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"That's interesting work suggesting that Russian troll activity was significantly more ambitious on an international scale than previously thought. It also suggests a way of spotting this kind of meddling as it is happening by looking for the kind of forensic fingerprint the team identified. Of course, finding trolls is a cat-and-mouse game. For the organizations responsible for Russian troll activity, it ought to be a straightforward matter to change the pattern of activity in a way that does not create the same signature."

"Welcome, real human A troll is a fake social media account, often created to spread misleading information. Each of the following 8 profiles include a brief selection of posts from a single social media account. You decide if each is an authentic account or a professional troll. After each profile, you'll review the signs that can help you determine if it's a troll or not."

"Taming trolls is fairly easy if you follow the four-step approach below. It really works-in public and private social-media spaces, I tame 90% of trolls after phase one and have blocked fewer than a dozen people over the past four years."

"Russia's online trolling operation is becoming increasingly decentralised and is gaining "incredible traction" on TikTok with misinformation aimed at sowing doubt over events in Ukraine, a US social media researcher has warned."

"But the default settings of the service are configured in the expectation of trust between participants, meaning trolls can wreak havoc. Some zoombombers have used the screensharing feature to broadcast pornography and violent imagery. "

"Facebook has allowed a state-backed harassment campaign targeting independent news outlets and opposition politicians in Azerbaijan to return to its platform, less than six months after it banned the troll network. A Guardian investigation has revealed how Facebook allowed an arm of Azerbaijan's ruling party, the YAP, to carry out the harassment campaign for 14 months after an employee, Sophie Zhang, first alerted managers and executives to its existence in August 2019."

"With all the information together, they created a prediction model which can guess with 80% accuracy whether or not that user will go on to be banned from just their first five posts. "

"This week, a 16-person narrative design studio has found itself at the centre of a conspiracy theory that holds it responsible for the insidious prevalence of "wokery" in modern video games. A group with more than 200,000 followers on PC games storefront Steam, as well as thousands in a Discord chat channel, believes that Sweet Baby Inc is secretly forcing game developers to change the bodies, ethnicities and sexualities of video game characters to conform to "woke" ideology. They think that Sweet Baby has written and controlled almost every popular video game of the past five years, shutting straight white men out. As Trump once again heads out on the campaign trail, this is part of a broader far right panic about diversity and inclusion that has already resulted in proposed regressive anti-women and anti-woke legislation in the US and elsewhere."

"The Chinese government is fabricating almost 490m social media posts a year in order to distract the public from criticising or questioning its rule, according to a study. China's "Fifty Cent Party" - a legion of freelance online trolls so-named because they are believed to be paid 50 cents a post - has long been blamed for flooding the Chinese internet with pro-regime messages designed to defend and promote the ruling Communist party."

"That's right, they're coming after us literally for a few splotches of ink. What companies like this do is broker works of art on behalf of actual photographers, but then engage in copyright trolling by threatening anyone who uses even a small piece of them. Increased computing power and more sophisticated algorithms allow them to do this with improved speed and "efficiency.""

"More than 10m tweets sent by state actors attempting to influence US politics have been released to the public, forming one of the largest archives of political misinformation ever collated. The database reveals the astonishing extent of two misinformation campaigns, which spent more than five years sowing discord in the US and had spillover effects in other national campaigns, including Britain's EU referendum."

"It found that social media bots were used by many countries to drum up ideas aligning with party messaging, by inflating social media engagement, "creating an artificial sense of popularity, momentum or relevance." An army of 500 to "amplify" ideas In Duterte's case, his social media manager has said they've used some 400 to 500 people to "amplify" ideas. They individually handled groups on platforms like Facebook, that each had hundreds to hundreds of thousands of followers."

"The triumph of open standards has manifestly demoralized Chiariglione, who grudgingly admits that a combination of rent-seeking by MPEG members and legal threats from patent trolls has spelled the end of the "business model" of creating standards for the purpose of allowing companies to charge royalties for everyday technological activities by injecting their patents into it."

" If your consumption of content is tailored by near limitless observations harvested about people like you, how could your universe not collapse into the partial depiction of reality that people like you also enjoy? How could empathy and respect for difference thrive in this environment? Where's the incentive to stamp out fake accounts, fake news, paid troll armies, dyspeptic bots?"

"he foresees fake text being used "for the production of [literal] 'fake news', or to potentially impersonate people who had produced a lot of text online, or simply to generate troll-grade propaganda for social n"

"Clearview, the shady facial-recognition firm with links to law-enforcement and alt-right internet trolls, reports that its entire client list has been stolen."

"What might happen next? First the investigators would find out the culprits' names, telephone numbers, and where they lived. Then the authorities would be alerted. Shortly afterwards, accounts would be closed down. And, in the worst cases, the police would prosecute. Finally, as people began to realise that actions online had actual consequences, many would start modifying their behaviour. The tsunami of online hate might eventually become a sea swell."

""China has a politically weaponized system of censorship; it is refined, organized, coordinated and supported by the state's resources," said Xiao Qiang, a research scientist at the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley, and the founder of China Digital Times. "It's not just for deleting something. They also have a powerful apparatus to construct a narrative and aim it at any target with huge scale." "This is a huge thing," he added. "No other country has that." "

"As Americans continue to grapple with media distrust, conspiracy theories, bots, trolls, and general panic amid multiple unprecedented crises, Twitter is once again trying a new method of identifying misinformation. A new feature in development at the social media platform, called "Birdwatch," was first reported by reverse engineer Jane Manchun Wong (h/t Tech Crunch) in early August. "