PsyOps and Socialbots
September 3, 2013
Introduction
Social media are the principal aggregation “places” in cyberspace; billions of connected people are using it for a wide variety of purposes from gaming to socialization.
The high penetration level of social media makes these platforms privileged targets for cybercriminal activities and intelligence analysis. In many cases, both aspects come together and operate in a manner similar to the pursuit of the same objectives.
As described in my previous article “Social Media Use in the Military Sector,” social media are actively attended by state-sponsored actors and governments to support military operations such as:
- Psychological operations (PsyOps)
- OSInt
- Cyber espionage
- Offensive purposes
Psychological Operations (PsyOps)
Military doctrine includes the possibility of exploiting the wide audiences of social media to conduct psychological operations (PsyOps) in a context of information warfare with the primary intent to influence the “sentiment” of large masses (e.g., emotions, motives, objective reasoning).
PsyOps is defined by the U.S. military as “planned operations to convey selected truthful information and indicators to foreign audiences to influence their emotions, motives, objective reasoning, and ultimately, the behavior of their governments, organizations, groups, and individuals.”
“Psychological operations” is not a new concept. In the past, on many occasions and in different periods, the military has used the diffusion of information to interfere with opponents divulging artifact information or propaganda messages. Governments have used secret agents infiltrated behind the enemy lines or launched leaflets with a plane over enemy territories; today, social networks have the advantage over these types of missions.
The terms “psychological operations” and “psychological warfare” are often used interchangeably; “psychological warfare” was first used in 1920 and “psychological operations” in 1945. Distinguished theorists like Sun Tzu have highlighted the importance of waging psychological warfare:
“One need not destroy one’s enemy. One only needs to destroy his willingness to engage…”
“For to win one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the acme of skill. To subdue the enemy without fighting is the supreme excellence.” – Sun Tzu
Governments consider PsyOps a crucial option for diplomatic, military, and economic activities, the use of new-generation media and large-diffusion platforms such as the mobile and social media gives governments a powerful instrument to reach critical masses instantly.
PsyOps consist in conveying messages to selected groups, known as target audiences, to promote particular themes that result in desired attitudes and behavior that affect the achievement of political and military objectives. NATO promoted a doctrine for psychological operations defining target audience as “an individual or group selected for influence or attack by means of psychological operations.”
In the document, “Allied Joint Doctrine for Psychological Operations AJP-3.10.1(A),” NATO has highlighted the possibility of supporting military operations with PsyOps following three basic objectives:
- Weaken the will of the adversary or potential adversary target audiences.
- Reinforce the commitment of friendly target audiences.
- Gain the support and cooperation of uncommitted or undecided audiences.
The military sector is investing largely in PsyOps professionals; it is exploring these technologies to influence individuals to support their cause or the sentiment of an entire population.
To influence common sentiment on specific topics, intelligence agencies arrange political and geopolitical campaigns using impressive amounts of data to induce specifically crafted information, fake or not, on the masses. Intelligence agencies use social media networks as a vector of the information flow; dedicated content is created to raise the attention of topics of interest and various discussions are carried on to involve an increasing number of users. Just the dynamicity of discussions represents the primary element of innovation in modern PsyOps: These discussions are structured with ad hoc comments and posts and they are used to sensitize and influence the user’s perception of events.
The principal advantages of using social media for PsyOps operations are:
- Social media can reach a wide audience instantly and speed is an essential factor in PSYOPs.
- Social media can reach individuals difficult to reach in other ways, thanks to the high penetration level of the Internet technology.
- The information being presented can be easily modified and changed in the cyber domain to address the target audience.
- Flexible and persuasive technologies are interactive and make it possible for an attacker to tailor operations for highly dynamic situations.
- Cyber and persuasive technologies can grant anonymity.
- Automated PsyOps on social media are more persistent and efficient than humans.
- PsyOps is a cheap means of dissemination.
- Impossibility of limiting the availability of information published to selected audiences, unless it is sent directly to the target audience as e-mail. This causes a further effort to minimize the negative impact of operations on unintended target audiences.
- Target audience has to be able to access the Internet.
- The PsyOps messages have to appeal to the target audiences much more than in most other media; this requires a great effort by the attackers.
One of the principal factors for the success of PsyOps operation is the possibility of automating the processes for information diffusion and management of the sources. To do it, entities that conduct psychological operations start from the assumption that the Internet, and in particular a social network, lacks proper management of users’ digital identities; this means that it is possible to adopt various techniques to pursue the above goals.
