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Yes, they exist and yes, they have troll factories, but they usually promote narratives with some immediate benefit to themselves. When they do promote irrelevant stuff, I think it's just to build social media clout for their actual messages. The payload so to say.
In particular, when Russian trolls promote both sides in some divisive foreign domestic issue, it's not to "spread chaos", but to gain a foot in the door to promote their actual messages, which are things like, "Sanctions on Russian leaders are pointless and counterproductive", "Assad didn't gas anyone", "Actual nazis have the Ukrainian leadership's balls in a vice" etc.
I'm not on Twitter anymore thankfully, but when I was there seemed to be a lot of truth to this. It even got to the point of there being successful witch hunts outing quite large/popular accounts as being Indian people pretending to be British
There are many people who don't live in a country where English is spoken natively, but who speak it well enough to lurk on the English internet. Those people are exposed to American and British politics and start to form opinions. It's not unusual for us to have our own takes on what happens in these countries.
I’m not an economist but it seems that a lot of things boil down to “X is cheaper in country A” or “Y is more costly in country B” creating arbitrage opportunities for players operating in grey area.
Again, I’m not an economist and am just speculating as a layman who understands math, but without wage normalization it seems the other option would be to only have per-country regulated social media. So Canadian social platforms are only accessible to users with Canadian IDs, US to US ID holders, and Indian ID holders can only access Indian social networks. And so on and so forth.. but then we become China.
Twitter may have a lot of faults, but they're ahead of Facebook on this one.
I get the sense Zuckerberg is a lot more disconnected from everyday Facebook and Insta content
You "could" end up with police at your door, but even if reported most of these things do not meet the requirements for being recorded: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/non-crime-hate-in...
https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2025-11-16/kin...
https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2025-11-16/kin...
Some highlights:
> The move made him a mint — and Sam was soon raking in thousands of dollars a month.
> “I was spending maybe 30 to 50 minutes of my day, and I was making good money for a medical student,” he recalled.
> He said he also attempted to make a liberal counterpart for Hart on Instagram, but “Democrats know that it’s AI slop, so they don’t engage as much,” he said.
The effort-to-profit ratio is so insane that you almost can't blame them for turning the internet into such toxic wasteland.
The ex-KGB defector you're thinking of is Yuri Bezmenov (also known by his alias Tomas Schuman). The strategy he described is called "Ideological Subversion" (also referred to as "Active Measures" or "Psychological Warfare")
Their time scale is measured in decades.
1. Demoralization Undermining the moral and cultural foundations of a society — making people lose faith in their own country, values, and institutions ~15–30 years (one generation)
2. Destabilization Exploiting the demoralized state to create social, political, and economic instability — polarizing the population ~2–5 years
3. Crisis Pushing the destabilized society into a full-blown crisis, creating a situation where people demand radical change ~6 weeks
4. Normalization After the crisis leads to a power shift, the new order is "normalized" — a totalitarian system is established and accepted as the new normal Ongoing
took Putin less than 10 years to do that to Russia. the collapse is postponed while the regime's eunuchs and dogs are fed, of course, but God wills it, that might not be the case for much longer.
We're in a recession caused by the current government's 11 years of mismanagement but approval ratings are higher than ever because our government just blames the US.
Meanwhile the gap between our peers and us is widening and certain Canadians (mostly boomers) just refuse to see the problem.
Everyone I know has left the country and I've already got one foot out the door.
https://economics.td.com/ca-silent-brain-drain
I would point you towards the various hybrid warfare attacks on civic society especially across Europe, such as infrastructure sabotage, bomb threats to election centers, and hiring petty criminals to attack religious sites or paint hateful graffiti.
My interpretation of this strategy is that it's an attempt to undermine social cohesion, create sectarian politics, which fragments the society, draws its attention inwards and makes it impossible to pursue any specific coherent direction.
This turns out to have been alarmingly effective. All it needs is someone willing to hand cash to bored teenagers, and their vandalism can be redirected from bus shelters to critical infrastructure.
