Linkerbaan moment.
The stoopid are quite frightening
unlimited resources
Russia
… So what like a shitty laptop from 2009, a broadband connection and a full bottle of vodka as pay?
id love to get paid in 2009 laptops and vodka :/
Yeah you could flip those for a pretty penny
imagine what an ex-KGB agent with unlimited resources can do.
Oh, there’s no need to imagine: I’m on the internet right now. I’m probably staring at this kind of state-actor bullshit on a daily basis without even knowing it.
Sometimes it’s easier to recognise than other times.
Fifty-fifty.
But my history has at least one.
Just like everything in the Trump era, that KGB agent would fail miserably because why would something so ridiculous work? The most significant lasting legacy of Maga-politics will be the death of comedy, because who would write something so extreme? No one would believe it
It also took one person to start the whole couch fucking thing.
In both cases, it wasn’t the original message that kicked off the firestorm, it was a deliberate strategy put forward by billion-dollar presidential campaigns.
Nobody knew about the “eating my neighbor’s cat” post even after the debate. It took weeks to track down what Laura Loomer had whispered into Trump’s ear. Nobody considered the “Hillbilly Elegy had a chapter where Vance fucks a couch” tweet important until celebrities and politicians began retweeting it as a means of disgracing a weird conservative sex pest.
If there’s a rumor started by a smear campaign run out of an office in Moscow (and they’re even halfway competent in their execution) you’re likely only going to hear about it once it becomes the focus of some rhetorical exchange-of-fire on a top tier domestic social media celebrity or in a Senatorial debate. Even then, you won’t get to hear where it originated from until the polls have long since closed, in much the same way nobody got the details on the Comey indictment of Hilary or the Georgia election-steal attempt by Trump until it was too late.
It isn’t “one person” starting a rumor. Its an industry that feeds on rumors and is constantly regurgitating them to get your attention.
even after the debate. It took weeks to track down…
It hasn’t been a full week since the debate.
Damn. It feels like its been ages. My mistake.
I too am tired of living in Interesting Times.
That one was more fun
And a lot fewer people have threatened to bomb schools and hospitals because of it.
And no one ever took it seriously
I’m not so sure about that…have you seen some of the people on the internet.
But it reeeaaally pissed someone off and that’s what matters
Yes, all they had to do was laugh a bit and ignore it, but they just couldnt
Invade ukraine apparently.
Apparently not.
No shit.
Having been living it for the last what 10 years now? It amazes me how stupid and gullible the right wing public is.
People are gullible, not just right-wingers. You’re just more likely to perceive the other side as gullible and not notice the blind spots of your own. And well, we are living in a moment in history of a surge in right wing populism, which puts that side’s gullibility in full frontal display.
While technically true that “People are gullible, not just right-wingers.”, this is misleading in this context. Studies have been done! For example: https://academic.oup.com/poq/article/87/2/267/7147091
Some quotes from the study: “Accordingly, a surplus of pro-conservative misinformation may indicate, simply, that conservatives are more gullible. This logic is illustrated by the story of Macedonian teenagers who converged to producing false stories catering to Trump supporters, rather than Bernie Sanders supporters, because it worked better.” “…misinformation catered more to conservatives, and this contributes to them being on average more likely to believe false information.”
I am aware, and it’s good you brought this up. All sides are gullible, but some perhaps more than others. Although, the very study you posted a link to states clearly that other studies have had mixed results. Are you posting this one because, as a political scientist, you know the field and studies referenced and can assert with confidence acquired through disciplined study that this work provides better proof that conservatives are indeed more gullible (where other studies failed), or are you posting it because it appears to confirm your a priori views of conservatives?
Apart from the actual truth of the matter, I made my comment above because I believe that looking down on conservative concerns and viewpoints - something that is naturally aided by any perceptions of conservatives as gullible simpletons - has not served liberals well. In fact, it’s something that right wing populists have been able to exploit quite well to gain the sympathy and ultimately the vote of large swathes of said simpletons.
I am not a political scientist. I’m merely someone who reads a fair bit and tries, in my own fallible way, to get to the truth of things. Certainly this study is not the final word on the matter, and I certainly do not think that all conservatives are gullible simpletons. Just that there are more of them than non-conservatives. And maybe these are just the extremists (e.g. the gullible MAGA republicans who believed Trump’s rhetoric that the election was stolen and attacked the Capitol), but there are not such extremists on the other side.
I would be happy to read about gullible non-conservatives. I’m sure there are some!
