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The Guardian: British army creates team of Facebook warriors
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The Guardian: US military studied how to influence Twitter [and Reddit] users in Darpa-funded research [2014]
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The Guardian: The Ministry of Defence is developing a secret, multimillion-pound research programme into the future of cyberwarfare, including how emerging technologies such as social media and psychological techniques can be harnessed by the military to influence people's beliefs. [2014]
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Vice: Your Government Wants to Militarize Social Media to Influence Your Beliefs
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NY Times: The Environmental Protection Agency engaged in “covert propaganda” and violated federal law when it blitzed social media to urge the public to back an Obama administration rule intended to better protect the nation’s streams and surface waters, congressional auditors have concluded.
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CBC News- Canadian government monitors online forums
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Slate on 2018 midterms interference: "Project Lakhta was a Russian influence campaign that had no particular ideological bent; it appears that the goal was simply to stir up conflict in online political debates by putting forth extreme arguments and inflammatory misinformation to incense both liberals and conservatives."
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NY Times: The Secret Agenda of a Facebook Quiz (Cambridge Analytica)
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NY Times- From a nondescript office building in St. Petersburg, Russia, an army of well-paid “trolls” has tried to wreak havoc all around the Internet — and in real-life American communities.
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Washington Post: Facebook says it sold political ads to Russian company during 2016 election
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New York Times: "Hundreds of people work at a so-called troll farm in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia to smother the voices of dissidents like Mr. Khashoggi."
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CNN: Facebook announces first takedown of influence campaign with ties to Saudi government
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The Nation: US Officials Won’t Say if a New Anti–Russian Propaganda Project (shilling on social media) Is Targeting Americans. The newly created Global Engagement Center’s “focus and intent” is foreign audiences, but officials won’t rule out propagandizing Americans and funding American journalists.
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Ex -MMA fighter and ex-police officer exposes corrupt police practices, which includes infiltrating Reddit communities and becoming moderators in order to manipulate and censor information.
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Times of Israel: Israeli government paying bilingual students to spread propaganda online primarily to international communities without having to identify themselves as working for the government. "The [student] union will operate computer rooms for the project...it was decided to establish a permanent structure of activity on the Internet through the students at academic institutions in the country."
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The Intercept: Leaked Documents Reveal Counterterrorism Tactics Used at Standing Rock to “Defeat Pipeline Insurgencies." TigerSwan attempted a counterinformation campaign by creating and distributing content critical of the protests on social media.
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WashingtonPost: Obama pick for NSA review panel wanted paid, pro-government shills in chat rooms (Thread with source paper.)
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Psy Group developed elaborate information operations for commercial clients and political candidates around the world, which included infiltrating target audiences with elaborately crafted social-media personas. The CEO of PSY Group was former commander of an Israeli psychological warfare unit. Tactics deployed by PSY Group in foreign elections included inflaming divisions in opposition groups and playing on deep-seated cultural and ethnic conflicts, something the firm called “poisoning the well." It has conducted messaging/influence operations in well over a dozen languages and dialects and employs an elite group of high-ranking former officers from some of the world’s most renowned intelligence units.
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Wired: Clinton Staff and Volunteers Busted for Astroturfing [in 2007]
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Vice: Amazon Requires Police to Shill Surveillance Cameras in Secret Agreement
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The Intercept: The Rise of the Net Center. How an Army of Trolls Protects Guatemala’s Corrupt Elite.
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The Independent: Massive British PR firm caught on video: "We've got all sorts of dark arts...The ambition is to drown that negative content and make sure that you have positive content online." They discuss techniques for managing reputations online and creating/maintaining 3rd-party blogs that seem independent.
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The Guardian: US spy operation to manipulate social media
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Washington Post: Why crafty Internet trolls in the Philippines may be coming to a website near you
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BBC: Vietnam admits deploying bloggers to support the Communist Party's policies, operates a network of nearly 1,000 "public opinion shapers".
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Glenn Greenwald: How Covert Agents Infiltrate the Internet to Manipulate, Deceive, and Destroy Reputations
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The Intercept: Behavioural Science Support for JTRIG’S Effects and Online HUMINT Operations
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USA Today: The co-owner of a major Pentagon propaganda contractor publicly admitted that he was behind a series of websites used in an attempt to discredit two USA TODAY journalists who had reported on the contractor.
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Glenn Greenwald: Hacking Online Polls and Other Ways British Spies Seek to Control the Internet
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The Guardian: Chinese officials flood the Chinese internet with positive social media posts to distract their population
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The Guardian: Pentagon preparing for mass civil breakdown - Social science is being militarised to develop 'operational tools' to target peaceful activists and protest movements. "Minerva"-funded social scientists tied to Pentagon counterinsurgency operations are involved in the "study of emotions in stoking or quelling ideologically driven movements," he said, including how "to counteract grassroots movements."
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Bloomberg: How to Hack an Election [and influence voters with fake social media accounts]
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USA Today: Businesses and organizations may refer to it as a tool for competitive advantage and marketing; but make no mistake, they are using the massive reach of social media and the Internet as a weapon. One U.S. 3-letter special agent said, "You could influence an election with this."
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Times of Israel - The internet: Israel’s new PR battlefield
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Arstechnica: GCHQ’s menu of tools spreads disinformation across Internet-
“Effects capabilities” allow analysts to twist truth subtly or spam relentlessly.