Maybe it is time for us to stop sane-plaining Americans and just take them at their word?
Brexit and other forms of dissension spread in Europe by Russian agents (from bombings in Berlin to poisoning dissidents in London) are definitely deliberate and war by other means, not some sort of sideshow. Separatist movements have and will be used to weaken enemies and figures like Farage and Orban are still doing Russia’s work.
I would not be at all surprised to find that dissent/separatism in countries opposed to Russia is funded by Putin. Dissent and chaos are an important part of the Russian playbook, not an afterthought.
By my rough estimation a third to a half of these people: https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders
What would be the point of that? Wars and support of wars do not generally rely on public support. For instance here in the us, only around 3% of americans vote based on foreign policy. Does it really matter which narrative the masses believe? I would think it would be people in power worth persuading, and there are much more direct ways of buying politicians and career government workers.
Propagandizing their own people I get, but what you're outlining just doesn't make sense. "Spreading chaos" does because it draws resources away from their interests to domestic discord.
Either way, it doesn't have to actually work, the propagandist only has to think it's worth it to try.
> It does seem to have some effect - the Trump administration withdrew support from Ukraine.
No, they haven't. We just haven't increased support. They still benefit from our existing aid packages and intelligence.
Up until Iran, wars in America had large general support. Americans liked wars and their support for leadership went up when those wards started. And Americans politicians who wanted those wars put a lot of work into making people support wars.
Russians supported invasion of Ukraine. And Putin made sure they will. Even Germans prior WWI and WWII supported and wanted war. Ironically, especially young wanting to prove their masculinity.
Perhaps projection? It is perfectly valid to have different opinions. "Russian trolls" are not some sort of uniform centralized group, that gets directions what to "promote". Some people just have opinions, and do stuff out of conviction, not to get reward.
I'm also of the mindset that the effort to suggest there's state propaganda everywhere is, itself, mostly domestic state propaganda in an effort to try to 'otherize' dissenting views, especially as politicians and their actions become ever more unpopular.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yevgeny_Prigozhin
However, from the article: "This may not always be classic foreign interference in the state-backed sense. Sometimes it's much more banal. It's in some ways more depressing, ... People sitting thousands of miles away working out that Canadian outrage is a profitable niche. I think they may not actually care about Canadian politics at all."
I wonder how "free speech absolutists" defend the idea of people in low-income countries using these platforms to spread outrage simply to make themselves a little money (and the platform owners a lot of money), rather than to "exercise their right to free speech" or whatever, given these people aren't saying anything they believe in (let alone have any interest in or even knowledge of). Not that you can really call it free speech if you are being paid to do it.
* transparency about the filters we have on our feeds
* the ability to tweak them if they're not working
* the ability to change providers without losing your entire social graph / reach
To put it:
" * Government decides and approves about the filters we have on our feeds * the government has the right and duty to tweak them if they're not working in the way a panel of experts decides * no ability to change providers since there is only one that takes care of your entire social graph / reach "
Choose the premise wisely.
I separate those two things because they are very different with respect to the scale of the dissemination of speech. Nevertheless, magazines and newspapers are free to publish opinion, though it is significant in my opinion that in those cases there is an accountable individual (the editor/publisher).
It strikes me as different when we have social media platforms that amplify speech to a massive scale without any accountability. Clearly, monetization fuels the large-scale amplification of some undesirable speech so that 1. it is not an opinion expressed in good faith and 2. there is no directly accountable individual, unless the poster can be considered accountable for FBs large-scale publication of their speech, which feels perverse to me. It's effectively "robo-published".
There are some conclusions which could be drawn here, and I'm not sure which should be drawn if any. But I think it's important to point out that the details do matter (libel laws and "malice" for example) and that the details change in significant ways as society and technology change.
A true free speech absolutist would not be concerned with paid speech being blocked, in fact they should really be against paid speech, at least in the sense being discussed here. The point of free speech is to be able to say what you want and saying something else because you are paid to, because you can't afford to turn down the payment to say what someone else wants instead, is anti-free-speech.
