<story><title>Undercover reporter reveals life in a Polish troll farm</title><url>https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/nov/01/undercover-reporter-reveals-life-in-a-polish-troll-farm</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>TheRealDunkirk</author><text>Google has largely solved the spam problem for end users. What I can&amp;#x27;t figure out is why platforms like Facebook and Twitter couldn&amp;#x27;t mark these sort of posts as, essentially, spam, by the same sort of rules and heuristics as email spam. Why can&amp;#x27;t they look at the metadata of verified troll-farm-generated clickbait&amp;#x2F;junk&amp;#x2F;spam&amp;#x2F;fake news, and make their own filters, and demote that content?&lt;p&gt;Simple. Because they&amp;#x27;re making money on the garbage. It&amp;#x27;s a misalignment of incentives. Until that is fixed, through reorganization or regulation, the problem will persist. They will only do enough to fight this -- both in terms of technology and public image -- so that it doesn&amp;#x27;t impact their bottom line(s).</text></item><item><author>nkozyra</author><text>This really is a critical juncture for the internet; the moment wherein the democratization of information has empowered those with the resources to overwhelm the signal with noise.&lt;p&gt;I wish I saw a way out.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nomel</author><text>I think you’re trivializing the difficulty in categorizing the low quality, and extremely brief, comments of social media.&lt;p&gt;Go look at a political subreddit, or some controversial tweet. There’s little conversation or context. Most users could be bots.&lt;p&gt;Google often has the advantage of having hard (url) or soft (product&amp;#x2F;key word mention) links that point to something extremely rare and “unimportant”. Everyone is bitching about politicians and policy in a way that’s not far from a Markov chain.</text></comment>
<story><title>Undercover reporter reveals life in a Polish troll farm</title><url>https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/nov/01/undercover-reporter-reveals-life-in-a-polish-troll-farm</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>TheRealDunkirk</author><text>Google has largely solved the spam problem for end users. What I can&amp;#x27;t figure out is why platforms like Facebook and Twitter couldn&amp;#x27;t mark these sort of posts as, essentially, spam, by the same sort of rules and heuristics as email spam. Why can&amp;#x27;t they look at the metadata of verified troll-farm-generated clickbait&amp;#x2F;junk&amp;#x2F;spam&amp;#x2F;fake news, and make their own filters, and demote that content?&lt;p&gt;Simple. Because they&amp;#x27;re making money on the garbage. It&amp;#x27;s a misalignment of incentives. Until that is fixed, through reorganization or regulation, the problem will persist. They will only do enough to fight this -- both in terms of technology and public image -- so that it doesn&amp;#x27;t impact their bottom line(s).</text></item><item><author>nkozyra</author><text>This really is a critical juncture for the internet; the moment wherein the democratization of information has empowered those with the resources to overwhelm the signal with noise.&lt;p&gt;I wish I saw a way out.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>exogeny</author><text>This is 100% correct. FB and TWTR are publicly traded companies; their executives and their board have convinced themselves in an extremely cowardly fashion that their only duty is to the shareholders. They absolutely know that the second they take this stuff seriously, they have to report both how bad it was&amp;#x2F;is, and how much traffic&amp;#x2F;revenue to their product was fraudulent at best.&lt;p&gt;It’s so gross.</text></comment>