from Hacker News

RedHack leaks reveal the rise of Turkey's pro-government Twitter trolls

by mynameislegion on 10/9/16, 11:40 AM with 3 comments

• by JumpCrisscross on 10/9/16, 2:04 PM

  > Simultaneously, Albayrak’s wife, Esra, who is a Ph.D. graduate from the University of California, Berkeley, arranged a social media monitoring agency for sentiment analysis of online content about the government, according to a June 22 email. The agency’s presentation, attached to that email, offered to set up a 60-member team for PR and crisis management on social media.

  If we are training foreign leaders and their families in our universities, we need to have an ethics discussion. Banning abusive regimes could backfire by isolating them from our values. Perhaps this is a side effect of turning our universities into trade schools, where the "soft" arts are deëmphasised in relation to the "hard" core sciences.

• by clydethefrog on 10/9/16, 11:55 AM

  "Troll armies" have been quite successful in quieting dissent the last years in Russia, Turkey and other authoritarian countries. There are also theories Russia is partly responsible for the whole Trump spam on Twitter and Reddit. It's time this is taken as a serious threat to democratic values instead of shrugging off "it's just the internet, 99 % of the comments is always garbage".

  It's part of a successful information war now when the majority of the public gets their news from social media, which take popularity as a metric for what news is important. It's propaganda behind a proxy.