Makes sense. Russia and friends would seem to have an interest in Scottish independence as it undermines the UK.
It seems to me most social platforms (not just big tech, smaller UGC sections like the BBC) have many puppet accounts that are triggered by certain content.
Anecdotally looking at BBC comment sections of Scottish content, the "highest rated" comments are almost unilaterally pro-British/anti Scottish National Party which deviates a long way from historical voting preferences. The SNP have performed very well in Scottish and Westminster elections and the weakest barometer for them is/was the 45%/55% vote split in the Scottish independence referendum 12 years ago. I think if anyone took a "sentiment score" of what's there vs how people generally think or behave there'd be a large deviance.
More generally, any platform seems to have systemised abuse and this pattern goes all the way back to generic content management systems being abused in the early 2000s.
I do wonder, are these accounts being accessed via proxy? i.e. someone claiming to be from the UK and having a residential IP- if the platform doesn't care about the location of access, maybe start checking for latency?
Presumably only some Scottish people have an interest in undermining the UK? Latest (2024) results from YouGov suggest yes/no is 34/49 to the question 'Should Scotland be an independent country?' [1]
Out of the 26 polls since the GE, 13 are pro indy 13 aren’t. But it’s worth noting that 9 of the 13 pro-indy polls were commissioned by strongly pro-Indy groups (The National, The Herald, STV News), which seems like it could have some selection bias.
My perspective, is Russia only sees other countries on how they can militarily respond to Russia's intentions.
For Scottish independence- well Adam Smith, David Hume et al set up the modern world. There's a definite Scottish identity. For others in Scotland it's a UK identity and they still identify as Scottish.
> If England want to house American nuclear weapons, they can house them in England
Sure. But the point is they don't. Moving nuclear weapons (and building a new submarine base) is difficult, disruptive and expensive. (Having a non-nuclear power on the same landmass as a geopolitical competitor is also nice. If there is an underlined vision of this millenium shared by the world's great and regional powers, it's that nuclear sovereignty trumps the conventional kind.)
> Do you want a nuclear weapons site 20 miles from your largest city?
If you’re nuking a submarine port you’re nuking other port infrastructure. And if the UK is under strategic nuclear fire, any population center is going to be leveled.
(I understand the NIMBY argument. I don’t want to live next to nuclear weapons more due to accident risk than targeting.) And I understand the non-proliferation one when it worked.)
Countries aren’t just economies. Scotland was colonized by England and it’s reasonable for them to want to be independent. It’s also reasonable for them to want to remain in the UK. Trying to paint one side as the one Russia supports is an ugly way of treating a decolonization movement.
Aren't you a German? (Maybe I am mistaking you for someone else.) If so, I would like to remind you of the German saying „Nicht alles, was hinkt, ist ein Vergleich“.
Your analogy is very, very stretched. One can definitely say that suppression of Highlanders after the defeat of the last Jacobite Uprising was somewhat similar to other British military actions, including those in India, but that was the standard of the day in the 18th century.
Scotland was in no meaningful way "colonized". The local elite kept their power, their property, and got adequate representation in the common British Parliament, which meant real influence over the legislative process and formation of governments.
Can you name any Indian MPs sitting in the Westminster back then and co-determining the next budget and the next Prime Minister? No.
Yes, a foreign adversary can only really leverage existing stressors. Iran could not really radicalize for an issue which the country was either totally unified on, or else is totally apathetic about.
Right. You're always going to be able to press on racial tensions, but just try manipulating the mass study of advanced calculus. The latter is just going to be impossible.
I actually think that the process around Scottish independence actually demonstrates that the UK is actually relatively sane - a part of the country wanted to consider independence, the government at the time said "OK you can have a referendum", the referendum was held and Scotland voted to stay in the UK.
I was, and still am, a support of Scottish independence but I how the whole thing was handled reflects pretty well on the UK as a whole.
I'll certainly give you that. We have a (reasonably!) healthy democracy in Blighty, despite our grumblings.
Though it's fair to say that had the referendum been held more recently, Russian interference would have been orders of magnitude more severe. I'm not sure what the solution is to protect against such interference. (That is, interference in the worlds democracies, not just ours).
I do believe that if people have good "unofficial" unwritten/unspoken manners and customs, pretty much any official "system" can work. Conversely, if the unofficial stuff is not on point, you'll have all sorts of trouble even with a theoretically good system.
It's like "Thinking Fast and Slow". Fast, unofficial, unconscious part of decisions and actions versus the slow, official, conscious part. The unconscious is more important in many cases.
> I'm not sure what the solution is to protect against such interference. (That is, interference in the worlds democracies, not just ours).
Do to them what they do to us. Make "FAFO" a thing again.
We once upon a time stopped supporting the Russian opposition and it cost us dearly.
As for "what can we do now" - for every attributed or even suspected action of interference by Russia, Ukraine gets handed another few billion dollars worth of ammunition. When something gets attributed to Iran, give some nice toy to Israel. When something gets attributed to China, how about some missiles for Taiwan. We don't need to engage in wars ourselves, but we can put serious impedances against their plans.
The only ones I can't think of a solution are the North Koreans because they're so isolated and have the unique advantage that for anything we do they can shoot ballistics onto South Korea.
Relatively sane just says how bad it is elsewhere, as in we probably wouldn't descend into civil war.
As a fellow Scot, I watched the commentary unfold while I lived in Canada and to me the what would you call it, blatant, slant on things meant the vote would go a particular way. I think it all boiled down to the uncertainty of negotiations with Westminster. Pensioners were scared about their pensions disappearing and whatnot.
All the same, it's true that Scotland runs a deficit much the same as the rest of the UK does, relying on London generated revenue.
That seems to me a stark reality of independence, which some voters were willing to pay. Point being anyway, online algos are readily manipulating opinions and spreading false information.
> I actually think that the process around Scottish independence actually demonstrates that the UK is actually relatively sane - a part of the country wanted to consider independence, the government at the time said "OK you can have a referendum", the referendum was held and Scotland voted to stay in the UK.
You cannot ignore the influence of EU membership, both to the referendum vote for Scottish independence, and post-Brexit attitudes. The Scottish independence referendum was impacted by it becoming clear that an EU membership would not be automatic nor even possible (Spain would veto); Brexit happening means that part of what motivated Scotts to remain in the UK was taken from them (they voted overwhelmingly for the UK to remain in the EU).
Then you had the insane Brexit referendum which was non-binding but considered binding, where the "leave" vote could mean any number of things, and blatant nonsense was allowed to be used as slogans (that famous Boris bus), with the government failing to communicate on what the EU is.
Talk of referendum's being "non-binding" is a red herring and a distraction.
The Scottish independence referendum was also non-binding, because that is how things work in the UK.
.. Of course there was a complication in the Scottish case as the Edinburgh Agreement (2012) was necessary to hold it, and the UK government was politically bound to honour the result - but that's the same as the UK brexit vote. All parties were politically bound to honour the result, but not legally bound.
The SNP have won a lot of seats through the voting system because the other parties split the non-independence vote. The SNP have never had a majority of votes, even with an overwhelming majority of parliamentary seats.
It has been quite a long time since a Westminster party has won with a vote share of over 50%, and the SNP vote share at Holyrood is higher than those of parties that win Westminster elections. The Westminster electoral system (nb to non-Brits: all the UK constituent bodies run different voting systems for no good reason) delivers majorities at the cost of legitimacy.
A survey of online posts is usually not representative of a population at large, either within the online community or the society as a whole. There are so many biasing and selection effects at work, even before talking about anything deliberate which is probably also going on.
Presumably BBC comments also contain comments from English people who might not follow the same 45/55 split on Scottish indeoendence as Scottish people do?
>Makes sense. Russia and friends would seem to have an interest in Scottish independence as it undermines the UK.
Do they? Since Independent Scotland is very likely to rejoin EU it seems to me Russia & co would be interested in keeping it on the sinking ship that is post-brexit UK(economy wise).
