Re: <nettime> Ideological Turks

The original article is amusingly fuzzy about who or what is doing the commenting.

http://ozonpress.net/politika/naprednjacka-strogoca-ko-ne-plati-clanarinu-do-ponedeljka-nek-se-spremi-za-smenu/

translation into googlish:

"From the report of a party official in charge of the Internet team (read party bots), it could be heard that the SNS has 3,456 bots in charge of lively comments on portals, websites, FB sites ... In a year, bots have written about 10 million comments on 201,717 published news . Only 24 hours ahead of the Executive Committee meeting through the SNS system passed 1,147 news that the party bots made over 43,000 comments. Vojvodina is the leader when the activities of the SNS Internet team, The bots in question, and the best among the best are the bots from the South Banat District."

On Sun, Dec 9, 2018 at 3:12 PM Morlock Elloi <morlockelloi@gmail.com> wrote:

Recently there was a leak from a fringe decaying country about numbers
involved in poor man's version of social media manipulation. Having no
access to control structures of network monopolies like the big guys,
Serbian honchos had to resort to manual labor:

In the last 12 months, about 3,500 workers were engaged (full time it
appears) to inject pro-employer messaging, and they did quite well: 10
million comments. Note that Serbia has population of about 8 million.

See
https://www.serbianmonitor.com/en/sns-sponsored-bots-made-10-million-comments-online/

It works. They ain't being paid for nothing.

Does this mean that there is a proportional number - around 3 million -
of such workers worldwide? Probably not (I'd guess 1 million.) More
developed countries (with far more expensive labor) likely pay only the
elite liars, and do the rest by directly manipulating platforms from the
inside (algorithm tweaking.) Efficient liar is not something that can be
easily outsourced, because it's relatively easy to spot a cheap wetback
from somewhere around the world telling you how bad or good something is.

I think that even in developed countries the ruling classes are
recognizing the limits of the combination of automata and few elite
influencers, so there may be a real solution on the horizon for the
dwindling job market. Instead of deploying the poor as cannon fodder or
sex service for the rich, they can be employed as direct persuaders.
There should be no stigma around this profession. The wages will be good
enough for a decent living, and it even may help re-populating the
middle classes. Many of your neighbors can be working as persuaders.

This is far more preferable to the situation today, where elite liars
(euphemisms like 'activists', 'social scientists', 'lecturers',
'speakers', 'critics' and such are used instead) work in combination
with crude algorithms. Everyone knows that these are just liars and just
machines. Even the workers know it deep down, which causes painful
cognitive dissonance. It's dehumanizing on many levels. We don't need
that. The next revolution will involve removing the stigma and making
this a legitimate and compassionate mass-employment profession. The New
Deal.

Down with elites!

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