Paid Obama Troll
I first discovered the blogosphere in 2005 but I didn’t start blogging until March or April of 2008. By that time the Obama internet astroturf operation was well under way. I first became aware of this massive propaganda effort during the first six months of that year.
I began noticing similar (sometimes identical) comments being posted by people using different aliases. Sometimes at the same blog, sometimes they were posted at different blogs almost simultaneously. This was most notable during Obama speeches and debates between Dick and Hillary.
During Obama’s Greatestest Speech on Race EVAH! two different commenters at Buffoon Juice both claimed (just minutes apart) to have been moved to tears just from reading a transcript. As we all know, even the live version wasn’t that good.
The ABC debate was held on April 16, 2008. It started at 7:00 p.m. Eastern. I was switching between three different blogs watching the reactions. At about 7:45 p.m. I saw comments similar to this one on all three blogs:
Un-fucking-believable. This debate has gone on for nearly 45 minutes, and the moderators haven’t asked a SINGLE POLICY QUESTION. NOT ONE. Nothing about health care, nothing about the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan, or about how the Bush adminstration TORTURES PEOPLE. Noo, we want to ask questions about Bittergate, and flag pins! Oh, and then there’s Reverend Wright – that’s obviously more important than the country going down the shitter! I can’t fucking believe this! No wonder Bush got re-elected – he had simpletons like Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos helping to keep the American electorate in the fucking dark.
I think it was Joseph Cannon who first noted that many of the troll comments he was receiving at Cannonfire came from the same IP address located in a suburb of Chicago. Vastleft at Corrente noted that different trolls seemed to be working in shifts. Right about the top of the hour each day one troll would disappear and another would show up.
After the creation of PUMA we used to see Obot trolls at The Confluence who would use similar phrases. One of those phrases was “help me understand.” I saw it so many times it was a dead giveaway the person was an Obot. I even did a post about it:
Kevin Dujan of Hillbuzz and some of his regular readers determined that someone with the same name as the founder of the troll-blog Rumproast was an employee at a PR firm that did unspecified work for the Obama campaign.
When you put these pieces together it becomes obvious that there was an organized effort to manipulate public opinion on behalf of Barack Obama.
I’m not trying to suggest that every online supporter of Barack Obama was a paid shill, but not long after he was elected 99% of the trolls disappeared. Most of the ones that remained (like ABG) were too insipid and moronic to be part of any professional operation.
But now the Obama reelection campaign has started and the trolls are back. Here is one using the alias “Montana” that visited here recently:
All hail to Astroturf TeaBparty Queen (ATQ), Michele Bachmann. Isn’t she the one that who rails against the Federal Government while every year she benefits from Federal Medicaid Payments for her Clinic, Federal farm subsidies (talk about a Corporate Welfare Queen), and adopts kids to work them on same farm. Oh yeah she is also a self-proclaimed historian on the US Founding Fathers and US history. The sad truth she will lie to get her way, what honor is there in that? But if you manipulate our US history and double down when you are found out, well don’t go crying to Fake News when you lose. Kind of like the Former half-term Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin (Most recent quitter of her Bus Tour to restore America). We remember what happen when after “W” manipulate Florida (w/ the help of brother Jebb) to win the presidency and his failure to win any of the two wars he started that devastated our treasury and ruined our economy for the next 50 years. If the GOP thinks that Michele Bachmann is the answer, good luck with that. After her “John Wayne” mishap and Tom Petty, calling her a thief, well you know, same old Bachmann, you have a winner GOP.
How do we know this person is a troll? Our friend Dario used teh google:
They aren’t coming here to try to convince us to support Obama. I’m pretty sure by now they have figured out we don’t like Obama and never will. So their goal is to discourage us from supporting any other candidate and to convince us opposing Obama is hopeless (“resistance is futile.”).
In other words, they are trying to induce “learned helplessness“
Learned helplessness is a psychological condition in which a human being or an animal has learned to believe that it is helpless in a particular situation. It has come to believe that it has no control over its situation and that whatever it does is futile. As a result, the human being or the animal will stay passive in the face of an unpleasant, harmful or damaging situation, even when it does actually have the power to change its circumstances. Learned helplessness theory is the view that depression results from a perceived absence of control over the outcome of a situation, or situations (Seligman, 1975). Examples can be found in schools, mental institutions, orphanages, or long-term care facilities where the patients have failed or been stripped of agency for long enough to cause their feelings of inadequacy to persist.
The fact that you’re here and not at Cheetoville or some other Koolaid blog shows that you are resistant to peer pressure and psychological manipulation. Not only that but knowledge is power – when you know what they are trying to do it loses it’s effectiveness.
The people behind this are experts at propaganda and psychological manipulation. But we’ve been there and done that. This time around we need to focus on exposing them and showing our friends and family members what these people are up to.
“And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” – John 8:32
Like this:
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He was a brilliant man.
