Growing number of cyber shills

[pnwmom]

I do wonder, sometimes.

http://consumerist.com/2011/12/13/growing-number-of-cyber-shills-invade-online-reviews/

Since the dawn of online reviews, businesses have been attempting to game the system by flooding sites with bogus star ratings, fictitious reviews. And even though the major sites have enacted safeguards to prevent automated ways of rigging reviews, there’s little they can do to stop an actual human from logging on to boost a review in exchange for a few pennies.

And that’s literally all it takes, says a new study from researchers at the University of California Santa Barbara, which found that a growing number of companies are turning to shadowy shills in China, where a fake review — or a Facebook like, a Twitter follower, etc. — from a real person can run you as little as $.13 to $.70.
The chart shown above (from the UCSB study) shows what two China-based companies charged per-task for things like posting on forums and registering accounts.

Explains InfoWorld.com:
Organizers enlist dozens or hundreds of professional shills. They orchestrate mass account creation (bolstering “XYZ Systems now has 100,000 registered users” claims), generate bogus ratings, post canned cut-and-paste positive reviews — and follow up with screenshots of their successes. Money flows from the customer to the organizer, then to the shills. And it’s very difficult — if not impossible — to trace.

[RKP5637]

1. I see this for some product reviews. I know the product is junk, yet it has amazing

reviews. And some are so poorly written, it makes one wonder.

[L. Coyote]

2. Follow the IP numbers on the log files.

When I shut down George W. Bush's Facebook discussion group, I pasted an image on my server in my post on his Fb page. I then had the IP number of Bush's PC, which I of course shared with some Washington ethics investigators. It is easy to track computer activity, difficult to connect user shills with their employers though if they are not on the same network.

[pnwmom]

3. Good for you! But most of us lack your talent, sadly. n/t

[cantbeserious]

4. This Citizen Wonders How Many Paid Political Shills Post On DU

eom

[R. Daneel Olivaw]

6. Check the fawning support for Israel in I/P

for that answer.

[cantbeserious]

7. This Citizen Agrees - This Citizen Also Suspects Similar For The Ongoing Primary

eom

[R. Daneel Olivaw]

10. No arguments there. The Fix is in...but this time the DNC is pulling it.

So very fucking sad...

[cantbeserious]

11. This Citizen Suspects The Same - Whither Democracy - When The Parties Become Propagandists

eom

[Ichingcarpenter]

5. Get ready for the robot propaganda machine

Get ready for the robot propaganda machine





Humanity has been advancing the field of propaganda for as long as we've been at war or had political fights to win. But today, propaganda is undergoing a significant change based on the latest advances in the fields of big data and artificial intelligence.

Over the past decade, billions of dollars have been invested in technologies that customise ads increasingly precisely based on individuals' preferences. Now this is making the jump to the world of politics and the manipulation of ideas.

Some recent military experiments in computational propaganda indicate where this could be taking us. In 2008, the US State Department, through its "foreign assistance" agency USAID, set up a fake social network in Cuba. Supposedly concerned with public health and civics, its operatives actively targeted likely dissidents. The site came complete with hashtags, dummy advertisements and a database of users' "political tendencies". For an estimated $1.6m (£1m), USAID was, between 2009 and 2012, able to control a major information platform in Cuba with potential to influence the spread of ideas among 40,000 unique profiles. Building on this project in 2011, USCENTCOM (United States Central Command) -- the US military force responsible for operations in the broader Middle East region -- awarded a contract to a Californian firm to build an "online persona management service", complete with fake online profiles that have convincing backgrounds and histories. The software will allow US service personnel to operate up to ten separate false identities based all over the world from their workstations "without fear of being discovered by sophisticated adversaries". These personas allow the military to recruit, spy on and manipulate peoples' behaviour and ideas.

Such projects represent the first wave of computational propaganda, but they are constrained in their scale (and ultimately their effectiveness) by the simple fact that each profile has to be driven by an actual human on the other side. In 2015, we will see the emergence of more automated computational propaganda -- bots using sophisticated artificial intelligence frameworks, removing the need to have humans operate the profiles. Algorithms will not only read the news, but write it. ...............


more: http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2015/06/wired-world-2015/robot-propaganda

[leveymg]

9. And there are those here who claim only Russia does it.

Nobody's fooled but them.

[Renew Deal]

8. Did you see this article about bots from a few days ago?

http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1016&pid=138657

[L. Coyote]

13. Growing number of real people with real voices in social media in shill free zones

Just because it is cyberspace does not make it vulnerable to propagandists. In Facebook I control what I see from whom. In fact, in a participatory world, the shill are drowned out by sheer numbers.

The bigger the site, such as DU where you are not in a shill-free zone, the more difficult to impact with trolls. So, they are here in great number, no doubt, and of many genera too. It would be interesting to see the site stats on IPs of those posting. How many posts from countries with cheap English-writing laborers?