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Ask HN: Has there been a change in the troll activity on the internet?

13 points by edge17 ↗ HN
Just curious if anyone has seen a change in the trolling, memes, etc on the internet/twitter etc since the Russian actions in Ukraine? Are we seeing a drop in areas of US/Western politics as those resources are directed towards a different offensive front?

14 comments

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rolph
now would be a good time for contrast and comparison of heat maps relating trollish content to IP, before and after; producing a very raw metric of troll origin from regions now kicked off the internet
PaulHoule
Personally I haven't engaged with trolls since the invasion but that's probably because I am involved in drama IRL.
zthrowaway
Personally I’m seeing a huge uptick in memes on the right that are portraying Putin as some resistance to the globalists and framing that as a good thing. Lots of “US is the real problem not Russia” trolling. Turning every discussion into a deep dive into whataboutism.
kderbyma
I'm seeing trolling on both sides with little variation in quantity. The location of the comments usually correlates with the type of propaganda which is most prevalent but on the opposing views you have the inverse proportion.
[dead] xolotltlaloc
blankface
realest comment here but you know the "Build something people want! :)" crowd will downvote this shit
tsol
The tone of social media definitely changed. How much is organic and how much is due to engineering discourse is always hard to tell. But things have moved so quickly, and to such an extreme, it feels somewhat artificial. But of course, measuring these things is difficult. There's certainly some aspect that is being pushed by the powers that be, as we know warfare occurs online now as well
pixl97
>and to such an extreme

Seeing Russia act like this is going to cause an extreme reaction. I'm old enough to remember when the USSR was still around, so seeing this happen just makes it look like we've returned to those days. More so you had the US government coregraphing exactly what Russia was up to across the border from Ukraine. This occurring was completely expected, the exact question of when was the only doubt.

krapp
It's weird how Hacker News went from quoting Smedley Butler and Noam Chomsky to everyone suddenly being an armchair general pushing pieces around the Risk board of their minds almost overnight.
pixl97
It turns out when an event of interest occurs that people interested in that event post on the internet about it. There is absolutely zero weirdness about this.
netizen-936824
There's also zero correlation with people being interested in something and them also having actual insight in a situation that they aren't personally involved in
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AnimalMuppet
To me, the trolling dropped to near zero for about 24 hours afterward. Then it started ramping back up, but has failed to reach the normal pre-invasion level.

I think pro-Russia trolls really had to stop and think, because there was no easy way to defend what was happening, and nobody was going to be deflected by what-aboutism for a while. And anti-Russian trolls didn't have to troll; they could stick strictly to reality and do just fine. And trolls on any other axis were just ignored; nobody had attention for them.

Just my experience. Your mileage may vary.