The U.S. military is considered one of the most active entities in developing automated software that can manipulate social media sites by using fake identities to influence internet conversations and discussions, and to spread pro-American propaganda. The Guardian reported that a Californian corporation, Ntrepid, has been awarded a contract ($2.76m contract) with United States Central Command (Centcom), which oversees U.S. armed operations in the Middle East and Central Asia, to design an “online persona management service” that will allow one U.S. serviceman to control up to 10 separate identities based all over the world.
“0001- Online Persona Management Service. 50 User Licenses, 10 Personas per user.
“Software will allow 10 personas per user, replete with background, history, supporting details, and cyber presences that are technically, culturally, and geographically consistent. Individual applications will enable an operator to exercise a number of different online personas from the same workstation and without fear of being discovered by sophisticated adversaries. Personas must be able to appear to originate in nearly any part of the world and can interact through conventional online services and social media platforms. The service includes a user-friendly application environment to maximize the user’s situational awareness by displaying real-time local information. ”
The Centcom contract stipulates that each fake online persona must have a convincing background, history, and supporting details, and that up to 50 U.S.-based controllers should be able to operate false identities from their workstations “without fear of being discovered by sophisticated adversaries.”
The intent of the U.S. military was to influence global sentiment to create a false consensus in online discussion. A Centcom spokesman, Commander Bill Speaks, clarified that the software will not address U.S. audiences; the system is able to produce activities in different languages, including Arabic, Farsi, Urdu, and Pashto.
“The technology supports classified blogging activities on foreign-language websites to enable Centcom to counter violent extremist and enemy propaganda outside the U.S.”
Office Centcom was not interested in U.S.-based web sites, in English, or any other language, and it declared that isn’t analyzing Facebook or Twitter, but recent revelations on PRISM and other surveillance programs raise numerous doubts of the official declarations.
“Once developed, the software could allow U.S. service personnel, working around the clock in one location, to respond to emerging online conversations with any number of coordinated messages, blog posts, chatroom posts, and other interventions. Details of the contract suggest this location would be MacDill air force base near Tampa, Florida, home of U.S. Special Operations Command,” posted The Guardian.
The contract appears to be part of the program dubbed Operation Earnest Voice (OEV), which was first developed in Iraq by U.S. military with the purpose of conducting psychological warfare operations against al-Qaida on-line supporters. The program is reported to have expanded into a $200m program and, according to intelligence experts, it has been used against jihadists across Pakistan, Afghanistan, and the Middle East.
Gen Mattis said: “OEV seeks to disrupt recruitment and training of suicide bombers; deny safe havens for our adversaries; and counter extremist ideology and propaganda.” He added that Centcom was working with “our coalition partners” to develop new techniques and tactics the U.S. could use “to counter the adversary in the cyber domain.”
On February 5, 2011, Anonymous compromised the HBGary website, disclosing tens of thousands of documents from both HBGary Federal and HBGary, Inc., including company emails. The hack revealed that Bank of America approached the Department of Justice over concerns about information that WikiLeaks had about it. According an article published by The New York Times, the Department of Justice in turn referred Bank of America to the lobbying firm Hunton and Williams, which connected the financial institution with a group of information security firms collectively known as Team Themis that includes HBGary, Palantir Technologies, Berico Technologies and Endgame Systems.
Their mission was to undermine the credibility of WikiLeaks and the journalist Glenn Greenwald; the hack also revealed that Team Themis was developing a “persona management” system for the United States Air Force that allowed one user to control multiple online identities (“sock puppets”) for commenting in social media spaces. It is the same system we have already introduced.
Socialbots and Persona Management Software
Socialbots are considered the most efficient way to control social media in an automated way, trying to influence the common sentiment about specific topics. Scientists believe that socialbots are already expanding their presence in social media. During 2012, the number of Twitter accounts topped 500 million, but according some researchers nearly 35 % of the average Twitter user’s followers are real people. The Internet traffic generated by nonhuman sources is more than 50%, mainly produced by bots or M2M systems.
On occasion of the Russian parliamentary election in 2011, thousands of Twitter bots operated for several months to create specifically crafted content. Every day the principal social networks were flooded by messages targeting the political opponents and the anti-Kremlin activists, aiming to drown them out. Researchers say similar tactics have been used more recently by the government in Syria. Same tactic has been followed by officials from Mexico’s governing Institutional Revolutionary Party that used bots to sabotage the party’s critics.
