public is tired, corruption is not a virtue, no matter how you dress it up.
After getting my future and my sperms future written off last week forless then the price of suppressed silver or coinstar money. im not going to be very cordial or inviting to any "personality" that may be online, no offense. Maybe youre yoda, but well you know.
The subtext im getting from our "betters"
"What was it you told me last time, oh if you save your breath i feel a man like you can manage it."
I just hope i catch your wives all drunk, pissed at some government ego fag, super pissed and drippin for attention. Ill send you the star wars trilogy of boning, ill send it you during christmas in a favorite kids video, like fuckin barney
Hey its barney kids, then pow "me doing brutal gutbusters on your wife" and then ill find your daughters, im thinking of hooking them on drugs because im so angry, and i dont even like drugs. The public is tired, corruption is not a virtue, no matter how you dress it up.
Ill be waving too, in your favorite sailboat dude hat with the crest on the front, im generally sorta sympathetic towards injured average so and so people, fred, wilma types
But not you guys, you get "the other way"and you have truly earned it. Enjoy.
When Lyudmila Savchuk heard about the assassination of Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov earlier this year she was shocked and saddened.
“I felt the bullets between my own shoulders,” she said, recalling how the Kremlin critic was gunned down near Moscow's Red Square in February.
Yet within hours of Mr Nemtsov's death, Ms Savchuk and her colleagues were going online to pour bile on the former deputy prime minister and claim he was killed by his own friends rather than by government hitmen, as many suspect.
“I was so upset that I almost gave myself away,” she said. “But I was 007. I fulfilled my task.”
The "007" role that Ms Savchuk refers to is her own extroardinary one-woman spying mission, which appears to shed intriguing light on the propaganda machine that props up the rule of Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president.
Ms Savchuk says that for two months, she worked as one of scores of "internet operators" in a secretive “troll factory” called Internet Research, an anonymous four-storey building on a back street in St Petersburg, Russia’s former tsarist capital and Mr Putin’s hometown.
Ms Savchuk’s job was to spend 12 hours a day praising the Kremlin and lambasting its perceived enemies on social networks, blogs and the comment sections of online media.
The trolls' task, reminiscent of the black arts of Soviet disinformation, was to attack any opponent of the Russian authorities, be it dissenting politicians, pro-European Ukrainians or even Barack Obama – who was branded a "monkey" because of his black skin.
“We had to say Putin was a fine fellow and a great figure, that Russia’s opponents were bad and Obama was an idiot,” she recalled.
All along, however, Ms Savchuk was copying documents and making clandestine video footage about the “factory”, gathering evidence in the manner of a Cold War spy. Or, as she prefers to see it, a Victorian sleuth. “I was really inspired by detective novels and Sherlock Holmes played by Benedict Cumberbatch,” she told the Sunday Telegraph in an interview last week.
Ms Savchuk says she was sacked in March after leaking her information about Internet Research to a local newspaper. Now she is out in the open and leading a campaign against the firm, which is allegedly run by a Kremlin-connected businessman.
“I want to get it closed down,” she explained. “These people are using propaganda to destroy objectivity and make people doubt the motives of any civil protest. Worst of all, they’re doing it by pretending to be us, the citizens of Russia.”
In an attempt to expose the practices of Internet Research, Ms Savchuk is suing the company for breaches of labour law because she never received a contract and was paid in cash.
The story of her time as a troll is a rare and piercing insight into Russia’s attempts to skew the truth and flood the internet with political innuendo.
She worked from January 2 to March 11 at the building of Internet Research at 55 Savushkina Street in St Petersburg, which insiders say is still operating as a “troll factory”.
Working two days-on, two-days off, its army of bloggers - who are thought to number several hundred - spew out thousands of posts a week.
At her interview, Mrs Savchuk says, she pretended to be “a housewife with no real views” when she was asked if she sympathised with Russia’s opposition. She “cleaned” her pages on Facebook and Vkontakte (a Russian equivalent) in advance - the interviewers asked to see them – and replaced posts about her campaigns as an eco-activist with recipes.
