Gods, Eugine, you're boring. You've been banned from LW, you can't accept that, and the best way you can think of to handle this situation is to keep posting the same fucking comments again and again and again and again because ... what? What good outcome do you expect from doing this? Literally the only thing you are doing is adding a bit of annoyance to the lives of people who never did you any harm.

Perhaps it makes you feel like you're outsmarting the moderators or something. I do hope not. Because any idiot can copy and paste things, and anyone a step or two above idiocy can write a script to do it.

Get a life and leave us in peace.

It's happening not just in USA. In Slovakia there was recently a research published about fake accounts commenting on social networks and comment sections of major newspapers. It's quite scary how effective the guerrilla information war can be. This is how it works, in a nutshell:

You hire a few people (you really don't need many of them) working for minimal wage, speaking the language of the target country. Their task is to create dozen accounts on various websites. If names and photos are required, they just make fake names and steal someone's photo from google images. (If someone finds that out and bans the account, no problem, they create a new one).

Separately from these people, you have a few smart guys who decide what memes they want to spread. They choose the message, compose a few dozen text samples saying the same thing using different words. Then they e-mail the text samples to the minimum-wage people, whose task is essentially to keep copy-pasting these messages on many places with minor modifications, for 8 hours a day.

Imagine a group with e.g. one manager, two smart guys designing the memes, and five stupid guys who copy them. How many comments they can generate each day? How much can they influence a perception of an average reader?

Top half of the article is about politics, but halfway down they start getting into info war and bots and AI.

"THE war of the bots is one of the wilder and weirder aspects of the elections of 2016. At the Oxford Internet Institute’s Unit for Computational Propaganda, its director, Phil Howard, and director of research, Sam Woolley, show me all the ways public opinion can be massaged and manipulated. But is there a smoking gun, I ask them, evidence of who is doing this? “There’s not a smoking gun,” says Howard. “There are smoking machine guns. There are multiple pieces of evidence.”

“Look at this,” he says and shows me how, before the US election, hundreds upon hundreds of websites were set up to blast out just a few links, articles that were all pro-Trump. “This is being done by people who understand information structure, who are bulk buying domain names and then using automation to blast out a certain message.”

One of the things that concerns Howard most is the hundreds of thousands of “sleeper” bots they’ve found. Twitter accounts that have tweeted only once or twice and are now sitting quietly waiting for a trigger: some sort of crisis where they will rise up and come together to drown out all other sources of information.

On its website, Cambridge Analytica makes the astonishing boast that it has psychological profiles based on 5,000 separate pieces of data on 220 million American voters

Bio-psycho-social profiling, I read later, is one offensive in what is called “cognitive warfare”. Though there are many others: “recoding the mass consciousness to turn patriotism into collaborationism,” explains a Nato briefing document on countering Russian disinformation written by an SCL employee. “Time-sensitive professional use of media to propagate narratives,” says one US state department white paper. “Of particular importance to psyop personnel may be publicly and commercially available data from social media platforms.”

Out on Twitter, the new transnational battleground for the future, someone I follow tweets a quote by Marshall McLuhan, the great information theorist of the 60s. “World War III will be a guerrilla information war,” it says. “With no divisions between military and civilian participation.”

By that definition we’re already there."

Whenever a place sinks into the #NeverTrump pit of stupidity, it never crawls back out.

Trump won because the left forgot how to argue rationally, and Trump knew how to make his supporters feel smart for not believing the paranoid moronic more-biased-every-day media. Trump outsmarted every leftist on the planet. At this point, he deserves America, and if he turns out to be half as bad as the libtards say he's going to be, he'll be kicked out in seconds. So why care? Why try to work people up into a paranoid frenzy, when that's failed once before and it'll fail again and again until the left learns how to admit its many flaws and mistakes and learn from them?

a

a

a

This reads like what Scott Adams would call cognitive dissonance.

In particular it omits the fact that the (anti-Trump) CEO's of twitter and face have access to more data, and presumably better algorithms, but weren't able to swing the election. Almost as if it's easier to influence people if the direction you're trying to influence them agrees with their day-to-day observations. But that's way to scary a thought for the people at the guardian.

a

a

a

a

a

the truth doesn't change no matter how many times it's deleted

Your comments aren't being deleted for being true, nor for being false. They are being deleted because you have been banned from Less Wrong. Over and over again. For gross abuse of the system. And anything, true or false, becomes boring when repeated often enough.

Which means that if you actually cared about persuading people you'd long ago have either given this place up as a bad job and tried elsewhere, or fixed your behaviour in the hope of getting unbanned and being able to have the kind of conversation that occasionally actually changes people's minds. (I suspect that the faint possibility that one day that might happen is one reason why some of your sockpuppet accounts have lasted longer than a few hours.)

If you genuinely want to convince anyone, that's how you do it. Otherwise you're just getting in the way, and teaching everyone the lesson that people who say the sort of things you do are likely to behave the way you do. That is not the lesson you actually want to be teaching.

a

a

a

a

a

a

a

a

a

a

a

a

a

a

a

a

a

a

a

a

a

a

a

a

a

a

a

a

a

a

a

a

a

a

a

a

a

a

a

a

a

a

a

a

In particular, this:

A majority of online and social media defenders of Obamacare are professionals who are "paid to post," according to a digital expert.

"Sixty percent of all the posts were made from 100 profiles, posting between the hours of 9 and 5 Pacific Time," said Michael Brown. "They were paid to post."

He began investigating it after his criticism of the former president's health insurance program posted on the Obamacare Facebook page. He was hit hard by digital activists pretending to be regular people. She reports that he evaluated 226,000 pro-Obamacare posts made by 40,000 Facebook profiles.

"Digital activists are paid employees; their purpose is to attack anyone who's posting something contrary to the view of the page owner wants expressed," he told Attkisson. "Sixty percent of all the posts were made from 100 profiles, posting between the hours of 9 and 5 Pacific Time."

a

a

a

a

a

a

a

a

a

a

a

a

Most of them are over-and-over-again reposts from the same person, who was banned years ago for abusive behaviour and keeps coming back and being banned again (and creating huge numbers of sockpuppets to downvote people he doesn't like, which is the main reason why there are currently no downvotes on LW).

[EDITED to clarify:] So what happens is: he posts something, his account gets zapped because he's supposed to be banned and his comments are deleted, and then he makes a new account and posts all the same things again, repeat ad nauseam. I can't imagine he thinks he's actually doing something constructive; I think he does it as a sort of fuck-you to the LW admins.

That would be the person you recently said "Did we just become best friends?" to, by the way.

a

a

a

a

a

a

a

a

a

a

a

a

a

a

a

a

a

a

a

a

a

a

a

a

a

a

a

a

a

a

a

a

a

a

a

a

a

a

a

a

a

a

a

a

Yet, you somehow decided that noting it in response to the great-grandparent was worth your while.

a

a

a

a

a

a

a

a

a

a

a

a

There seems to be an effort to propagate...

I don't think so, or just a trivial amount. Looking at downvotes or lack of upvotes, I don't get that sense at all. Political talk is almost always discouraged and when it does go on, its fairly even handed.

I want to take a look at his data before I believe him.