Facebook is making much ado about trolling, but are Americans the ones being trolled by Big Tech?
The major social-media platforms and the mainstream media are attributing high importance to reports of so-called troll farms whose goal it is ostensibly to spread disinformation and sow division among the American people. Conveniently, such vocal concerns play right into these entities’ desire to further restrict conservatives’ use of these platforms.
“Professional political trolling is still a thriving underground industry around the world, despite crackdowns from the biggest tech firms,” Sara Fischer at Axios laments.
Describing the field of “professional trolling” as “coordinated online disinformation efforts” that allow foreign actors “a fast, cheap way to get under rivals’ skin,” Fischer claims that troll farms “offer a paycheck to people who are eager for work, typically in developing countries.”
The Axios article goes on to quote CybelAngel VP of Operations Todd Carroll as saying, “It’s a more sophisticated means of disinformation to weaken your adversaries.”
In its March 2021 Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior Report, Facebook said it uncovered a large troll farm in Albania linked to an Iranian militant group. The social-media company said it had the all tell-tale signs of a troll farm, which Facebook defines as “a physical location where a collective of operators share computers and phones to jointly manage a pool of fake accounts as part of an influence operation.”
“The main thing we saw was strange signals [and] centralized coordination between different fake accounts,” said Ben Nimmo, Facebook’s global influence operations threat intelligence lead.
Another tell was that the content from the network targeted Iran but was posted to social media during normal working hours on European Central Time.
BuzzFeed News last week wrote about a major troll operation in Nigeria. It involved a Nigerian PR firm and a U.K.-based nonprofit paying social media influencers in Nigeria to tweet out support for a Colombian businessman Alex Saab, who was accused of money-laundering in the United States.
Last week, Twitter suspended over 1,500 accounts for manipulating the #FreeAlexSaab hashtag, per the BuzzFeed report.
In addition to accounts with a shared physical location and posts all made during working hours, a common sign the media outlets say is indicative of a troll farm is hyper-targeted messaging, meaning the fake accounts post almost exclusively about a single political message, rather than about a variety of topics as a real human user would do.
Axios notes:
CNN, in conjunction with Clemson University, last year uncovered a major troll operation in Ghana being used to sow division among Americans ahead of the 2020 election. The operation was linked back to the Russian state-backed troll operation called the Internet Research Agency.
Carroll, a 20-year veteran with the FBI, said that in his time investing [sic] troll operations, he saw many from places like Vietnam, Philippines, and Malaysia — “places where there’s a lot of cheap labor and little oversight.”
Africa has become a breeding ground for troll farms due to widespread poverty on the continent. These operations ostensibly make use of systems that pay “trollers” without having to go to a bank so that they can remain undetected.
Yet even as Facebook bemoans “troll farms” that produce slanted content in favor of foreign political interests, the company itself pushes forward a biased political agenda in lockstep with foreign powers.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, like other Silicon Valley bigwigs, has attended a conference hosted by the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), one of the communist Chinese regime’s major propaganda agencies.
As The New American has reported, the CAC has ties to “Election Integrity” groups that played a role in electing Joe Biden to the White House.
One of these groups, the George Soros-linked Transition Integrity Project, said prior to the election that Donald Trump must not be allowed to claim victory on election night, as any apparent victory of his at that time would be overturned once all mail-in ballots were counted in subsequent days.
Facebook and other social-media platforms played a crucial role in promoting this narrative by censoring user posts that claimed President Trump won on election night, and then by declaring Joe Biden the winner even before the Electoral College had certified the results and while there were still election-related lawsuits in the courts.
It appears, then, that some of the foreign-controlled troll farms are the social-media companies themselves.
