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this post was submitted on 14 Nov 2023
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I've been on reddit for over a decade. There were clear signs of Russian trolls on reddit during the 2016 election. What I witnessed was that people in general were very easily deceived.
No longer on reddit so i cant tell of they are there, but the Chinese spam and disinformation bots/accounts are quite active on Twitter(X). I follow dozens of Chinese dissidents on Twitter and each time they tweet something, there are 5-10 bots tweeting sexual contents. It's ridiculous.
My experience with Chinese trolls on Reddit is that they are not discreet. They do not hide that they're actively propagandising. Whereas Russian trolls are more effective and subtle by pretending to be local of other countries and sowing division. Although with the Ukrainian invasion, I see that Russian trolls became less discreet. Creative, in fact, with putting interesting spins into how the war in Ukraine is unfolding. My favourite is when a Russian troll asked "was Stalin a necessary evil?". The poster reasoned that Stalin may have killed people, but he industrialised the Soviet Union. And Stalin may have blundered during the first phase of the invasion of Nazi Germany, but he won in the end. The poster then projected the history to support Putin and the war in Ukraine. An interesting spin but Putin has no competent military command and there is no one near enough to competently lead. Someone made a point that Putin has no Zhukov.
Edit: spelling
Discreet, just for the record. Had to look it up after a bit of confusion.
Corrected.
There is an idea that may help this, if it were built and then also used. it's a form of group decision making based on fluid data that solidifies as more data comes in.
One of the main aspects is that comments and things are compared to others to find how similar they are, something may present itself differently but be the same discussion. This method of identifying each 'argument' and 'rebuttal' goes hand in hand with declaring definitions so that conversations can't be flipped around by a bad actor. There's a big write up of the way it can be used to combat disinformation but as far as I know it's just the outline of how such a system would work, no one has built the system.
It's kind of similar to voting sites like reddit but goes a lot farther in defining ways things work, and works so ostracize trolls and the like. but as it would require something no one online would ever go for, being in one way 'tied' to your offline person, that I don't see it ever being a mainstream thing. Of course the accounts people would be using would be in no way identifiable unless selfdoxed they would still be like voter registration in that a real person had to be there once, and all things that person does online are here tied to them so that trolls and things show clearly over time. It's really designed to be mostly a niche discussion platform engine for people in the same hobby or interest.