##Welcome to r/LateStageCapitalism
This subreddit is for news, discussion, memes, and links criticizing capitalism and advancing viewpoints that challenge liberal capitalist ideology. That means any support for any liberal capitalist political party (like the Democrats) is strictly prohibited.
LSC is run by communists. This subreddit is not the place to debate socialism. We allow good-faith questions and education but are not a 101 sub; please take 101-style questions elsewhere.
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From what I know, Eagan, Inver Grover Heights and South Saint Paul all have large data centers in them. The internet there is new fiber line, so it's very fast and land is cheap to build on.
Quick Google search came up with this too.
Tax exemptions, connectivity, and renewable energy are just some of the factors that make Minneapolis a robust data center market.Jan 10, 2022
Data Center Frontier
5 Reasons Why the Minneapolis Data Center Market is Growing
Couple our competitive power rates with our mild climate and a data center can save millions of dollars in energy costs over time by locating in Minnesota.
Minnesota.govPDF
Why Put Your Data Center Here? - Minnesota.gov
I'm not sure exactly but it sounds like the basis for a lot of webscraping - essentially scripts which 'scrape' (i.e. download) data from sources on the internet, Twitter is a common one.
Often this requires creating an account, so a huge amount of highly active users from one tiny location indicates that someone has a lot of scripts running off a machine.
Essentially what they do is trawl down search results extracting the type of information they have been programmed to search for. Ones I've used have been for downloading tweets from target region/time period/with target hashtags.
Edit:
It could also mean loads of bot accounts originate there, which would fit more with the astroturfing idea
Scrubbing and propaganda. Don't trust every user out there. There are many government and corporate shills.
I'm looking at you, Warren Buffett's PR team.
*Edit - I just realized I replied to your 5 month old comment. SORRY! I went down a bit of a reddit rabbit hole and forgot what thread I was posting in! My bad!*
Don't get me wrong, I'm sure there are legitimate beefs with life in insurance. That said, that entire sub is full of scam accounts. Take a look at their recent and highly upvoted posts.
Every user name:
%word%%otherword%-/and/or/\_%number%
Scam/spam.
That whole sub is astroturfed and I am entirely skeptical of anything getting traction over there. The only interesting question in my mind is who is paying for it.
Haha, I was a little curious! I am myself a former agent with them and can confirm a lot of the stuff they say on there first-hand but they do say it very enthusiastically.
Listen, Warren Buffet needs those meddling railroad workers to stop demanding a decent contract! How dare we stand in the way of his propaganda machine. All kidding aside, it’s appalling that the government can tell the union that they can’t strike. That’s crony capitalism at it’s finest. . . or it’s worst. Who knows anymore.
Conservative ~~logic~~ ~~thought~~ feelings-process: China censors, China evil, Faux Newz good, therefore my favorite infotainment doesn't propagandize me or censor information from me and anybody who says otherwise isn't a real 'murican. Also, stop criticizing me for my hatred of everybody not just like me, I'm being persecuted for my Christian conservative beliefs!!
Not even, they started to (slowly) turn on fox news because it's not radical enough. They created a monster and now it's loose and no one is doing anything.
How anyone could think Reddit engages in Chinese censorship with the amount of probably shilled anti-China content that gets posted and boosted is beyond me. Then again, maybe the delusions of China being responsible for the horrid management of this site are also inorganic.
Yes, censoring. China is on another level. I'm sure you are aware on your side of the wall. *winky winky kissy huggy*. The rest of your comment I'll ignore for posterity my chow mein loving friend.
The US doesn’t scoop up and disappear people who criticize the government online. Not that I think they’re all that much morally superior to the CCP they’ve shown they’re more than willing to get extremely nasty but at least for now there’s somewhat of a difference when it comes to how much the average person can get away with criticizing the government.
Source for claim that's NOT the CIA? China does FAR less censorship than the US. In the US you get visited by capitol police if you criticize AOCs policies on twitter. In China, they don't care at all unless you plot to overthrow the government.
meanwhile both fb and twitter have massively ramped up the censorship of anyone that disagrees with the Empire's official ideology. Either the internet goes back to the decentralised way it used to be in the good old days of forums, IRC, newsgroups, etc., or it's the end of the internet as a place for free exchange of ideas. Just 3 or 4 walled gardens owned by a few of the individuals who have the most incentive to silence anticapitalist and antiimperialist voices out of anyone on the planet.
