The Gentleperson's Guide To Forum Spies (2012)

Everyone wants to believe they're sizing up some psyops scheme. The dopamine chemistry is just too good: you've got an enemy, the feeling of being in a dramatic narrative where nothing's what it seems, the superiority of knowing that you've spotted something everyone missed, and a way of bucketing the stories you dislike as illegitimate. The threads are even worse, because if you've got an all-purpose argument for shutting down rebuttals, why not use it?

Everything cited in this article can be grouped under the umbrella of &#x27;manipulation of public opinion&#x27;. The tactics used have been analyzed and grouped similarly before, for example there was the late 1930s Institute of Propaganda Analysis which produced some publications grouping propaganda tactics into these categories:<p>Name-calling, Glittering generalities, Transfer, Testimonial, Plain folks, Card stacking, Bandwagon.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Institute_for_Propaganda_Analysis" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Institute_for_Propaganda_Analy...</a><p>The other notions - i.e. malicious sabotage or disruption of groups by inserting agent provocateurs - have a similar long history and have also been analyzed, it&#x27;s basically just spying of various sorts (see Sun Tzu, Art of War, Chapter 13)<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;suntzuart.com&#x2F;sun-tzu-art-of-war&#x2F;chapter-13" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;suntzuart.com&#x2F;sun-tzu-art-of-war&#x2F;chapter-13</a><p>As others note, assuming someone you disagree with on an internet forum is a malicious bad-faith actor isn&#x27;t a very healthy or useful perspective to take. Yes, there&#x27;s a lot of PR efforts directed at social media platforms for various reasons, but it&#x27;s always best to just present a well-reasoned argument in support of your views and leave it at that.

HN makes it easy to stifle dissent with &quot;flag&quot; and graying out a comment until it is &quot;dead&quot;. That&#x27;s why I always browse with &quot;showdead&quot; set to &quot;yes.&quot; Most of the dead comments deserve it, but some of them are quite interesting but don&#x27;t match the values of the HN community. I&#x27;ve been &quot;killed&quot; a couple times when I didn&#x27;t think I deserved it. I&#x27;m a contrarian by nature, but I value HN too much to feel bad about it. There are other places to discuss sensitive topics.

I’m skeptical how good anyone is at identifying any of this.<p>The amount of “you’re one of them” or “you’re just a troll” out there on the internet when someone simply doesn’t agree or even understand is seemingly infinite.<p>It’s a nearly weekly accusation thrown at me on Reddit.<p>People’s willingness to believe someone else is a troll or similar seems to just mean they never have to consider any ideas they don’t like.

I&#x27;m not saying this doesn&#x27;t happen. It obviously does. But I still think you have to take everyone at face value if you want to have a healthy community. The only thing less healthy than a forum full of psyops and shills is a forum full of genuine people accusing each other of being shills.

Though still relevant, this is old stuff.<p>Nowadays many of the largest forums are simply captured, by a dedicated team working to a script with dozens of alts. Once you have complicit moderators, this stuff is <i>lame</i> in comparison.<p>Once your guy &#x2F; team has mod control, you can change the entire culture and tone of the forum, as soft or as hard as you like, and ban complainers.<p>You can make posts invisible to search engines, or remove posts for a couple hours and then put them back once the algorithm is bored of them. You can wipe posts entirely, give no explanation, and wipe the posts that complain.<p>If you think people wouldn&#x27;t bother to do this, think again. There&#x27;s significant amounts of money and political capital involved. What PR company or major political party wouldn&#x27;t want control of a national subreddit that keeps making corruption and cover-ups hard to control?

<i>If a very sensitive posting of a critical nature has been posted on a forum - it can be quickly removed from public view by &#x27;forum sliding.&#x27; In this technique a number of unrelated posts are quietly prepositioned on the forum and allowed to &#x27;age.&#x27; Each of these misdirectional forum postings can then be called upon at will to trigger a &#x27;forum slide.&#x27; The second requirement is that several fake accounts exist, which can be called upon, to ensure that this technique is not exposed to the public. To trigger a &#x27;forum slide&#x27; and &#x27;flush&#x27; the critical post out of public view it is simply a matter of logging into each account both real and fake and then &#x27;replying&#x27; to prepositined postings with a simple 1 or 2 line comment. This brings the unrelated postings to the top of the forum list, and the critical posting &#x27;slides&#x27; down the front page, and quickly out of public view. Although it is difficult or impossible to censor the posting it is now lost in a sea of unrelated and unuseful postings. By this means it becomes effective to keep the readers of the forum reading unrelated and non-issue items.</i><p>Except if someone bumps it again it means you need to make a bunch of new replies again, which will look suspicious and be a lot of work. Also, it would still be indexable in google.

