various beliefs in their missions-- all with lots of money to spend and extreme secrecy.

After all the other things we've seen, why would we not expect at least some of them to be doing this?

with a top priority of bilking taxpayers.

I spend much time on their forums mocking their silly beliefs.

oh, wait.
I dont.

I love Canada and Canadian DUers; the phonies, not. I live and work in metro Detroit. I actually have friends and families who actually head north every day and cross over and under the border most every day.

The stuff about protecting the interests of the national security state in general and the Bush crime family in particular through whatever smear is handy must be volunteer icing on the wings of character assassination. None of them do it.

is an inflamed and pustulent boil on the buttocks of DU whose next intelligent comment will be his first.

redstates....to the right people....republicans???

I'm sure they have a ready supply of budding libertarians living in their moms basements reading Ayn Rand that would love to spend all day on the computer troll posting.

An enterprising contractor with mad powerpoint skilz could make a ton of $$ with a shell company and 50-100 "grunts" working for him.

That's simply because Wikipedia articles are placed at or near the top of most search engine results.

And because "anyone can edit" it, it's naturally been taken over by paid shills and trolls. They aren't there to "improve Wikipedia", as Jimmy Wales always exhorts editors to do; but to push petty biases - usually of a corporatist nature (that is, they want everything on Wikipedia dealing with the social sciences -geography, economics, etc.- to sound like a cross between The Economist and The Weekly Standard). I'm sure more than a few DUers reading this have experienced this first-hand.

My guess is that when Jimmy Wales passes on (and possibly sooner), Wikipedia will fold under the weight of all these scandals - which are just the tip of the iceberg.

Just curious.

Where does one apply?

[hr][font color="blue"][center]A ton of bricks, a ton of feathers, it's still gonna hurt.[/center][/font][hr]

Government and corporate trolls <-------- You believe they're here, and you're a bloody nutcase. A nutcase I tells ya.

Criticize the obvious failings of the ACA, or TPP and TTIP and they come out of the woodwork. There are a number of Wall $treet defenders, too. Often the same people.

really?

zerohedge is not a great source, but even granted that Governments including the US and UK,have cyber-warfare operators; I have a hard time believing there are thousands of paid trolls monkeying about the intertubes in any effective way.

I think a more correct statement would be, "Have you ever come across someone on the Internet that you suspected was a paid government troll? Well, there is a tiny chance that you were not imagining things.

Sometimes it's just trolls.

Not government trolls of course.

The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust has a small army of trolls whose mission is to destroy the Shakespeare Authorship Question.

I can't blame them; they stand to lose a lot of income if the world decides that the town of Stratford was the birthplace of a literary front-man, and not that of the greatest writer in history.

And before you trash me over this issue, please note that one of our candidates for the Democratic Nomination has expressed her doubts about the accepted identity of the writer of the Works.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/compost/wp/2014/06/16/hillary-clinton-is-a-shakespeare-truther/

seems to coordinated, to wordy than usual gop bullshit.

if there are lefties paying please let me know so i can apply

For example, there has been a war in Syria for four years but only in the last 2 months did major media focus so extensively on the refugees. The timing points to an effort to get Europeans and Americans behind a military push to "end the war."

Another: the Ebola outbreak that magically went away and was never heard about again right after the GOP took majorities in the House and Senate in 2014.

Going to social media was probably seen as a necessity by those whose job it is to influence public opinion because increasingly people do not look at MSM like cable news.

A big part of modern propaganda seems to be less about moving people to do something than it is about pacification, getting people to accept bad outcomes and government actions that at best have no benefit for them and at worst are outright rip-offs.

that so many current practices used to be illegal says a lot about modern day USA.
not to mention those who brook this betrayal of the public interest.

Their most successful actions seem to have been to cast doubt on patently obvious things or to likewise make a credible source look untrustworthy.

Making up reality and controlling the dialogue has been a top priority for the 1% and the Gov't for decades, possibly since the beginning. Plenty of people have been jailed or killed over it, so to think they would not do it in every corner of where we get our information would be silly.

are sterling examples of this crap.

The REAL story on them is summarized here: http://economixcomix.com/home/tpp/

while blogging. You can never be too careful.

Yeah, I remember the Snowden NSA wars here.

as I am there alot. I have never seen anything like, what they are talking on my twitter feed. What would it look like, be like?

Of course they do and they do it very poorly. I think some of them are just algorithms. Even the real live trolls suck at their job.

TO me, the worst of the worst is not on the WWW...but on the cable news channels. Trolling in real life on Foxnews and CNN.

Pundits are just well paid trolls.

a significant number of them right here on DU.

And others that were here in years past and gone now, or wearing different names.

They bomb threads where real work is getting done, or start flame threads to try and get people in trouble. It wold be laughable if it wasn't so effective.

This sound like more fear generation and look at the website, right wing libertarian hogwash zerohedge.