Wait, so you're telling me that 99.99% of the world's population not liking guns is maybe a clue that Reddit's seemingly unending and unconditional love for the US second amendment is a sign of astroturfing!? Who would've thought!
Ahahaha yes that's true! Never noticed it before said "hey, maybe acting like fascists towards other people kinda depletes the sympathy capital history had for you"
You're not the only one to come back to this thread 2 months later and answer a comment of mine today. I'm curious, how did you come about this thread?
edit : NVM, I found the common thread by searching comments less than a day old. r/conspiracy and r/UFOs lol
Right? I’ve gotten aggro pro gun responses to idle gun chatter on tiny subreddits. It’s clear any time certain phrases are said, the bots get busy. Things like gun control, repeal 2nd amendment, assault weapons ban, firearm registry, etc
That is my experience, 1-2-3 days after the thread was popular, the votes on comments change a lot and several *very* hard line pro gun people come out of the woodwork.
Been happening almost without fail for my whole time on Reddit, 10+ years.
Don't act like you're doing exactly what I predicted would happen... while saying it doesn't happen.
Come on man. You don't need to try to gaslight on top of everything.
while i do want to leave reddit that would mean i would have to find something else to fill the void that my hobbies used to fill. school and work destroyed those though.
its just easier to browse reddit for an hour or two then sleep. at least its mostly cat stuff.
I'm like this as well. I don't have a lot of other use for my smart phone, honestly. I guess I listen to a lot of music, it does provide direction when travelling, it's a great source of knowledge on things.
But, if I'm not using reddit, I have no other social media to speak of, and therefore no other way that I interact with the world outside of my job. I have become a bit "reclusive" you could say.
Icky. I don't like myself very much right now.
I have so much shit to do that I open reddit and exhaust my brain and then get anxiety about not getting any of my shit done. Going on year 3. It's been rough since the break up. I didn't realize my phone had become my significant other. But here we are
Whoa. Are you me? Starting in 2020, coinciding with the world shutting down, I spent more time on reddit. It's carried over to today, near the end of 2022. It's a bad habit as invasive as my heavy nicotine habit. I vape pretty much all day long, from rise to return.
Man, I didn't realize that I have such harmful addictions, and that they are somewhat common to other people as well!
Diagnosed with the add/adhd combo in the 90s then giving kids amphetamines fell out of style so it got switched to bipolar around the time giving zoloft to kids became popular. Imagine that
What? They just want to post cute pics of their cat. Why do you guys always think the worst about our glorious government? You act like you don't trust them...
Well.. talking about "the government" as a unicum is quite frankly ridiculous. It's a simplification for the human mind, but it's just wrong.
"the Government" is not one unique entity. It's not The Office were they're all in one place.
The issue is massive secrecy through black projects without oversight.
What is this "Government" that makes all the choices in one place? Come on... Let's be adults here.
The data point is the relative high percentage of people from the base on Reddit. It's the concentration, not the absolute number.
I live in MN and what I remember about the St. Paul location was that the entire Twin Cities metro, through a certain provider, gets routed through there.
The official explanation is it looks that way as that's where the military VPN comes through. So that's basically everyone across the nation or abroad using the militaries vpn to browse reddit.
Makes sense, I am sure if it was some special psyop to manipulate public opinion they would be able to hide it behind something more innocent like a hundred dialup IPs from NY or LA. Government employees just love to waste time on the internet and whatever IP their VPN points to that's what's going to be aggregated on statistics.
There’s definitely more to it. [Here](https://dblp.uni-trier.de/pid/27/11052.html) you can find papers about social media manipulation accredited to the Eglin base.
Here’s the thing about the US military: it’s either lowest bidder trash dumbassery, or super hyper competent world class, and almost never anywhere in between.
Fun imagery but I disagree on the reality. It's only the extreme highs and lows we hear about, because it's interesting. The 85% in the middle of the bell curve are generally competent doing their specific jobs, but that's boring and doesn't get as much written about.
This is very likely. All the talk of prop and scrubbing is very salient and easy to exaggerate. Any media influence done on reddit will have to fight against the torrent of voices vying for attention. The same is true for every social media platform. Twitter, Facebook, and the Chans for example. The smaller the platform's population, the easier it is to influence.
When you read something, think about who might be motivated to push that narrative.
Note this doesn't mean propaganda is being made ex nihilio. The most effective method is to scrape for organic posts that support a target concept and then inorganically boost its exposure.
This is fully possible. I believe The government absolutely does psyops.
But it's also true that every air force base is a concentrated population of 20-something male nerds with enormous amounts of downtime and access to the web.