Nothing in this article is specifically related to forum posts. This stuff can be found within any gathering of people and most have been described way earlier than the internet, as far back as the original Forum or Agora. That is not what is wrong with it.<p>If you read the article and think there is something to it, please read it again and compare all the &#x27;evidence&#x27; to the behavior of what you suspect a normal forum user would do: Ask questions? Gather information? Establish rapport? Propose something stupid or dangerous? Comment on the wrong thing? Post something that leads people away from the post you are interested in and have so much people comment on it that your important information disappears. You can get that just by the number of people telling the original poster it is &#x27;off-topic&#x27;. Yes you would expect normal users to do all of them some of the time.<p>If you value your (online) community judge all actions by Hanlon&#x27;s razor: &quot;never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity&quot;. If malice was that easily distinguishable from normal behavior there would be a lot less of it. Don&#x27;t let anyone tell you you should approach your community with suspicion, because then they are already halfway there in destroying it.

Related:<p><i>The Gentleperson&#x27;s Guide to Forum Spies (2012)</i> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=21165313" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=21165313</a> - Oct 2019 (10 comments)<p><i>The Gentleperson&#x27;s Guide To Forum Spies (2012)</i> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=7329162" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=7329162</a> - March 2014 (33 comments)<p><i>The Gentleperson&#x27;s Guide To Forum Spies</i> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=4277278" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=4277278</a> - July 2012 (57 comments)<p>Should I list the Simple Sabotage Manual threads too?

There is a claim that getting caught is bad for the attacker, but it seems like creating a few fake accounts that get caught probably would help increase the level of distrust quite a bit.

This is fantastic, because it describes fairly typical forum activity as a sign of _soviet KGB super spy activity_. Now, those happen, but aren’t _that_ frequent. Meanwhile when you see those “who cares” posts, you’re just dealing with genuine bona fide terrible people.<p>So now this post triggered folks here to look at every time their post - or something they _personally_ believe important - sinks and think “oh, it’s the COINTELPRO” - meanwhile it’s just that nobody cares. Maybe they should, I don’t know, but they don’t.<p>On top of that, I bet it made a few of you think that police violence videos are Russian psyops. Just smuggled that under the radar, phrased it in a technically correct way.<p>Essentially I’m saying it’s like those “protect women against trafficking” videos aimed at wealthy middle-class white women - that both make them paranoid, and distract from real issues, all so that the poster can feel smart.

As in many other areas, the younger generation raised on Web 2.0 are far beyond the Web 1.0 crowd in regards to industriousness and psyche. Nobody writes or reads stuff like this anymore. They just install Shinigami Eyes and move on with their day