I don't think that's a given, or even necessarily a strong likelihood. A majority of Scotland's trade is with the rest of the UK, unlike the Brexit situation where a shrinking minority of the UK's trade was with the rest of the EU, the only EU member for which this was the case. Scotland is accustomed to deficit spending and to large subsidies from the rUK, neither of which would be epecially palatable to EU finances.
And while I certainly think it's fair to describe the UK economy as a sinking ship, I also think that blaming that on Brexit is, to put it politely, "starting with your conclusion". UK growth has been higher than France, Germany or Italy since 2016. Brexit has obviously had impacts, but they haven't all been negative (the City in particular has zero enthusiasm to fall back into any EU alignment) and I think the COVID lockdown shambles and the Homerically inept current government have been bigger factors.
It would disrupt UKs defence (nuclear submarines in particular) and energy (oil fields) both of which currently are primarily based geographically within Scotlands territory. This is classic Russian tactics. Its not about whether Scotland joins EU or stays with UK, or which is economically or politically the best decision - its about seeding chaos and uncertainty within one of Russias largest antagonists.
Given that a sentiment for independence of Scotland has only really became an actual topic people discuss semi-seriously after the Brexit, I think it is fair to assume that there is a quite high likelihood of it, and there are quite some EU states that get preferential treatment budget wise, no reason to assume that Scotland cannot become that.
Covid has been global, lockdowns have been everywhere, UK is not unique and did not even have the worst of it in terms of lockdown strictness. While "averaged out" UK economy post-brexit/pre-covid might not look that much worse than EU, if you look into specifics the picture gets far uglier with entire economy sectors going bankrupt, all in all it was a spectacular self inflicted damage that will be felt for decades to come, especially now that US is becoming a hostile actor.
An independent Scotland or Wales would have pretty much the same trading relationship with the EU, as England has.
At least for several decades after independence
The level of integration of everything, including trade and supply chains and finance etc, is so big as to be almost total.
In addition, I'm pretty sure that EU would not welcome another hard border with England, it's already waisted far too much time and effort on the issue in Ireland. I'm sure it doesn't want to have to go through that again.
An independent Wales is a non-starter and I say that as a Welshman… Wales is just to reliant on subsidies from London (as is Scotland and the majority of England)
The EU has not yet set a precedent for allowing breakaway states into full membership, so it's far from a given that an independent Scotland would be able to rejoin the EU.
Scotland is of enormous strategic importance due to its location relative to Russia's naval ports. An independent Scotland with no other backing would have minimal resources to monitor and deter Russian naval activity.
The precedent is now the promise to allow Ukraine into the EU.
I note that if you're looking for a weakly defended EU country reachable from the North Atlantic and quietly relying on the UK defence umbrella without admitting it, Ireland is already there.
That is an interesting precedent. However, Ukraine is not a breakaway state from an existing EU member state (or a state which has been in the EU). There are numerous regions in the EU on a similar path, and none have yet succeeded (including Kosovo, which has been independent since 2008).
I'm also not talking about the defence of Scotland itself, I'm noting that monitoring and curtailing Russian naval activity in the Baltic Sea corridor is of wider strategic importance. If Scotland became unable to do this, Russia would have an easy exit path for naval vessels from its Baltic Sea ports.
In your example, Ireland as an EU member has significantly more access to military resources than otherwise.
I think it'd make the remainder of the UK weaker and more divided if Scotland joined the EU after leaving the UK, so I'd think that serves their interests too.
> Since Independent Scotland is very likely to rejoin EU
That is in no way clear because Spain has previously (during the Scottish independence referendum) indicated they would veto such a thing (because they don't want to give Catalonia any ideas or hopes).
But in any case, a Scottish independence would force the UK to find, and invest a lot in, a new base for its nuclear submarines. Scotland is also the most important UK part of GIUK gap, where there is a lot of infrastructure to catch and track Russian assets entering the North Atlantic. UK losing access to that is not good for it nor for the US with their special relationship.
A Scotland in the EU can also create tensions between the UK and the EU, which would also be good for Russia.
The problem with this argument is that it is very simplistic.
And a very simple way of de-legitimising any anti-establishment position, and protecting the status quo.
We can look at independence movements in Europe, Brexit, Trump, republicanism in the UK, any sort of heterodox economic or foreign policy.
Even if you disagree with these positions, it is helpful to you to steelman your position and your arguments. And just dismissing them as Putin's work drops you into a trap. It's arguably one reason why Trump got re-elected. People spent his entire first term assuming he'd be exposed in some complicated Russian plot and put in jail; rather than thinking hard about why he got elected in the first place.
Same thing happened to some degree with the Brexit vote.
>‘Jake’ claimed that a “top BBC anchor resigned on air and was immediately detained by security services” and that “crowds have surrounded the residence of the newly appointed ‘Governor General’ imposed by London”.
>Meanwhile, ‘Fiona’ said that “protesters have seized Balmoral Estate” and “International markets are dumping UK assets as images of tanks in Edinburgh go viral”.
>‘Lucy’ claimed that "farmers have used tractors to block the A1 at the English border”, while another account called ‘Kelly’ said that “army trucks are rolling down the Royal Mile. Soldiers in fatigues are guarding the Scottish Parliament”.
Surely the number of Scottish people influenced by accounts making such outlandish claims is exactly zero.
A lot of this stuff doesn't work by changing people's mind on topic X, but rather by saturating the informational environment so that people declare epistemological bankruptcy. For example, one thing that you can quite often hear from a Russian that has been confronted with something unpleasant is "well, who knows what's true". This is usually not a figure of speech, not some kind of washing down of facts, but rather an accurate representation of their mind.
Between being fooled and being uninformed the latter is much more pleasant.
It's quite possible a lot of this stuff just doesn't work, or only has an extremely slight effect. The internet is so full of nonsense, I'm not sure how much effect you can add by tossing some more on the top of the pile.
But, these sorts of bots are fairly cheap to run, and they have time on their side to try a bunch of different ideas.
I hear that sentiment from a lot of right wing friends in US fwiw. IME here it's more a coded speech and / or an escape from difficult conversations. The coded speech part steers it towards general conspiracy topics, which are often a simple way to blanket discard everything "liberal".
An actual example: "What did you think about Bill Gates climate book?" (they'd read it) -> "He was associated with Epstein, he's a creep. I don't trust anything he says". Then, "What do you think about Trumps delaying and denying of Epstein associations" -> "There's so much back and forth, who knows what to believe."
To be clear I think your take is correct, its just I think that if the space were saturated in a direction that were more convenient towards their "team", they won't have much difficulty taking a clear stance.
Maybe it’s not meant to be signal. It’s meant to be noise that makes the signal increasingly hard to distinguish. You get used to there being bullshit and now you can’t tell precisely which unlikely but maybe plausible messages are true. It helps weaken the ability for the target to be able to engage in meaningful discourse.
I hate to admit it but I failed the NPR real vs fake video quiz [1] and it is exactly because of this. There is so much fake noise out there that it is very hard to tell what is true.
Thanks for sharing this. I got all 4, but none of which were so obvious that I had absolutely no doubt. I had to reason about all of them. And I'm absolutely confident that a LOT of perfectly reasonable people can potentially score zero on this test.
Same. Managed all 4. But the differences are tiny and I'm only 70% confident. Most of my judgement is based on human reactions to a changing situation.
Yeah, I have pretty much stopped analyzing the media itself for cues, and am evaluating the scene and the actors. Are they convincing? The behaviour of the cops in the first video were entirely unconvincing. I didn't consider the video quality, artifacts, lip sync issues, etc.
Thanks for sharing. I am curious which of the four quiz questions you failed—to me they looked relatively easy to tell apart, but I follow the progression of this tech very closely.
Personally, I've mislabeled the one with the animal in the restaurant as AI generated. I might have clicked too quickly because it was looking like the animals trampolines video's. I've not really looked at the timestamps.
I'm generally good at detecting AI generated content but I might have a few false positives. :)
4/4 for me, but probably only because I knew about that tear gas incident, and that snake was way too loud and they don't tend to move like that unless it's sand.