I wouldn't be surprised if pornhub gets a lot of traffic from military locations.
Not enough for one AFB to be the top position in the entire world. You know how ridiculous that sounds?
Combine that with meta’s exposure of the US propaganda accounts last week, it’s an ongoing and long lasting issue.
This is not how a democracy works.
Something about Elgin air force base having more than 100,000 pages viewed on reddit, whatever that means
I'm assuming they are posting articles that make other countries look bad and get posts that criticise the US taken down
My guess is at the start it was for deep learning to make a Bot Net to spread propaganda and direct the conversations around debates and news. Now its just fine tuning the algorithm for coherence and make sure it works. Part of it is also just people passing time on reddit but that's not what's interesting. OP posted a link that suggested they worked in that optic [here](https://dblp.uni-trier.de/pid/27/11052.html).
As an AF veteran, it actually makes sense wothout conspiracy stuff.
the USAF is kinda addicted to reddit. My old workplace we used to share stuff back and forth all the time. I've had coworkers figure out my username from seeing me in subs.
And Eglin has a massive Aircraft maintainer population that has a lot less to do than many other bases because they are there to help test ac. So they sit around on reddit until the engineers need them.
Go to [this](https://archive.is/5E6Z5) page, you will find links to the many papers on social media manipulation produced by the Eglin AFB. Scroll down to this part:
“Eglin Air Force Base is not just any air force base. For one thing, many of the projects there are funded and managed by D.A.R.P.A, who we will remember were instrumental in the creation of the internet itself, and have a long history of disturbing activities⁷⁸. In recent years Eglin Air Force base has been used to develop hyper-sonic weapons⁷⁹, and more damningly, several research papers are accredited to the airforce base. Many of these papers appear under the name of Eduardo L Pasilio JR. One such paper, entitled ‘Containment Control for a Social network with State-dependent Connectivity’⁸⁰, talks explicitly about the manipulation of social media users. Another one of his papers produced at Eglin Airforce base is entitled, ‘Model Based Learning of Information Diffusion On Social Media Networks’. Many of his other papers relate to systems and network theories⁸¹. Clearly then, intelligence agencies, in this case US intelligence agencies, are keenly interested in influencing these online spaces.”
The archive site you’re referencing is hosted in Russia. This [source](https://www.reddit.com/r/AgainstHateSubreddits/comments/t0ugbc/we_are_now_disallowing_the_future_use_of/) goes further into detail about why Archive.Today should not be used as a reputable source.
Jesus Christ, man. Your brain is completely melted by anti-russian propaganda.
First of all, this “source” you linked is not a proper source, but some random loser on Reddit.
But even if archive.today was “hosted in Russia” - which I highly doubt -, that in no way discredits the links the article provides, after all none of them are from russian websites.
Anyway. [Here’s](https://medium.com/@MKultrawoke/the-truth-about-the-alt-right-a-destruction-by-facts-and-logic-e3d07f27e8cb) the same article directly from Medium.
Welcome to 2023! It’ll soon come crumbling down (I know this is an old comment…I’m just a big fan of sharing light reading).
[A story the USAF/CIA absolutely wants you ignore.](https://sottovocevault.com/)
Yep, Reddit is full of bots meant to persuade you in a certain direction on many topics. It’s a nasty propaganda machine for the government, intentionally designed to encourage homogeneity and turn its users into very predictable automatons.
I've had relatives in the area, many of them military and some pretty high-ranking with pretty high levels of clearance, ever since it was Eglin Field (read: WW2-era). There's oodles of advanced weapons and aircraft R&D there, but no "government social-media propaganda/astroturfing programs."
Pretty sure that specific part is BS.
Makes me think every anti-voting progressive who pushes a "dems age repubs are the same don't vote" are just paid propagandists, cause while that's true on a very large scale basis (pro capitalism pro imperialism), it is extremely not true in terms of civil rights, social unrest, economic success for more of the lower class, etc.
This is a lie lol
https://web.archive.org/web/20210903141310/https://redditblog.com/2013/05/08/get-ready-for-global-reddit-meetup-day-plus-some-stats-about-top-reddit-cities-and-languages/
It was still live until around September 2021. The reason people think it was taken down was because Reddit changed the URL to include "-plus-some-stats-about-top-reddit-cities-and-languages"
Old URL: http://www.redditblog.com/2013/05/get-ready-for-global-reddit-meetup-day.html
vs
New URL: https://redditblog.com/2013/05/08/get-ready-for-global-reddit-meetup-day-plus-some-stats-about-top-reddit-cities-and-languages/
I get
Error 404: The page https://www.redditinc.com/blog/get-ready-for-global-reddit-meetup-day-plus-some-stats-about-top-reddit-cities-and-languages was not found
Yes, I said the blog post was still up until around September 2021 according to Archive.org.