Sounds more like a mealy mouthed argument against it.
To add, in essence I agree with you, that's why I regard Jean-Jacques Rousseau as one of the really few free thinkers out there, i.e. because he was aware that as soon as he was accepting to be paid for what he was writing then his speech would become "imprisoned".
Yep. I was going to say I wouldn't go as far as all, but I can't think of a mainstream counter example…
I think the idea that various mechanisms in modern society are subtly corroding free speech en masse with various nasty knock-on effects is an interesting one though.
By recognizing that undesirable uses of free speech are the price society pays for having free speech, and by strongly believing that it is a price worth paying.
Just like 1.3 million global road traffic deaths per year are the price society pays for having cars, and believing that people should still be able to freely own and drive cars doesn’t make someone a “car absolutist”.
The idea that free speech should probably be restricted if it turns out that free speech can lead to unpleasant consequences misses the whole point of free speech – in many cases deliberately, I think.
The implication that if someone is unwilling to compromise on free speech, they must belong to the far right, is certainly revealing.
Car traffic is heavily regulated to reduce the harm being done by cars/drivers.
And of course in this case the root problem is not that people have free speech but that they are financially rewarded for using it in bad ways. Financial models that reward impressions are fundamentally bad for society.
Being saturated with ragebait slop is a good way to get people to associate ragebait with wasting their time.
1) we're a genealogically different ethnic group from the rest of the country
2) we're better than the major ethnic group of the rest of the country
Both bits are absolutely essential. I can't recall a single instance of a separatist movement based on purely political differences gaining serious ground, Alberta included.
So brave CBC making this woman doing this to eke out a few bucks the star of this exposé while the fb executives enabling this get to remain nameless
Canada should use this channel to promote tariff cancellation in the USA.
I doubt that Facebook is efficient on important matter. If I'm wrong then Canadian government is doing very bad job in promoting democratic values in and outside Canada.
So, they're naturally able to influence the West way more than the West can influence them.
The countries that would need this the most are usually also the countries where it is the hardest to reach their population from the outside.
Just on a personal level I’ve found it hard for example to get YouTube and Facebook to stop showing me short videos, which I don’t want to see. You can click the “not interested” or “show less” button, and it doesn’t do much.
What works though if you apply it consistently is, when you see something on a feed that you don’t want anymore, is to immediately close the app and don’t come back for a while at least. That’s the strongest signal you can send to their recommender.
MAGA are mostly inherently dumb, gullible, and afraid. And 'strongman' (fascism) is the answer for dumb, gullible, and afraid.
And from an accompanying article https://nypost.com/2026/04/21/us-news/top-maga-influencer-em...
> He said he also attempted to make a liberal counterpart for Hart on Instagram, but “Democrats know that it’s AI slop, so they don’t engage as much,” he said.
We're now solidly in a point of tine that a random 3rd world noodle merchant can make livable money by significantly warping and distorting governments across the world. I dont know the solution for this, but Id have a real hard look at DMCA Section 230, and social media's responsibility in enabling and amplifying.
Nothing to do specifically with albertan separatism, it has (and will) happened with plenty of other topics as well.
A system is what a system does, not what a system is claimed to stand for.
I'd argue that it just wouldn't work. Outrage is what's "engaging" and it is engagement which actually forces these things to go viral and spread. You are therefor limited in what sort of information you can spread on social media, at least in the virality sense. You could not, for instance, use social media to "trick" millions of people into practicing calculus every day. And you could not use social media to coerce people into spending hours meditating.
It's of course not that you could never house this content on social media, but instead that this content could never be viral, never make a strong, immediate emotional impression in the eyes of the viewer. Practicing calculus or meditation is much, much more than a strong, quick, (and I'd argue) innate emotional reaction to bare stimulus. It requires focus and participation.
