<story><title>The Vietnamese military has an actual troll army and Facebook is its weapon</title><url>https://restofworld.org/2023/force-47-vietnam-military-group-facebook/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>falcolas</author><text>Or, to put it another way, average commenters are fighting against coordinated groups of state actors just to have genuine discussions. And it would shock me if Vietnam was a leader in this space.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s like how ads pit big bags of mostly water against billions of dollars worth of psychological manipulation. Us mere mortals have no chance.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mrtksn</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s quite wide spread. There were reports about Israel doing it, Russia doing it and now Vietnam. I&amp;#x27;m sure it&amp;#x27;s done by many many more.&lt;p&gt;In Turkey Erdoğan&amp;#x27;s presidential communications office has budget of 100 million dollars and 30 story building. He has also 11 million registered members and the word on the street is that they are granting jobs based on social media trolling performance and pay for tweets. When Musk announced the Twitter Blue subscription, Erdogan said he will ask him for discount and regional pricing.&lt;p&gt;You think you can catch trolls by IP or geolocation? Nope, those people work from home or wherever they are. You think you can catch them by requiring government ID or payment? Nope, they have the budget and they are real people.&lt;p&gt;The content created by these people is nor organic but it&amp;#x27;s not a bot generated crap too. They do utilise bots to manipulate trending topics but the wast majority is real people following orders.&lt;p&gt;Maybe large scale monitoring over trends can be helpful to identify inorganic campaigns nut the lines are very blurry. After all, arguably, marching behind a leader with agenda is an organic behaviour.&lt;p&gt;Humans are simply not equipped with defense mechanisms for the era of mass communications. Tiny issues can be easily amplified to push an agenda. If you look at the social media you would think that half of the youngsters are trans, the other are fascists or something.&lt;p&gt;It gets unhealthier and unhealthier as the in person relationships are breaking down, people start living in imaginary worlds where the life is about culture wars.&lt;p&gt;Techies like to imagine that they are going to &amp;quot;defeat the government with tech&amp;quot; but they are wrong, the governments can have the tech because they have the money and the power to design the landscape. For example, here is the Turkish interior minister boosting to a Youtuber about this special app which has total overview of the social media and takes a photo of him to run face recognition in seconds: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;twitter.com&amp;#x2F;Darkwebhaber&amp;#x2F;status&amp;#x2F;1655561171900964865&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;twitter.com&amp;#x2F;Darkwebhaber&amp;#x2F;status&amp;#x2F;1655561171900964865&lt;/a&gt;?</text></comment>
<story><title>The Vietnamese military has an actual troll army and Facebook is its weapon</title><url>https://restofworld.org/2023/force-47-vietnam-military-group-facebook/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>falcolas</author><text>Or, to put it another way, average commenters are fighting against coordinated groups of state actors just to have genuine discussions. And it would shock me if Vietnam was a leader in this space.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s like how ads pit big bags of mostly water against billions of dollars worth of psychological manipulation. Us mere mortals have no chance.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>gondaloof</author><text>&amp;gt; it would shock me if Vietnam was a leader in this space&lt;p&gt;Don&amp;#x27;t be too shocked. Vietnam is little China in the region. People are still ok with it because Vietnam has been seeing tremendous growth in the last couple of decades… sounds familiar? Lots of tech companies are also setting up shop there… it&amp;#x27;s a 100% dejavu. I just hope it won&amp;#x27;t suffer the same fate in 20 years.</text></comment>