Federal government routinely hires internet trolls, shills to monitor chat rooms, disrupt arti

[Lucille]

FWIW, while reading some essays today, I came across this comment:

poppsikle says:
When Topix trolls were attacking me 2 years ago in defense of the NSA, they said they were hires of Homeland Security....

 

[Carson]

Why were the comments sections so overwhelming when the fed government is hiring so many internet trolls?

I also don't think internet comments are necessarily representative. Most people don't comment and I don't think most even read the comments. Many youtube videos will have 3 million views and 5,000 comments (made by 1,000 people). It's a specific demo that comments and reads the comments - it isn't necessarily representative of the people who are actually reading the story.

Saw this on Fark today;


Scientists find that comments on websites shape public opinion and public opinion shapes public policy. Still no cure for Congress


The article;

http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2013-09/why-were-shutting-our-comments



The comment section;

http://www.fark.com/comments/7946916/Scientists-find-that-comments-on-websites-shape-public-opinion-public-opinion-shapes-public-policy-Still-no-cure-for-Congress

 

[NorthCarolinaLiberty]

If you want to see something monitored in a funny way, then go to wikipedia, look up a medical topic, and change it. Try changing, for example, the article on AIDS. Some doctor or nerd will often change it back within minutes. The "controversy" articles (e.g., AIDS controversy) are almost as big a joke as the entire site itself. They'll take obvious facts regarding these "controversies" and spin them to look just like the mainstream article.

All this is not exactly shilling, but really a better example of how business, government, medical, etc. try to control the information. Some of these articles are viewed by more than one person a minute, so you can be sure somebody is controlling the PR of their organization. Even I have to acknowledge that the site has to be recognized, but a lot is still lost in a morass of poor writing, vandalism, and other things that make it untrustworthy and generally a poor source.