So it's not just that there are these little evil troll farms sowing discord around the world. Rather, outrage, and particularly outage about social or tribal topics will always float to the top in any sort of system (algorithmic or not) that preferences engagement. There will always be at least outrage in the general population of posters (whether "natural" or else astroturfed) who are putting out outrage content, and this content will always be treated preferentially in any system that filters for outrage content. It's quite hard to avoid. You actually see this on the "boring" 4Chan boards. There is no algorithm in the modern sense of the word (although of course there is something like an algorithm in the literal sense of the word) and on these boring boards you just cannot get much much traction when starting a thread that is not a "troll" thread. A normal, informative thread gets fewer replies, and so it falls off the front page, and then no one sees, and so it gets even fewer replies.
In other words, these systems will always privilege outrage bait, even if they had real incentives to attempt to avoid it. There are only certain topics that get people fired up in a quick, immediate, emotional sort of way -- and the communication systems we've built and have become addicted to will only preference that sort of communication. Identifying these troll farms matters, but why would a crappy little troll farm from far away be able to to write content that captivates you. If they wrote a book, you wouldn't read it. If you directed a TV series, you wouldn't watch it. But one dumb little caption on an image about how a person from the wrong group has trespassed against you and it sticks in your mind forever. People need to think about why that is.
It has been years since I signed into Facebook. The content on Facebook is just vile and disgusting, IMO. I remember signing in 3 years ago, and signing out less than a minute later because I couldn't look at it. It wasn't content from people I knew. It was all the thirst traps, rage bait, weird ads, and other garbage. I don't think normal humans still use Facebook, do they? I can't imagine regularly frequenting a sewer like that.
YouTube and Tiktok have been paying creators for years. You can guarantee people will post stuff that gets traction, not just nefariously but even regular creators getting pushed in certain directions because it’s a reliable source of views. Many will do it for free just for attention or a sense of power.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive
Check this grifter, indian in canada, running a bot to support MAGA to grift and milk engagements, will this bot exist if monetization wasn’t a thing?
https://ottawacitizen.com/news/ottawa-man-ai-bot-maga
https://www.reuters.com/world/india/fearing-fraud-canada-rej...
Seems Canada hasn't rejected enough of them yet?
Alberxit?
Albexit?
> a new report titled “Monetizing Occupation: Meta’s Financial Enablement of Settlement Activity and Violent Rhetoric Against Palestinians.” The report reveals how Meta allows Israeli far-right pages, settler-affiliated accounts, and extremist media outlets to generate revenue through its platforms, despite publishing violent, racist, and inciting content against Palestinians, and despite many being directly linked to promoting illegal settlement expansion, as well as widespread violence and attacks against Palestinians in the West Bank.
https://7amleh.org/post/meta-monetizes-settlements-and-viole...
But we most keep them that they are indeed visionaries of enshitification.
> [The person they're investigating] even posted about income she generates from Meta's monetization program, which rewards creators for engagement and solicits subscribers on her personal page.
Facebook pays people to post content that people "engage" with, outrage is engagement, and tiny amounts of money incentive money are significant to poor people in the 3rd world.
It's the same cluster of facts that lead to "Shrimp Jesus" slop: https://www.forbes.com/sites/danidiplacido/2024/04/28/facebo....
Rules for thee and not for me. Sure, Canada isn’t the CIA, but they’ve been right there with the US from Iran to Ukraine.
Canada is not being hypocritical.
Would also work as a headline. But wouldn’t attract as many clicks I guess. The implication that Facebook is actively promoting a certain view point is disgusting, and old media loves to do that (even though they were historically the ones doing so). I’m all for local filtering (on some level) and preventing foreign interference on local political matters, and social media companies ought to do better. But I twist my nose at old media shamelessly trying to manipulate the views of people on tech. And this is Facebook we’re talking about here…
(yes, this is a serious problem with content monetization intermediaries; somehow as soon as the topic is sexual everyone immediately understands what the problem is and rushes to condemn the intermediary)
The point is that Facebook's mechanisms drive poor people in the third world to promoting division in the developed world.
Doesn't need to be some sort of evil scheme in order to be dangerous. Often dangerous things come from people not thinking through the consequences of their actions instead of mustachio-twirling supervillains executing elaborate plans.