Pretty sure the entire ad industry was in the tank and working with OFA in some way during the last election. Many professional trolls were probably ad copywriters, similar to the Rumproast people you mention. David Plouffe was given a major Cannes Lion tribute in 2009 by the global ad industry elite in recognition of OFA’s role in winning the presidency, it was a victory celebration for everyone from the industry who helped. They loved the idea of a historical presidency, maybe in part because nobody beats the ad industry for non diversity in its ranks. I see the same types now on facebook and twitter with less energy and direction, but still committed to working for reelection.
Thanks for the warning.
Yes… I am seeing more and more of the trolling propaganda machine… at several of the blogs I frequent.
There is something about their posts that immediately trips my intuition that I am being manipulated. Can’t say just what it is… but it’s there.
Some of them claim to be anti-Obama but they spend their 99% of their time talking trash about Hillary and the Big Dawg..
According to them Bill caused the Bush-Obama Depression and the prosperity of the 90′s was fake.
Thanks for posting this. Perhaps it will keep some of them away.
Sure, everyone could simply ignore them, but the temptation to engage them is sometimes too irresistable
We like to play “Whack the Troll” around here.
oh yeah, I remember well the comedic responses you changed their posts to on Riverdaughter.
sort of like your anthony weiner, want to see my obama comments.
Keep up the good work!
I didn’t do it. It was a WordPress miracle!
But not ignoring them might lead to someone like YouKnowWho becoming a respected – even if opposed to – member of the “inner circle”. See TL. And thus giving him (aren’t trolls mostly male?) far more leverage (and legitimacy!) than he is worthy of.
Well, at least it has helped me to realize that commenters at that site are not as smart as they think – and as I used to think – they are, and to understand why the site has ended up in the “Blogs We Mock” column here. Sadly the(ir) fear of being called raçists is apparently still overwhelming.
Yes, but many of them pretend to be female (just as ABG pretends to be black) so they can spew misogyny.
I still think ABG is the troll who used to pretend to be a black woman at TL to take shots at Hillary.
Ignoring them is not an option. Addressing them directly is ill-advised. What we need to do is focus on the people around the troll, and place rhetoric that addresses their concerns/issues/beliefs/etc. 11-dimensional chess, it turns out, is not that difficult to learn, let alone play.
Absolutely. And thus, by not adressing their comments, ignoring them. I strongly advocate taking the “Don’t feed the troll” course.
I do hope the trolls are getting paid — that at least will get some money back in the economy .
Perhaps I should forward this post to Jane at fdl… gawd, that place was a mess during 08!
just completely ruined any credibility she’d attained…
She’s back on the bandwagon after the SS cuts were announced. I’ve been reminding them how cruel they were to PUMAs in pertinent threads. “Party Unity My Ass doesn’t sound quite so stupid or racist now, does it?” kinda thing.
The term Judas Goat popped into my head reading this. How many were among the Kossholes and at FDL? It couldn’t have taken too many to get the lemmings thundering after Obama.
The trolls abused the rating systems at blogs that used them – they would give positive ratings to Obots posts and downrate all the others.
When each troll is using multiple sockpuppets it can have a powerful effect.
Of course we now know that Cheetoville and FDL were receiving ad revenue from the Obama campaign so they had a financial interest in backing Obama (and not interfering with the troll swarms)
Susie Madrak said she had people threaten to cut off donations if she didn’t take pro-Hillary blogs off her blogroll.
I remember all that. There were DOS attacks on Hillary blogs as well. There is one accusation that the right makes against the left that is at least partly true. They don’t want to win the debate, they want to shut down debate and silence all other voices. And they feel justified in doing so, because after all, if any sane person already knows they are right, what need is there for those other voices? They are a distraction from the One Truth, so shut them all up.
Not all do this of course, but it’s a very prevalent attitude, sadly.
At this point if you appear to be pro Obama or a bit too much against real threats to Obama, you can only be paid to say that or completely insane. Either way, let the obot/troll whacking games begin!
From the comments at TC:
That’s an insult to real internet reputation management consultants.
OT: Obama is going to speak now about the historic Onemployment numbers (9.2%).
Whatever he says will probably just make it worse.
It’s the Obama effect.
I updated my next post (going up any minute now) with that info
We had a pretty good day yesterday – 3320 hits. Traffic has picked up quite a bit lately. Probably because we’ve had lots of posts.
(I’ve been putting adderall in the Klown’s beer)
I was wondering about that extra-crazed look in the Klown’s eyes lately.
Keep the flow of drugs coming. It’s working.
Thanks Myiq for helping expose the true astroturf that clogs the series of tubes, a.k.a. the internet.
Exposure, yes, but also return the favor. You, too, can be an incognito political blog troll. It’s actually kind of fun. I particularly enjoy using my codename on DK. Those people are so easy to unsettle.