Реддит

[tijd.livejournal.com]

Сеть Reddit имеет не так много постоянных пользователей, как Facebook или Twitter, но эти пользователи активные. Большинство (70%) из них пользуются сайтом для того, чтобы узнавать новости.



Во время выборов 2016 канал r/The_Donald превратился в центральное место для фанатов Трампа из числа alt-right троллей, генерирующих мемы и теории заговора.



Печальной стала история 33-летнего Лэйна Дэвиса из Сиэттла, убившего своего отца.

Lane Davis, who went by the username Seattle4Truth, was a regular on r/The_Donald, sometimes posting conspiracy theories several times a day. Davis, also a former intern of Milo Yiannopoulos, killed his father last July after accusing his father of being a pedophile, according to his mother in a harrowing 9-1-1 call.
“He’s mad about something on the internet about leftist pedophiles and he thinks we’re leftist and he’s calling us pedophiles. And I don’t know what all,” Davis’ mother Catherine told the operator.
“He just lives on the internet and he gets really worked up about everything that’s going on. He needs an intervention of some kind here.”
Minutes later, Davis stabbed his father, killing him.
Davis later told detectives the fight started when he asked his father “whether toddlers could consent to sex or not.” Davis said his father called him a Nazi and a racist.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/reddit-rises-up-against-ceo-for-hiding-russian-trolls



Следует ли удивляться тому, что сообщество было успешно инфильтровано российскими троллями? Влиятельный тролль TEN_GOP в 2016-2017 лично разместил в Reddit 1575 постов. Наиболее популярным из постов троллей, разоблаченных в Твиттере, оказался пост "CNN Immediately Ends the Interview When Leading Democrat Reveals The CIA Has No Evidence Of Trump/Russia Collusion" (Имелось в виду интервью Дайэн Файнстайн 4 мая 2017, в котором на вопрос "Do you have evidence that there was in fact collusion between Trump associates and Russia during the campaign?" она ответила "Not at this time.") Этот пост питерского тролля pamela_moore13 набрал почти 16 тысяч голосов.
https://www.reddit.com/user/f_k_a_g_n/comments/7eest1/reddit_submissions_linking_to_twitterrussian/

Дополнительная информация об инфильтрации Reddit и Tumblr появилась из утечки внутренних документов питерской фабрики троллей.

A leak of internal data from the Kremlin-backed Internet Research Agency discovered by The Daily Beast serves as the first confirmation that the Russian troll farm deployed its online agitators on Reddit as part of its campaign to interfere in American politics.
The leak also reveals 21 Tumblr accounts, including login credentials, run by the Internet Research Agency (IRA). The listing for the leak offers “American proxies” for Reddit and viral meme site 9Gag.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/russians-used-reddit-and-tumblr-to-troll-the-2016-election



Наконец глава компании Reddit, 34-летний Стив Хаффман, был вынужден откликнуться:

I believe the biggest risk we face as Americans is our own ability to discern reality from nonsense, and this is a burden we all bear. I wish there was a solution as simple as banning all propaganda, but it’s not that easy. Between truth and fiction are a thousand shades of grey. It’s up to all of us—Redditors, citizens, journalists—to work through these issues. It’s somewhat ironic, but I actually believe what we’re going through right now will actually reinvigorate Americans to be more vigilant, hold ourselves to higher standards of discourse, and fight back against propaganda, whether foreign or not.
https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/827zqc/in_response_to_recent_reports_about_the_integrity/

Хаффман отказался банить r/The_Donald, предложив посмотреть, как этот канал зачахнет сам собой. Не всем юзерам такой ответ понравился.

Multiple Redditors in the comments section of Huffman’s post pointed out that not only had r/The_Donald been infiltrated by Russian trolls (many argued that it was little more than a front) but also that the subreddit’s continued existence was a sign that the platform wasn’t taking Russian propaganda seriously at all.
Huffman addressed this criticism by responding in comments: “Banning them [users on r/The_Donald] probably won't accomplish what you want. However, letting them fall apart from their own dysfunction probably will. Their engagement is shrinking over time, and that's much more powerful than shutting them down outright” (link original). Redditors responded by downvoting Huffman’s comment a record-breaking 6,000 times.
https://www.mediamatters.org/blog/2018/03/07/Russian-propaganda-is-rampant-on-Reddit-Heres-why-that-matters/219576

Хаффман также пообещал сотрудничество с расследованиями Конгресса. Однако, как выясняется, Reddit dо сих пор не передал в Конгресс никакой информации.

The Daily Beast has learned that the cooperation Reddit is providing is, at most, precursory. Knowledgeable sources tell The Daily Beast that Reddit has not, for instance, produced any documents to the House or Senate committees shedding light on how Russian propaganda hijacked a site that bills itself as the “front page of the internet.”
https://www.thedailybeast.com/exclusive-reddit-says-its-cooperating-with-russia-investigations-theyve-handed-over-zero-documents

Comments

[tijd.livejournal.com]

Reddit также использовался российскими троллями в попытке распространить дурацкую "антиклинтоновскую" игру Hiltendo.



Russians created an anti-Hillary Clinton video game called "Hilltendo" and tried to make it go viral in the weeks before the 2016 U.S. presidential election, CNN has determined through a review of internet records and computer code. <...>
A link to the game was also posted to Voat, a platform that markets itself as an alternative to Reddit. There, the game was posted by user "Peter_Hurst." Hurst posted to Voat almost 200 times in the two months between July and September 2016.
Dozens of Hurst's posts linked to articles on DoNotShoot.us and BlackMattersUS.com, two websites CNN confirmed were part of a Russia's effort to interfere in American politics. The account is still on the platform but has not posted since 2016.
On Reddit, a "Peter_Hurst" account also regularly posted links to Internet Research Agency websites, CNN found.
Reddit said the Peter_Hurst account was suspended in 2016 for spam, but did not provide any further details.
http://money.cnn.com/2018/03/08/technology/hilltendo-russians-anti-clinton-video-game/index.html

[tijd.livejournal.com]

В ноябре 2016 предвыборный номер журнала Atlantic содержал обращение от редакции "Against Donald Trump".