Botnets are a primary choice for the attackers, who could use these malicious architectures for the following purposes:
- By replacing the identity of targeted individuals, hackers could infect victims’ systems, using spear phishing attacks to acquire their complete control. State-sponsored hackers could use zero-day exploits to hide their campaign; once they have acquired control of victims, they could impersonate another user for various purposes, from intelligence to social engineering. These kinds of operation are considerably high risk and therefore are not common for ordinary PsyOps; it is, in fact, very easy to detect an attack on a specific legitimate account that is used to spread specific information.
- More feasible is the use of botnets for identity spoofing. Attackers could create a network of fake profiles which do not correspond to any existing individual to operate conditioning on a large scale. The botnet could be designed to simulate the dialogue between those individuals on specific topic within popular forums and social networks; in this way it is possible to raise the level of attention on various issues.
Security researchers are convinced that socialbots could be used to sway elections, to attack governments, or to influence the stock market, and probably many recent events have been already influenced by the use of such malicious architecture.
Recently computer scientists from the Federal University of Ouro Preto in Brazil announced that the popular journalist on Twitter, Carina Santos, was not a real person but a botnet that they had created. What is very surprising is that, based on the circulation of her tweets, a commonly used ranking site, Twitalyzer, ranked this account as having more online “influence” than Oprah Winfrey profile.
Early in 2013, Microsoft detected a malware called Trojan:AutoIt/Kilim.A., a Trojan specifically designed to target the Google Chrome browser.
“The Trojan may be installed when an unsuspecting user clicks on a shortened hyperlink that redirects to a malicious website. The website masquerades as a download site for legitimate software, and tricks the user into downloading and executing Kilim. Upon successful execution, Kilim disables user account controls (UAC) and adds an auto-start entry in the system registry to survive the reboot. It then proceeds to download two malicious Chrome browser extensions,” Microsoft revealed.
The installed extensions are able to gain access to the victim’s social networking sites and perform actions in place of legitimate users. It’s clear that a similar behavior could be exploited to build a network of agents that promote specific topics in an automated way, using existing and legitimate user accounts.
A Zeus Trojan variant has also recently been used to hit social media. Using this popular malware, attackers could increase the rate of specific posts and spread a series of links to which the bots add thousands of likes. These variants are able to automatically post content, such as photos and comments, and to increase the number of followers influencing the attacked social media on specific topics. Using the Zeus Trojan, hackers could conduct the essential operations for a psychological operation by creating various fake profiles having a specific role in the fake network. Some nodes, in fact, will post contents simulating a discussion and thousands of others will post an unlimited amount of likes and followers for the first group of profiles, fueling the interest in a particular discussion by using comments and images.
This use of malicious code is also increasing in popularity in the cyber ecosystem; the generation of these fake items on social media to increase visibility is becoming a profitable business. On average, 1000 Instagram followers can be bought for $15 while likes go for $30. Social media customers are willingly paying thousands of dollars on similar issues and it is normal to expect that, as the rise of social media continues, the demand will rise.
“The current version of Zeus is a modified one which attacks all infected computer running on a network and forces them to like or follow pages. Furthermore, it also calls the users to install spammy apps and plug-ins.”
Usually socialbots can be more or less complex: They are able to query an internal DB that is constantly updated and containing the latest news on current events and on facts of major importance for the topic that will be addressed. The botnet structure is the optimal solution, the last generation of P2P botnets and Tor-based botnets are practically impossible to track. The botmaster could control hundreds of thousands of infected machines that could concur to promote a series of discussions on various social media. Almost any social medium could be compromised by the psychological operations conducted through these architectures; to the untrained eye, it would appear that a plethora of users are confronted on issues of various kinds when, in fact, intelligence services are working to disseminate content that will influence global sentiment.
Paradoxically, the main problem for the conduct of these operations is not the control of thousands of bots around the planet to compromise as many systems as possible, but state-sponsored actors use to exploit zero-day vulnerabilities to do this dirty work.
Also, the cybercrime industry is interested in the capabilities of socialbots, mainly for the possibility of selling Twitter followers for a price or to involve victims in fraudulent activities, such as stealing passwords or spreading other malware for a price.