In contrast to all the dubiously useful AI applications springing up lately, one that would be great is an AI that can reliably and accurately detect bots, shills, astroturf, disguised advertisements and other sponsored content masquerading as organic. I’d install a browser plug-in that could put a warning under comments and tweets that are detected as fake or a bad faith actor.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.washingtonpost.com&#x2F;outlook&#x2F;2021&#x2F;05&#x2F;20&#x2F;ai-bots-grassroots-astroturf&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.washingtonpost.com&#x2F;outlook&#x2F;2021&#x2F;05&#x2F;20&#x2F;ai-bots-gr...</a> &amp; <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ag.ny.gov&#x2F;sites&#x2F;default&#x2F;files&#x2F;oag-fakecommentsreport.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ag.ny.gov&#x2F;sites&#x2F;default&#x2F;files&#x2F;oag-fakecommentsreport...</a><p><i>&gt; New York state attorney general issued a report on ... big telecommunications companies paid millions of dollars to specialist “AstroTurf” companies to generate public comments. These companies then stole people’s names and email addresses from old files and from hacked data dumps and attached them to 8.5 million public comments and half a million letters to members of Congress. All of them said that they supported the corporations’ position on something called “net neutrality,” the idea that telecommunications companies must treat all Internet content equally and not prioritize any company or service. Three AstroTurf companies — Fluent, Opt-Intelligence and React2Media — agreed to pay nearly $4 million in fines.</i><p>U.S. 2012 Smith-Mundt legalization of propaganda lead to an industrial-scale &quot;grassroots PR&quot; industry for use by any buyer in the &quot;nudge&quot; market, including a sizable subset of the global Fortune 500. This industry has since been active in online venues with meaningful audiences, <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.techsoc.com&#x2F;grassroots.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.techsoc.com&#x2F;grassroots.html</a> &amp; <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;evoleadership&#x2F;status&#x2F;761959456624082944" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;evoleadership&#x2F;status&#x2F;761959456624082944</a> &amp; <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;qualpolicomm.wordpress.com&#x2F;2014&#x2F;10&#x2F;06&#x2F;q-a-with-ed-walker-on-grassroots-for-hire&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;qualpolicomm.wordpress.com&#x2F;2014&#x2F;10&#x2F;06&#x2F;q-a-with-ed-wa...</a><p><i>&gt; Walker shows how repertoires of participation originally developed by advocacy organizations, electoral campaigns, and social movements are commercialized by public affairs consultants who offer them as professional services ... The result is an increasingly “subsidized public” where selective incentivization and rational prospecting by public affairs consultants looking to mobilize support for their clients’ interests work to get people involved in particular political processes.</i><p>2014 book <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;dp&#x2F;B00IO0E69E&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;dp&#x2F;B00IO0E69E&#x2F;</a><p><i>&gt; ..illuminates how elite consultants have adopted grassroots advocacy tactics for paying clients. Rather than being dismissed as mere &#x27;astroturf&#x27;, these consultants&#x27; campaigns should be seen as having real effects on political participation and policymaking</i><p>Organized (e.g. software-assisted) online pseudo-persona lobbyists of public opinion are usually outnumbered by individual humans, who can gain the experience to move such arms races towards higher quality debate.

(2018), but mostly timeless.

This is influencing the world more than what we want to believe.

Amazing that HN of all places are taking this childish LARP seriously.<p>&gt; Guys they are trying to disrupt my obscure forum about some niche technical subject!<p>&gt; Who?<p>&gt; Them!

Easiest way to see psyops and narrative control in action is to go look at all the deleted comments from any of the popular subreddits. If dissent gets you banned then you know something is wrong.

Twenty-Five Rules of Disinformation = you can see this at work with NAFO

The ancestrors of #nafo #nofakemeds and so on.<p>May be next article will talk about the practice of Hasbara and Israel...<p>let&#x27;s wait and see.

I&#x27;ve wondered about stuff like this when a post appears here that is critical of some well-known company.

How likely is Ghislaine Maxwell to be on reddit?

The easiest way to spot it (at least for me) is to pay attention to how you feel when reading a forum. If you get super pissed off or anxious while reading, there&#x27;s a chance you&#x27;re getting screwed with<p>An example: the other day I read a NYT article that seemed like it was almost <i>designed</i> to be irritating. It was so irritating that I was about to subscribe just to comment on how stupid the author was, but then I realized I had my credit card out. Then I realized that I was the stupid one and put the card away<p>Forum agitators will almost always go for your emotions (because it scales better). How to solve this? Don&#x27;t go to online places that fuck with your head. Go to the places that tend to be less emotionally charged, less groupthink oriented, and more boring. I.e. the reuters of social media

You can see this at work all day on &#x2F;pol&#x2F; as well.

Oh wow it&#x27;s like a rare free pass to talk about shills here on HN :)

Assuming that Elon Musk is paying off shills, or proponents of nuclear energy are, or whomever else you suspect, how hard would it be to get a job doing this, get paid for it, then go public with receipts and proof that it&#x27;s happening?

For a real-time example, go to r&#x2F;politics and sort by new. See what news never sees the light of day but somehow still gets 50+ comments saying “who cares” or “what about…”.

I am visiting forums for entertainment. Well I also get some really useful tech links on HN every once in a while. If the author of this insanely long list thinks that I have nothing to do with my life but study their creation and then use the &quot;wisdom&quot; gained to hunt for psyops they have to get a life. Well if it is their job I understand ;)<p>Yes there are all type of &quot;agents&quot; on forums. If they think that their posts are going to change my opinions I have a bridge to sell.