Propaganda
Spam
- 40% of New Mechanical Turkers' Work Requests Are Now For Spamming - What a Lost Opportunity!
- Amazon's Mechanical Turk Used for Fraudulent Activities
The Internet Water Army
The Internet Water Army is a group of individuals who act as paid mercenaries to inundate the Internet with comments, gossip, or other content to build up or demolish credibility of articles, information, Websites and more. These people demolish the consumer ranking of products and services, create false images, provide a sense of false perception to destroy the truth. Some blame China as the pioneer of the Internet Water Army. China may be using the same but the list of abusers is vast. It is very common in the free world. The corporations are employing them, the unions are employing them, and even the political parties employ them. The Internet Water Army are typically tasked with registering on a Web site and then producing content in the form of posts, articles, links to sites and videos, etc. University of Victoria computer science researchers Cheng Chen, Kui Wu and Venkatesh Srinivasan went undercover as posters to expose the group's modus operandi. According to their analysis, paid posters post far more new comments than replies to other comments. They tend to post more often, and they move on from a discussion without completing a topic like a a legitimate users. These artificial perception creators take shortcuts, frequently cutting and pasting comments from a template they use. The researchers developed intelligent system to look for these patterns in the web sites to identify paid posters with more than 85% accuracy.
- Undercover Researchers Expose Chinese Internet Water Army - An undercover team of computer scientists reveals the practices of people who are paid to post on websites