The tear gas was the only one that had me guessing. Knew the video was real, but wasn't sure it wasn't doctored just at the end with the throw. Overall, it read more real than fake, I was just sure they were going to try to "gotcha" me.
It's for the Scottish. It's in Iran's interests for Scotland to become independent because that would enforce change on the United Nations Security Council. The UK ceases to exist and loses its veto, then what happens on the UNSC after that is anyone's guess.
The UK doesn't cease to exist though, it just shrinks. Plus the USSR fragmenting and Russia (as the main constituent part, the nuclear power and the country the independent republics were happy to acknowledge as the continuation of the USSR) becoming the successor state is pretty well-established precedent for what happens when states fragment, whose legitimacy Russia probably doesn't want to contest too strongly...
General disruption in the UK would help the Iranian government a little, but I managed to click on one of the accounts before it was suspended, and its most popular tweets received very interaction (and were pretty banal statements of independence support indistinguishable from stuff thousands of completely normal Scottish people posted) I assume their attempts to seed wilder rumours were low effort and had very little success.
Russia was allowed to inherit the USSR seat on 3 conditions:
- It took on all the sovereign debt from the newly independent nations.
- It relinquished nukes that were left behind in Ukraine.
- The United Nations collectively agreed to it.
I don't think any of those things would happen in the UK's case. But of course it doesn't matter what you or I think. It only matters what _Iran_ thinks will happen if Scotland gains independence.
Russia didn't lose its veto when the USSR collapsed and neither would the UK lose it in such a case. If the UK was in danger of losing its veto it would never allow Scottish independence.
It doesn’t matter whether independence is realized, what Iran wants is more time and effort spent on domestic disagreement, so less is available to support international engagement.
This is a tool of international competition and the U.S. and U.K. have been trying to do it to Iran (and others) for even longer than the reverse.
Not Iranians - what would anyone gain by influencing Iranians' views of Scottish nationalism? My experience has been that people outside the west barely know Scotland exists and are not going to care about it anymore than the average Scot is likely to have strong feelings about Laos.
It may be aimed at Scots but sometimes be done too blatantly so slips into the implausible. It may be aimed at influencing just those prone to conspiracy theories - who might be few but more likely to extreme actions.
If their objective is to damage the UK they can do that without breaking it up. For example, for example by fostering violent Scottish Nationalism, or even just sowing hatred between the Scots and the English, or between Scots who want to remain the UK and those who do not..
Its quite unusual for separatist movements to both remain peaceful themselves, and not to be violent suppressed. Even other western democracies have not managed, nor did one other part of the UK for a long time.
My other nationality is Sri Lankan so I have seen how bad it can get. I do not think that will ever happen in the UK, but even a very small number of sufficiently nasty people can do a great deal of damage.
People leave Iran for UK. The idea is that if UK seems less attractive and stable, fewer people will be strongly inclined to pursue it. It also normalizes chaos at home.
I think there are parallels to draw to how Fox News tried to paint a picture of places in Europe being on fire and overtaken by gangs and radicals years before that became close to actual reality.
We are the target of this propaganda, and I don’t mean the Scottish independence stuff. The US and Israel are jamming the airwaves with anti-Iran propaganda to manufacture consent to attack Iran. Every day we’re being subjected to a ton of this stuff on every channel (including HN).
It’s certainly not working on me, but I fear far too many of us are just taking these stories at face value.
tbf the US is a very different place where you'd have to at least double check rumours that the executive hadn't decided that tanks in cities were the best way to address crime in cities.
The UK rumour people probably believe is more likely to be "English police suppress tweets of valued contributors to the Scottish nationalist movement"...
Northern Ireland is a big part of why the UK doesn't think the optics of deploying tanks are a show of strength and doesn't think it comes without a cost...
I think these accounts may not be as political as many people think. It has been observed that foreign bot accounts often support both positions on contentious issues.
Maybe they're just Russian cybercriminals chasing impulse likes and follows for the sake of building up their accounts' social currency? Once they've gotten enough real engagement that the algorithm thinks they're real people, they can pivot to something entirely unrelated to the political controversy they pushed. Change name, change style, suddenly the victim follows an account they don't remember but gives interesting advice on crypto investments.
Now, I do certainly believe Russian cybercriminals do work for the government now and then in return for tolerance. But it may be less mustache-twirling chaos farming and more plain old scams.
> Once they've gotten enough real engagement that the algorithm thinks they're real people, they can pivot to something entirely unrelated to the political controversy they pushed. Change name, change style, suddenly the victim follows an account they don't remember but gives interesting advice on crypto investments.
bingo.
you need a trail of real-looking accounts. not just for posting, too, but also to link to, or retweet, or like, etc., in ways that get algorithms to put stuff on the top of a feed.
there may be only one actual account pushing the marketing or propaganda, but you need 5k more to upvote or share -- and those accounts can be just random AI slop or reposts of something. take the top replies of a popular post and shorten it, then post it a day or two later. or repost the most popular generic post of last month, etc.
You don't actually need real looking accounts. Almost all of this stuff is done with the most superficial and obvious accounts.
You don't need any reputation at all because the sites do very little actual work to block literal nation state level information warfare campaigns (because that would cost money and reduce their metrics)
You also don't need any reputation because the real humans who will be boosting your false narrative or "information" are the type that take someone else telling them "No, that's fake because <reason>" to be high quality evidence that it is "The real truth THEY don't want you to know"
Like, these accounts will quite literally only be active from 9-5 Moscow time despite being "In the US", and yet that is apparently not a strong enough signal for companies to target them for review or bans?
> It has been observed that foreign bot accounts often support both positions on contentious issues.
Absolutely
>Maybe they're just Russian cybercriminals chasing impulse likes and follows for the sake of building up their accounts' social currency?
No, you've misunderstood. Pushing both sides isn't evidence that they aren't literally posting as information warfare. The Kremlin goal is not really any party wins in particular (though they have preferences), but to weaken a country by ensuring it spends more effort on internal struggles.
Both Iran and Russia (as well as many other nations) have known information warfare arms that actively post with the intent of stirring up shit. They really don't try to legitimize those accounts because the don't actually need the con to be hidden, because nobody fucking checks, because microblogging platforms like X are full of people who have self selected to be especially credulous, especially bad at interrogating a source of information for quality, and really really bad at recognizing how many times they have fallen for outright false info.
> Both Iran and Russia (as well as many other nations) have known information warfare arms that actively post with the intent of stirring up shit.
So we have been told. What if these are just repurposed cybercriminals, spammers and fraudsters? To me, it makes perfect sense that fraudsters try to convince their own corrupt authoritarian government, "no, we're spreading chaos and distrust, it's great for our country actually! You should protect us and pay us!" when they don't give a rat's ass whether the "distrust propaganda" is useful or not, they're just pumping their scams.
The thing I'm arguing against is mainly that this thing works and can be stopped with aggressive censorship. I don't think that's true even if Putin and co. totally buy into the "spreading distrust" narrative. It wouldn't be the first time our spooks and their spooks agreed on a bizarre view of the world.
I’m certain that a key pillar of Russian propaganda in the USA is to repeat the horseshit that Europe is some degenerate shithole/caliphate arresting people left right and centre for tweeting. See also the US’s total obsession with London and its supposed “no go zone” for white people. The irony is that the US is far less white than Europe is, so they really cannot point fingers at us. It’s worked fantastically at separating the US from all of its allies. We saw that at the Munich security conference last year.
In reality we are their closest and truest friends and yet they’re relentlessly shitting all over us, even threatening to invade now. The only comfort is that the USA will inevitably reap what it is sowing.
A lot of the racist and islamophobic talking points get exported from the US, then they seem to mull around in Europe for a while, and eventually the US right wing points at what the right is saying there (particularly in the UK) and reimports the rhetoric, often as if it's now solid evidence.
It happened with anti-vax as well. I remember finding it very striking when I started hearing US anti-vaxxers refer to "the jab" in 2020. That's a term we never used in American English.