The “Infiltration”—a Socialbot Experiment
Researchers Aviad Elishar, Michael Fire, Dima Kagan, and Yuval Elovic published an interesting paper, titled “Homing Socialbots: Intrusion on a specific organization’s employee using Socialbots,” that presents a method for infiltrating specific users in targeted organizations by using organizational social network topologies and socialbots. To measure the efficiency of the method, the researchers decided to target technology-oriented organizations, for which employees should be more aware of the dangers of exposing private information on social media. The scope of the experiment is to induce social network users to accept a socialbot’s friend; the acceptance is also called infiltration.
The infiltration exposes users’ information, including their workplace data. The researchers used socialbots in two phases:
- Information-gathering phase, the reconnaissance of Facebook users who work in targeted organizations.
- Target identification, the random choice of 10 Facebook users from every targeted organization. The 10 users were chosen to be the specific users from targeted organizations that the attackers would like to infiltrate.
The results were surprising: The method was successful in from 50% to 70% of the cases. The infiltration could be conducted simply to allow the attacker to gather access to personal and valuable information or to establish a first link to exploit for further psychological operation. The infiltration could be considered a strategic part of the conduction of PsyOps.
The Opinion of an Expert
To better understand the phenomenon of socialbots and the real diffusion of such malicious architecture, I decided to interview my colleague Andrei Komarov. He is a CERT-GIB CTO, the head of international projects for Group-IB, a leading company in fraud prevention, cybercrime and hi-tech crime investigations.
Mr. Komarov, based on your experience, is the use of botnets for psychological operation a common practice?
Definitely, it is one of the key parts of modern cyber warfare without any doubts. And it is important to say, that it is not related to public or military sector only. It has great impact on business and it is widely used by private companies and corporations in the competitive struggle, sometimes between brands, similar technologies, or exact personalities and top management. It terms of technologies, it is also important to mention that during 2010-2012, lots of tools of software products for social networks were appeared, most of it is targeted at mass-posting, tweeting, geotagging and etc. In terms of botnets, we found some botnets which use C&C on Twitter and Facebook, which confirms that it is really useful and sometimes it is quite difficult to find it and to take down without fast incident response from the social network.
Which are the most active countries in this field?
It is really hard to figure out the exact countries, as most of such operations are very non-transparent and, in order to detect who is behind the operation is not possible, sometimes due to the various levels of anonymization, and additional software adopted to spoof the identity of the end operators.
Has Group-IB form found evidence of working sailboat used for PsyOps?
From my side, I can mention some facts of PsyOps in social networks before important political events, such as elections of national leaders, periods of rallies and demonstrations, when it is important to increase the attention to the problem of the society and mass media. One of the brightest facts is the use of social media and PSYOPs before the important legislative changes in some countries, when social network users and specially prepared groups begin to agitate to send letters to high court or politicians and etc., which sometimes really works. Most of the accounts of fake users are ordering through online-services, such as https://buyaccs.com/, which makes this field really cost-effective. The end impact is dependent only on operators and its ideas for PR.
PsyOps Mitigation
Mitigation of automated psychological operation is a very complex mission. The technologies have provided an impressive boost for these types of operation; the instantaneity of messages, anonymity, and a wide audience are the primary keys to their success.
DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) has started the social media in strategic communication (SMISC) program to develop a new science of social networks built on an emerging technology base.
The general goal of the SMISC program is to develop a new science of social networks built on an emerging technology base. DARPA is working for the development of a new generation of tools to support the efforts of human operators to counter misinformation or deception campaigns with truthful information. The program has been sustained to detect any action induced by external agents to shape global sentiment or opinion in information generated and spread through social media. For the scope, security and media researchers are joining their effort to recognize specific patterns that could reveal the operation of automated botnets.
“If successful, they should be able to model emergent communities and analyze narratives and their participants, as well as characterize generation of automated content, such as by bots, in social media and crowd sourcing.”
To detect ongoing PsyOps, it is necessary to analyze large amounts of data from social media networks. Security researchers could work on two distinct fronts, detecting the flow of information aimed at influencing the global sentiment on a specific set of topics and trying to discover evidence of automated software (e.g., bot agents) that work to poison conversations on principal social media. Both paths are very hard to follow. It requires a meaningful computational capability and the definition of adaptive models able to detect the various phases of a psychological operation such as the “infiltration.”
