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Disruption and the Lewes Forum

On 28 Feb 2017 at 10:00am thinker wrote:

I'm a Luddite as far as technology is concerned. But I have become increasingly concerned with the disruption on this forum. It does not seem random to me. I looked up 'bots' on Wikipedia: 'Bots may be used on internet forums to automatically post inflammatory or nonsensical posts to disrupt the forum and anger users'. We may well be dealing with bods rather than bots but their intent seems to be the same.
There is an article by Cadwalladr on Robert Mercer and Cambridge Analytica that might be worth a read (Observer, the new review, 26/02/17) it ended with a quote by Marshall Mcluhan - 'World War 111 will be a guerrilla information war with no divisions between military and civilian participation' - and the wry comment: 'By that definition we're already there.'
I would be interested in hearing the views of other forum users especially those who have far more expertise than me in this area.

On 28 Feb 2017 at 10:06am Office worker wrote:

Newms is a bot? An @rse more like

On 28 Feb 2017 at 10:57am World War 111 wrote:

World War one hundred and eleven, OMG when will people learn wars are not the answer!

On 28 Feb 2017 at 2:33pm Tom Pain wrote:

Yes thinker,I too wonder which of the posters are bots. Facebook is a wonderful tool for agencies to harvest personal information and profile personalities. They can then provide you with friends and enemies ad infinitum in the cyber world until you don't know what's real and what's not. Actually it's not that different from the physical world where people have been trained to parrot one of two opinions,pro or anti whatever is fed to them by the television or the newspaper.

On 28 Feb 2017 at 2:40pm Paranoid wrote:

Yes we are all bots...we have come to take over this forum...bleep...bleep....exterminate...exterminate

On 28 Feb 2017 at 2:45pm Tom Pain wrote:

Thank you splifford for confirming my worse suspicions!

On 28 Feb 2017 at 3:27pm Zebedee wrote:

@thinker
You are right. However, you mostly have the wrong platforms, bots and paid trolls are used extensively through Twitter and Facebook. These are often backed by shadowy organisations and huge amounts of money.

You've heard of 'Fake News'? It's the same thing. The aim is destruction of truth. There is now an incredibly large number of fake news sites and propagators. The most well known site are those financed by Putin (Sputnik News, Zerohedge, Global Research etc)... see fakenewschecker.com for many more.

It's beginning to get so bad that it's hard to know what to believe any longer. The situation is not helped by Trump's willingness to play fast and lose with the truth whilst at the same time slagging of traditional media as 'the enemy' and banning them from his press conferences. It's also not helped in the UK by the fact that sections of our media have been peddling fake news for decades (Express, Daily Mail, Sun et al) such that many of our citizens have already lost the power to discriminate.

Fake news, paid trolls and Facebook algorithms are said to have affected the results of the UK's EU referendum and the US elections.

There is a war on, a war for hearts and minds and disinformation and obfuscation is at the heart of it.

If you have time to read a reasonably long article the one linked below might give you an idea of how far manipulation via the web and social media has got.

Check it out here »

On 28 Feb 2017 at 4:39pm thinker wrote:

Thanks for this. The link you include is actually the article I referred to in my original post. Yes definitely worth a read. it opened my eyes.