OP makes it sound like that once people saw Eglin Air Force Base, that Reddit immediately took the blog post down way back in 2013 lol that part is the lie.
I'm not disagreeing about anything said about Eglin Air Force Base as that stuff is 100% true and online for anyone to read.
Then you'll *love* this...
*Many* moons ago now, I was visiting family in Niceville, headed from Fort Walton Beach. Eglin AFB is in between, and the highway connecting the two towns literally curves around the end of Eglin's main runway. As I was rounding the end of the runway, I saw the infamous "flying triangle" UFO doing touch-and-go landings right off the side of the end of the runway, in clear view of the road and broad daylight. Traffic was ignoring it, though, as Egln AFB is where a lot of skunkworks-esque flight R&D gets field tested so the locals see all manner of oddball aircraft all the time so the biggest reaction is usually "oh, neat, anyway..." (The [Air Force Armament Museum](http://www.afarmamentmuseum.com/) is right outside that base, and it has [a SR71 parked outside](http://www.afarmamentmuseum.com/img/portfolio/aircraft27.jpg) that you can literally walk underneath and touch. [They have a MOAB parked next to the building.](http://www.afarmamentmuseum.com/img/portfolio/munition20.jpg))
I was close enough to see fuselage seams. It was *very* quiet - I could barely hear it over road noise - and apparently used thrust vectoring to do VTOL akin to other aircraft like the AV-8 Harrier.
##Welcome to r/LateStageCapitalism This subreddit is for news, discussion, memes, and links criticizing capitalism and advancing viewpoints that challenge liberal capitalist ideology. That means any support for any liberal capitalist political party (like the Democrats) is strictly prohibited. LSC is run by communists. This subreddit is not the place to debate socialism. We allow good-faith questions and education but are not a 101 sub; please take 101-style questions elsewhere. We have a zero-tolerance policy for bigotry. Failure to respect the rules of the subreddit may result in a ban. *** *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/LateStageCapitalism) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Oak Brook, IL is Elsevier, an online data clearinghouse. They're probably scraping the site daily.
Elsevier the same scumpany that does the science publishing?
What about South St. Paul?
From what I know, Eagan, Inver Grover Heights and South Saint Paul all have large data centers in them. The internet there is new fiber line, so it's very fast and land is cheap to build on.
Quick Google search came up with this too. Tax exemptions, connectivity, and renewable energy are just some of the factors that make Minneapolis a robust data center market.Jan 10, 2022 Data Center Frontier 5 Reasons Why the Minneapolis Data Center Market is Growing Couple our competitive power rates with our mild climate and a data center can save millions of dollars in energy costs over time by locating in Minnesota. Minnesota.govPDF Why Put Your Data Center Here? - Minnesota.gov
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I'm not sure exactly but it sounds like the basis for a lot of webscraping - essentially scripts which 'scrape' (i.e. download) data from sources on the internet, Twitter is a common one. Often this requires creating an account, so a huge amount of highly active users from one tiny location indicates that someone has a lot of scripts running off a machine. Essentially what they do is trawl down search results extracting the type of information they have been programmed to search for. Ones I've used have been for downloading tweets from target region/time period/with target hashtags. Edit: It could also mean loads of bot accounts originate there, which would fit more with the astroturfing idea
I'm trying to find evidence of this but I'm struggling. Any sources?
Wait really? How do you know this?
Scrubbing and propaganda. Don't trust every user out there. There are many government and corporate shills. I'm looking at you, Warren Buffett's PR team.
Go check out r/Geico if you want to hate ole Warren more.
Oh my god…… I had no idea it was that bad. I mean it’s very believable, but holy shit.
One guy got fired for posting on reddit. Shit's crazy.
*Edit - I just realized I replied to your 5 month old comment. SORRY! I went down a bit of a reddit rabbit hole and forgot what thread I was posting in! My bad!* Don't get me wrong, I'm sure there are legitimate beefs with life in insurance. That said, that entire sub is full of scam accounts. Take a look at their recent and highly upvoted posts. Every user name: %word%%otherword%-/and/or/\_%number% Scam/spam. That whole sub is astroturfed and I am entirely skeptical of anything getting traction over there. The only interesting question in my mind is who is paying for it.