Probably one of the most precious contributions to the definition of defensive models is provided by the offensive approach to social media: The same cyber units responsible for the detection of PSYOPs operated by foreign actors are in charge to define a new generation of software able to elude actual automated systems for the detection of the operation.
Conclusions
Psychological operations have been always considered a crucial option for the military. The large diffusion of social media gives to governments the possibility of using a new powerful platform for the spread of the news and propaganda in a context of information warfare.
The aggressor may exploit social media to destabilize a company or any other aspect of modern society: Diffusing fake news of an attack on the White House, the hacktivist group Syrian Electronic Army caused a serious temporary problem with the New York Stock exchange. It’s clear that someone could benefit from this event.
The principal change introduced with automated PsyOps is that potentially every actor could control information diffusion on media: Cyber criminals, private intelligence contractors, terrorists, and hacktivists could influence global sentiment with artifacts documenting and disseminating information with convincing and persuasive data. This aspect is crucial and represents a serious menace to contemporary information society.
It is easy to forecast an increase of PsyOps based on social media in the next year, the information war was begun many years ago and governments must address this menace with a proper cyber strategy to avoid serious risks and crisis.
PsyOps need not be conducted by nation states; they can be undertaken by anyone with the capabilities and the incentive to conduct them and, in the case of private intelligence contractors, there are both incentives (billions of dollars in contracts) and capabilities.
In 1956 the FBI established a special counter intelligence program called COINTELPRO to "neutralize political dissindents." One of the purposes of the program was to "expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize."
What the heck happened to this sub??
By mrsuncensored, MakingaMurderer
February 10, 2018
Is there something I don’t know? I took a long (over a year!) hiatus from reddit and only recently came back and a lot of the subs are different now...but I think I might have to unsub from r/makingamurderer because the only things I ever see posted are saying Steven Avery is guilty and anyone who says otherwise is wrong...the whole point of "Making a Murderer" (to me, and it used to be to others when this sub was new) wasn’t even about Steven Avery and Teresa Halbach at the core, it was all about how messed up our legal system is and how regardless whether Avery is guilty he did NOT have a fair trial and he should have been innocent until proven guilty.
You do realize that a lot of innocent people have been put in jail, right? I don’t know if Steven Avery is innocent or guilty, but I do believe he didn’t deserve to be treated the way he was in the public eye before his trial ever started.
[–]angieb15
Everyone moved over to another sub because about a year ago we got taken over by some of the worst mods on reddit, they didn't know anything about the MAM and used the sub as their personal power trip/ego booster. Most of the people left are the ones who take advantage of the absence of dissenting opinion. So that's your summary. We have better mods now, but the people haven't come back.
[–]TheAngryBird03
I don’t know the history of this sub and I can’t post for the history of the other sub. However I’ve been on this sub for about a year and it is exactly as described above.
If you have a dissenting opinion in this sub you are downvoted and basically bullied out the sub. This is why you have no dissenting opinion in this sub and so many lurkers because people don’t dare to raise a subject for discussion because at some point they will be aggressively taunted and rebuked. There are people in this sub who track usernames and immediately comment with vile responses because in the past they have said they weren’t sure of SA guilt.
This is an opinion piece but please everyone who reads have a 30 second think about what you’ve posted and if it helps discussion or turns people away.
This and other subs should be about 1. establishing the truth (for either side) and 2. hopefully having a tiny bit of influence on the future of the justice system.
[–]SilkyBeesKnees
You nailed it! You don't have to spend a lot of time reading past comments and OPs on this sub before it becomes clear that there is no interest in finding the truth here. You can see what happens when someone tries... bullying, insults and rudeness. They try to spin it as though they are not to blame, but spend a bit of time reading and it will become clear... even though they say both sides are guilty of this, the proof is here in black and white for anyone who cares to look.
[–]7-pairs-of-panties
So let me get this straight...you let a shrill take over MAM before the implosion removing and deleting all kinds of post and comments and people left in droves over to TTM to carry on the conversation. Your mad cause they didn’t let the guilters follow, but only the innocent comments were ones being preyed upon in the implosion. Now many many moths later your upset because the truthers haven’t “come back home?”
No one has forgiven or forgotten what happened. Newbies are lucky to find TTM if they even do because this is the first site they’ll find. You can’t have it both ways. TTM is never going to change its mind cause it’s working. U don’t need us and we don’t need u.
