Goverment Hires Internet Trolls to Disrupt Online Forums

reply to post by Bassago


Honestly I didn't even know they had any connection to InfoWars until it was mentioned in this thread. My opinion of them is based exclusively on reading articles on there and finding errors and outright lies in every one. To deny that they have an agenda and that they will spin and lie to promote that agenda is pure naivete.

Maybe make it so that every forum board is filled with centrist, socialist, communist, but no conservatives.

MarsSentinel
Name names or STFU, if you think there are Bad Actors here.

Let us review their posts and decide ourselves.

well inyour 5 years here you should know that it is against the t&c to do shuch a thing as call out members by name

Battlefresh

Bragi
That is absolutely ludicrous...sorry, but no.

And now you are prime suspect #1

7 years bud and 44 posts you are a prime suspect as well no

Dustytoad
You guys have to realize there are special jobs in the Army for this type of thing. They don't just use these techniques to sway "enemy combatants."

I believe the present administration in the US considers any American who isn't collecting a government paycheck of some kind to be an enemy combatant.

reply to post by Xcalibur254


Fair enough. I haven't spent a ton of time there but the articles I read seemed to check out. Yes they have an agenda, everyone does and media outlets perhaps more so. I will double check their sources next time I read an article from them. That said I still have a favorable view of NaturalNews based on past reading.

reply to post by Xcalibur254


As to the question why bother with a little old site like ATS? In and of itself your right but that is thinking very narrowly, every ant can only produce a small portion but the army as a whole can accomplish much. If they target every popular alternative site the influence could be great and maybe it has been or maybe not, anyone claiming otherwise is full of it.

reply to post by Metallicus


I'm not so sure that the government would waste their time and money on something with so little payback. Let's face it, the world is full of dicks and always have been and now the internet has made it easy for them to 'get off' by being a dick while hiding behind a computer, their fat little fingers poking keys and making them feel like they are controlling someone!
I mean go to you tube and read some of the comments about one of your favorite bands, their are people that go around knocking just about everything you watch and many times they are the same people, so I don't think the Government has trolls telling people they suck because you like Megadeth and they like Lady Gaga!
I would need a lot of proof to believe this and nobody has shown any, just saying "It's true, I worked with a group doing that!" well, we want a little more 'proof' than your word!

The only internet troll I see is the creator of this thread, trying to sew dissent amongst the people that utilize this site. I'm sure the article does have some merit though however. Abovetopsecret is a well known place to visit if you want to hear different things. I'm sure this site is number one on the governments lists of things to monitor, as far as the area of pseudoscience. But I'm sure that there are more than a few stories here that have actual merit. That's somewhat the allure of coming here; possibly reading about something that has actually transpired.

I'm sure the government does pay trolls to go from site to site. They probably do it here too, but I think many of the people who frequent this type of site are already skeptical. I've been stalking for some time and never believe nor disbelieve anything on here, to me that's the point.

I would imagine if there are paid trolls the majority would be on sites like Yahoo and the mainstream sites where people can range from dumb as a rock to college education dumb as a rock. Those groups are only paranoid when the MSM tells them they should be and even then can be lured away from rational arguments with wedge issue hate mongering.

Like how many times have you heard about gay marriage in the last 10 months compared to other issues? A lot. Not because it affects the majority(glbt families only make up a small percentage of the U.S.) but because it is a very big wedge issue that makes many hateful when they discuss it. This is not making a point of gay marriage as I am gay and therefore benefit from the things that have happened. To me though, the other WAAAAY more important things that have happened trumped that issue by a billion percent.

So I think trolls exist but going back to the original topic, this site isn't the best place to try and implant msm ideas. Most of us on here read the MSM and are so sick of it that the official story becomes false until proven true. I have seen a few people on here that never, ever, ever have a conspiracy theory on ANYTHING, which begs the question...what are you doing here?

wulff
reply to post by Metallicus

 

I'm not so sure that the government would waste their time and money on something with so little payback. Let's face it, the world is full of dicks and always have been and now the internet has made it easy for them to 'get off' by being a dick while hiding behind a computer, their fat little fingers poking keys and making them feel like they are controlling someone!
I mean go to you tube and read some of the comments about one of your favorite bands, their are people that go around knocking just about everything you watch and many times they are the same people, so I don't think the Government has trolls telling people they suck because you like Megadeth and they like Lady Gaga!
I would need a lot of proof to believe this and nobody has shown any, just saying "It's true, I worked with a group doing that!" well, we want a little more 'proof' than your word!

Do you know how many friends I have on facebook who have no idea what ATS is? About 525, which are all my friends on facebook. None of the know or care about ATS. I am the only person I know who even visits ATS.

ATS might be a wonderful site, but it isn't that huge or powerful.

Maybe other people have a lot of friends from here, but ATS isn't that famous. To believe the government would use ATS as a vehicle to sway public opinion, then they better be telling people to come to ATS. They aren't doing a very good job at advertising for ATS.

How many times has ATS made mainstream news? Maybe three times? Right now, Pinterest is more popular. Reddit is way more popular, and clearly Facebook is the most famous. Heck, even Photobucket is more popular. If someone in the government thinks they are going to change the world through ATS, I think that person should be fired.

Government, your advertising campaign for life changers of ATS is a failure, because the only ones here are the ones who want to be here. 7 billion people on this planet, ATS is how old, and maybe they have 40,000 members?

Of those 40,000, you can break that in half, 20,000 may actually believe in the conspiracy theories. That leaves another 20,000 who just like to come here for fun or to find things or be annoying. Youtube gets more traffic. If there are shills, they are preaching to an empty choir because no one is really listening. Which is why I say there are no paid shills, just a bunch of people that are jerks and the rest of us who try to ignore them.