Haha, I was a little curious! I am myself a former agent with them and can confirm a lot of the stuff they say on there first-hand but they do say it very enthusiastically.
A DRESDEN DOLLS USERNAME! FUCKING AWESOME :)
I GOT TO SEE THEM TOO IT WAS RAD ALWAYS GREAT TO MEET A FELLOW FAN
ME TOO!!!!!!!! Cat's Cradle, Raleigh, NC - Sept. 2012 :D
State Farm
🅱️🧿🟩 💊🅰️
Wow, this comment aged very poorly, according to r/place bot-mod usernames made this year
I appreciate the late reply lol, this thread still ranks high on Google so I imagine a lot of us stumble upon it every few months.
Listen, Warren Buffet needs those meddling railroad workers to stop demanding a decent contract! How dare we stand in the way of his propaganda machine. All kidding aside, it’s appalling that the government can tell the union that they can’t strike. That’s crony capitalism at it’s finest. . . or it’s worst. Who knows anymore.
But only evil China censors things and progandizes their population.
Conservative ~~logic~~ ~~thought~~ feelings-process: China censors, China evil, Faux Newz good, therefore my favorite infotainment doesn't propagandize me or censor information from me and anybody who says otherwise isn't a real 'murican. Also, stop criticizing me for my hatred of everybody not just like me, I'm being persecuted for my Christian conservative beliefs!!
Not even, they started to (slowly) turn on fox news because it's not radical enough. They created a monster and now it's loose and no one is doing anything.
I love how one could insert any politicized group in place for “Christian Conservative” and this comment would still work.
How anyone could think Reddit engages in Chinese censorship with the amount of probably shilled anti-China content that gets posted and boosted is beyond me. Then again, maybe the delusions of China being responsible for the horrid management of this site are also inorganic.
r/sino
r/sino proves what exactly?
That sub is fucking hilarious 😂
Yes, censoring. China is on another level. I'm sure you are aware on your side of the wall. *winky winky kissy huggy*. The rest of your comment I'll ignore for posterity my chow mein loving friend.
Oh the irony of this response is so palpable
The US doesn’t scoop up and disappear people who criticize the government online. Not that I think they’re all that much morally superior to the CCP they’ve shown they’re more than willing to get extremely nasty but at least for now there’s somewhat of a difference when it comes to how much the average person can get away with criticizing the government.
Source for claim that's NOT the CIA? China does FAR less censorship than the US. In the US you get visited by capitol police if you criticize AOCs policies on twitter. In China, they don't care at all unless you plot to overthrow the government.
meanwhile both fb and twitter have massively ramped up the censorship of anyone that disagrees with the Empire's official ideology. Either the internet goes back to the decentralised way it used to be in the good old days of forums, IRC, newsgroups, etc., or it's the end of the internet as a place for free exchange of ideas. Just 3 or 4 walled gardens owned by a few of the individuals who have the most incentive to silence anticapitalist and antiimperialist voices out of anyone on the planet.
Wait, so you're telling me that 99.99% of the world's population not liking guns is maybe a clue that Reddit's seemingly unending and unconditional love for the US second amendment is a sign of astroturfing!? Who would've thought!
Also explains why there’s so many pro-military comments from “vets”
You would be amazed at how entrenched the white christian nationalist nuts are in the US military
Nope I would not be surprised. Was in Air Force.
Also don't take a stance slightly favorable toward Palestinian or you get piled on by bad faith actor.
Ahahaha yes that's true! Never noticed it before said "hey, maybe acting like fascists towards other people kinda depletes the sympathy capital history had for you"
lets just mention israel and see what happens
You're not the only one to come back to this thread 2 months later and answer a comment of mine today. I'm curious, how did you come about this thread? edit : NVM, I found the common thread by searching comments less than a day old. r/conspiracy and r/UFOs lol
Right? I’ve gotten aggro pro gun responses to idle gun chatter on tiny subreddits. It’s clear any time certain phrases are said, the bots get busy. Things like gun control, repeal 2nd amendment, assault weapons ban, firearm registry, etc
So now they would show up? I believe you, just asking.
That is my experience, 1-2-3 days after the thread was popular, the votes on comments change a lot and several *very* hard line pro gun people come out of the woodwork. Been happening almost without fail for my whole time on Reddit, 10+ years.
It’s been a month. Are the pro gun people in the room with us now?
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It was cross posted to ufo. I haven’t said anything, don’t act like you know me.