[–]southpaw72
Hos_gotta_eat_too [the founder of TickTockManitowoc] got banned for posting a public doc that he didn't redact some personal info out of, it was up for about 2 minutes before it was spotted and edited, unfortunately in those 2 minutes somebody spotted it and reported him, he was demoted from being a mod which he took exception to and refuses to reddit ever since.
Needless was occasionally dropping the odd hit an run post over at ttm but I am not sure if that's still the case as I don't spend much time there
[–]MaMStats
I have a script that computes total word counts and most common words for users in a subreddit. I'm not allowed to post the results due to all the extra rules in these subreddits. What I can say is that the top 5 posters by word count in the last 3 months are all people arguing that Avery is guilty. The very top poster (who you will quickly discover if spend more than a day on this subreddit) has a word count that is 4 times higher than the next most prolific poster. Some of this posters top 25 frequent words by volume include: absurd, nonsense, bogus, irrational, idiocy, wild.
Avery's current lawyer, Zellner, filed a 1000+ page (including exhibits) motion for post conviction relief that folks on this sub like to talk about. Just for comparison, the top poster on this sub has vastly surpassed the number of words in that motion in the last 3 months.
[–]MaMStats
Here's the script if you want to run it yourself. You can adjust things like the number of pages to process if you want to change how far back the stats go.
I'm glad to hear that you also find the top poster's extreme verbosity surpsing. Also happy to see you actually doing some checking on the numbers. Your estimates are a little high though. The word count for the first 221 pages of the brief, which is the actual motion (rather than exhibits) is more like 68,000 words. So that's an average of around 308 words per page. The exhibits are a little more sparse since they often contain partially blank pages. It's also worth noting that Zellner didn't write a lot of these. They are things like phone records, work dispatch records, terms of service, etc. Also, there is a ton of boilerplate. The motion itself has 16 pages of tables of contents and such that were automatically generated. Still, I did include all that. With all that noise, the overall words per page is just over 300 words. That puts the total in the 360,000 range.
The top poster on this site absolutely did write more words than that in the last 3 months. I posted the script in many places here. Please verify for yourself.
[–]maliciousgnome
Are they paid by the word or something?
[–]MaMStats
Here's the script so you can run it yourself.
https://pastebin.com/ffpCJxZX
[–]MaMStats
Motion is around 360K words. Top poster is around 500K words. Obviously changes depending on which day you run the script. Note also that I try to exclude boilerplate from the reddit posts, like places where one user quotes another. I didn't do that same thing for the motion, so it is definitely exaggerated.
[–]MaMStats
So... the OP's question was what happened in this sub recently. These stats tell the story of what's happening.
[–]MaMStats
This account is about stats. The top 5 posters are people arguing that Avery is guilty. The very top poster writes 4 times more than the next highest poster (which would be you). This top poster also has 4x the number of posts as the next highest poster (also you). This poster also leads 2nd place in raw number of comments by a wide margin (nearly 2x). The top 5 posters combined have written 15x more than the top posting person arguing for Avery's innocence.
There is a point at which writing a lot becomes spamming. This is especially problematic in this sub where the comment downvote button is hidden by CSS. The noise is nearly impossible to filter out.
You'll obviously disagree, so I'll just save some time for you - absurd, nonsense, bogus, irrational, idiocy, wild
[–]MaMStats
It's not just word count, it's also posts. The top poster leads the next highest poster in posts (4x) and comments (nearly 2x). It's more than a 15-to-1 flood of words, posts, and comments from one side.
For those that seem to be suffering from verbal diarrhea, let me suggest the advice of many historical figures. Take more time to think about what you're writing so that we don't all have to suffer through the noise.
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/04/28/shorter-letter/
[–]MaMStats
This trend started almost exactly when this top poster started flooding the subreddit 6 months ago. The top poster has written the equivalent of a 1500 page book (just in this subreddit) in the last 3 months.
Your explanation might be feasible if the amount of content on one side had stayed constant. But that is not what happened. The posts on one side have vastly ramped up. This is quantifiable with stats.
[–]baking_bad
Look at the users who comment on here the most. They post here literally 100 times a day and only post in this sub. They not only act like SA is without a doubt guilty but that you're a moron if you don't 100% trust the state's story. I honestly believe it's organized astroturfing and I wish someone had the time and energy to look into where it's originating.