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The Guardian: Internet Astroturfing
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BBC News: US plans to 'fight the net' revealed
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Israel is paying internet workers to manipulate online content such as Wikipedia (2 minute video)
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Buzzfeed: Documents Show How Russia’s Troll Army Hit America
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NY Times: Effort to Expose Russia’s ‘Troll Army’ Draws Vicious Retaliation
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Raw Story: CENTCOM engages bloggers
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Wired: Air Force Releases ‘Counter-Blog’ Marching Orders
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Wired: Military Report: Secretly ‘Recruit or Hire Bloggers’
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The Guardian: Israel ups the stakes in the propaganda war
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BBC News: China's Internet spin doctors
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Raw Story: Air Force ordered software to manage army of fake virtual people
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DailyKos: HBGary: Automated social media management
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Huffington Post- Exposing Cyber Shills and Social Media's Underworld
Information about shilling on Reddit
/u/slaterhearst spammed Reddit with links to The Atlantic. "The Daily Dot has confirmed that slaterhearst was Jared Keller, the associate editor and social media editor at magazine giant The Atlantic."
Forbes: Reddit Is Being Manipulated By Big Financial Services Companies
User pushes InfoWars links on Reddit, eventually admits to working for Infowars.
Shareblue accounts caught in /r/politics posting links to Shareblue without disclosing their affiliation, which caused the mods to create a new disclosure rule and an official Shareblue account was registered. About a month later, Shareblue was again caught shilling on /r/politics without disclosing ties to the outlet, which caused them to ban Shareblue links to the sub.
Hillary Clinton Super Pac and "strategic research and rapid response team designed to defend Hillary Clinton from baseless attacks" openly admits to shilling on Reddit.
User posts video using GoPro, gets video to front page, admits in comments that GoPro sent him free cameras in exchange for advertising. (archive: http://archive.is/ICGrl)
Top mod of /r/Mechanical_Gifs tries to sell subreddit on ebay for 999.00 dollars.
How Reddit Got Huge: Tons of Fake Accounts - According to Reddit cofounder Steve Huffman, in the early days the Reddit crew just faked it ‘til they made it.
Shill posts picture of a dog in a hammock with the brand clearly visible without indicating that it's an ad in the title of the post, making it an illegal advertisement. Later, he posts a promo code in the comments for 20 percent off his hammocks.
Redditor who works for a potato mailing company admits to being a shill. He shows off his 27 thousand dollars he made in /r/pics (Screenshot because he deleted his posts.) [Here's the thread.]
/r/netsec talks about gaming reddit via sockpuppets and how online discourse is (easily) manipulated.
Reddit is being gamed by professional shills every day. We investigate how widespread the problem of fake comments and fake votes is in our Reddit For Sale follow-up. [11:48]
Reddit For Sale: How We Bought The Top Spot For $200 [8:27]
Some websites use shill accounts to spam their competitor's articles, causing their competitors to become banned on Reddit.
Wikileaks: Reddit cofounder consulting for Stratfor to bring in the social media dollars
Shilling on Reddit is openly admitted to in this Forbes article
What I learned selling my Reddit accounts
Reddit automation bot: "Run Up To 100 Threads, Checks For Valid Proxy Access & Also To Check If Banned From Site, Keyword Based Submission Finder & Vote Up/Down Capabilities, Mass upvote or downvote Mode..."
Boostupvotes.com
Reddit Secrets, buy upvotes
Reddit Secrets, buy pre-aged and high karma accounts
Science
New Scientist: Sock puppet accounts unmasked by the way they write and post
Researcher's algorithm weeds out people using multiple online accounts to spread propaganda - Based on word choice, punctuation and context, the method is able to detect whether one person or multiple people are responsible for the samples.
Fake product reviews may be pervasive, study finds
When grassroots activism becomes a commodity - UCLA sociologist investigates 'astroturf' campaigns
Content-Driven Detection of Campaigns in Social Media [PDF]
Additional information
Shill Confessions and Additional Information (most confessions are unverifiable due to NDA's and possible trolling.)
Clinton Campaign used "grass-roots tweeters" to post tweets and graphics at strategic times during the 2016 election campaign.
Meme Warfare Center (PDF. Proposal written in 2006)
WAR.COM: THE INTERNET AND PSYCHOLOGICAL OPERATIONS (Proposal written in 2001 by Angela Maria Lungu - Major, US Army.)
The Gentleperson's Guide To Forum Spies
Corporate and governmental manipulation of Wikipedia articles
TEDx Astroturf and manipulation of media messages (Sharyl Attkisson)
"Changing the hive mind -- How social media manipulation affects everything" by Tim Weninger at TEDxUND
What you should do about this
I made this thread in the hopes that it could be used as a citation. There isn't much we can do to stop the manipulation, but we can spread this information so that people can at least become aware of it.
The previous generation became somewhat aware of the manipulation in the media. Imagine how effective it would be if few people knew about it? That is what is happening today. We are being advertised to and subjected to propaganda without being aware of it, which is very dangerous. The only reason why this type of propaganda works so well is because most people trust comments and posts with a lot of upvotes and likes. People trust that the information they are looking for will be at the top of threads or on the front page of a subreddit, oblivious to the fact that certain types of information may become buried in artificial downvotes or buried using a "forum slide." Not only that, but this is becoming automated. We must educate others about this problem before we are drowned out by bots.
Some of this stuff is automatically removed by Reddit, so you have to link to a thread that was manually approved in order to cite the information.
Share this thread where you can or cite small bits of this post in your travels.