On social media, I generally share lefty relevant news (like the news user) to a number of pages that are mostly active, but where it would still be very obvious to tell if someone tried to astroturf.
In about the past year and a half, around the 2016 elections between Trump and Hillary, I've started to notice that more replies to what I share tend to be the same peculiar sorts of reactions and comments that are very dismissive and also oddly out of place when you look at what's similar and not about these accounts and the timing of their posts, etc.
I suspect that there's something very off about these accounts, and at most that it's part of a larger interest that is materially motivated to push these views however "uncanny" it seems, and it definitely doesn't mind pushing reactionary views about capitalism in the US and stopping criticism of it.
Which goes back to the title of my OP
And am I witnessing that?
How prevalent are bots in astroturfing really?
Other urls found in this thread:
incapsula.com
dashboard.securingdemocracy.org
democraticunderground.com
reddit.com
notbored.org
cybersoc.com
theintercept.com
wired.com
npr.org
washingtonpost.com
youtube.com
twitter.com
The internet is controlled opposition. All of it.
I'd want to expand on this: I know that the narrative in the US about Russian interference in the elections, including about the "troll farms", is questioned a lot here.
But given that there is a lot of anti-worker actions by the Trump administration that is partially reported, the "uncanny" reactions that I'm talking about are the ones that are poorly criticizing this for not being pro-Trump and have generic or otherwise similar accounts, including the posting-style.
Forgot to finish my post: So, I'm guessing what I'm saying is, what exact kind of operations are going on here and who is it being run by if some of my suspicions are immediately, provably true?
And what of some of these things even correlating with reports about national (mostly "Russian") deep-states running astroturfing campaigns, among other tactics?
Whatever is happening, it is mostly and undeniably aiding whoever is pushing reactionary talking-points more, which admittedly makes me rather bitter.
Does anyone recall the thread discussing something along the lines of "Russian trolls" or "interference" at least from a few days ago?
Still can't find even a cached version of it, but it seems to have discussed the possibility of deep-state linked entities in Russia pushing unabashedly pro-Trump neoliberalism through the Internet.
If you post pics it would be easier to tell you if your dealing with bots/shills.
bump
I expect there are probably shilling operations run/funded by random conservative porkies too.
The point is: how do you counteract this along with the bots?
Good point, more domestically some Koch Brothers-related group may have a hand in these things. Mercer possibly too.