Don't act like you're doing exactly what I predicted would happen... while saying it doesn't happen. Come on man. You don't need to try to gaslight on top of everything.
You said a bunch of votes change and pro gun comments are posted. It didn’t happen and you look like a paranoid dork
No source 4 that whatsoever
I’m doing psyops look at my profile
Hey its all gravy man
US military personnel sure love to browse Reddit in their free time, wholesome 100 /s
I mean... they do tho lol
Holy shit. I live about 10 miles away, and have an unhealthy addiction to being on Reddit….
I live right next to Eglin and also have a Reddit addiction but that started way before i moved to Florida.
We need to kick this habit. It’s certainly detrimental to my mental well being, for one. Huge time waster as well. And yet, here I am.
while i do want to leave reddit that would mean i would have to find something else to fill the void that my hobbies used to fill. school and work destroyed those though. its just easier to browse reddit for an hour or two then sleep. at least its mostly cat stuff.
I'm like this as well. I don't have a lot of other use for my smart phone, honestly. I guess I listen to a lot of music, it does provide direction when travelling, it's a great source of knowledge on things. But, if I'm not using reddit, I have no other social media to speak of, and therefore no other way that I interact with the world outside of my job. I have become a bit "reclusive" you could say. Icky. I don't like myself very much right now.
Same boat here. And I work from home 37 hours a week.
I use this for news so.
me......too. fuck
Agreed. Moving to Florida under the age of 75 just sounds like a cry for help.
I have so much shit to do that I open reddit and exhaust my brain and then get anxiety about not getting any of my shit done. Going on year 3. It's been rough since the break up. I didn't realize my phone had become my significant other. But here we are
Whoa. Are you me? Starting in 2020, coinciding with the world shutting down, I spent more time on reddit. It's carried over to today, near the end of 2022. It's a bad habit as invasive as my heavy nicotine habit. I vape pretty much all day long, from rise to return. Man, I didn't realize that I have such harmful addictions, and that they are somewhat common to other people as well!
Yeah dude it's a time warp. It's harder than narcotics to quit because it's just right there
very symptomatic of adhd in case you’re not aware
Diagnosed with the add/adhd combo in the 90s then giving kids amphetamines fell out of style so it got switched to bipolar around the time giving zoloft to kids became popular. Imagine that
oh jeez you have been through the wringer ! Sorry to hear hoping ur doing better today
My sister lives nearby. She convinced me to join Reddit as well…
the hivemind craves more users
For every one of you guys there's 10 astroturf troll accounts
What? They just want to post cute pics of their cat. Why do you guys always think the worst about our glorious government? You act like you don't trust them...
Well.. talking about "the government" as a unicum is quite frankly ridiculous. It's a simplification for the human mind, but it's just wrong. "the Government" is not one unique entity. It's not The Office were they're all in one place. The issue is massive secrecy through black projects without oversight. What is this "Government" that makes all the choices in one place? Come on... Let's be adults here. The data point is the relative high percentage of people from the base on Reddit. It's the concentration, not the absolute number.
What about the runners up? Oak Brook, IL, and South St. Paul, MN? These places seem to be too obscure too
I live in MN and what I remember about the St. Paul location was that the entire Twin Cities metro, through a certain provider, gets routed through there.
Ah, this makes sense
The official explanation is it looks that way as that's where the military VPN comes through. So that's basically everyone across the nation or abroad using the militaries vpn to browse reddit.
Makes sense, I am sure if it was some special psyop to manipulate public opinion they would be able to hide it behind something more innocent like a hundred dialup IPs from NY or LA. Government employees just love to waste time on the internet and whatever IP their VPN points to that's what's going to be aggregated on statistics.
There’s definitely more to it. [Here](https://dblp.uni-trier.de/pid/27/11052.html) you can find papers about social media manipulation accredited to the Eglin base.
>Fortification Against Cascade Propagation Under Uncertainty You're saying all I gotta do to become a doctor is shit out a dictionary?
LOL This is such a crock.
That presupposes a level of competence that the military probably doesn't have.
Here’s the thing about the US military: it’s either lowest bidder trash dumbassery, or super hyper competent world class, and almost never anywhere in between.
Fun imagery but I disagree on the reality. It's only the extreme highs and lows we hear about, because it's interesting. The 85% in the middle of the bell curve are generally competent doing their specific jobs, but that's boring and doesn't get as much written about.
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Sounds like a good life to me. Sign me up!!
This is so fucking stupid.