Donald Trump has no record of public service and no qualifications for public office. His affect is that of an infomercial huckster; he traffics in conspiracy theories and racist invective; he is appallingly sexist; he is erratic, secretive, and xenophobic; he expresses admiration for authoritarian rulers, and evinces authoritarian tendencies himself. He is easily goaded, a poor quality for someone seeking control of America’s nuclear arsenal. He is an enemy of fact-based discourse; he is ignorant of, and indifferent to, the Constitution; he appears not to read.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/11/the-case-for-hillary-clinton-and-against-donald-trump/501161/

Это был третий раз в истории журнала, когда редакция явным образом поддержала кандидата на президентских выборах (после Авраама Линкольна и Линдона Джонсона).



Но заглавный материал этого номера назывался War Goes Viral: How social media is being weaponized across the world и во многом предвосхитил дальнейшие разоблачения.

Today, netwar is a daily reality. After lingering in the shadows of Russian military planning for decades, Soviet-style “information warfare” entered a period of renaissance in the past decade. Russian officials felt increasing pressure from the forces of Western liberalization and internet technology as they watched “color revolutions” engulf many nations of the former Soviet bloc. So they set out to harness the power of the internet to their own ends, controlling it at home and using it to divide foes abroad. An association of nearly 75 education and research institutions was devoted to studying the finer details of how the internet works, coordinated by the Russian Federal Security Service—the successor to the KGB.
The flagship of the Russian propaganda machine is Russia Today—or just RT, as it is emblazoned on New York City buses and street signs lining Fifth Avenue—which promises the time-honored service (and perceived truth) of “the second opinion.” A glitzy and contrarian news service that received roughly $250 million in government subsidies for 2016, RT injects Russian state opinion into international reporting; it broadcasts in English, Arabic, and Spanish, and posts additional items online in Russian, French, and German. It has become the most popular television news network on YouTube.
Yet Russian information operations are like icebergs: RT and other branded propaganda outlets are just the small part that is visible. Beneath the surface, Russia maintains a vast digital network of bloggers and paid social-media commenters, many of whom do not advertise themselves as Russians at all. It is surprisingly easy to draw their ire. Just post something unfriendly toward the Russian position on Crimea or the 2014 shooting-down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over Ukraine and you will soon find yourself receiving insulting messages from people you’ve never met and friend requests from mysterious lingerie models eager to change your mind (and keep a closer watch on you besides).
Many of the real people behind these fake accounts are young and chic—aspiring writers who show up each day to work in “troll factories,” darkened office buildings nestled in the suburbs of Moscow and St. Petersburg. They manufacture dozens of online personae, working 12-hour shifts. From cramped cubicles, they vent fog into discussions about geopolitics, nato, Ukraine, American elections, and everything in between. As a European Union official who studies Russia’s propaganda put it, “The aim is not to make you love Putin. The aim is to make you disbelieve anything. A disbelieving, fragile, unconscious audience is much easier to manipulate.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/11/war-goes-viral/501125/

[tijd.livejournal.com]

На Reddit остаются следы деятельности уже разоблаченных троллей.

Columbia University researcher Jonathan Albright has found more than a thousand posts submitted by a small coterie of accounts between the spring and fall of 2016 linking back to phony websites created by the IRA. These posts were still live on Reddit as of Friday morning.
Uploaded at a frenetic pace during 2016, the posts link predominantly to the websites DoNotShoot.US and BlackMattersUS.com, both of which are still active and were created by the IRA not only to spread divisive propaganda, but to collect personally identifying information about American citizens who visited the sites. (WIRED doesn't suggest visiting these sites, which still actively use ad trackers.) Several Reddit accounts that submitted the bulk of these links—in some cases at a rate of 25 posts in a single hour—have since been deactivated, presumably as part of Reddit's previously announced purge. Two were deactivated only after WIRED asked Reddit about them Thursday. But the articles they posted—some of which garnered hundreds of upvotes and dozens of comments—remain.
https://www.wired.com/story/reddit-russian-propaganda/

[tijd.livejournal.com]

In my post last month, I described that we had found and removed a few hundred accounts that were of suspected Russian Internet Research Agency origin. I’d like to share with you more fully what that means. At this point in our investigation, we have found 944 suspicious accounts, few of which had a visible impact on the site:
70% (662) had zero karma
1% (8) had negative karma
22% (203) had 1-999 karma
6% (58) had 1,000-9,999 karma
1% (13) had a karma score of 10,000+
https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/8bb85p/reddits_2017_transparency_report_and_suspect/

[tijd.livejournal.com]

The account, Rubinjer, was the Russia-linked agency’s most popular account on Reddit and received almost 100,000 upvotes, or Reddit’s version of Facebook’s “likes,” in its lifecycle before it was shut down by the site.
One of Rubinjer’s posts on Reddit’s largest pro-Trump community, r/The_Donald, titled “This is How Hillary gets black votes,” links to an animated gif of the fake porn video that is still available on the platform. The same sex tape was posted five times to PornHub under the name “Leaked Hillary Clinton’s Hotel Sex Tape with Black Guy,” and also the porn site SpankBang.
The video was viewed more than 250,000 times on Pornhub.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/ncna864871