I have encountered a great many issue trolls recently.I believe that many of them may be under the direction of various campaigns. They use circular arguments and cut and pasted talking points and links to "conspiracy" websites or smear articles...
Politics is adversarial.The Internet is sort of anonymous and anarchistic. Therefore it is not news that forums and comment sections get subverted from time to time by cut and paste spam from various political interests. I think DailyKos is fairly civil in this regard but that may be because there is quite a lot of homogeneous agreement on this site. (I won't argue if you think that I'm wrong about DailyKos but it has been my experience that there is generally a more civil discourse here most of the time.)....I have noticed when looking at postings on Politico and other contentious sites that tag-team political operatives are hijacking discussions with back and forth cut and pasted subject changing comments to not actually think and discuss issues and bat around ideas but to present poisoned ideas about one topic or another.
Mostly the attempts seem fairly amateurish and a little bit desperate but I think there is something ominous about an electorate that seems to be swayed pretty easily by things like this. I am definitely not advocating muzzling free speech but I am against robot smear campaigns to either introduce dirt or to try to reinforce political talking points.
Have other people noticed these things happening. Please use this forum to cut and paste the most disgusting or sneaky examples of this and I wonder if anyone else agrees with me.
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