[–]ThatKiwiBloke
This sub isnt worth visiting unless you want to see drama. People from both sides just sling mud at each other and the "guilty" side of the sub simply attack anyone who disagrees with them in numbers to make people belive they outnumber the innocent side.
[–]SilkyBeesKnees
SAIG anyone can come and debate. Try it.
Sure they can but many of their comments are either deleted by the mods or they're shadow banned. All while saying that they don't. They do.
[–]idunno_why
Can't help the fact that most Truthers that go over there will post insults in the thread title and move on and those will most likely get removed.
Why aren't the posts that insult truthers in the title removed on this sub? It's the same mods here. It happens daily on this sub.
[–]hilandhall
Ha. I was thinking this morning. Why the hell am I still subscribed to that? Glad it’s not only me. Unsubscribing now.
[–]Jfdelman
Yeah, the guilters over run all the subs and then get buthurt that TTM is pro Avery.
[–]JJacks61
I haven't and will not read all of the comments. But simply said, a current MoD in this sub brought in an outside MoD friend of hers. That MoD began deleting Topics that were pro Avery and Dassey. (This is what I refer to as the Rogue MoD, with an agenda.)
Then Rogue MoD LIED about it. It got so bad, Admins were contacted. More lies were told. MoDs getting into open arguments when they were caught, then going back and deleting THEIR OWN COMMENTS.
Spez got involved, and the Rogue MoD that was brought in LIED to him, then went back and deleted those comments. But it was too late.
Of course, there is much more to this saga. But the damage was done. TTM was created so that people that believed that SA and BD got shafted by the State could have a place to discuss, speculate, debate without fear of their posts being deleted by some Rogue MoD that is biased. Or being verbally attacked with vile comments.
It is true that redditors that believe these guys are guilty are not welcome on TTM. This has been tried before and it simply will not work. Two groups with different outlooks can not work together. Look at what happened here. Happened on SMAM too.
It is interesting that considering the basis of the series, what is actually happened (and is continuing to happen) in this sub. But this is Reddit. Your rights mean nothing here.
BTW- At one time, there were almost 66k subscribed. 10k have left. That speaks volumes.
[–]JJacks61
"Wait, the totally annoying mod with the maturity of a 12-year-old that basically killed the old MAM sub is/was a friend of cucumbers-in-brine? (Wow. If so, that explains so much.) Or did you mean someone else?"
No, not a friend of that MoD. At this point, the names are pretty much meaningless. Nothing can or will be done. Also to note, several of the original MoDs that were here hauled ass when all this went sideways. They damn well knew what was going on and did nothing to stop it.
The Rogue Mod left after being caught red-handed. Many of us learned a valuable Reddit lesson as well. Don't expect Admin to make things right in these subs. If they get involved, it's going to suck the life out of the room.
This trainwreck could have been stopped, but was allowed to derail. Many redditors just left after many of their posts were deleted without warning.
"Nothing has happened, people have seen that SA is guilty and moved on. They were taken in by a TV drama and seen it for what it is."
You weren't even around when this sub was set on fire. Shows what little you really know about what really happened.
I'm at a loss as to why you are saying SA is guilty. His trial was over coming up on 11 years ago and he was found guilty. Is he guilty again?
MANY people believe he and Brendan aren't guilty, and MANY more know that neither one received fair trials. Due process were just words without meaning.
Also, with your reply, it is hard to fathom why YOU are here? Except to troll. These guys are in jail, their Lawyers are trying to right this wrong.. but still, they are in prison. These constant meaningless replies reek of desperation.
MaM was a catalyst, that's all. The editing is meaningless, and it had NO impact on any legal proceeding. Except that Kratz tried to steal their footage. In reality, the filmmakers were very kind towards the State players.
The legal docs tell us part of the story. We don't have everything yet.
Still, I reply to various topics here when I feel so inclined. The OP had been gone, so I filled in a few of the blanks about what has happened in this sub. And these events DID HAPPEN. He could see the drastic change in everything after being away.
I will continue to reply here on various issues or questions from time to time. Rarely doesn't mean ever in my world. I think you didn't like my comments and are slyly trying to get me to leave. I believe that's clear.
I'll answer a few of your questions, but first a comment.
I'm not living in the past. The OP asked what happened in this sub. I answered, filling in a few of the details. It's really that simple. Still, I believe it's important for current Redditors to know and understand that their posts may "disappear" without warning. To be fair, AFAIK this hasn't happened in a while. But given the history here, there is always that chance.
