Million Dollar Crowdturfing Industry Dupes Social Networks 170
New submitter bowlinearl writes "Three weeks ago Slashdot featured a story on the Chinese Water Army. A new study from researchers at UCSB delves even deeper into the problem of crowdturfing (full disclosure: I am one of the authors of the study). The study reveals that evil crowdsourcing services in China are a multi-million dollar industry, and that the number of jobs and the amount of money are growing exponentially. Hundreds of thousands of workers are involved, including a small contingent of career crowdturfers who each manage hundreds of accounts on social networks. The researchers observed the behavior of workers and the unwitting users who click on the generated spam by infiltrating the two largest crowdsourcing sites in China. However, crowdturfing isn't confined to China: the researchers discovered crowdsourcing sites in the U.S. that are 95% astroturf, as opposed to Amazon's Mechanical Turk, which actively polices itself, and is only 12% astroturf."
Re:Evil crowdturfing services? (Score:4, Informative)
Both sides would be noise, not signal, which turns comments sections into total trash. Yahoo is an obvious example where you have red/blue or racists/anti-racist white nights drowning out any intelligent posts. People trying to "balance" render the section useless and those posting factual information people already know are just as useless as they do nothing to progress anyone's thinking.
Re:Evil crowdturfing services? (Score:5, Informative)
Class man. Vote parent up. One of the first on topic Microsoft astroturfers.
And to answer your serious point; It's absolutely fine for someone to post on here on behalf of Microsoft. There certainly used to be quite a few people who would put "I work for Microsoft" in their posts when giving serious answers. The key thing is that if you are benefiting financially from posting you should declare that and just speak directly on behalf of Microsoft. Because the astroturfers don't do that they are deceptive and illegal in quite a number of jurisdictions where Microsoft markets to Slashdot readers.
The fact that Microsoft is willing to use deceptive, illegal practices quite rightly discredits other people who attempt to support Microsoft in forums. Even if someone isn't benefiting directly, it's quite likely they got their viewpoint from someone who did. This is a general poison to the public debate which makes serious discussion more difficult. There is no possible justification for it.
There is already a tendency on Slashdot that any minor technical error in a criticism of Microsoft gets picked on. If the astroturfers left this alone, this would provide more than sufficieint balance. As it is, I think that the underlying motivation is mostly to misdirect discussion making the astroturfers equivalent to forum trolls.
It's not like tv ads (Score:5, Informative)
Also ads elsewhere are not posted without consent, the spam comment that show up on my blog are not ads placed with my consent (Note I have spam filter and personally reviews everything it doesn't kill).
It's equivalent to a people just putting ad-posters on your wall without your consent.
Furthermore it is the biggest threat to the free internet today, to some extent outright destroying the internet as we know it.
Evil is a strong word, but it's capitalization with total disregard for other peoples property and misleading to the degree that it's outright criminal.
A related fallout (Score:5, Informative)
I don't know whether it falls in this category, but the ability to buy crowds for cheap is having interesting results.
A real case I observed recently.
A leading motorcycle manufacturer did a contest in Asia (over 6-7 countries). On their webpage, write some thing about yourself(related to touring). Depending upon the number of "votes" winner will be declared, and then the winner gets a 20,000$ bike or something like that.
The lead guy led till the second or third last day. I followed his posts on FB asking people for votes and all.
And then bam, on the last two days, an unknown came up with largest number of votes.
Most of his friends accused the organizer of rigging votes. After all, how could somebody with almost nil votes come on top.
What they do not realize, for 1000$ you can actually buy tonnes of votes from these crowdturfing sites.
For 1 cent, you can get one guy to vote, so 100,000 votes is quite a bit.
For a random guy, not clued to this, getting 5000-10000 votes can be an achievement, and beating 100,000 votes are next to impossible.
I have seen this happening in many online voting contests where prize money is huge.
Re:Mandatory Notice (Score:5, Informative)
I've been keeping track of the shills I run across in a journal entry:
http://slashdot.org/~GameboyRMH/journal/273120 [slashdot.org]