Thanks for the great link. I'm saving to read the whole thing later, but wanted to point out that a variation of forum sliding (or possibly another tactic, haven't read it all) appears to be in use on Reddit.
The amount of noise from what are in many cases fairly obvious troll accounts introduced in important and high information density threads on /r/politics is staggering.
I can only surmise the intent has been to leverage Reddit's thread compression and comment ranking system to push down informative posts with lots of "active conversation" that really is just tossing low information, low quality chatter back and forth to reduce the signal to noise ratio of the comment section an bank on people getting to annoyed with the poor comment quality to bother scrolling for the good stuff that has been pushed down.
I'm also curious if tools like Masstagger are compromised yet and what the tooling of attackers may look like by comparison.
I'm sure there is much more going on that is harder to directly observe, but Reddit really is a great data source for any researchers on this topic.
Sorry for not replying earlier. Thanks for the reference to Masstagger which I wasn't aware of as I'm not a regular reddit user. Every platform has its own quirks, but the brigading techniques are easily adapted from platform to platform much like skills learned in one FPS are fairly transferable to any other FPS etc.
If you're interested in this topic and/or have any expertise in directed graphs and network mapping please drop me a line, same username at gmail.
And exactly what those who don't want fair and safe elections would prefer the general public does not read.
I often wonder, if the government is so genuinely concerned about fake news, why do we see zero effort to educate people on general techniques to detect it, but see only substantial effort to attack specific instances of it?
The amount of noise from what are in many cases fairly obvious troll accounts introduced in important and high information density threads on /r/politics is staggering.
I can only surmise the intent has been to leverage Reddit's thread compression and comment ranking system to push down informative posts with lots of "active conversation" that really is just tossing low information, low quality chatter back and forth to reduce the signal to noise ratio of the comment section an bank on people getting to annoyed with the poor comment quality to bother scrolling for the good stuff that has been pushed down.
I'm also curious if tools like Masstagger are compromised yet and what the tooling of attackers may look like by comparison.
I'm sure there is much more going on that is harder to directly observe, but Reddit really is a great data source for any researchers on this topic.