Internet Water Army On the March 137
Posted
by
Soulskill
from the or-on-the-wade dept.
from the or-on-the-wade dept.
New submitter kermidge sends in an article at the Physics arXiv blog about what's called the "Internet Water Army," large groups of people in China who are paid to "flood" internet sites with comments and reviews about various products. Researchers at the University of Victoria went undercover to figure out exactly how these informational (or disinformational) floods operate, and what they learned (PDF) could lead to better spam-detection software. Quoting:
"They discovered that paid posters tend to post more new comments than replies to other comments. They also post more often with 50 per cent of them posting every 2.5 minutes on average. They also move on from a discussion more quickly than legitimate users, discarding their IDs and never using them again. What's more, the content they post is measurably different. These workers are paid by the volume and so often take shortcuts, cutting and pasting the same content many times. This would normally invalidate their posts but only if it is spotted by the quality control team. So Cheng and co built some software to look for repetitions and similarities in messages as well as the other behaviors they'd identified. They then tested it on the dataset they'd downloaded from Sina and Sohu and found it to be remarkably good, with an accuracy of 88 per cent in spotting paid posters."
Re:Wu mao dang (50 cent gang) (Score:1, Interesting)
This "army" has been a staple of the CCP for years. They're usually pretty easy to spot on Chinese language sites and (increasingly) on English language sites. The name comes from the reputed 5 mao (or 1/2 of a Chinese yuan) they're paid for each message. That's about 7 US cents. For the Chinese psyche, it's much more satisfying to see a large number of shill posts that "agree" with the party line than to "waste" effort on even a thin veneer of truth.
Isnt' it a tad racist to classify an entire large group of people as having a certain, characteristic, ascribed "psyche" or tendency on the basis of nothing more than having the same genetic race in common?
I don't think you hate them or anything but I don't think you've really thought about why you believe this.
Re:Feedback loop... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Slashdot Good (Score:5, Interesting)
Have you ever used it. Dont brag, I am an iPhone lover, but WP7 is good. Used all three platform now . No doubt WP7 is better. I am not a fanboy of anyone though. Try reading the reviews you will understand why eveyone is behind WP7. I think Microsoft has learned a lesson and turned around.
- A verbatim reply to one of my recent posts somewhere else. Hmm... 7 cents for that? They overpaid.
Re:Feedback loop... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Feedback loop... (Score:4, Interesting)
Ultimately this is why the 'social web' is becoming so important. If I know the people who are telling me something is good then I know they aren't paid for posters. Obviously one side affect of this is that companies are realising that 'influencers' (users who drive adoption amongst their social group) are more valuable and trying to buy their love.