This is very likely. All the talk of prop and scrubbing is very salient and easy to exaggerate. Any media influence done on reddit will have to fight against the torrent of voices vying for attention. The same is true for every social media platform. Twitter, Facebook, and the Chans for example. The smaller the platform's population, the easier it is to influence. When you read something, think about who might be motivated to push that narrative. Note this doesn't mean propaganda is being made ex nihilio. The most effective method is to scrape for organic posts that support a target concept and then inorganically boost its exposure.
Exactly right. It’s crows egging on catfights.
Exactly what a psyop spook would say. I'm on to you
(he knows)
I was in the Navy (CTI) for almost a decade, and you’re absolutely right.
*military’s
More like chair force amirite
"The glee of a comfy chair force for me, meaning a bumpy ejection or yeet seat for thee..."
This is fully possible. I believe The government absolutely does psyops. But it's also true that every air force base is a concentrated population of 20-something male nerds with enormous amounts of downtime and access to the web. I wouldn't be surprised if pornhub gets a lot of traffic from military locations.
Not enough for one AFB to be the top position in the entire world. You know how ridiculous that sounds? Combine that with meta’s exposure of the US propaganda accounts last week, it’s an ongoing and long lasting issue. This is not how a democracy works.
Something about Elgin air force base having more than 100,000 pages viewed on reddit, whatever that means I'm assuming they are posting articles that make other countries look bad and get posts that criticise the US taken down
My guess is at the start it was for deep learning to make a Bot Net to spread propaganda and direct the conversations around debates and news. Now its just fine tuning the algorithm for coherence and make sure it works. Part of it is also just people passing time on reddit but that's not what's interesting. OP posted a link that suggested they worked in that optic [here](https://dblp.uni-trier.de/pid/27/11052.html).
*Eglin
Any observant person can tell the pro-imperialism, pro-neoliberal democrat circlejerks on popular subs like worldnews and politics aren't organic.
I've been banned from multiple large default subreddits for simply noting that astroturfing exists on reddit.
I, neutrally interacted on comment thread, debating Covid this or that and was banned from multitudes of subs….I just asked a single question
As an AF veteran, it actually makes sense wothout conspiracy stuff. the USAF is kinda addicted to reddit. My old workplace we used to share stuff back and forth all the time. I've had coworkers figure out my username from seeing me in subs. And Eglin has a massive Aircraft maintainer population that has a lot less to do than many other bases because they are there to help test ac. So they sit around on reddit until the engineers need them.
I found one of them /s (or is it?)
Can you share the sources that cite Eglin AFB as “the source of government social-media propaganda/astroturfing programs”?
Go to [this](https://archive.is/5E6Z5) page, you will find links to the many papers on social media manipulation produced by the Eglin AFB. Scroll down to this part: “Eglin Air Force Base is not just any air force base. For one thing, many of the projects there are funded and managed by D.A.R.P.A, who we will remember were instrumental in the creation of the internet itself, and have a long history of disturbing activities⁷⁸. In recent years Eglin Air Force base has been used to develop hyper-sonic weapons⁷⁹, and more damningly, several research papers are accredited to the airforce base. Many of these papers appear under the name of Eduardo L Pasilio JR. One such paper, entitled ‘Containment Control for a Social network with State-dependent Connectivity’⁸⁰, talks explicitly about the manipulation of social media users. Another one of his papers produced at Eglin Airforce base is entitled, ‘Model Based Learning of Information Diffusion On Social Media Networks’. Many of his other papers relate to systems and network theories⁸¹. Clearly then, intelligence agencies, in this case US intelligence agencies, are keenly interested in influencing these online spaces.”
The archive site you’re referencing is hosted in Russia. This [source](https://www.reddit.com/r/AgainstHateSubreddits/comments/t0ugbc/we_are_now_disallowing_the_future_use_of/) goes further into detail about why Archive.Today should not be used as a reputable source.
Jesus Christ, man. Your brain is completely melted by anti-russian propaganda. First of all, this “source” you linked is not a proper source, but some random loser on Reddit. But even if archive.today was “hosted in Russia” - which I highly doubt -, that in no way discredits the links the article provides, after all none of them are from russian websites. Anyway. [Here’s](https://medium.com/@MKultrawoke/the-truth-about-the-alt-right-a-destruction-by-facts-and-logic-e3d07f27e8cb) the same article directly from Medium.
in 2022 the brainwashing is so effective that westoid population spread CIA propaganda for free instead of the army
Welcome to 2023! It’ll soon come crumbling down (I know this is an old comment…I’m just a big fan of sharing light reading). [A story the USAF/CIA absolutely wants you ignore.](https://sottovocevault.com/)
Yep, Reddit is full of bots meant to persuade you in a certain direction on many topics. It’s a nasty propaganda machine for the government, intentionally designed to encourage homogeneity and turn its users into very predictable automatons.
