Do you often have trolls commenting or dominating conversation on your blog posts, Facebook posts, etc? My blog does not yet have a huge audience, so it is not much of an issue here, but it often is when I comment on public Facebook pages and on the articles of others. The question always comes up, "what motivates an internet troll?" The answer may be money, or some other compensation from the US federal government.
While scanning my Facebook feed I ran across what appear to be a fairly unreliable article claiming that internet trolls are often employees of the federal government whose goal it is to direct discourse on the internet in a particular direction. However, this article appears to be linked to an article by The Intercept that is a bit more reputable. The idea here is that agencies like the NSA monitor activity throughout the internet, particularly on sites like Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, and yes, even Blogger. The organization for whom we have the most evidence of this right now is the Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group (JTRIG), We only know of the existence of this organization as a result of the courage of one our our heroes here at the Alkahest Institute, Edward Snowden. The two main purposes and tactics of JTRIG are to "(1) to inject all sorts of false material onto the internet in order to destroy the reputation of its targets; and (2) to use social sciences and other techniques to manipulate online discourse and activism to generate outcomes it considers desirable". These tactics are used not just against foreign governments and such, but are sometimes used as "alternative law enforcement" to destroy the lives of those whose activities, legal or not, the government finds undesirable. They can do this by creating blogs claiming to be victims of their enemies, or by other "false flag" type operations.
As I said earlier, the organization for whom we have the most evidence of behaving this way is British Intelligence, but it would be silly not to assume that the FBI, NSA and CIA are engaged in the same types of behavior, if not worse. These tactics have even been suggested by some close to the current president of the United States: "Harvard Law Professor Cass Sunstein, a close Obama adviser and the White House’s former head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, wrote a controversial paper in 2008 proposing that the US government employ teams of covert agents and pseudo-'independent' advocates to 'cognitively infiltrate' online groups and websites, as well as other activist groups." This same person is one of the people Barak Obama appointed recently to the NSA review panel, leaving once again, the government fox in charge of the citizens' hen house.
Please, as you have time, read more about this from the original article and its companion article. Now that we know that western, supposedly free, governments are behaving this way, how are we to handle it? How should we react to minor or major trollish behavior on our own pages? How skeptical should we be when a sudden destructive media campaign takes over a famous person's life for supposed bad behavior? (Bill Cosby?). As for the first question, my future response to all trolls on my internet outlets will be to accuse them of being NSA or JTRIG employees, not just because it may be true, but because it will be entertaining to watch their reaction. As for the second question, it will be much harder for me to believe in the publicly announced crimes of any famous person, almost regardless of the evidence, if that person has publicly held any opinions that are inconvenient to a branch of the government (cough, Bill Cosby, cough).
Right now, The Alkahest Institute is likely much to small to garner much negative interest from the American or British governments, but as we grow and the attacks begin, please remember not to believe the hype :-)
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