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I'm glad you were a lurker here, you indicated nothing happened. I also lurked starting in 2008 before I registered. I've seen other subs go sideways. Seeing it firsthand and watching the time you've spent get deleted is frustrating. But this is Reddit, your rights mean nothing.
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There are thousands of pages in the DCI reports that we cannot get. Hopefully at some point soon, those will become available, but who knows.
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I cannot begin to relly know why the filmmakers included Kratz personal problems. But, understanding who he is, his character, his actions as Prosecutor in these cases should be included. After his marriage imploded in 2009 or 2010, even more outlandish behavior was uncovered. While I understand some people think this should be off limits, I and many others feel his character traits will tell us what he is willing to do as a person and as a Prosecutor.
In the years afterwards, Kratz has hitched his belt to Avery and Dassey for profit. I've had many discussions with people in this very sub that say, oh he's not like what you see and read about. But honestly, I haven't seen anything different than what I saw and read 10-12 years ago.
It's too bad really. He's clearly intelligent. But I believe he made some critical errors in these cases. I believe evidence has been buried or destroyed because to date, it hasn't been turned over. This is as serious as it gets. No matter how much it's debated, this evidence is missing, and it shouldn't be.
But I speculate, bottom line, they wanted his character and his actions to be included. They are integral to this saga, continuing to this day.
I have read that someone here has read the DCI reports, but I'm not convinced of that. Maybe I'm wrong. Skipp tried twice to get these records through FOIA requests. Denied, being not specific enough as I recall. Idk about you, but I believe if these reports further shown guilt, Kratz would have used them at trial. That's why I suspect they show something different.
My response to the OP wasn't totally meant to be a negative view of the sub, but I can understand it could be seen that way. Yes, I'm still pretty angry about how everything was handled, but with time it's not as bad. I believe this sub and the other related subs are difficult to MoD at times. I also know for a fact they cannot be modded the same way many other subs are. It really takes true fence sitters, that know the cases. Having your posts or comments deleted because a mod doesn't like them is maddening lol.
I believe the information about Kratz would have became viral no matter what. I don't know, they were probably not happy with him. Was it retaliatory on their part? It's possible, I just don't know. Andrea Canning (SP) did an in depth report on him when she worked for ABC in 2010 I believe, so it really was already out.
Still, given his actions that we know happened, shouldn't we understand his character as a Prosecutor? I guess it depends how one views his actions in the scandal - i.e. if he's willing to do this kind of thinking, what else would he do? I understand this is very subjective. Personally, I feel like he did things in these cases he wouldn't otherwise do.
I'll list a few critical things that we don't have, that we should. At least I don't understand why they are missing:
Timestamps removed from the dispatch logs.
Timestamps removed from the MTSO/CASO audio calls.
Edited flyover video footage from Nov 4th and 5th .
Missing Dassey PC Forensics CD.
I believe the system is only as good as the people running it. I don't know what he was doing during the trial time period, but I have a difficult time believing he went off the rails a couple years after these trials were over.
Anyway, thanks again for your thoughts and being very civil even though we don't agree about some things. I believe that's the underlying issue here in the sub now. We need more civility. Proof right here, that it's possible. I'm sure I'll be around :D
[–]heelspider
I posted a piece on the problems with forensic evidence in the US and even included a submission statement pointing out what it has to do with MaM specifically. The post was removed without explanation, even when I asked for it.
Meanwhile I had a guy from this sub decide his bullying wasn't working good enough and started following me to subs that had nothing to do with MaM and calling me an irrational lying idiot on everything I post everywhere and not just here. Mods told me they would do nothing about it at all.
I know modding is hard and often thankless...but I hope you can understand how it feels like posts that question the justice system get removed arbitrarily while Guilters are allowed to harass people without limits.
[–]BohemianSeekRhapsody
There is nothing wrong with a good passionate debate but no need for the smart-ass remarks, superior attitudes, and downright nastiness. Why so many hours are invested online doing this is bewildering when SA & BD are both in prison. Doesn't seem to be enough. Why is that? Let them continue to talk among themselves in their own toxic environment. I expect sub to die out completely soon. Reasonable people have no interest in engaging with jerks. And that's the truth!
The Gentleman's Guide To Forum Spies -- How to Spot a Spy (Cointelpro Agent)
By nomdeguerre
July 29, 2012
How to Spot a Spy (Cointelpro Agent)