Yeah this is one conspiracy I believe. There's this narrative at the moment that the UK is some dystopian hellhole where you'll get arrested for basically anything you post online. It's very pervasive to the point that fairly normal American people I follow online have repeated such things.
Now, the UK has plenty of problems, I do not deny that. But the situation is nothing like it is presented online.
My thinking is that this is meant to make people in the US feel that the rising authoritarianism isn't so bad in relative terms "well the UK is far worse!".
Apart from anything else, where are they rolling 'down' from? The castle? I mean I know it's technically a castle, but it's not like there are a bunch of troops there just waiting to spring on Holyrood, no?
.. correct, a good old fashioned non-AI mis-googling error. The castle barracks is the "New Barracks", so called because it was built in 1799, and I saw the blocky stonework construction and went "close enough". Sources are a bit vague on how currently used it is. https://edinburghtourist.co.uk/questions/who-lives-edinburgh...
Yeah, fair point. I was just not sure if they have enough troops to take the parliament in any meaningful sense (not that this stuff should really be taken seriously).
Of course, if there are pipers involved, then everyone better watch out ...
Seems totally risible stuff. On Twitter, I've mostly seen this story shared by British nationalist accounts, presumably because they think it tarnishes the cause of Scottish independence by throwing support for it into question.
Having said that, partisan people on social media are always happy to share stuff that they agree with regardless of the source. Presumably these accounts posted less loopy stuff sometimes and got retweets.
You only need look at Musk’s Twitter and right wing media outlets to hear about the U.K’s no go zones for white people — which do not exist. Accounts professing to be from Scottish people are not trying to influence Scottish people, they’re trying to influence Americans into believing that Scotland has already fallen victim to what the fearmongers say is coming for America.
It's part of their government's "Death to England" vision, which they describe as a "policy". Splitting up the UK is part of it. It's ineffective and bizarre, but this insular theocracy has a long track-record of such decision making.
Surely the number of Scottish people influenced by accounts making such outlandish claims is exactly zero.
The accounts appear to be suspended, so it is true that Scottish people are not being influenced by these accounts.
In fact, the link in the story about tanks in Edinburgh goes nowhere. Combined with the links to suspended accounts, the article almost reads like it was written by a sock puppet...
Important thing to note - UKDefenceJournal only tracks a set of known Iran linked related accounts that could be tracked because of previous Internet blackouts in Iran.
It would be interesting to see how this applies more widely to other sets of content and countries.
From the original UKDJ article:
> The original UK Defence Journal investigation stressed in an editor’s note that “this article does not claim that Scottish independence is a foreign plot, nor does it suggest that support for independence is illegitimate, inauthentic, or driven by anything other than sincere political conviction.”
> The focus, we underlined, was not on genuine activists but on documented attempts by Iranian-linked actors to exploit authentic political debates for their own strategic purposes. Robertson’s reply arguably missed this distinction. The concern raised by analysts was not that independence itself is tainted, but that foreign actors are infiltrating the conversation, seeking to magnify division and undermine trust in democratic processes.
"a 2024 study by researchers at Clemson University has estimated that 4% of content relating to independence were linked to one Iranian-backed bot network of around 80 accounts."
Speaking as a Scot, I would expect there are those who support attempts to break up the UK who care zero about Scotland. Who's ultimately behind it is speculative.
It goes without saying that social media is causing irreparable harm to the fabric of our society.
To use an analogy: if the village idiot went to the town square and shouted hate speech, he'd be laughed at or dealt with. Now anyone has a platform to go to the town square, except it's the world, and shout hate speech. And unlike before there will be hateful people, some of them unrecognisable from real people, who will support the village idiot. They will help amplify his voice and validate him and legitimise him.
We have to find a way to stop this. The only thing I can think of is require you to attach your real identity to social media accounts, and regulate the living daylights out of it to hold the networks accountable if their owners don't want to do the right thing. Free speech isn't free.
I agree that social media is a net negative, but want to also point out that before social media it was the mainstream press and TV have been shaping society for decades. Things like buying a used car from Nixon or fighting in Vietnam etc are all mainstream press impact.
I like to think that contrary to this modern idea of media bias that the “mainstream” media as you label it has been a net benefit to society. Journalists used to challenge authority in democracies and bring out truth. It’s a lot more difficult now due to social media polluting the information space.
"This sharing of biased and false news has become all too common on social media"
... say the local TV presenters parroting an identical script from the Sinclair Broadcast Group, which owns or operates 193 TV stations in the USA, covering 40% of US households
You'd be mad to think that consolidated control of information, the endgame of "mainstream" media, is of benefit to society.
"Mainstream" media is financed either directly by very rich individuals, who then use their control of the thing they own (even just by controlling its hiring policies, to give like-minded people a voice) to spam their own agenda on the populace, or a generic money-making enterprise that then deals with less-affluent people who want to spam the populace (advertisers).
Touche. But you miss that not all social media (e.g. blogs and forums, instant messaging) are "social media platforms".
Also, the trick doesn't work with social media platforms in the same way. Rupert Murdoch bought Myspace, where is it now? He didn't get the same control and power he got when he bought The Times and The Sun and could tell the staff who wrote the content what to say to their passive readers.
Do you think this doesn't happen in other countries?
Just to give an example from the UK of "state" media, the nominally independent BBC has to answer to a board, and to the regulator Ofcom. But in 2021, Boris Johnson installed Richard Sharp (Tory pary donor, Rishi Sunak's old boss) as the head of the board, and Robbie Gibb (Theresa May's head of communication) as a member, and attempted to rig the selection of the head of Ofcom, even though he's not legally allowed to do that. He still tried it. He "let it be known" he wanted Paul Dacre (former Daily Mail editor) be head of Ofcom. https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/politics/63982/boris-john...
They are all at it, to try and control public opinion and gatekeep what is seen and not seen.
Sure, but on the whole I'd argue outside of tabloids there are still real journalists doing real journalism and trying their best to hold people to account.
The thing is, the internet was supposed to democratise, but it's ended up centralising (and therefore distorting) discourse
A good example is publishing: until relatively recently, books were how most knowledge was distributed, and publishers were able to gatekeep it
Back in the 1990s, one of the promises of the internet, was that it could break this stranglehold. The argument was that instead of 10-ish major publishers, we could have ten billion
What we've ended up with is 5 or so major platforms. Their algorithms now distort, not only the distribution of information, but the production of knowledge itself (click chasing)
An argument I'm sympathetic to, is that the internet hasn't just been a neutral medium, but has actually accelerated this centralisation
The other aspect is the shrinking role of non commercial institutions, like public sector broadcasters, universities, scientific orgs. These entities had their own biases and groupthink. But they added diversity to the media landscape and helped set useful norms
> To use an analogy: if the village idiot went to the town square and shouted hate speech, he'd be laughed at or dealt with. Now anyone has a platform to go to the town square, except it's the world, and shout hate speech. And unlike before there will be hateful people, some of them unrecognisable from real people, who will support the village idiot. They will help amplify his voice and validate him and legitimise him.
As usual the problem is the commoner idiot, not the group of sociopaths that now have the means to astroturf their agendas efficiently.
Especially puzzling since this submission is about exactly the latter.
> We have to find a way to stop this. The only thing I can think of is require you to attach your real identity to social media accounts, and regulate the living daylights out of it to hold the networks accountable if their owners don't want to do the right thing. Free speech isn't free.
Think harder then.
The village idiot could move and reinvent himself as a respectable fellow. Basically, pre-digital we naturally had different personas; there was no Panopticon that could ever hope to know all our associations. Digital tools have changed that. And inventing the fiction of “one single persona” to tie back to what you said five years ago, ten years ago, thirty years ago, is a terrible idea, and I would argue (based on intuition) very unnatural.
I sometimes wonder how much your own beliefs change consuming some content online even if you consciously disagree with it. Like a slight subconscious erosion that you don't even realise is happening until you have been radicalised. Ironically I think people who are more honest or empathetic might be more susceptible to this as they try and take in other people's view points without crudely dismissing it.
