Smurfing Bots together

 

I believe Troll Farms are now Smurfing to avoid detection as observers work to identify Astroturfing networks.

Astroturfing is the Manipulation of social media algorithms so that the manipulator can make it appear that some information (or disinformation)  they plant is "going viral". Naturally going viral means the virtual world become interested in something in a very short amount of time. Astroturfing is a fake way of making something go viral so it looks everyone cares about it or believes it to be true even if it is disinformation.

 Astroturfing is one of the oldest forms of troll farm activity and is used in White, Gray and Black propaganda. But there has been study to watch and expose Black and gray propaganda  manipulators. 

In response to this watching Black and Gray Manipulators may have been trying to make it harder to find their astroturfing operations by using Smurfing tactics

In Money Laundering, smurfing  means using a network of many people making deposit amounts below reportable $ limits to by-pass regulators.

In Cyber DDOS Attacks in means networking together many unrelated computers to all Ping a website at the same time to overload it in a denial of service n attack.  

In Troll Farm operations, it means 

• building many small bots with a small amount of followers
• They keep adding small bot accounts together across many topics
• network them together by a controlling bot. 
• The controlling bot then drops in the Targeted disinformation and all the Smurf bots begin reposting liking the target information, and then reposting each other's posts until it looks like thousands of people are all repeating the same information - when in actuality its not people, its just Bots
• This makes real people and even news outlets take an interest in the disinformation
• as real people take over the Astroturfing bots would then go to sleep to stay hidden

There are astroturfing Bots that have up to hundreds of thousands of followers. After they get exposed, they often go dormant and begin the tedious process of rebuilding new follower accounts.

Smurfing networks may be harder to identify. One way to do that is to lower the follower threshold that AI uses to search for  Troll farm behavior