Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/09/23/can-you-spot-the-professional-troll.html
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5 Likes
7/8 - Disappointing they didn’t point out almost 100% of accounts with a long string of numbers after the name (e.g. @john2342342) are bots - because the script that creates the accounts uses a random number generator to ensure unique user names. Just knowing that avoids around 70-80% of the junk on social media.
Although to be honest - given that kids hate facebook, and pretty much don’t use twitter - I think the days of ‘social media’ being a thing are on the decline - all that is left these days are the bots and people yelling at the bots (who tend to be more 20+ years old) - the hallmark of the death throes of tech is the abandonment of the young.
Lack of moderation, and letting the chimps run the zoo resulted in a climate that isn’t fun - who the hell wants to visit a zoo where the monkeys throw shit at you from trees where you can’t reach them all day?
9 Likes
5 out of 8? You just answered “Troll” to all of them too, didn’t you?
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I got 6/8…
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7/8 - the one I missed was a nevada_blue_line account, I think I over thought it.
Just happy I wasn’t on the list. 
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Are they members in good standing of the Professional Tröll Society, entitled to add P-Tröll after their nick?
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I got 7/8, because they changed the pattern on the last one. The catch, of course is whether I’ll be aware to look for the patterns when I encounter this kind of nonsense in the wild. Of course, I disbelieve almost everything at first glance, snopes is my friend, and peer-reviewed science is king.
8 Likes
I didn’t do well… I see too many people repeating this BS…
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wow I did really bad on this. And I always think of myself as being pretty good at calling the bravo sierra
The youth is just using other social media. The android Tiktok app has over a billion downloads.
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Trolls are often a subjective thing. I consider the “natural news” guy a troll, a real person but still a troll…4/8 
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I scored 8/8. For real, I studied them carefully, for sure, but in the end I found them all pretty easy to discern. The last one was the toughest, but I still managed to identify it correctly. Oh, and I am not a troll, I swear. 
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That’s no longer true, because twitter now FORCES new users to accept a username based on firstlast12345678 . You can change it once you’ve created the account, but you have to consciously want to. So many people who set up accounts after 2017 have these troll-like usernames but are in fact real people who just don’t care about what their username is.
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5/8 - A surprising number of actual people look exactly like the trolls. Which is of course the point of the manipulation. Whip actual people up into a partisan froth, and they do all the unthinking hostility and polarising hatred for you.
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I got 8/8. I figure I wouldn’t be as accurate in looking at the accounts “in place” - they selected posts to highlight salient differences between human / bot accounts, so all the work was done for me.
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I got 8 out of 8 but only because I knew it was a quiz. Some of the fake ones would have disgusted me too much in a real context so I wouldn’t have bothered to look for astroturfing signs.
The digital black face and fake feminist ones I would definitely have spotted as fake in a real context but then I’d keep second guessing myself about it without the instant confirmation. Which is one of the points.
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And the reason that it’s being banned - because it doesn’t funnel hate speech at you when you use it. Tik Tok is so much better at figuring out what kind of stuff to show you, after using it for a week or so. No matter what I did on facebook or twitter they continue to shovel hate memes at my face so they are useless.
You’ll notice that the stuff kids are migrating to is all video based - youtube, twitch, tik tok - it’s not because video is the ‘new hotness’ - it’s because vile speech or not at least when it’s a person talking you can be 100% sure that it’s not some program attempting to game your human brains built in animal instincts.
Deep fakes are around the corner though - and so the spam bots will continue - just not quite caught up with the change…
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For some reason I’m getting fake Generals trying to follow me on Twitter. I think it’s because I follow Giant Military Cats.
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6/8. Is everyone a troll?
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5/8
I have a liberal blindspot.
And like @LvData, I think the Natural News guy is a troll. Real people can be trolls, too - I have an ex-friend that trolls for fun, since bulletin board days.
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