This is 100% a real factor in shaping opinions. Every piece of information we encounter affects us - that's how we're built & how we can learn. But this also makes us easy to influence by consistently repeating lies, like we've seen with the "Flood the zone" technique, as well as basically the whole rise of the right over the last decade. It's all lies and misinformation, but it works because of how we're built & because there are not enough counter operations.
US would probably have a large impact as well, of course because lots of internet-users are from the US, but also because the US likes to astroturf as well.
I can confirm that when I blocked a huge swathe of mobile broadband providers in Russia and Israel, something like 95% of the spam on the forum I run stopped instantly.
It seemed like a messy and obvious approach - sign up with a clearly bot-generated gmail account, hit the activation link sent by email an average of 100ms, and immediately post in every thread something along the lines of "WHEN WE'VE FINISHED IN KHARKIV / GAZA WE'LL BRING THE GAS CHAMBERS TO ENGLAND", all in under about ten seconds.
I don't think it's Russians or Israelis behind it, necessarily, but that's where the annoying noise has been coming from.
During the Prigozhin uprising / coup attempt, internet was cut off in parts of Russia, and there was a noticeable slowdown in comments on multiple popular subreddits. I don't know if any studies have been done to evaluate this empirically though
Russia is a waning superpower with a low GDP but a powerful enough internal economy to wage a conventional invasion of a large European country. The US is a much richer country, the leading superpower, and an IT powerhouse. But for some reason the first thing that pops into people’s mind when they hear propaganda bots is “Russia”.
(I would buy China, too. A huge country with a powerful economy.)
That in itself looks like a programmed response.
Of course Russia uses bots and propaganda. But the focus on Russia seems completely out of proportion.
This is why my FB feed is full of misinformation, strawman arguments, sweeping conclusions and no nuance. it does not matter what they are arguing about of which side they are on, the stupidity is constant. Left and right, theists and atheists, pro and anti-immigration. Anything else you can think of. All things I am happy to have an interesting argument about, but what social media offers is engagement bait of one kind or another - from rage bait to feigned ignorance.
Networks were full of this stuff before the bot armies were a glimmer in whoever's eye.
I don't doubt bots are a factor in the sheer volume of it, but human nature on network debates was bad when it was only fairly smart, educated people, and it only got worse as the AOL-to-Facebook pipeline demographic became politicised.
Glinner isn't a bot, just to pick one example of somebody who - irrespective of the merit or not of his argument - simply behaves like an asshole, constantly.
I'm sure regulation would be more complex than "Feeds must be chronological and only what you're explicitly following" - hammer out the details - but yeah, basically, that
Good job being skeptical, it's a good first instinct to have with any media. However, reading the actual article is a good choice as well.
- They link to several of the accounts (now suspended) in the article.
- The geolocation was easily spoofed with a VPN, as stated in the article.
- They never claim these account have any significant standing, only that they have "thousands of followers", likely in aggregate.
The news here is that they were previously known to be Iranian-linked. This blackout is further evidence, because they all stopped posting when Iran went offline.
"‘Lucy’ claimed that "farmers have used tractors to block the A1 at the English border”, while another account called ‘Kelly’ said that “army trucks are rolling down the Royal Mile. Soldiers in fatigues are guarding the Scottish Parliament”."
Very convincing stuff. We must fast-track the shutdown of X in the UK to stop this ultra-persuasive disinfo from brainwashing our citizens.
I think folks attempting to build a unicorn could just do what nextdoor did -- require a modicum of proof of life -- but for clones of twitter, reddit, etc.
The idea that I might get in a fight with a robot or some state agent on -- gasp -- Hacker News... it makes me want to pull my hair out. I would happily receive a postcard with code once every few years to quasi-prove my location.
Not surprising at all. Wasn't most of pro-Trump content during 2016 election campaign actually generated by some kids in Macedonia who figured out how lucrative fake and sensationalized news can be ?
Social media is increasingly the poison of the society.
There is no incentive to implement such a feature. Bots and paid social media workers drive engagement. Also social media sites are designed to avoid any triggers that make users click away (like showing origin flags that would allow a user to easily dismiss a thread as fake). This is the same reason why Youtube removed dislike counts.
10+ years ago I had a job which involved developing/testing geo-restricted software in another country. Eventually each VPN exit point would get marked up as such, and I would have to switch to another.
So if posts were marked with the country of origin or VPN, that might be enough for most people to evaluate the intent of the post.
Of course things have changed. There might not be so many IPv4 addresses around to trade, but IPv6 has probably changed that. And it's probably hard to know how long an address was used by a VPN before being traded back to a telco.
I think Russia did, successfully for quite some time, attempt to direct anger towards the countries supporting Ukraine. Russia would drop a bomb on Ukraine and 90% of the comment section would hate the West for it. The goal was to fuel defeatism and infighting. The latter they encouraged from the start. Reading Reddit, you would have thought Germany had attacked Ukraine from the western flank. In the days and weeks before every major pending Ukraine decision in the US, you could see a noticeable uptick of Russian-friendly talking points. Before the US election, a suspicious amount of Redditors claimed that Trump would give Ukraine more weapons than Biden. These days, they are encouraging the Europe is weak rhetoric. If a toy drone gets spotted somewhere, the only acceptable response is nuking Moscow and EU should disband if they don't dare - that inane take to me is also trolling.
It's about half a dozen accounts, it could just be the very strange hobby of a single person in Iran. I don't know why all the other comments are acting like this is evidence of a huge misinformation campaign by Russia.
> The [STASM] formula works best in the treatment of monitored materials of which the source is known. First point to note is the character of the source. There are several choices on this: the true source (who really got it out?) and the ostensible source (whose name is signed to it?); also, the first-use source (who used it the first time?) and the second-use source (who claims merely to be using it as a quotation?). Take the statement: "Harry said to me, he said, 'I never told anybody that Al's wife was a retired strip-teaser.' Mind you, I don't pretend to believe Harry, but that's what he said, all right." What are the possible true sources for the statement of fact or libel concerning Al's unnamed wife? What are the alternatives on ostensible sources? First use? Second use? The common sense needed to analyze this statement is of the same order as the process involved in analyzing the statement: "Reliable sources in Paris state that the visit of the American labor delegation has produced sensational repercussions in Moscow, and that Moscow, upon the basis of the American attitude, is determined to press for unification of the entire German labor movement."
> It is soon evident that the mere attribution of source is a job of high magnitude.
I'm not sure what we were using 2 watts worth of cerebellum for before sophisticated language, but afterwards source attribution sounds like it'd sure soak up the cycles...
(he also has technical terms for what we now call a "sock puppet")
> The account, which describes itself as “a proud Scottish lass” and “passionate about Scotland's independence & our right to self-determination”, is based in Europe (according to X’s location data).
I get suspect everytime an online socialist overuses famous socialist terms (or supposed socialist terms) before segueing into a conjunction. “Of course I want the socialist utopia just as much as all of us, comrades, but...”
When I read wildly insane comments on a mildly contentious issue here on HN (e.g. as a very mild example, posts on electric cars always draw out someone who needs to state they drive 1000 miles a day and so electric cars will never work for anyone) I wonder how many sock puppets accounts there are here. There must be some. The radicalization of, e.g., Marc Andreessen was very useful to some group, so there is no reason they wouldn't try more of the same in this venue.
When you do the job we do, and spend hours each day looking at the discussions and the data, it becomes fairly easy to spot inauthentic actors on HN. It stands out when newly registered accounts (which appear in green) or older accounts without much posting history, suddenly start posting comments in support of a particular position.
This is another reason why HN's primary purpose – gratifying intellectual curiosity – is so important. Curious conversation is hard to fake. You can't really be inauthentically curious, at least not for long. So the more we can succeed at nudging the community's conduct towards curious conversation, the more it stands out when accounts are acting to promote a particular agenda, and the faster we can weed them out.
I'd like to think HN is generally better at this than most communities, but it's hard to imagine we're immune.
