According to a recent article per The Guardian of London, a California company is developing software that will allow U.S. military personnel to use multiple fake “online identities” to log onto comment boards and post comments promoting U.S. interests. Is this really news?
Surely, we are all aware of the routine use of professional trolls to influence comment boards?
The article says this “social media propaganda software” would only target foreign audiences, as it would be “illegal to use this technology on U.S. citizens.”
Really? How soon will (biotech CEO) Hugh Grant and the Koch brothers be arrested?
Years ago, Monsanto hired full-time employees to do nothing but troll the Internet looking for mention of Monsanto, and then jump onto that chatroom/newswire/message board and post pro-Monsanto comments. The Koch brothers have been financing similar activities for years.
Professional trolls use internet services to notify them immediately when anything is published containing certain keywords. For instance, “genetically modified organism (GMO).” I know, because I”ve programmed similar alerts. The difference is, I am not being paid to do this, I”m just a citizen with a real life and a real job, so instead of programming my alerts to arrive instantly, I use the one-summary-per-day option and read the results on my own time.
The first comments under any article about GMO”s are usually written by biotech industry trolls. If the article was anti-GMO, they call the author a Luddite and heap disdain upon anyone so stupid as to think we can “feed the hungry world” without GMO”s. It does not matter how well real people and independent scientists articulate evidence-based facts about the many failures and dangers of GMOs. Corporate trolls are paid to post 24/7 and that”s a tough act to keep up with.
It has become something of a game for real people to engage the corporate minions.
In the comments below, a recent GMO-related article, the first posts were lengthy diatribes that appeared within minutes of the original article (trolls have scripts from which they cut-and-paste.) The third comment was a real person, who exclaimed “Dang! the trolls beat me again!”
Yes, funny. But not so funny if corporate-financed-faux-grassroots-deviousness succeeds in creating the illusion “this is what Americans think.”
No. This is what corporations want you to think Americans think.
Today, university ag and science departments rely upon corporate donations, which means science for science”s sake has been replaced with science for corporate profits” sake. The internet is flooded with “peer reviews” and “scientific” articles designed to push the corporate agenda. The media is full of expensively disseminated stories about corporate “gifts” to communities, schools or third-world nations, gifts, which in truth amount to little more than advertising-by-another-name and tax dodging.
To distract attention from the greatest transfer of wealth in history (from 95 percent of us into the pockets of 5 percent), corporations have financed an ongoing culture war in this country. Their goal is to prevent real people from discovering that regardless of whether we are Republicans or Democrats, we have more in common with each other than we have with the amoral and unpatriotic villains who are looting this nation.
The Internet has been one battleground. Corporations out-gun us with money, power and armies of professional spin-masters disguised as normal Joes.
On our side are individuals too eccentric or independent to march in step, but with brains, creativity and the desire to keep the world honest, fair and moving toward a better future.
Please, God, let the 95-percent figure out how to work with each other, before our impoverishment by the 5 percent becomes complete.
Deb Baumann
Upper Lake
