I’ve heard rumours of such a thing. With the US elections approaching and several others too FWIW I am beginning to wonder.
Is there an informal campaign to flood the new media, the internet and so forth, with arguments that are on-message for one candidate or another? Whether by content or simply being?*
In candour there is the bones of a circumstantial case or 2 on this very board: Arguments that have the appearance and timing to suggest co-ordination with an overall plan. On the other hand it may be that the approaching events are putting upward pressure on the general temperature and it shows?
Your thoughts kind folk, bearing in mind as I do, the rules concerning certain accusations against individuals.
I’ve considered the feasibility of advertising for groups this way (I do not own a business), so I’m sure other people have thought about it.
I’m sure it could be effective… probably also very time-consuming. Too much so for advertising but not for campaigning where people are willing to volunteer.
Jon Stewart has certainly done some wonderful pieces on ‘talking points’, showing a unified front of conservative leaders using the sames words and catch phrases on the same day. Clearly, they got them from somewhere, and were instructed, or ‘asked’, to use them, and they did. How it is all coordinated, I don’t know.
The same thing is probably done by liberals, they just aren’t as good at it.
Let me know if I am nitpicking. To me a troll is someone who purposely posts to piss people off, not to push certain talking points. I always picture a twelve year old giggling at his keyboard about how pissed off everyone is. I think you are talking about underground marketing which I asked a question about here (although I wasn’t talking about political ads). There are some advertising firms that do specialize in such pratices. A political campaign would have to look long and hard at it because it would seem very underhanded and dishonest. I’m sure a group like Moveon or insert your rightwing group here would have fewer problems with doing something like this.
Both sides have used talking points for years. The DNC is just as good as the RNC at putting them out. I would bet (but have no proof) that the DNC is better at using the web to get their point across. Howard Dean used it better than anybody so far and the RNC has been playing catch-up.
It’s not even new. Advertisers have been doing it for years, plugging or slandering products in discussion forums and marketplaces. Go through some of Amazon’s comments sections and you’ll see astroturf all over the place.
Very true. It also happens a LOT in support forums. My dad recently spent $200 on fuses he could have gotten for a tenth of that in Autozone, because some of the regulars on the forums he goes swore up and down that only the OEM fuses would work. And of course if anything goes wrong, there’s a dozen people jumping out to point the blame at anyone except the OEM.
I respectfully differ. To my mind a troll is someone who posts for purposes other than honest debate. So I’m not real keen on partisans of any colour. Obviously there is no hard and fast answer to what makes a troll however.
I have also noticed that certain phrases do seem to come into season and then fade away. Does anyone else recall how variants of the phrase “we weren’t just going to take those attacks” were popping up over the internet a few weeks ago, whenever any mention of invading Iraq came up?
Is there any way of finding a cite or hard evidence of these things occurring?
Now, I have not tried going through that particular list in order to match any of those points with any of the ‘arguments’ brought forth to the SDMB by the Swifty defenders. But I wouldn’t be overly surprised to find some correlation to what’s been presented here as evidence in their support.
Does that automatically make the poster a “troll”? Not my call to make, but I suppose we all have to get our information somewhere. OTOH, I do find the source more than a little bit questionable.
Not that I am going to, but if someone were to ‘wade into’ their archives, one wonders what else could be found along those lines.
I’d add that if someone presents arguments as their own invention, without linking to or mentioning the source, that would be pretty close to trolling in my mind. For example I recall someone last week flatly refusing to tell the source of their quoted material. Trolling in my mind
Orchestrated is another question. For that to happen, I think there would have to be some co-ordination and deliberation.
Given some of the filth on the SwiftVets site I’m not going back there. There are limits to curiousity that the sane will observe.
In the last couple of days I’ve noticed the phrase “better the devil you know” coming up more and more frequently from Bush supporters.
The one I recall being repeated ad-nauseum before the war was “How do you expect the weapons inspectors to find something in a country as large as California”, with the “as large as California” part being repeated over and over in slightly different sentences.
What do you mean by “these things”? Do you mean the fact that some phrases come into season and then fade, or do you mean the fact that this is orchestrated?
For the former, you can use something like web.archive.org (never used it myself).
For the latter, I guess only leaks from insiders would provide any proof, if indeed it is happening. Without such insider information, this could be all attributed to the theory that these phrases were successful “memes” for a while.
‘Flip-flop’ has a real ring to it, while ‘waffle’ is a bit lame. I thought Kerry ‘waffled’ too, though.
On a related matter, there seems to be more words in common usage for the Republicans (Pubbies, Bushies, Repugs) than for the Democrats (Moorons, ??). Any other good ones?