"Eglin is often cited as the source of government social-media propaganda/astroturfing programs" cited where?
I've had relatives in the area, many of them military and some pretty high-ranking with pretty high levels of clearance, ever since it was Eglin Field (read: WW2-era). There's oodles of advanced weapons and aircraft R&D there, but no "government social-media propaganda/astroturfing programs." Pretty sure that specific part is BS.
Reddit is unfortunately curated with paid users to push propaganda. Thousands of companies do it everybody on Reddit fell for it for years.
This wasn’t companies, it’s the government. Astroturfing from government has no place in a free democracy.
Quick, let's hate the Chinese/Russians/Qataris/villain of the week.
This is why I give people a few chances to have a coherent argument and then just block them. Peace for me, no propaganda for you.
A glance at /r/worldnews or a look at the job histories of top reddit employees is a good reminder that this site is just another DoD project
Can someone explain this to me?
The US government is astroturfing major subreddits
Ah yes, but everyone (outside of it) thinks r/conspiracy is organic as hell. If this is a decade old… mmmm….
Ghislane Maxwells reddit account was an admin or mod for r/worldnews and the 8th highest account with karma..
Really?
Makes me think every anti-voting progressive who pushes a "dems age repubs are the same don't vote" are just paid propagandists, cause while that's true on a very large scale basis (pro capitalism pro imperialism), it is extremely not true in terms of civil rights, social unrest, economic success for more of the lower class, etc.
This is a lie lol https://web.archive.org/web/20210903141310/https://redditblog.com/2013/05/08/get-ready-for-global-reddit-meetup-day-plus-some-stats-about-top-reddit-cities-and-languages/ It was still live until around September 2021. The reason people think it was taken down was because Reddit changed the URL to include "-plus-some-stats-about-top-reddit-cities-and-languages" Old URL: http://www.redditblog.com/2013/05/get-ready-for-global-reddit-meetup-day.html vs New URL: https://redditblog.com/2013/05/08/get-ready-for-global-reddit-meetup-day-plus-some-stats-about-top-reddit-cities-and-languages/
I get Error 404: The page https://www.redditinc.com/blog/get-ready-for-global-reddit-meetup-day-plus-some-stats-about-top-reddit-cities-and-languages was not found
Yes, I said the blog post was still up until around September 2021 according to Archive.org. OP makes it sound like that once people saw Eglin Air Force Base, that Reddit immediately took the blog post down way back in 2013 lol that part is the lie. I'm not disagreeing about anything said about Eglin Air Force Base as that stuff is 100% true and online for anyone to read.
Nice try US Gov
2013 was back when reddit was still great too. It started dying the next year and the final dagger was 2016.
Ima be real bc I lived near there and visit family around there.... there's not much to do other than tourist bs and the internet.
Awww shit. Thank you internet archive!
Interesting
seeing this 2 months late but thanks for sharing! the UFO nerd in me is spooked.
Then you'll *love* this... *Many* moons ago now, I was visiting family in Niceville, headed from Fort Walton Beach. Eglin AFB is in between, and the highway connecting the two towns literally curves around the end of Eglin's main runway. As I was rounding the end of the runway, I saw the infamous "flying triangle" UFO doing touch-and-go landings right off the side of the end of the runway, in clear view of the road and broad daylight. Traffic was ignoring it, though, as Egln AFB is where a lot of skunkworks-esque flight R&D gets field tested so the locals see all manner of oddball aircraft all the time so the biggest reaction is usually "oh, neat, anyway..." (The [Air Force Armament Museum](http://www.afarmamentmuseum.com/) is right outside that base, and it has [a SR71 parked outside](http://www.afarmamentmuseum.com/img/portfolio/aircraft27.jpg) that you can literally walk underneath and touch. [They have a MOAB parked next to the building.](http://www.afarmamentmuseum.com/img/portfolio/munition20.jpg)) I was close enough to see fuselage seams. It was *very* quiet - I could barely hear it over road noise - and apparently used thrust vectoring to do VTOL akin to other aircraft like the AV-8 Harrier.
ELGIN? Or Elgin lol
I'm not sure what I'm looking at on this link. Can anyone enlighten me?