Government Hires Internet Trolls and Shills To Sway Opinions
Originally posted on September 20, 2013
According to reports, not only is the Government monitoring social media sites, it also hires trolls, shills and disinformants to comment in Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and website comment sections to try and sway people’s opinions and divert conversations. Not only are trolls used in comment sections, they also make YouTube videos to get their viewers to feed into groupthink on various topics.
According to Natural News, at a 2012 summit, former CIA director David Petraeus essentially admitted that the CIA has a covert online presence that it uses not only for data mining purposes but also to infiltrate online conversations for the purpose of protecting “national security” interests. Such interests, it turns out, include disrupting conversations that discuss topics like 9/11 truth, for instance, or U.S. involvement in giving weapons to Syrian rebels.
Natural News writes:
“You’ve probably run into them before—those seemingly random antagonizers who always end up diverting the conversation in an online chat room or article comment section away from the issue at hand, and towards a much different agenda. Hot-button issues like illegal immigration, the two-party political system, the “war on terror” and even alternative medicine are among the most common targets of such attackers, known as internet “trolls” or “shills,” who in many cases are nothing more than paid lackeys hired by the federal government and other international organizations to sway and ultimately control public opinion.
Several years ago, Canada’s CTV News aired a short segment about how its own government had been exposed for hiring secret agents to monitor social media and track online conversations, as well as the activities of certain dissenting individuals. This report, which in obvious whitewashing language referred to such activities as the government simply “weighing in and correcting” allegedly false information posted online, basically admitted that the Canadian government had assumed the role of secret online police.”
Humans Are Free website says the troll work falls under five categories:
1. They combine their vast knowledge with disinformation and ridicule, in order to make a subject appear as uninteresting and misleading as possible.
2. At the same time, they fuel meaningless debates on uninteresting subjects, easily diverting attention from the important ones — while keeping the first page of a forum filled with subjects bringing nothing new or crucial, and acting merely as distractions.
3. If a given subject is of major interest and they are not able to instantly kill it, then they will divert the discussion to one of the never-ending “divide and conquer” debates, like politics, racism, war, etc.
4. They work together to report those who are informed for things they have not committed, like copyright infringement or spam, in order to have their accounts suspended; or provoke them systematically, looking for an offensive reaction that is sanctioned by the forum rules.
5. Finally, they infiltrate the high ranks of a forum or website, becoming “moderators”. This gives them power to delete threads of interest, due to fake copyright infringement reported by their undercover colleagues, and they can go as far as permanently banning a user.
According to Occupy Corporatism, the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), which was recently exposed by American hero and whistleblower Edward Snowden for its illegal surveillance programs, has devised a training program that literally scouts out hackers from American colleges and universities and recruits them to work for the government. Among the many duties sought from those enrolled in the National Centers of Academic Excellence in the Cyber Operations Program are “collection, exploitation, and response” activities to take place in the online environment.
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