“The first thing we would do each day would be to turn on the proxy server to hide our IP addresses,” said Ms Savchuk. Then the operators would start to receive “technical assignments” – written descriptions of themes they should raise in their blogs and comments, with key words to be included.
The bloggers are kept under tight control – their email is subject to checks and their workplace monitored by CCTV. Failure to reach quotas invokes a fine, as does a poorly scripted post. Ms Savchuk said she and others were asked to sign a non-disclosure agreement.
She was put in the so-called Special Projects department using the LiveJournal blogging platform, where, she says, “people pretending to be individual bloggers– a fortune teller, a soldier, a Ukrainian man – had to, between posts about daily life or interesting facts, insert political reflections”.
“I was told on the first day that we were working for the good of the motherland, that we were supporting the authorities,” she explained in an interview at a friend’s apartment in the city’s Pushkin district.
Samples of assignments which she secretly copied show that targets for the bloggers were the Ukrainian government, Mr Obama, and Alexei Navalny, the Russian opposition blogger and anti-corruption crusader who has been frequently jailed on trumped-up charges. Pussy Riot, the feminist activists who performed a “punk prayer” in Moscow’s main church, were also singled out.
Some of the resulting blogs, said Mrs Savchuk, featured crude montages of people like Petro Poroshenko, Ukraine’s president, while others used more subtle techniques to discredit the West.
Between musings about ghosts and crystals, Cantadora – an imaginary fortune teller created by Ms Savchuk and colleagues – occasionally swerved into politics. On March 3, she wrote a post called, “Bad premonitions: Why I’m worried about my sister living in Europe”. The sister, she says, told her from her home in Germany that “thousands of farmers have gone bankrupt in the EU because of sanctions” on Russia and “unemployment is thriving”.
Marat Burkkhard, 40, another ex-employee of the troll factory who has gone public, said in an interview that “America and Obama was one of the top themes that we wrote about every day”.
“When there were black people rioting in the United States we had to write that US policy on the black community had failed, Obama’s administration couldn’t cope with the problem, the situation is getting tenser. The negroes are rising up.”
Ukraine was another constant topic. “That was always about the Kiev ‘junta’, how the poor people of Donbas are being bombed, how women and children are being shot, how Nato is to blame and Blackwater has mercenaries there.”
On Syria, Bashar al-Assad, its autocratic president, was praised as a “friend of Russia”. Closer to home, the team was ordered to laud domestic products like the Armata, the Russia army’s new main battle tank, and the YotaPhone, a homegrown rival to foreign smartphones.
Mr Burkkhard worked in a department focusing on provincial online forums, where he had to write 135 pro-government comments per shift to earn his salary. He took the job for two months because he needed the money – it paid 45,000 roubles (GBP450) per month – and because it was close to his home. But the work soon grated.
“The most unpleasant was when we had to humiliate Obama, comparing him with a monkey, using words like darkie, insulting the president of a big country,” he said. I wrote it, I had to.”
How the secretive Internet Research is funded remains a mystery. On an overcast day last week, all windows of the building had blinds drawn across the windows. At a turnstile in the lobby a security guard told the Telegraph there was no one who could speak to a reporter and no contact number. The company “doesn’t have any telephones”, he said.
Some internet experts think there are thousands of people working in such troll factories across the country, but hard evidence is scarce.
The building on Savushkina Street has been linked to Yevgeny Prigozhin, a businessman who has been photographed with the Russian president, and whose companies win state tenders.
Dmitry Peskov, Mr Putin's spokesman, claimed on Friday that the Kremlin had no knowledge of Internet Research. "To be honest, we don't know what this agency is, and there was never any cooperation with it," he said. "We couldn't have cooperated with it because we don't know what this agency is, what it does and whether it exists."
However, Andrei Soshnikov, a reporter from the St Petersburg newspaper Moi Rayon who has investigated Internet Research, said: “This is such an industry that I can’t believe it is allowed to happen without at least a say-so” from Kremlin officials engaged in propaganda, if not an order. The project pointed towards the presidential administration, he added.
