Wednesday, January 21, 2009
Downvote Bots Fight Propaganda War
Government propagandists, their hired private contractors and useful idiots are creating "downvote bots" or scripts to bury stories which question the government.
Anyone who has posted news items questioning the government's version of 9/11, the government's unquestioning support for Israel, or a host of other topics has probably noticed that all of their recent stories get downvoted virtually simultaneously, which defies the laws of probability.
One free, simple scripting program to create automatic downvotes of certain topics or news posters is called "Greasemonkey", which is commonly used on large social news sites such as Reddit.
For example, there are some 2,480 hits for the google search site:reddit.com greasemonkey downvote. This is some 2,480 times that Reddit users are publicly admitting to using greasemonkey (see also this).
Propaganda agents obviously aren't going to publicly brag about what they are doing, and you can bet that their use of downvote bots is much greater. Moreover, they probably have more sophisticated software than Greasemonkey.
As one example of a publicly-available downvote bot, this script automatically downvotes any stories on 9/11, Gaza, torture, Guantanamo and a host of other topics, downvotes certain posters, and engages in other forms of cyber warfare.
I call on programmers to figure out a way to fight this cyberwarfare propaganda.
Note: Greasemonkey has valid uses as well, such as blocking pop-up ads.
3 comments:
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Posts
My solution to this problem involves setting up a proper voting/polling environment with voter verification.
ReplyDeleteI want to find out what we really think, as a nation, because I suspect the national consensus -- the supposed political "center" -- has been heavily manipulated in a generally authoritarian / neo-feudalist direction.
I'm sorry you feel that greasemonkey was created to automatically downvote stories. Greasemonkey was originally designed to allow customizations of web pages to better suit the needs of the user. It uses a simple scripting language to allow greater flexibility than most rules based customizers. So, technically it is not greasemonkey but rather a script to run in the greasemonkey environment which is the problem. Similar to the way that visual basic is not the problem, but rather the worms and viruses that are written using visual basic are the problem.
ReplyDeleteGreasemonkey and visual basic are just tools. Some people use these tools to do bad things.
Is there any possibility of using this type of software for our purposes? -- say, to get Russell Tice's latest accusations more visible? Can we use the same weapon, different way? Or can it only be used in a negative way?
ReplyDelete