It's also important to remember that (rightly or wrongly) a lot of these culture war issues are really touching a tribalism nerve rather than really touching on the issues themselves. To a lot of people, the EV debate amounts to "those _other_ people trying to force a change on _me_." Mind you, I'm not suggesting this is the right way to look at these sorts issues, but I think that's how it plays out for a lot of people. I had a real-life friend who was very anti-environmentalist, and his view was effectively that it was all made up, and was just an excuse for the left to push things on people.
> I'd like to think HN is generally better at this than most communities, but it's hard to imagine we're immune.
This is a zero-barrier-to-entry forum (not even an email required!) that has the eyes of a people prone to being involved with startups. Why would you think in any way this would be better than an average equivalent? Because you don't personally notice it?
There's little barrier to entry, but for the most part the community does good internal policing. Stupid emotional comments are pushed down, and the worst ones are flagged. (I've had a few moments of weakness here, so I'm not trying to be sanctimonious here)
I see a lot of people who conflate "my opinion, which is the correct opinion just won't fly here, so how can you say the community does a good job of self-policing?" I really don't agree with this. Any community is going to hold some opinions you disagree with, and will hold some bad or even wrong opinions. What I generally (but not always) see is HN upvoting comments that are thoughtful and intelligent, not necessarily ones that I think might be correct.
Partisan tribalism is such an odd phenomenon, and it has a very obvious deranging effect on people. They no longer pay attention to principle or policy. Instead, everything becomes a matter of some vacuous “groupism”. Parties become little jingoist nations unto themselves. Our of weakness, people are unable to maintain a position rooted in honesty and truth, and instead search for some Borg cube to join in order to receive “protection”, as long as they chant the party’s mantras. Very often, it crosses over into cult of personality territory. People make idols of the party and the party leader.
The tragedy of it all is that it completely misses the point. Politics is in service of the common good of the polity. True loyalty is to that common good as an objective good. Loyalty to a party is a false loyalty, as parties are not proper objects of loyalty. They are merely convenient political instruments, not the objects of the good pursued. Things become doubly absurd when this party loyalty remains intact despite a party’s errors.
> it was all made up, and was just an excuse for the left to push things on people
The fact is that environmental issues - like almost any political issue - can be used by any party to push an agenda in parallel to the actual issue. So, here, environmental concerns can be used by any party as a cudgel and an instrument, whether negatively (e.g., painting all environmental concern as subterfuge in order to push through policies aimed at private profit at the expense of quality of life) or positively (e.g., stopping critical projects proposed by a political opponent by commissioning bogus ecological studies to create impediments).
Of course, that’s different than the extreme position that all environmental concern is part of some conspiracy (the Left has its own share of analogous conspiratorial crackpottery).
> I'd like to think HN is generally better at this than most communities, but it's hard to imagine we're immune.
We're much, much worse. "Most communities" are built around consensus. Show up at your Facebook group organized around your favorite hobby and you'll find that everyone has a bunch of similar opinions about most things, and that's the way most people like it. Walk off the reservation and try to pick fights over something controversial and you'll find the community walks away.
That sounds bad, right? What if consensus is wrong? Don't we need free thinkers?!
HN is an enclave of antisocial nerds[1] who think they're smarter than the rest of society. We live for disagreement. Discovering that we disagree with our peers isn't a mark of shame, it's evidence that we've discovered a Magical Great Truth, that our "peers" at HN are all sheep, and that we're therefore smarter than the herd.
Sure, Facebook fishing groups or knitting sites or whatever breed senseless group think. But on the whole "group think" usually works out pretty well and keeps people from wandering off into the scarier weeds of the thoughtscape.
HN? We breed radicals. And therefore we're more susceptible to deliberately radicalizing sockpuppetry, not less.
[1] To wit: we're basically 4chan but with an older demographic and industry cred.
Doesn’t that also create a kind of immunity, though? If what I see is a cacophony of differing views, then I am unlikely to be influenced by any particular sock puppet account.
Whereas a community that tends towards groupthink might have a narrower range of views, but if those views begin to shift in a particular direction then it’s much harder for those who are disadvantaged by that shift to resist, because to do so requires violating the norms of groupthink.
I’m not sure which is better. My own preference is to tolerate a wide range of views in return for robust disagreement being the norm, but I can imagine some (most?) people preferring the opposite.
About your last point, you hit the nail for me. HN is 4chan without the pure chaos, with people talking smartly. Here you can find all the political spectrum (including nazis), but people will try to not be as inflammatory as 4chan users (most of the time, at least). There's no limit to what people will defend here. I don't think that it's something necessarily bad for HN, but it opened my eyes about how tech billionaires are a bunch of HN users that got a lot of power.
Its really ironic that I read the term radicalism in Hackernews as being against tech billionaires and this is the sentiment that I usually see here reasonably (atleast in my opinion)
But your comparison to HN radicalism to equating tech billionaires as HN users themselves flips my whole comment upside down.
I don't know much about the political biases here but I like to think that most people are pro open source and that they dislike the manipulative characteristics deployed by some infamous tech billionaires or those companies. Usually I think that's the case unless of course someone might have a bias themselves I suppose.
That is something we are susceptible to indeed. Our job is to grok complex systems, and that easily leads us to hubris like we can push historians and sociologists away.
I think the same can be observed in econometric circles, where I see inevitable complexity arising from human social dynamics, be it historic, cultural, sociological, or religious in nature, often gets ignored.
I feel like people are radicalizing in Hackernews because partially tech is becoming at forefront of finance for many cycles and this combination of tech and finance [for better or for worse] and they are very predatory for the average person (Crypto scams, AI bubbles and the list goes on)
They are also very sneaky in their predatory nature at times so the average person either doesn't know the extent or doesn't look out for alternatives (Open Source) and other issues
Most people on Hackernews are able to realize predatory nature of Big tech (I think) and are usually very supportive of Open source.
Personally I may be wrong but one of the most common things we can discuss in Hackernews is the extent that big tech or such aspects genuinely harm the average person.
If we try to talk about this nuance or other related topics with friends and family, they suffer from the same issue and as such Hackernews becomes a place where people discuss this more frequently
I don't know if this counts as radicalism but a lot of my political viewpoints stand from that one of the easiest ways to bring as such good points is when country can support Open source and can fight against unethical practices in a fair and square way in general.
> [1] To wit: we're basically 4chan but with an older demographic and industry cred.
Teenager from High school here. 4chan is genuinely a cesspool where trolling is the key purpose. I feel like hackernews is much more on the knowledge side of things so much so that I feel more confident about knowing certain projects or gluing things together and just this make shift attitude of make things work and curiosity with great influence to Hackernews and I cannot be thankful of it enough
Perhaps I try to be more agreeable though and see other person's perspective because I may be wrong I usually am and I think I just get this kick in having an agreeable conversation in the end. I think I can treat hackernews as a book for open source projects which are cool and interesting tidbits. I have found some really really great software which I must not have found if it were not for Hackernews and I am grateful for it
Ooh I got a question
Let's rephrase it this way, What would you prefer more, if your child used HackerNews or used tiktok?
I 100% agree and I wanted to write something like this but In the end I chose not to, to point out all the other issues first
The reality of the situation is that in many places like Reddit or even twitter which are radicalized, firstly they become echo chambers and secondly, instead of being radical for bringing change for all people (Think focus on open source but I think its not a radical idea but still) but what ends up happening in those places is that they literally treat each other as another species and the rift grows even further and secondly that they also mostly don't have ideas but rather ideologies to implement.
In this sense, Hackernews is far more effectively radical atleast in my opinion. I must admit that I am a little surprised about the comment of HN being radical because usually, its mostly knowledge based and sure there are some political comments but nobody's forcing somebody to acknowledge those
So in essense, a lot of people are being radicalized, either some just dont know how to approach things or they try to focus absolutely on the us vs them dynamic where the major systemic issues are just not focused on (inequality,poverty etc.)
The world is radicalizing also because its leaders are usually radicalizing it too.
I must admit that the world feels like on the brink of war and no this time its not hyperbole. There are systemic issues in world and instead of addressing them, we are trying to force the focus outside these by all the recent political issues happening and I am not even sure if somethings can be done or the domino has fallen already and I am sure I must not be alone in this when we see massive wars erupt all around the world.
