If, (and only if), there were professional trolls and moles here, what if anything should be done?

Question

OFF TOPIC note: This question is hypothetical, therefore comments and answers disputing its hypothesis are off topic. That is, while the question of "Are there actually any trolls and moles here?" may be interesting, that is a different question.

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Suppose for the sake of argument, that some minority of users were mostly here in the capacity of employees, such as those of of the Internet Research Agency of St. Petersburg (IRASP), or perhaps not that group, but one using kindred methods sponsored by other nations, corporations and organizations. Their jobs in part being:

• Juggling as many identities using persona management software as seems strategically feasible.

• Accumulating reputation, perhaps by merit, or gaming the system, or more likely both. A small network of personas might be used for logrolling.

• Confusing or degrading communication contrary to their employers' wishes. Methods might include voting pools, time wasting questions and comments, red herring questions, or by skillfully offending and baiting emotionally sensitive partisans into some squabble which leads to their banishment or a question closing.

• Promoting, whether directly or indirectly, the current slate of their employers' talking points.

• Waging covert propaganda war against any other known trolls, if need be. (Or perhaps just pretend to, during budget reviews.)

This wouldn't be all bad. Sometimes a given employer's talking points would in fact be correct, and those users might naturally then provide good answers, or object to bad ones. Employees of opposed groups might cancel each other out.

But sometimes it would be bad. Misleading answers might be promoted, and good answers demoted. Ordinary users might be contemptuously manipulated. The site as a whole might be overly weighted down and founder.

What sort of policies on Politics.SE would help reduce those harms particular to paid trolls and moles?

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Note: Answers should not obsess over mere suspicion or identification of specific individuals or groups. Think of it like pest control via sanitation -- a hospital full of stagnant puddles and dark corners provides a more habitable environment for pathogenic organisms, compared to a clean, well-lit hospital. (But it isn't possible for a hospital staff to find each and every pathogenic individual bacterium under a microscope.)

Answer 1

I don't think we could really do anything specific about it.

There is no way for us to tell a paid government agent apart from a loyalist citizen who just loves their government and considers it their duty to defend its interests. Trying to do so would just lead to a witch hunt. However, the damage caused by people who think that Politics.SE is an appropriate platform to spread government propaganda does not depend on if they get paid for spreading it or not.

So all we can and should do is what we do anyway:

• Edit any posts which are useful, but have an obvious political slant
• Downvote, vote to close and flag any posts which are not useful.
• Flag abusive or discussion-provoking content
• Upvote any constructive content

Answer 2

Hypothetically, If we knew for certain that someone was posting here as a paid troll, then they would be banned.

Sowing confusion is contrary to what we want to do here, and someone here for only that purpose is not likely to change their ways due to getting punished.

Understand that's a very big "If". We are unlikely to actually be able to identify for sure that someone as a paid troll.

That also applies to a fairly narrow definition of "paid troll" who is someone paid specifically to misinform us. A social media representative openly posting on a company's behalf, might not qualify for instance.

Answer 3

Given the premise that sufficient proof existed of hireling propagandist trolls, (let's say there was something like an auditable Wikileaks troll list such that it could be confirmed), I'd suggest:

1. The users in question should be banned from future activity, barring some future evidence that exonerates them.

2. No deletions of troll accounts, comments, answers, or questions unless the posts are offensive on some other grounds. A known troll's postings would be valuable in of themselves, keeping them around would:

   • Show that SE doesn't hide problems.
   • Show users what troll posts look like, and how they may differ from ordinary user posts.
   • Provide meta-data, if any, on what a troll's employers are interested in.
   • Have value as humor.
   • May preserve some otherwise unobjectionable and useful answers.

3. Keep their posts public mostly as before, with certain allowances:

   • All votes from non-Trolls should remain as before.
   • Votes, favorites, and answer acceptances from actual trolls should be printed alongside the legitimate votes, with some clear indication that those votes should be regarded as fraudulent.
   • Upvoting, downvoting and favoritizing of troll texts should be generally suspended, but it should still be possible to change an accepted answer from, or even to, a troll answer.
   • All troll posts could be in a conspicuous troll-font, perhaps like one of these Halloween fonts, perhaps with a conspicuous background color, and accompanied by some kind of troll-ish icon.

4. For those who'd prefer to forget, or don't want any static, some kind of user option, perhaps in on a config page, to disable the display of any of the above, (votes, text, etc.). For those users, SE would look the same as it does now, minus any known troll posts.

5. The user page of a known troll should make it clear that the user was a known troll, (special fonts and icons would help), with as much general data as can be had, perhaps using special troll tags.

   An example of a troll tag would be if a troll was known to have worked for IRASP or whoever, there could be an IRASP tag, or whoever, which would link to a list of every other known troll with that employer. Or a more general tag indicating, if known, the political power bloc that employer is allied with.