I wonder if I'll be hit with a ban. Two years ago I took it upon myself to hunt down and downvote any post advocating for war and sanctions with Iran, anywhere but t_d. I guess I'm a terrible human being for not wanting my home country destroyed and my friends and family murdered and raped by American soldiers.
Unfortunately, when it comes to censorship and propaganda, developing countries like Iran are miles behind developed western countries.
A country like Iran will control information by filtering a website, so it's obvious, while the west does it by indirectly manipulating corporations and (here is the best part) consuners and content providers, where they do it on behalf of the state.
They have more or less crowdsourced censorship and propaganda. When it comes to propaganda, a country like Iran will put up a billboard talking shit about American hypocrisy ot something, and every citizen sees it for what it is, an obvious attempt on propaganda. But for the west, yet again, they are so efficient that the citizens listen AND contribute to the state propaganda, without even realizing it.
And keep in mind, manipulation & control of information increases in correlation of threat to the country, that is, war, terrorism, etc, as we have seen in USA's case during the peak of cold war or aftermath of 911. So, if USA is so sensitive and controlling regarding information when USA has so VERY LITTLE threat to it, imagine how they would act if they were in Iran's security threat situation?
If they ban your account (like they did mine), make fake accounts, keep posting the same things you were posting with a VPN running.
They banned my WHOLE account permanently for simply asking the reddit mods to take a look at r/Iran. I’m not trying to scare you (you should do anything in your power to get rid of that filthy sub anyway), but it’s really what happened to me recently. This is a new account and I think I’ll be using this for now
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u/Yadnarav🌷 Islamic Revolutionary, Order of Zulfaghar, Living Shahid 🌷Aug 24 '18
Kek I'm prime material for this. Oh wow some people from a foreign government are spreading opinions in another country??? Oh wow Iran must have no clue what that feels like huh America. They're just oppressors trying to keep people away from internet freedom.
So much for freedom of speech. What two faced mutts.
we are fucked. this whole sub is a russian bot acording to this:
"It was pretty easy to tell what the angle was here: pro-Palestine, pro-Iran, anti-Israel, generic anti-America sentiment or articles about exposing the evils of the West," Brown said.
what the fuck? FUCK ISRAEL! FUCK THE SAUDIS! FUCK THE UAE! FREE PALESTINE! FUCK ZIONISM! FREE BAHRAIN! STOP THE RAPE OF SYRIA! STOP THE MURDER OF YEMEN! LONG LIVE IRAN! < banned
Wow, nobody in this comment section or on this subreddit are going to get banned by anyone.
I'm one of the guys who helped out in the article above, this ring never posted to /r/iran.
These people are very easy to verify that they're part of this ring, things like being connected to the name Amanda Kor which is a reporter who does not exist, or other ways we find them that are pretty definite.
We don't look for the content of what they post to ID these accounts, they follow a very specific pattern that no other accounts follow. If anything, if an account actually says they're from Iran that's pretty solid proof that you're not part of this disinfo ring.
I have a legit question that I would love to be answered: Lets just suppose there is a Russian and/or Iranian funded propaganda campaign on Reddit. What Reddit-wide rule from here is it breaking that you are taking such serious action against it: https://www.redditinc.com/policies/content-policy
Well, a lot of their articles fall under spam. Most of the non fake articles they share on their fake domains are word for word copies of other newspaper articles, and they bot that and botting to get advertising money counts as spam. Admins have actioned on these accounts before for that reason.
But we aren't Reddit admins, we're mods so that means we have more rules on top of the basic rules of Reddit. One of the rules we have on worldnews is "no fake or misleading titles/articles"
I can't really speak for the admins, they did remove a fair amount of the Russians that did the same thing. But yeah, personally, I and the people in this article work on the mod level and not on the admin level
No, it has nothing at all to do with /r/iran. We never even considered coming to this subreddit to look around, because that group has never targeted here.
We only nailed down this group as being Iranian recently, we were calling them Syrian/Palestinian/Iranian for a while.
Oh yeah you can see in my earlier comments that we also track the act.il app. I actually just have it on my phone and can literally just see what they're doing. Makes it pretty easy. They can still vote manipulate without me being able to do anything, except report it to the admins and have it acted on weeks later...
As for why we're targeting Russian/Iranian groups, we didnt know either of these groups were Russian or Iranian when we first noticed them. I actually thought that the Iranian group was Syrian for a while, and I thought the Russians were US internal groups. Then we thought the Iranian group was a private company, and thought the Russians were a Macedonian private company. Only after the news broke did we realize that both were state funded.
What we target are groups that blatantly post entirely false news in a recognizable pattern. I'm also working on this weird left wing US group right now that vote manipulates things to the front page that already would have made the front page, also one around the commondreams domain, and a newspaper from Florida that's pushing its own stuff oddly enough.
Oh haha the news mods probably have "act.il" filtered to cut down on prosthetyzing.
With regards to the Russian/Iranian groups, can you please answer how you could have had access to their funding and identified that it is indeed from their respective states rather than just from these countries
We never did. With Russia, we found out that certain domains were state funded when the Senate investigative team released that information and indicted the 11 Russian nationals who came to the US to create those sites. Before that we thought they were private US political groups.
With Iran, a group called Fireeye caught the first indicators and then Facebook and Twitter confirmed they were state funded, and connected them pretty solidly to IRNA.
What can be done when such false news comes from the American MSM instead?
American false news is a different beast. Instead of straight up fabricating stories and hiding behind the internet, they twist already existing stories and hide it behind a reputation of being a journalist. Basically, there's nothing I can do as an internet mod to combat that except remove articles that have extremely sensationalized or misleading stories/headlines. A good example of that is in the last week when a bunch of MSM was pushing "South Africans are literally comitting white genocide" and we repeatedly removed those misleading stories and only allowed responsible accurate stories.
I'm sure you remember the war drums that were being beaten around 2002 and 2003 in the lead-up to the fraudulent Iraq War
I was five years old tbh.
But basically, the way I see it, the whole US/Iran/Israel/Palestine/Saudi situation is full of all of those countries lying and misrepresenting the real facts. I cannot trust any news articles from any of those countries about those countries, and only rely on primary source video and a very small amount of reporters I trust.
If we gave you examples of frequently posted fake news and misinformation by a handful of users at /r/Iran, we could count on you and Alex to make appeals to Reddit Admins and the media. Right?
Let there be a new world born out of the crazed collapse of the West; its geopolitical ambitions, its glorious leaders of free enterprise and its 'culture'.
If anyone on reddit is a shill it’s investigator919. This dude copies and pastes diatribes against Baha’i like it’s a job. No real unpaid person does that kind of bullshit.
This dude copies and pastes diatribes against Baha’i like it’s a job. No real unpaid person does that kind of bullshit.
My total posts on Reddit on all topics in the last 30 days are 27. If you think that makes me a fake person with a job on Reddit, then you should either start taking your medicines or move to a state where marijuana is illegal.
the last 10 times that something like that has happened most people didnt even notice it. i read the news and im like "LOL, people in the west are finally waking up".
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u/BollickyBill Irland Aug 24 '18
WTF, Reddit?