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| ▲ | culi 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | All threads that have... certain keywords... are like this. Talk about meta. Looks like I'm now in the positive (+5) after being in the negative just a moment ago. Anyways, I got really interested in this topic around mid 2010s because of some really interesting reporting by Codastory[0] covering Russian "troll factories" especially used to influence opinion in eastern Ukraine, but also in many other circumstances. In Houston in 2016, Russian troll accounts planned both an ANTI Muslim rally AND a counterprotest to that rally all on Facebook.[1] Hundreds of real human beings showed up! Russia got a ton of attention for their use of troll farms but the truth is that the US and certain allies have actually been using stuff like this for far longer and, imo, with much more success. In fact, Coda Story itself is funded by the NED which is a massive pillar of global US, uh, "soft power". [0] https://www.codastory.com/ [1] https://www.npr.org/2017/11/01/561427876/how-russia-used-fac... | | |
| ▲ | Paradigma11 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | For me the main difference is if the activity is clandestine and meant to deceive/hide the origin. Everybody tries to influence things their way. Doing it covertly is a hostile act. That does not mean that I would not condone hostile acts against my/our enemies but it is something take into account. And regarding your Russian examples, it showed for how long they have seen the west as enemies and conducted hostile acts. | | |
| ▲ | aa-jv an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | They view certain components of "The West" as their enemy - indeed, the very organizations which conduct the same operations against the Russian people. | |
| ▲ | smalllangmodel an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | I wonder why they view the west as enemy, nothing ever happened to them right? :P | | |
| ▲ | kakacik an hour ago | parent [-] | | Thats rather simple to understand, for somebody coming from eastern Europe. russian mentality permeated entire region during their enslavement of what is now eastern EU bloc for +-40 years, to have a battleground for nuclear war with west that never came. It happens when all your politics is orchestrated in moscow and you have almost a million soldiers deployed in bases all over the place for decades, with nuclear weapons and all that. See, russians have massive inferiority complex. Against everybody, but mostly the more successful ones, meaning west in many aspects. Their approach to, well, everything is vastly ineffective, corruption, nepotism and similar stuff grinds any attempt at progress to almost halt. Just go there and see for yourself, they have money literally sticking out of ground left and right yet outside moscow and st petersburg you are in central Africa in terms of development. All this, propagated to 21st century where everybody seems to go ahead of them. A lot of frustration, envy and schadenfreude. A (correct) feeling russia is left behind and becoming insignificant local force at best, and laughing stock of whole world more realistically. Plus, human life is generally almost worthless there, its mafia state pyramid to the core. With all that, its vastly easier to keep reinventing enemies that are always guilty at damaging poor old russia, rather than cleaning up that clusterfuck and actually owning the shit they created for themselves. Its enough for general population. There is not much more actual stuff to the question 'why west', rest is just PR for simpler folks. A dictator never wants smart, strong and free population, double that for russia. Downtrodden, hopeless desperate folks are much easier to manage and manipulate. | | |
| ▲ | smalllangmodel 30 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Well, you could also look at the history and cold war and NATO and so on, but sure, the Orcs are just having inferiority complexes! | | |
| ▲ | ahartmetz 3 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | Russia has been a corrupt, inefficient and jealous country for at least the last 300 years or so. NATO was not necessary to continue that great tradition. | |
| ▲ | hlynurd 8 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | Is there a specific point you want to make or are you just vagueposting? |
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| ▲ | friendzis an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Because cognitive biases are one of the hardest things to even acknowledge, let alone suppress. All the media out there has such a strong bubble effect, because people hate being challenged and love to stay in their comfy echo chambers. Remember labubu? Bao buns certainly do not. There have been so many bot armies exposed over the years that one would think every narrative being pushed should be considered to be backed by bots. Some state-level actors even operate their narrative-pushing campaigns openly, yet people still happily deny their entire existence. HN is very much not an exception to this rule. It's very hard to accept that maybe some thoughts you have were actually installed. | | |
| ▲ | derefr an hour ago | parent [-] | | > people still Maybe a few are just “people” (i.e. the same people who normally post in the community.) But in most cases I’d suspect any such botting campaign brings along with it a few human agitprop agents embedded onto each target platform, well-positioned to deny and discredit anyone pushing back on the narrative the bot farm is spreading. (Sometimes this is pretty obvious — a lot of accounts coming out of the woodwork to deny Chinese bot farms have a conspicuous “English as learned as a second language in Beijing, to a competent but not fluent level” writing style that does not often otherwise crop up in other discussions in those same communities. But other times it can be far more subtle, making use of operatives hired from within the community’s own majority-culture rather than relying on foreign nationals playing the part of same.) |
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| ▲ | Beretta_Vexee 5 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | There’s bots that automatically downvotes certain topics on HN. I post at times that often coincide with the middle of the night in North America, and I get 3–5 downvotes within the next 5 minutes. Talking about a country that sets up fake think tanks is a good way of triggering them. | |
| ▲ | eli_gottlieb 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | You're not supposed to acknowledge that think-tanks are sort of endemically propaganda outlets. You're supposed to think it's special this time. |
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