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by whycome 342 days ago
> It leaves me wondering how the situation would have been if it would have been a (dramaturgically) 'bad' series. It might have left those involved even worse of.

Holy shit. You might see big corps like the post office fund big dramas as a way to sway public opinion. A tool in the pr playbook.
2 comments
mparkms 341 days ago
FIFA tried to make a movie to whitewash their reputation during one of their many corruption scandals: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Passions

It didn't work because it was a terrible movie and blatant propaganda, but I could see someone doing this successfully if they were more subtle about it.

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aspenmayer 342 days ago
I suspect it’s a deliberate strategy in other venues. I see a lot of comments on HN that seem like they’re rage/troll/flame bait to cause a line of inquiry they are advancing to be flagged/downvoted, but if done as intended, their reply will be divisive enough that the troll trigger man isn’t identified as a troll, but they induce trolling in others.

Anyone Can Become a Troll: Causes of Trolling Behavior in Online Discussions

Justin Cheng, Michael Bernstein, Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, Jure Leskovec

> In online communities, antisocial behavior such as trolling disrupts constructive discussion. While prior work suggests that trolling behavior is confined to a vocal and antisocial minority, we demonstrate that ordinary people can engage in such behavior as well. We propose two primary trigger mechanisms: the individual’s mood, and the surrounding context of a discussion (e.g., exposure to prior trolling behavior). Through an experiment simulating an online discussion, we find that both negative mood and seeing troll posts by others significantly increases the probability of a user trolling, and together double this probability. To support and extend these results, we study how these same mechanisms play out in the wild via a data-driven, longitudinal analysis of a large online news discussion community. This analysis reveals temporal mood effects, and explores long range patterns of repeated exposure to trolling. A predictive model of trolling behavior shows that mood and discussion context together can explain trolling behavior better than an individual’s history of trolling. These results combine to suggest that ordinary people can, under the right circumstances, behave like trolls.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5791909/

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