> Teenager from High school here. 4chan is genuinely a cesspool where trolling is the key purpose.
Middle aged curmudgeon here. And the older I get the more I realize that the hyperliterate technomagical credential flinging you see in the comments here is... basically just trolling. We do it to make ourselves feel smart.
Sure sure, we all want to imagine ourselves geniuses changing the world with the power of our intellect. But that's hard, and most of us settle for getting in a good barb or three in the comments.
Yes, you might be right. Still I feel like there are people who share some genuine info on products and other interesting projects for fun.
I think I can agree with you that perhaps sometimes comments might be getting barbs (first time I heard this phrase, I guess a still lot to learn xD) but also that this behaviour isn't rewarded in the context of an article or anything usually.
Most articles are about coding related software and the pretext around it thus makes comments mostly helpful, or atleast have genuine reasons that one can weigh against
And that behaviour is what's rewarded even in somewhat political posts on HN as compared to something like reddit which might not be helpful in a general stance and especially so in its political posts (or anything related to it)
Any site that becomes sufficiently popular will attract sock puppets, shills, paid agitators, paid astroturfers, spammers, scammers, people paid to warm up accounts and to vouch for their alternate accounts, accounts pretending to ask questions with alternate accounts that suggest a solution that they own and operate and many many other shenanigans. There are also no shortages of people that try to influence the thinking of others or trick them into buying something or voting a particular way. Some of them get nullified in /newest by some of us. Some make it through. Some even get massive responses and that is is a chance they are rolling the dice on.
Mr. Andreessen has been involved with high level politics for a long time. This is not "random radicalization". I will not comment on the quality of the politics but it feels fairly deliberate.
Just search and you'll find a million articles about his "dark enlightenment" (or whatever stupid name is used) views. I think "Chatham House" was the name of a private group chat he was in that helped this process along, and there are several articles about this.
Chatham house are famous for the rule that if you're invited, you agree that if you talk about what they talked about in their meetings, you must not say who said it.
Most political manipulation of influential people isn't sophisticated at all, it's 3rd grade bullying level. For instance, getting invited to an exclusive meaning as proof of your importance/"seriousness". Brazen flattery, but it works.
And the secrecy grooms them into betraying outsiders in favor of insiders. It's not such a big betrayal to give cover to powerful people's ugly opinions, but it's a start. And once you've done one bad thing with the gang, you're easier to persuade to do worse things with the gang. Again, really banal stuff.
Remember in Snowden's biography, he mentioned being involved in a plot to get some diplomatic person to drunk drive, so they could swoop in and "help" him. That wasn't just targeted at the diplomat. It was also targeted at rookie CIA agent Ed: first do iffy things with us, so that you have firmly rationalized and justified it to yourself once we ask you to do uglier stuff.
This post really reads like a C.S. Lewis novel - the whole fear of being an outsider and laughed at, and the gradual but slippery slope towards more substantial clearly bad stuff.
Chatham House is openly the sort of "inner ring" Lewis warned about.
To get the topic back more on topic for HN, I think that the fear of AI manipulation of the public is misplaced. Not because it can't be a thing, but because private AI-fueled manipulation will be far more destructive. If you fake a video of some horrific crime and post it on the internet, a thousand people will be examining it for mistakes - and a thousand people will claim mistakes which aren't there, and it'll create a lot of noise and certainly that's not a small problem. But if you fake a video and show it to your super-exclusive private circle and explain to them that of course you must not talk about this for the sake of the victims etc. then it's far less likely the mistakes will be spotted. Our leaders can be radicalized by propaganda we're not even allowed to see - that scares me.
He initially supported the Democratic Party but because of crypto and AI he donated millions to super PACs for Trump, supported DOGE and said that children are now being readicalized to hate capitalism as well as directly messaging the Trump administration to put pressure on Universities like NSF, SU and MIT because of DEI or something like that.
One can support a party and then change to not supporting a party for a variety of reasons. Such as disagreeing with the direction the party is going, especially locally, or even as simple as eschewing the previously supported party because you are betting the other one will win and need to curry favor.
I haven't studied Andreessen's views and actions, so I was just positing a strategic reason for a change in political support for a high profile person. (as opposed to a drastic change in their thoughts which is what I take to mean as "radicalized")
For example, I have always preferred most of Democrats' positions on the national level, but on the local/state level, especially in California/Oregon/Washington, I disagree with a lot of the Democrat leaders, more and more since 2010 (I would say my views have not changed much, but the party's priorities at the state and local level have).
Of course, I'm nowhere near as influential as Andreessen nor do I have interests that would warrant a say in national politics, but I can see why if one is against local leadership, they would cozy up to someone who they think can help you fight against them, without being "radicalized", per the above definition.
He’s a “sewer socialist”, his most radical pitch is… making buses free. It’s easy to get outraged by labels but when you strip them away and look at the actual politics it’s all pretty middling. Which is a large part of why he won.
His actual policies aren't that radical to be honest. Yeah the subsidized grocery store idea is one thing, but making busses free or telling hedge fund centibillionaires that it might be a good thing for American capitalism long term if they paid another 2-5 million dollars in tax isn't exactly the workers taking complete ownership of the factories.
For all intents and purposes, he's a milquetoast centrist who wants his city to be a bit better, and thinks it could be a bit better by doing things like making transportation cheaper.
You don't see him advocating for firebombing the NYSE or arresting Met Gala attendees.
And fuck, he's trying. God forbid someone care about their constituents, or their own city. Nope, let's smear him for not kowtowing to a country on the other side of the planet. Eric Adams just wanted to line his own pockets. Bloomberg wanted to line his own pockets. And now we blast a dude who grew up in NYC who just wants to do some really basic things to try to make life a bit better?
They're different economic philosophies, but most Western countries have a mixed system incorporating elements from both. Voting for Momdani doesn't necessarily mean you want total public ownership of the means of production. His manifesto is only moderately more socialist than the status quo.
No, not at all. Socialism is a reaction to extreme capitalism, and basically a call for socialism today is just saying "capitalism is cool and all, but there needs to be some guardrails so capitalism doesn't eat itself".
People voted for the mayor in NYC because capitalism started to eat itself in NYC, and the non-billionaires who actually make up the vast majority of the city wanted a change.
A simple, and reasonably small increase in taxes on the wealthiest of the wealthiest (who are in NYC because its a world class city and their businesses couldn't really "make it" as easily elsewhere) is not socialism. It's saying to the hedge fund billionaires "hey - we don't appreiciate that you're operating your businesses here yet refusing to help pitch in financially in order to keep our world-class city world-class". If Ken Griffin can afford to drop a quarter billion dollars on an apartment he spends ~25 days a year in, or Bill Ackman wants to continue to hire people educated at Colombia and NYU, they can afford to pay another 2-5 million dollars a year in tax".
> the core tenet of Socialism replacing capitalism
You can say Mamdani is a socialist. You can say the core tenet of socialism is replacing capitalism. But you can't say both. If Mamdani is a socialist, then replacing capitalism is not the core tenet of socialism. If the core tenet of socialism is replacing capitalism, then Mamdani is not a socialist. Those two things do not go together.
I remember a time when entire discussion threads were swiftly culled from HN based on the magnitude of their political content.
These days, it’s pretty clear that the direction matters a lot more than the magnitude, and “flamebait” is only a problem when the flames blow a certain way.
extremely anecdotal but whenever I see a racist on Twitter, there's a non-insignificant likelihood that I click on their profile and see Marc Andreesen following them.
Looking at various discussions, I'd say there's enough to attempt to steer narrations. In some cases users bury comments from such accounts rightfully with downvotes. But it's not just discussions - there are accounts submitting nothing but single-themed content to spread particular themes.
My account isn't that much old but I was lurking around for years and I can say that quality of content and comments has significantly dropped in last 5 years. I'd guess it's because people running away from reddit settled here, because HN serves more generic stuff - with help of notorious spammers who surely get paid for uploading content from big media outlets every few hours.
