There have been photos of several troll farms operating in the Philippines, and those 300 fake accounts on Twitter alone confirm their existence. There’s no doubting the authenticity of those photos. They were taken by persons working at those troll farms, manning banks of smartphones all transmitting propaganda at the same time off a single wifi router. Those ex-trolls, many of whom when recruited were told they would be working as “call center operators,” soon realized they were duped. Just for the money they stayed awhile—and God bless them—I can certainly understand why. Life is hard, every honest peso you can earn counts.
Ironically, that’s exactly the reason why some of them decided to leave. While they were working honestly, they soon understood that what they were being told to upload were lies. So just like those “Magnificent 35” COMELEC vote tabulators in the 1986 snap presidential elections who walked out of the national canvassing board’s tallying center, these former trolls left their shoddy workplaces (mostly dimly-lit warehouses in suburban Manila) and decided to go out in the real world and tell it all.
And tell it all they did—usernames, passwords, machine codes, filter links (designed to foil discovery)—everything. Now cybersleuths and independent industry watchdogs have the whole blueprint of these troll operations. So it’s very easy to detect them, even locate them now.
Personally, I have nothing against the individual UNPAID troll who is fervently supporting a candidate he believes in. I consider it the opinion extension of “one man, one vote.”
It doesn’t matter if you are the noble kind who builds and projects the virtues of your own candidate, or the virulent kind who tears down and villifies the opponent. All is fair in love and war AND politics. I don’t care how morally righteous you are, stop crying if you get hit below the belt. That’s your own naiveté expecting immoral people not to hit below the belt. We don’t live in a perfect world, but it’s the only world there is.
I don’t even care if you resort to libel, or cyberlibel (it’s all THE SAME, believe me). There are laws in place about these things and I say, hey, if you’re willing to do the time (behind bars) go ahead and do the crime.
What I have a problem with is when somebody employs digital automation so it becomes “one man, one million opinions”—that’s foul.
I’m not talking about multiple sharing, particularly network sharing. I make very provocative posts on MY Facebook wall that people share forward to their friends. That’s NOT me replicating my opinion. That’s REASON itself leading others to agree with my opinion and if they choose to adopt it, it becomes THEIR original opinion as much.
It spreads as far and wide as there are others who freely agree with the opinion of a friend of a friend of a friend. The spread is stopped dead cold only when it runs smack into the wall of someone who declines to believe—and THAT’S how it’s supposed to be in the freemarket of ideas.
Troll farms subvert that system. They pit machines against humans. If you get a comment consisting of a whole line of taunting emoticons—no words, just emoticons or an annoying short animation (called “GIF’s”)—you’ll be wasting your time engaging that robo-basher and chasing it down every rabbit hole. You’re literally arguing with a machine.
But your pride will often prod you to do it anyway—even digital factscape, if tweaked cleverly enough, can be convincing and utterly provocative.
In other realms, machine reality is useful—pilots train on simulators all the time that allow them to “crash” their planes as often as they like till they get it right, without hurting anyone.
That’s not what troll farms do with their version of machine reality. They ‘Photoshop’ a sparsely-attended rally to make it look like a million people attended. Or they ‘pelletize’ a provocative statement that fits any situation then write a short Java script file that launches and lodges that comment in your inbox or timeline when you click any of several innocent-looking links they float in cyberspace.
The reason I find this objectionable is not because of the content of troll material, but because of the glut that their volume causes to the system. All hacking attacks, in fact, have been volume-powered. Even federal government websites in the US have been disabled when unusually huge volumes of robo-logins swamped their servers.
Troll farms in the Philippines—thank God all they could hire so far have been less-experienced IT people with mediocre programming skills—try to flood FB comment sections the same way.
I was laughing when I saw one of those troll farm photos, where they had hundreds of cellphones propped up against a wall, and an overworked “operator” was flitting from one cellphone to the next, literally having to stalk “enemy pages” and keying in short trashtalking comments one at a time. It’s pathetic but you can draw consolation from the fact that one human being can only do so much damage.
But that’s only as far as the “meatball surgery” operations of barrio troll farms go. My fear is there can be more sophisticated operations somewhere in some Makati or Bonifacio Global City penthouse, with just one prodigious Bill Gates-person sitting behind ONE laptop, able to send bursts of text messages to thousands of recipients everytime he hits the “ENTER” key.
Fortunately, that’s easier said than done. Unlike phone numbers that an autodialer can systematically generate, it’s impossible to guess usernames and email addresses—and there’s no way to randomly create them to match a second existing key data stored in the server. That’s why both Facebook and YouTube now employ “Two-Factor Verification” during login.
In short, even “Bill Gates” in our scenario needs full access to USER DATABASES to gain traction for their robo-trashtalking trolls. They either surreptitously buy these databases from utility companies or, less likelier, CREATE them with their own “phishing” operations. And sky’s the limit on how creative they can get.
Even my favorite hardware store in SM shoved a form in my face at the checkout counter that promised me discounts and a “mystery gift” if I just filled in the blank for my email address. When I declined, the girl said, “Sir, we need those information so we can include you in this raffle…” so I said, “Hija, I don’t care what you need, I’m not giving my email address because I’ve got so much Spam in my inbox to put Ma-Ling out of business!”
She didn’t get the joke.
But these “surveys” are carried out everywhere, and it’s not like you can always refuse—like at the bank, for example. You HAVE to give the bank your email address, or how can they send you your bank statements? I tried reading their “EULA” clauses (for “end-user licensing agreement”) so I’d have an exact idea what I’m allowing them to use my data for. But it’s printed in 8pt. font you can’t read it with the Hubble telescope.
Besides, from my own knowledge about how BENECO lost P58-million and other contemporary news, they just happen to be among the Three B’s I don’t trust these days anymore: BANKS, BBM and Boy Abunda.*
(read more articles like this in theunheardside.blogspot.com)
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