Electoral-Vote, a very widely respected political blog has an interesting article about paid trolling online. It was also the subject of a Daily Kos article.
The Sanders campaign has denied that they are using paid trolls.
I do believe the Sanders campaign is using paid trolls online. I’ve certainly seen plenty of everyday people making Bernie is God posts. But, the extremely vicious anti-Hillary posts, with multiple paragraphs and endless hashtags do seem to reach troll level. This goes doubly when they’re made in the comments section of media groups that don’t usually see that type of discourse, such as The Economist, Foreign Affairs, The New Yorker, or The Atlantic.
Sure, because pure evil is what comes to mind when people say ‘Bernie Sanders’. Don’t worry, you can find out when he files his spending reports with the FEC, there’ll be a line item there for ‘Professional Trolls’.
The Daily Kos and Electoral-Vote articles I linked to mention Sanders’ FEC filing which shows payments to the alleged professional troll company, Revolution Messaging. The Daily Kos article also includes an example of an advertisement for ‘paid digital interns’ that are suspected of being the professional trolls.
The first article says Hillary is spending $1 million on professional trolls. Well I guess not, it’s just social media campaigning when Hillary does it, they’re only professional trolls if Bernie hires them. So you’ve proven your case right there.
I’m going to reserve judgement until I see what the result is of Hillary’s spending. If it’s an online presence refuting some of Bernie’s claims, then I won’t consider them to be trolling. If it’s the fever pitched vicious style posting that is so common among some Sanders supporters, then I’ll certainly agree they’re trolling as well.
It really wouldn’t make sense for Hillary’s campaign to launch an online troll offensive right now, if polls hold up and Hillary takes at least 4/5 states on Tuesday, Bernie’s campaign is over and there is absolutely no purpose to launch a troll campaign online.
Bernie has struck a nerve. The upside is an awakening of political commitment among reasonable and intelligent young people. Huzzah! The downside is an awakening. etc.
So he is paying people to be online for his campaign and spread the word. I’d guess that there probably are guidelines about how they shouldn’t troll or be hateful, but I don’t know if they don’t follow it, or if the trolls are not part of Revolution Messaging. And probably some of the messaging is stuff that some people might call trolling and some people might call as perfectly reasonable campaign messaging.
Also, Sanders does have a lot of devoted supporters, and a non-zero number of them cross the line from enthusiastic to trolling online. I’d guess more of the outright trolling comes from unpaid fans rather than paid campaign workers.
OP is clearly an attempt to preempt discussion of Hillary Clinton’s effort to “Correct the Record” by hiring people to promote her messages on Reddit and Facebook. The Daily Beast had an article about it yesterday. I think it’s clear that this is dalej42’s attempt to “Correct the Record” of doing what Hillary is doing.
You know, I didn’t even vote for Bernie but I feel like I spend a lot of time defending from Clinton-fan misinformation.
I don’t know if they are paid or not, but I do know the reddit.com frontpage is always littered with pro-sanders anti-hillary links. I understand the demographics of the site, I think, but what’s strange is the insinuation and half-truths and hyperbole associated with the link titles. I thought reddit users were more the truth-seeker/skeptic type, but it’s like reading a left-wing version of breitbart or foxnation, it’s really weird.
Hillary’s main concern right now is how to successfully pivot towards the general. I don’t think anyone was expecting how fractious the Democratic nomination was going to be when Bernie first put his hat into the ring. Bernie was expected to be the sacrificial puppet that would give Hillary a few practice rounds before the party all united in the quest for the general. Now, the relationship between Bernie and Hillary supporters has gotten so antagonistic that a significant fraction of Bernie supporters can’t imagine themselves voting for Hillary in the general. Hillary’s job now is to send a message to those supporters of “Look, Bernie’s great but Hillary’s a fine second choice and significantly better than Cruz/Trump”.
All of the Presidential candidates have easily enough enthusiastic supporters already on the Internet that any added by professionals would be a drop in the bucket. I would say that they’re wasting their money, except that $16 million is chump change to what modern presidential campaigns spend overall.
Anyway, Reddit is a very big place and has some terrible people/subreddits on it but just saying that “Reddit is for/against something” doesn’t mean much. You have your fact-based science subreddits and your chemtrail-9/11 weirdos as well. It’s like saying Usenet is for or against something.
Boy, I’m glad you posted this. I was getting tired of the other six “Bernie is evil!!! and his supporters are the dumb!” threads and this Hillary fans another one to feel good about. Keep it up! It’s sure to convince his followers that Clinton is clearly the better candidate!
I don’t think they’re paid trolls, just very enthusiastic younger voters who generally spend a lot of time online and have forceful opinions. What I do think is silly is that some people have given Clinton flak for hiring people to counter negative statements about her online. This isn’t censorship, this isn’t some scary Big Brother-ish world. Clinton has the same right to go online to post stuff as anyone else does and she has a lot of supporters willing to do that. If anyone online’s got a bunch of negative and false information about them floating around, its her.