I agree we should not look down on conservative viewpoints. But I have struggled to reason with proponents of those viewpoints rooted in gullibility. “America should not help Ukraine because it is full of Nazis”, for example, textbook Russian propaganda. I asked my brother for proof of his outrageous statement, and he sent me a photoshopped picture of Biden with his hand on Zelensky’s ass. OK, it was funny. But irrelevant. It’s not just the gullibility, they are either unable or too stubborn to reason with. I think they are unable to accept they are wrong, and yes, populists pointing out to them that we point this out somehow confirms that they are right.
Thank you for replying to my comment. Happy to read any further thoughts you might have.
Hmm well if you don’t mind a bit of unsolicited advice, I would say that (from the frustrations you express) maybe you, like most of us, enter discussions online with a mind to convince others of the absolute truth of what you believe in. It is actually more productive to listen to them, then ask why they feel the way they do about certain topics, and then try to see if you can find common ground with them. Only then can you perhaps influence their views a little. But if you are earnest about the exchange, you must allow them to influence you too.
I know that’s hard, I fail often myself and become frustrated.
Of course there are conspiracy theories and falsehoods that are absolutely bonkers and it stymies me too why some people will gobble it all up, but a wise person is never too sure of their own truths either. Funny thing is we are all biased one way or another, we just tend to be blind to our own biases. Of course some truths are supported by more evidence than others, but especially when it comes to politics it is less about the absolute truth of a matter than it is about adopting a particular perspective. No single perspective is more valid than others inherently. It is all just ways of looking at things. Of course one can try and come up with objective criteria, but that too is quite hard.
I think you and I are mostly on the same page here. I’m going to take your advice and put more thought into the perspectives of others. Thank you!
People are gullible, not just right-wingers.
See also: everyone who genuinely thinks JD Vance actually did fuck a couch.
He still hasn’t denied it.
also: everyone who genuinely thinks
One of the reasons that was fun was that it was always a joke, usually presented in the negative so it’s technically true “JD Vance denies fucking a couch”. Right from the beginning, it was presented as a joke gone viral.
Were there genuine believers?
The AP was clear: No, JD Vance did not have sex with a couch.
This story is the most Ohio thing that ever Ohio’d.
covie_93 is a psyops operative from Russia playing a whole different game here
i’m now scared of ex-KGB agents doing psyops
I went back to Ohio
But my kitty was gone
Ay, oh, where’d it go Ohio?
It probably only takes a staff on the order of a thousand people to make things go viral on the internet.
If it’s your job to just sign up for social media accounts (fill in the the captchas, type in a name, upload a few images) you could easily create at least a hundred per day.Multiply that by a thousand and that’s one hundred thousand accounts per day.
Of course you’d have to post some comments occasionally to make it look real. But that would just be re-wording the text from other comments. Of course if someone were to do this, youtube comments would look like, well… exactly like youtube comments are like right now.
So figure a a hundred thousand accounts per week with comments to make it look legit, that’s millions of accounts per year. Yeah you’d want to space it out a bit so it wouldn’t look suspicious. And you’d need to route the traffic through a botnet so the IPs are from the same country the account claims to be from. But within a year you’d have millions of accounts that all appear legit to any automated system checking them.
So now you’ve got the accounts and you want something to go viral. Have your thousand people start logging into accounts and running the video or whatever through your botnet, click like, leave a comment, maybe even check out the ad so the social media company makes a bit of money and aren’t incentivized to look at it too closely. This probably only takes around 10 seconds per account. You could have anything you want have at least a million likes and engagement within a day. Which is probably way more than is needed for the algorithms to start recommending the content to legitimate users. And then it’s all automatic from there.
Sure a few thousand people sounds like a lot. But not for the government of a country that wants to do disinformation.
YouTube comments I see are usually perfectly done, bots are the exception?
It probably only takes a staff on the order of a thousand people to make things go viral on the internet.
Depending on the site, maybe less than that.
It wasn’t all that long ago that Reddit had “power users” that was just a small handful of people/one person running an account that consistently made it viral on the site.
Yep, like the jackdaw dude. No, not going to name him. He didn’t have that many alt accounts but they were enough for that initial push of his posts.
Was that unidan? I remember it being a story back then but I could be mixing up my random internet amounts.
Correct.
Create an anti-vaxx movement?
Get agitators into communities and stoke fears. So that the messages are posted by the people stoked and you are able to stay removed from it as the actual source.
