My general thesis is that Voat has both organic users and inorganic accounts.
I theorize the following are in the "inorganic" bucket:
Government employees doing their jobs.
Foreign country employees doing their jobs.
Private interests (Corporate Espionage) doing their jobs.
Data miners and data scientists collecting data or creating bots, for profit.
From the organic users, the glut of the users appear to be from Canada, the EU, and America. Quite a lot of younger folk, compared to other parts of the Internet.
I believe there are less shills than most expect, for as much as the term is thrown around, but a few people fit the bill for the behavior that is standard for the Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group in that they specialize in "reputation destruction." @crensch acts exactly like known JTRIG operations as outlined in this article:
Operation Earnest Voice, mostly posting out of Virginia. Conservative projection but not "truth" oriented. One branch, in particular seems to focus on a lot of Wikipedia edits.
upvotes.club uses people from all over. Overtly Liberal, but not on Voat, so focuses on disruption and misinformation.
Miscellaneous PR firms who are keyword oriented. This means that if a certain keyword comes up, they are going to find it on Voat, Reddit, Poal, Saidit, etc and respond per a script. They don't invest much in the smaller platforms as it is too expensive for very little reward.
PSY Group, who are hyper focused on racism. They are designed to make free speech forums look bad to "normies." Voat is small enough that we are talking like one or two people from them.
GCHQ tends to focus on disinformation in their campaigns with a special flare for trying to present the opposite of the truth as fact.
Shill employees around the world number in the tens of thousands. It only takes a dozen or so to completely occupy Voat's attention.
Technology has reached a pinnacle of being able to measure feedback in order to know what is most effective. A lot of the tactics shills use predate the Internet, but the ability to measure results has allowed these marketing/propaganda machines to hone their focus.
The Angel Investor is liberal but not overtly on Voat and doesn't seem to be connected to these farms but, if they were connected, it would be with the group out of Virginia.
Admin uses a normal account constantly and mostly seems to want to grow Voat.
Angel Investor and Admin seem to find Poal troubling competition.
Funny story, while I'm chatty...
I had fake doxx planted on my server for my site (along with fake tables and extra db's) and someone managed to purloin the information. Someone tied to the angel investor had the fake information.
This is a site you can use to make seemingly realistic sock puppets.
you can start to fool the aggregate information collection on your devices. You know it works when you start getting correlating friend recommendations on Facebook and LinkedIn.
Posted automatically (#62330) by the SearchVoat.co Cross-Link Bot. You can suppress these notifications by appending a forward-slash(/) to your Voat link. More information here. (@thewebofslime: Click here to suppress your crosslink notifications from @Crensch)
Unforunately, most of your devices are compromised by a blueborne exploit that is always sharing information with devices around you. So, if you live with people or work with people who use these services, your data is still getting vacuumed up.
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virge ago
My general thesis is that Voat has both organic users and inorganic accounts.
I theorize the following are in the "inorganic" bucket:
From the organic users, the glut of the users appear to be from Canada, the EU, and America. Quite a lot of younger folk, compared to other parts of the Internet.
thewebofslime ago
I believe there are less shills than most expect, for as much as the term is thrown around, but a few people fit the bill for the behavior that is standard for the Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group in that they specialize in "reputation destruction." @crensch acts exactly like known JTRIG operations as outlined in this article:
https://theintercept.com/2014/02/24/jtrig-manipulation/
On Voat, we see (at least)
Operation Earnest Voice, mostly posting out of Virginia. Conservative projection but not "truth" oriented. One branch, in particular seems to focus on a lot of Wikipedia edits.
upvotes.club uses people from all over. Overtly Liberal, but not on Voat, so focuses on disruption and misinformation.
Miscellaneous PR firms who are keyword oriented. This means that if a certain keyword comes up, they are going to find it on Voat, Reddit, Poal, Saidit, etc and respond per a script. They don't invest much in the smaller platforms as it is too expensive for very little reward.
PSY Group, who are hyper focused on racism. They are designed to make free speech forums look bad to "normies." Voat is small enough that we are talking like one or two people from them.
GCHQ tends to focus on disinformation in their campaigns with a special flare for trying to present the opposite of the truth as fact.
Shill employees around the world number in the tens of thousands. It only takes a dozen or so to completely occupy Voat's attention.
Technology has reached a pinnacle of being able to measure feedback in order to know what is most effective. A lot of the tactics shills use predate the Internet, but the ability to measure results has allowed these marketing/propaganda machines to hone their focus.
The Angel Investor is liberal but not overtly on Voat and doesn't seem to be connected to these farms but, if they were connected, it would be with the group out of Virginia.
Admin uses a normal account constantly and mostly seems to want to grow Voat.
Angel Investor and Admin seem to find Poal troubling competition.
Funny story, while I'm chatty...
I had fake doxx planted on my server for my site (along with fake tables and extra db's) and someone managed to purloin the information. Someone tied to the angel investor had the fake information.
This is a site you can use to make seemingly realistic sock puppets.
https://www.fakepersongenerator.com/
When you combine it with real elements from this site...
https://www.familysearch.org/search/collection/list
you can start to fool the aggregate information collection on your devices. You know it works when you start getting correlating friend recommendations on Facebook and LinkedIn.
SearchVoatBot ago
This comment was linked from this v/GreatAwakeningMeta comment by @Crensch.
Posted automatically (#62330) by the SearchVoat.co Cross-Link Bot. You can suppress these notifications by appending a forward-slash(/) to your Voat link. More information here. (@thewebofslime: Click here to suppress your crosslink notifications from @Crensch)
virge ago
Since I don't use Facebook, Linkedin, or any social media for that matter I can see how I would be extremely frustrating to observe.
thewebofslime ago
Unforunately, most of your devices are compromised by a blueborne exploit that is always sharing information with devices around you. So, if you live with people or work with people who use these services, your data is still getting vacuumed up.
virge ago
Good there, too. I'm literally on an island.