Moderators and users on Reddit say they've seen coordinated activity on the site by pro-China accounts. "The pro-CCP effort vastly overshadows any operation by the Russians,” one person with insight into moderation practices told us.
China expert Bill Bishop said the activity fits with the Party leadership's emphasis on controlling the discourse about China outside of the country. He said said it’s hard to know which accounts are simply patriotic Chinese people, and which might be government actors.
We obtained a list of accounts banned frm r/geopolitics for what was described as pro-China trolling or related behavior. Some were burner accounts created just for the purpose of weighing in on China threads. Others seemed to be genuine Chinese ex-pats studying or working abroad
r/geopolitics mods implemented new rules as a result.
"We've had to implement a rule that prohibits posts from accounts less than 20 days old. This has helped to an extent but these redditors seem to be very patient and disciplined, and can ‘wait out’ the 20-day requirement.”
It's simple to work around those time requirements. It's not uncommon to see accounts that are months old with 0 prior activity become super active as soon as a thread criticizing China shows up.
There is no such rule set that a dedicated troll or attacker would be unable to circumvent.
Instead consider every rule as a evolutionary hint for attackers - eventually they reach a point that they can often pass for perfectly normal users.
People are creating accounts now, filling them with karma and health comments in funny subreddits. Then a year later, they will bring it out and use them.
For everything that's wrong with cryptocurrencies and the /r/cryptocurrency subreddit, I really like their approach to tagging users. Main activity outside of this subreddit? You get tagged. A lot of activity in one specific coin subreddit? That's a tag. New account? Tag. Old account with little activity before? Tag. Longer time with no activity on CC? Tag.
It feels weird at first, but it's actually a great way to recognize trolls.
I expect this to become explicit in many other forums based on how I know internal mod tools behave.
This is problematic, because it is effectively the same way as saying "this person is a foreigner", and tribal identities overwhelm the initial intention of a information granting doohickey - see the fate of the upvote and downvote button today.
I can't remember where I heard this, but I remember someone talking about creating the process/paperwork for government programs. They were saying that adding multiple steps and verifications atrophies legitimate people way faster than scammers. Scammers just have more patience and resources to spend than people who have a legitimate need.
Or just buy them by thausands online at 20 cents per pop. Suprisingly I bought bunch of gmail and yahoo accounts for testing at $25 per hundred, and all been working fine some year later.
Moderators and users on Reddit say they've seen coordinated activity on the site by pro-China accounts. "The pro-CCP effort vastly overshadows any operation by the Russians,” one person with insight into moderation practices told us.
China expert Bill Bishop said the activity fits with the Party leadership's emphasis on controlling the discourse about China outside of the country. He said said it’s hard to know which accounts are simply patriotic Chinese people, and which might be government actors.
We obtained a list of accounts banned frm r/geopolitics for what was described as pro-China trolling or related behavior. Some were burner accounts created just for the purpose of weighing in on China threads. Others seemed to be genuine Chinese ex-pats studying or working abroad
r/geopolitics mods implemented new rules as a result.
"We've had to implement a rule that prohibits posts from accounts less than 20 days old. This has helped to an extent but these redditors seem to be very patient and disciplined, and can ‘wait out’ the 20-day requirement.”