Maggie’s troll farm

There’s a grim irony in the anticlimax of the year-long “Trump colluded with Russia” investigation.  The entire ordeal took on the aura of the most paranoid of conspiracy theories, with the majority of the anti-Trump crowd wanting so badly for it to be true that they would take any evidence, no matter how flimsy, if it could confirm this belief.  Well, the only “evidence” of interference into our electoral system that the investigative team could come up with was a Russian “troll farm”, or a group of people sitting at computers talking about the US election on Facebook and Twitter.  This group of people spent a total of $100,000 on political ads, a grain of sand in a desert compared with the millions spent by other special interest groups.  Needless to say, there are plenty of other countries interfering in US domestic politics to a far greater degree than Russia.  Why no uproar over the influence of the Israel lobby or Saudi Arabia’s  political pull in Washington DC?

Anyway.  Now that there is uproar now over this pathetic “troll farm”, concerned citizens should be informed of their own government’s involvement in the creation and funding of its own troll farms that are used to sow dissent abroad, as well as here at home.  And what our government does, in the realm of foreign election interference and the propagation of propaganda, dwarfs the actions of every other State in the star system.

Specifically, The Hill recently reported on a $40 million influx of cash to the “Global Engagement Center”, which is the U.S. variant of the troll farm.  Ostensibly set up to counter foreign online propaganda directed at the U.S., this Obama-era troll farm is almost certainly being used to discredit the very real online critics of the United State’s actions abroad.  Disturbingly, DOD undersecretary for public diplomacy and public affairs Steve Goldstein had this to say about the boondoggle:

“This funding is critical to ensuring that we continue an aggressive response to malign influence and disinformation and that we can leverage deeper partnerships with our allies, Silicon Valley, and other partners in this fight.”

There’s something Freudian about this statement.  The malign influence and disinformation will, of course, be emanating from the Goldstein’s pet propaganda hub, used mainly to counter that most dangerous enemy of all governments, world without end: the comments’ section.

The comments’ section is the public arena where the common people eviscerate the actions of the inveterate asses, elected and unelected, that have run our country into the ground.  So, internet trolls have been mobilized en masse and deployed to the far reaches of unfettered, online speech, to counter “disinformation”. “We shall fight them on the beaches, we shall fight them on the landing grounds!”

Also, leveraging “deeper partnerships” with the tech giants doesn’t inspire peace of mind to any degree.  Will they also be drafted into the troll wars?  It’s a certainty that they already have, though. Reason reported back in November, in a piece entitled, Is Silicon Valley Building the Infrastructure for a Police State?, author Zach Weissmueller details how Silicon Valley “threat intelligence” firms, such as Palantir, are building AI surveillance tools designed to make sense of all the data that US intelligence agencies capture every year.

And there is no doubt that these firms are on a quid pro quo basis with the federal intelligence agencies.  They spy, and provide the government with the tools for total surveillance, in exchange for market protection and other favors.

But back to trolls.  US funding for internet trolls is nothing new.  Just look at this piece from The Guardian back in 2011: Revealed: US spy operation that manipulates social media.

Basically, fake online personas are created and then used to influence online discussion and crowd out undesired opinions.  One imagines it will be an automated AI army that will flood the ‘net with pro-American propaganda soon.

No, Russia has nothing on the US in terms of online propaganda, despite what it wants us to believe.