Ms Savchuk, a freelance journalist, remains shocked by the vitriol which her co-workers could switch on at will to slate Mr Putin’s critics.
On the day Mr Nemtsov was killed, the trolls received at least five assignments linked to his death. Their main task was to write that the opposition leader’s friends or Ukrainian oligarchs had arranged his murder and then pin the blame on the Kremlin.
For her, the assassination is now a symbol of the risks she herself has run in speaking out.
“Nemtsov’s death was a sign that any oppositionist, any citizen who declares their rights, can be rubbed out and no one will be held responsible. I know that any person, even me, could end up in his place.”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/russia/11656043/My-life...
OTHERS: https://www.google.com/search?q=kremlin+troll+army&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8
Hey troll. Let's get our own house in order. Who is surprised that Russia is trying to defend itself against the full court press from the global dreadnought?
Hey troll. They are not defending anything - putin regime uses trolls and controlled main stream media to brainwash people domestically and abroad.
What are they defending by producing lies, war mongering and hatred propaganda?
Here are examples:
Ridiculous lie on Russian TV: a child was crucified in Ukraine.
Ukrainian “punishers” are fighting to get slaves, - new portion of bullshit from Russian TV.As you can see - above - putin regime propaganda invents lies materials in most bizzard way. No facts, no proof - nothing - simply to generate hatred against Ukranians and to manipulate with viewers. These are only some examples. But such are common everyday in Russia.
But if you understand russian you would understand this:
https://youtu.be/iOdZLc-ulHs
https://youtu.be/p4-__Sb4DIc
Damn. Phone book much?
With the exception of RM I have learned to scroll right by posts that long.
Anyone who can come up with that much gibberish in one sitting just has to be getting paid by the word count.
Don’t ban him just ignore him.
His baby might need new shoes.
~ DC
SAINT PETERSBURG: The mysterious Russian agency that hires people to write pro-Kremlin propaganda on the web stepped into the public spotlight for the first time Tuesday as a former employee took it to court.
The Agency for Internet Studies, which runs what has been called a “troll factory” from a nondescript Saint Petersburg address, is being sued by employee Lyudmila Savchuk for alleged underpayment and various labour violations.
The agency however is now seeking to avoid public scrutiny by offering to compensate Savchuk, who told AFP in an interview earlier this year that she was one of many paid to write comments online supporting President Vladimir Putin’s policies.
Lawyer Yekaterina Nazarova, representing the agency, told the Petrogradsky district court judge that her client was “ready to strike a settlement” with Savchuk, who had asked for a symbolic sum of 10,000 rubles ($185).
Nazarova offered to wire the sum to Savchuk’s account, before quickly leaving the courthouse at the end of the hearing without commenting to the press.
Savchuk said she was happy with the outcome, but indicated that her crusade against the agency was not yet finished.
– ‘Out of the shadows’ –
“I am very pleased, they pretended they don’t exist at all and now they have come out of the shadows for the first time, we saw their representative,” she told AFP.
“But I will feel that I won only after the troll factory closes completely.”
Savchuk says she worked at the agency for two months after responding to a generic online advert, but quit in March 2015 and now vows to expose the organisation’s schemes.
The agency, located in the north of Russia’s second-largest city, is blamed by observers for doing the Kremlin’s dirty work on the Internet, polluting news websites with inflammatory comments and even causing social networks to block anti-Putin bloggers.
The phenomenon has become particularly intense during the conflict in Ukraine, with some reports claiming the agency has expanded into foreign languages, pictures and videos, and is even running its own news sites.
Savchuk’s lawyer Ivan Pavlov said the result of Tuesday’s hearing — the second this month after the agency skipped the first — was “unexpected” and he suspected the defendant of trying to escape the public eye.
“I suppose the defendant considers it a lesser evil to recognise the lawsuit and pay compensation,” he said.
Pavlov added that the next step would be a meeting with Savchuk at the agency’s headquarters in July, which he called “another chance to make their activities transparent”.
Well looky, looky.
Here is one now.