I’m a fan of Storage Wars, but I don’t know about Troll Wars. WorldNetDaily has put up an article, using a graphic featuring stylized Guy Fawkes masks, that talks about “pro-Obama ‘Trolls’ who post misinformation.” Yesterday’s article by Jerome Corsi takes on the Orwellian task of turning Internet censorship into freedom of thought.
Trolls are a problem and I have no doubt that WorldNetDaily gets their share of them. I commend the article for its general discussion of troll behavior and you might want to read that. What I do not commend is their conspiratorial approach to the topic, concluding that the trolls are paid.
They give one example of an anonymous post at a web site from someone claiming to be a paid troll. So was this a paid troll, or a troll whose gambit is pretending to be paid?
The WND article is somewhat muddled in its description of its troll detection process. It talks about names, email addressees and IP addresses, which it has available to it, but it also includes aggregate message counts from individuals at WND, CNN, Fox News and other sites. I find it hard to believe that CNN is sharing IP addresses with WorldNetDaily. The methodology is not disclosed.
Meanwhile, Orly Taitz has jumped on the anti-troll bandwagon. Reading her site lately, I found fawning praise of Orly in comments that are so over the top that I think the comments are actually making fun of Orly. She is always saying that someone is messing with her web site and this WND article is like gasoline on a fire for her [Link to Taitz web site]:
Obama’s operatives admit to being paid to defame and harass patriots on various sites. They are a part and parcel of a RICO conspiracy to aid and abet a criminal with forged IDs to usurp the U.S. Presidency by fraud
She’s citing the anonymous poster from the WND article, only that person claimed to be working for Republicans.
More efforts to further insulate and isolate The Faithful … It’s a necessary component of mind control … and needed to explain the increasing disconnect and continuing failure of The Truthiness of WND.
Identifying a cult ….
http://www.religio.de/cudef.html
Gives me flashbacks to the 70s and early 80s. Can we get compared to Dungeons & Dragons? Trolls & IP Tunnels, perhaps?
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I don’t see the Fawkes masks—disappointing! I was looking forward to the implied Anonymous tie-in!—but I did find the heartfelt Confession of a Paid Internet Troll touching.
😉
“I find it hard to believe that CNN is sharing IP addresses with WorldNetDaily.”
If a commenter is using Disqus (which WND employs) their Disqus profile shows the name of the websites they’ve left comments on as well as the number of comments. WND has other ways of logging in and leaving comments that don’t reveal such info.
Odd, it’s right at the top of the article, linking to:
http://www.wnd.com/files/2012/11/masks-340×170.jpg
And yes, it’s an anonymous tie-in.
way back (on other boards), i was accused of being paid (by soros) – i replied that i sit in an office with half of us being paid to be pro-obama posters and the other half anti (and at times we switch sides for fun) – it was all a fabrication but they believed me
Checking from home, and, duh, there it is. Either that crappy, firewalled IE7 they have at the office, or my all-too-human powers of observation.
Her’s another favorite line:
I never suspected every commenter at WND was a leftist plant. They’re all parodies! My faith in humanity has been restored. *cough*
WND banned me from posting there a couple months back. I’ve repeatedly requested an explanation for why, and they won’t give me one. I even posted under my real name, too, linked to my Twitter account! Guess they got tired of me asking when they’ll respond to John Woodman’s book.
Corsi’s article is entertainingly vague — it rails against “leftist trolls” but provides no actual evidence that any ever existed at WND.
Me, too.
Seems that most birther sites go back to being the echo chambers they used to be years ago. (And who can blame them, they are all suffering badly after Obama’s re-election, and deservedly so.)
As Doc has also observed about Orly, they often allow “Obot” postings that conform to their twisted view of the vile, obscene leftist activist (most of those postings likely come from birthers) but not those who display, as WND puts it, “intelligence and education”.
To give another example, ORYR has blocked my IP for being a polite Obot but still allows the “rikker” account that does nothing but mock birthers in a nonsensical fashion (because it gets the resident coprolalia birthers riled up).