Talk:Troll farm

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Needs improvement

This article should say more about the impact of troll farms on social media, and the efforts by Facebook et al. to fight back against them.^[1]^[2]^[3]^[4] These aspects of troll farms, which have a much greater impact on world politics and well-being than the geographical location of the workplaces online trolls-for-hire. HouseOfChange (talk) 13:22, 17 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

References

^ Hao, Karen (September 16, 2021). "Troll farms reached 140 million Americans a month on Facebook before 2020 election, internal report shows". MIT Technology Review. Retrieved September 17, 2021. Troll farms — professionalized groups that work in a coordinated fashion to post provocative content, often propaganda, to social networks— were still building massive audiences by running networks of Facebook pages. Their content was reaching 140 million US users per month—75% of whom had never followed any of the pages. They were seeing the content because Facebook's content-recommendation system had pushed it into their news feeds.
^ Howard, Philip N.; Ganesh, Bharath; Liotsiou, Dimitra (2018). "The IRA, Social Media and Political Polarization in the United States, 2012–2018" (PDF). Computational Propaganda Research Project. Retrieved September 17, 2021. 'Cyber troops' are defined here as government or political party actors tasked with manipulating public opinion online...We define computational propaganda as the use of automation, algorithms, and big-data analytics to manipulate public life (Howard & Woolley, 2016).The term encompasses issues to do with so-called 'fake news', the spread of misinformation on social media platforms, illegal data harvesting and micro-profiling, the exploitation of social media platforms for foreign influence operations, the amplification of hate speech or harmful content through fake accounts or political bots, and clickbait content for optimized social media consumption.
^ Huq, Aziz (June 25, 2020). "Political lies aren't new, but the methods of spreading them are". Washington Post. Retrieved September 17, 2021. a new tool kit for Web-based public lies has been tested by Russia and China, for use first at home and then against foreign foes. It is diffusing quickly to more nations. Howard counts five other countries — India, Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela — that are using the same tool kit against overseas democratic publics. In 2020, there were 'organized social media misinformation teams' working for parties and governments in some 70 countries.
^ Walker, Shaun (April 2, 2015). "The Russian troll factory at the heart of the meddling allegations". The Guardian. Retrieved September 17, 2021. The most prestigious job in the agency is to be an English-language troll, for which the pay is 65,000 roubles...other people in the room were told they had passed the preliminary test and were set to work composing comments on two English-language articles about Ukraine – one by the New York Times and another by CNN.

No mention of CIA-run troll farms.

Glaring big gap in the article. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 167.142.48.84 (talk) 14:48, 3 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

If you know any RS that we could cite about this, feel free to add material to the article. HouseOfChange (talk) 13:13, 5 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

removals

Hello HouseofChange. Can you explain in more detail where you are seeing the removals of well-cited material that I made? Clepushka (talk) 10:39, 27 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Clepushka: With two edits, you removed several well-supported sections of the article describing troll farms in Albania, Finland, and North Macedonia. Looking more closely, I see you moved information from those three sections into other sections, re-organizing the article so that sub-headings name the sponsors of ther trolling activity. I disagree only with your splitting the Macedonia case, which was quite interesting and unusual in being organized for ad revenue rather than on behalf of any particular viewpoint. So I am going to self-revert my revert, with an apology to you for my mistake. HouseOfChange (talk) 19:48, 27 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

[TR0916-1] Hao, Karen (September 16, 2021). "Troll farms reached 140 million Americans a month on Facebook before 2020 election, internal report shows". MIT Technology Review. Retrieved September 17, 2021. Troll farms — professionalized groups that work in a coordinated fashion to post provocative content, often propaganda, to social networks— were still building massive audiences by running networks of Facebook pages. Their content was reaching 140 million US users per month—75% of whom had never followed any of the pages. They were seeing the content because Facebook's content-recommendation system had pushed it into their news feeds.

[IRA2018-2] Howard, Philip N.; Ganesh, Bharath; Liotsiou, Dimitra (2018). "The IRA, Social Media and Political Polarization in the United States, 2012–2018" (PDF). Computational Propaganda Research Project. Retrieved September 17, 2021. 'Cyber troops' are defined here as government or political party actors tasked with manipulating public opinion online...We define computational propaganda as the use of automation, algorithms, and big-data analytics to manipulate public life (Howard & Woolley, 2016).The term encompasses issues to do with so-called 'fake news', the spread of misinformation on social media platforms, illegal data harvesting and micro-profiling, the exploitation of social media platforms for foreign influence operations, the amplification of hate speech or harmful content through fake accounts or political bots, and clickbait content for optimized social media consumption.

[WaPoLM-3] Huq, Aziz (June 25, 2020). "Political lies aren't new, but the methods of spreading them are". Washington Post. Retrieved September 17, 2021. a new tool kit for Web-based public lies has been tested by Russia and China, for use first at home and then against foreign foes. It is diffusing quickly to more nations. Howard counts five other countries — India, Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela — that are using the same tool kit against overseas democratic publics. In 2020, there were 'organized social media misinformation teams' working for parties and governments in some 70 countries.

[TrollHouse2015-4] Walker, Shaun (April 2, 2015). "The Russian troll factory at the heart of the meddling allegations". The Guardian. Retrieved September 17, 2021. The most prestigious job in the agency is to be an English-language troll, for which the pay is 65,000 roubles...other people in the room were told they had passed the preliminary test and were set to work composing comments on two English-language articles about Ukraine – one by the New York Times and another by CNN.

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