I was
impressed today by an article circulated in many websites like
zerohedge, the slog, etc. The title in zerohedge is "Why Trolls
Start Flame Wars: Swearing and Name-Calling Shut Down the Ability to
Think and Focus". I found two articles I wrote about
friendly-government trolls in Greece of crisis which unfortunately
were written only in Greek language. I thought it would be worth to
gather key parts to make a new article in English
by system
failure
When Greek
government decided to close the public broadcaster (ERT) through a
dictatorial way, an army of friendly-government trolls flooded forums
in order to gain support from desperate and unemployed citizens for
this decision and turn against those who disapproved it. It was a
similar tactic of the old days in Greece of Right-wing para-state
during Kostantinos Karamanlis presidency, using modern technology
this time.
It was then
a former Communist, George Georgalas, who advised the Karamanlis
administration to face the problem of the rise of EDA (the then
Left-wing party which for the first time gained 24% and second place
in national elections), by organizing the so-called
"anti-gatherings", which were teams of people who were
"invading" in EDA's gatherings and pretended to be indignant
citizens in order to break the influence of EDA in Greek society.
Today, on
the internet virtual reality, a similar conflict takes place, as the
friendly-government trolls invade in various websites and pretend to
be indignant citizens who demand transparency and therefore approve
PM's "braveness" to eliminate "corrupted" ERT.
Another
example is the Cyprus case. When economic crisis hit Cypriot banks,
the Cypriot parliament initially voted to reject the plan for the
"haircut" of deposits, which was the term in order to
receive a 10 billion euros bailout from EU and IMF. This was
something that exposed Greek government as the small Cyprus dared to
say "no" (even if later forced to retreat as was left
totally alone without any support from Greeks, Russians or any other
EU "partners"), while the Greek government was always
saying "yes" to the lenders without any attempt to
negotiate since the beginning of the crisis.
The
hypocrisy of the Greek government was characteristic as, on the one
hand, government officials were claiming that will support Cyprus
whichever decision will take, while on the other hand, through the
government propagandistic mechanisms, were trying to downgrade the
importance of the Cypriot parliament decision, exactly because this
decision was exposing them.
Such a
propagandistic mechanism was the friendly-government trolls of
"responsibility" who did the "dirty job" on the
internet, so that this "no" of Cyprus to appear as an
"irresponsible" - if not stupid - action by the Cypriot
MPs.
Well, maybe
it's just a conspiracy theory, but only think how easy is someone to
create multiple personalities on the internet and appear as indignant
citizen(s). A government will need only a few people to do the job!
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