Graffiti propaganda only works if someone actually looks at the wall. But generally, someone else will paint over it.

I think this exact topic was discussed here last year. Gov has hired a company to influence peoples opinion by making millions of fake facebook users and basically spreading whatever ideas they want to.

reply to post by WarminIndy


That actually gives me a way to put things into perspective. ATS currently has 288,559 members. Now I'm not sure if profiles are occasionally deleted due to inactivity nor if that includes banned members. That could be the total number of people who have joined ATS in its 10+ years of existence. In the past week we have had 7,496 members visit the site. Of course this doesn't account for lurkers, visits from bots, and any other entity that might be visiting the site. In comparison PewDiePie, the top YouTube user, has had 283,961 new subscribers to his channel in the past week. This is on top of his already 13 million+ subscribers and 2.45 billion video views. So someone explain to me why the government would be targeting ATS when a single YouTube user can generate as many subscribers in a single week as ATS has total?

While ATS does alright in site rankings it doesn't really have much influence outside of the conspiracy community. During my time here I can think of only two stories that made it in to the MSM that originated here. There was that one about the horses and then there was the Mars sasquatch. When it comes down to it ATS' shining moment was probably all the work and unity that went in to exposing the SERPO hoax. Yet ask a random person on the street about it and they'll have never heard of SERPO. Hell, many members on this site don't know what it is. As I have stated a number of times now, it would be pointless for the government to employ paid shills to infiltrate ATS. Our influence is minor and our own internal squabbles will cause us to be defeated long before any sock puppet could.

I wonder if before there was an internet and computers, if crazy people suggested that government agents hung out in bars to shout crazy things making them SOUND insane. Perhaps the government pays people to divert conversations at water-coolers to sports or cars.

Why would any government agency try to prevent anything when it doesn't involve arresting people and showing off afterward?

reply to post by greenday1978
best not to call people here trolls after 7 posts and 2 days in the door

Xcalibur254
reply to post by WarminIndy

 

That actually gives me a way to put things into perspective. ATS currently has 288,559 members. Now I'm not sure if profiles are occasionally deleted due to inactivity nor if that includes banned members. That could be the total number of people who have joined ATS in its 10+ years of existence. In the past week we have had 7,496 members visit the site. Of course this doesn't account for lurkers, visits from bots, and any other entity that might be visiting the site. In comparison PewDiePie, the top YouTube user, has had 283,961 new subscribers to his channel in the past week. This is on top of his already 13 million+ subscribers and 2.45 billion video views. So someone explain to me why the government would be targeting ATS when a single YouTube user can generate as many subscribers in a single week as ATS has total?

While ATS does alright in site rankings it doesn't really have much influence outside of the conspiracy community. During my time here I can think of only two stories that made it in to the MSM that originated here. There was that one about the horses and then there was the Mars sasquatch. When it comes down to it ATS' shining moment was probably all the work and unity that went in to exposing the SERPO hoax. Yet ask a random person on the street about it and they'll have never heard of SERPO. Hell, many members on this site don't know what it is. As I have stated a number of times now, it would be pointless for the government to employ paid shills to infiltrate ATS. Our influence is minor and our own internal squabbles will cause us to be defeated long before any sock puppet could.

While I agree with most of what you're saying (from numbers alone), the context of the discussion would make this site a popular target. Not to have an attitude, but the viewers of PewDiePie's channel just want to watch a gaming commentator share his experiences with his bros. It's a different discussion going on.

Obviously the MSM has the majority of people in the bag with only their basic propaganda that's spewed out from the bowel of their masters rear end. It would make sense then, if you were to try and create trolls to sway public opinion, you'd start at the heart of the most paranoid. The ones who, when in discussions with those same people that watch MSM and believe it, might plant little seeds of distrust.

How many members on here make a marked effort to try and make every conspiracy story and the people who add to the discussion seem foolish. Stating things like "how dare you think that, obviously it's IRRATIONAL" sort of thing without creating a thoughtful response on WHY and providing feedback.

reply to post by Metallicus


Hmm.. an "alleged former shill" is to be believed because "he said so" to "naturalnews.com"

For some reason I think it's wise to take that with a grain of salt.

greenday1978
The only internet troll I see is the creator of this thread, trying to sew dissent amongst the people that utilize this site. I'm sure the article does have some merit though however. Abovetopsecret is a well known place to visit if you want to hear different things. I'm sure this site is number one on the governments lists of things to monitor, as far as the area of pseudoscience. But I'm sure that there are more than a few stories here that have actual merit. That's somewhat the allure of coming here; possibly reading about something that has actually transpired.

I'm 99% sure the government could care less about this website full of kooks. They don't even keep the kooks from getting guns. If it's because they're too busy watching us rant on a half-decent forum that's covered in ads for homeopathic jarred beets, then I've lost all hope for America.

For more than a decade I have been sure that the government here in the USA has been doing this. It is often readily apparent when you see the posts. These kind of posts were specially heavy after 9/11. There had to be thousands of these people at work based on what I was seeing then. Even now, I spend a lot of time reading about world events on-line and you can tell when they've been tasked and what they have been instructed to do. This evidence becomes so abundantly clear that you can often work backwards from there to reveal truths that might be a bit murky without this help.

It's quite like what goes on in the mainstream media in America when you see all the networks come out in concert with the talking points of the day. Again, I point to 9/11 when the talking points almost seemed to have been delivered before the event because they were so quick to effect the same spin on many of the finer points of what happened. These were often so obviously contrived to manipulate certain fine points that were crucial to the selling of the story.

Both on-line and on network TV a lot can be gleaned from these efforts. With enough awareness and understanding you can begin to anticipate events at times.

reply to post by Metallicus


You mean I can get paid for this ??????