If there are sock puppets around here they are probably native internet crazies or maybe lazy covert software salesman. Most of the posters just represent the wide variety of opinions on a planet with 8 billion people competing with each other. There isn't much evidence of it and political propagandizing of HN through bots is pointless anyway - most readers have practically no money or power, there aren't that many of them and they aren't trying to coordinate to achieve anything politically interesting.
> The radicalization of, e.g., Marc Andreessen was very useful to some group, so there is no reason they wouldn't try more of the same in this venue.
He's a billionaire. They come pre-radicalised and detached from reality by default. A body don't get to be a billionaire by just going with the flow and not having any particular interest in influencing the world around them.
This place allows throwaway accounts, although it also greentexts them so they're easy to spot, and if they get controversial they tend to get downvoted/flagged. HN basically restricts politics to a narrow drip feed of one or two stories a day, a situation which has advantages and disadvantages.
Whether or not this is true, it's also true that a very popular way to dismiss someone and their beliefs is to insist they're one of these accounts. Happens to me all the time.
Unfortunately, yes there are. This is a interesting demography. But I think there are also cases of genuine stubborn blindness. For example, discussion topics that are critical of political state of things like ICE and the marriage of tech and fascism often get actively flagged.
For some, reality can't fit in their belief systems, and they have to suppress any challenging information. "Everything is fine/Don't make me think".
For others, it is highly inconvenient, because they have a stake in it. I think for something like the YCombinator audience in general it is a hard subject, as the business model seeks to pick out the winners to take it all. The monopolist playbook is so deeply ingrained and normalized, that it cannot face the higher order effects of this modus operandi.
So bots and sockpuppets yes, but I think some of the stupid flagging, the obvious poor argumentation and general context blindness also can be explained as people being unable to adjust their belief systems.
I don't much like MA. I want more from our VCs than the glib one-liner-and-no-thought-beyond-that EdwardSnowdenIsATraitor. Especially if they're going to fund multiple companies
Indeed, this thread is very contentious. Although my top-level post has a lot of upvotes, one of my comments is bouncing up and down. Very strange to me.
Do I agree with your post? No, I think >50% is too high. Do I think you should be downvoted? No, I don't think your comment is in bad faith or inflammatory.
The Herald information comes from ukdefencejournal.
They don't tell us exactly where the information comes from originally, despise talking about the company Cyabra later in another context.
But the Jewish Telegraphic Agency tell us that the information about Iran also comes from Cyabra (1)
Cyabra? The Tel-Aviv based company, with important customers as the USA State Department, informing us about Iran?
As someone who doesn’t use these products (FB, TikTok, Twitter, &c) I think it’s very clearly time to require proof of citizenship and formal ID verification to at least post content.
I’m not suggesting all of the Internet needs to go that way, but for large social media platforms I don’t see why not. You can argue that journalists need anonymity but I’m confident we can find a workaround or solution there.
I understand there’s this hacker spirit of doing things anonymous and I get it, and agree with it, but these platforms are the most mainstream things imaginable and they are way past the point of having gotten out of control.
You can’t have MAGA/Hamas/Iran/Antifa/Russia/Cuba/China/India/Pakistan all participating in shaping public opinion and sowing disinformation without contest. I’m surprised that western countries have been somewhat resilient to all of this BS by and large (nothing is collapsing, just degrading), but for how long?
Maybe they can work out some ZKproofs of ID thing and it becomes more palatable. I know there’s people in the crypto world trying to solve problems like that. At the moment kyc results in private data later being stolen or sold - and buying stolen ids to register is too easy. But maybe oneday we can prove who we are (or prove unique human) without needing to trust the authority of the site owner at the same time
I think that's a good idea for the verification mechanism so we don't expose data unnecessary. But I think it should have to be your literal name, city of residence, place of employment, &c *. on your posts. No hiding. People should know who they're talking to or who they're dealing with. There's some interesting discussion to be had about people who have something to lose moderating their opinion, a group of people who don't care about their reputation attacking people online and offline, &c. but those items can be worked and talked though I think.
Alternatively, if you don't want to do that just don't use the platforms. As someone who doesn't, it sucks that I have to sit here and watch people get radicalized or become confused about reality and then go and affect my daily life with their lunacy. It's annoying.
* I'm open-minded on the details, just using these as examples or discussion items.
https://archive.ph/9ziGM
Makes sense. Russia and friends would seem to have an interest in Scottish independence as it undermines the UK.
It seems to me most social platforms (not just big tech, smaller UGC sections like the BBC) have many puppet accounts that are triggered by certain content.
Anecdotally looking at BBC comment sections of Scottish content, the "highest rated" comments are almost unilaterally pro-British/anti Scottish National Party which deviates a long way from historical voting preferences. The SNP have performed very well in Scottish and Westminster elections and the weakest barometer for them is/was the 45%/55% vote split in the Scottish independence referendum 12 years ago. I think if anyone took a "sentiment score" of what's there vs how people generally think or behave there'd be a large deviance.
More generally, any platform seems to have systemised abuse and this pattern goes all the way back to generic content management systems being abused in the early 2000s.
I do wonder, are these accounts being accessed via proxy? i.e. someone claiming to be from the UK and having a residential IP- if the platform doesn't care about the location of access, maybe start checking for latency?
> Russia and friends would seem to have an interest in Scottish independence as it undermines the UK.
But so do Scottish people.
Presumably only some Scottish people have an interest in undermining the UK? Latest (2024) results from YouGov suggest yes/no is 34/49 to the question 'Should Scotland be an independent country?' [1]
1. https://d3nkl3psvxxpe9.cloudfront.net/documents/Internal_Ind...
More recent results from YouGov (November 2025) put yes/no at 39/41 [1] while other polling companies put yes in the lead [2].
[1] https://ygo-assets-websites-editorial-emea.yougov.net/docume...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_on_Scottish_in...
Out of the 26 polls since the GE, 13 are pro indy 13 aren’t. But it’s worth noting that 9 of the 13 pro-indy polls were commissioned by strongly pro-Indy groups (The National, The Herald, STV News), which seems like it could have some selection bias.
The Herald[1] and STV News (neutral as a broadcaster) are not strong Pro-Indy groups.
The National certainly is.
DOI: Scotsman not in favour of independence.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Herald_(Glasgow)#Political...
I honestly wasn't trying to game my reply, I looked for the latest results on their site and clearly failed at that!
Scotland is part of GB, so the fairly likely Northern Ireland exit will be the big blow to the "UK"
My perspective, is Russia only sees other countries on how they can militarily respond to Russia's intentions.
For Scottish independence- well Adam Smith, David Hume et al set up the modern world. There's a definite Scottish identity. For others in Scotland it's a UK identity and they still identify as Scottish.
Russia's interest in Scottish independence begins and ends with the British nuclear deterrent.
If England want to house American nuclear weapons, they can house them in England. Put them in Harwich or something.
Typically it's US manufacted missiles fitted with UK designed and built warheads.
eg: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trident_(UK_nuclear_programme)
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astraea_(nuclear_warhead)
There are / have been other nuclear warheads and bombs in the UK of both UK and US origin.
> If England want to house American nuclear weapons, they can house them in England
Sure. But the point is they don't. Moving nuclear weapons (and building a new submarine base) is difficult, disruptive and expensive. (Having a non-nuclear power on the same landmass as a geopolitical competitor is also nice. If there is an underlined vision of this millenium shared by the world's great and regional powers, it's that nuclear sovereignty trumps the conventional kind.)
Well, they can pay us rent or something.
Do you want a nuclear weapons site 20 miles from your largest city?
> Do you want a nuclear weapons site 20 miles from your largest city?
If you’re nuking a submarine port you’re nuking other port infrastructure. And if the UK is under strategic nuclear fire, any population center is going to be leveled.
(I understand the NIMBY argument. I don’t want to live next to nuclear weapons more due to accident risk than targeting.) And I understand the non-proliferation one when it worked.)
Specifically HMNB Clyde [0] - it's the only naval base in the UK that can host the Vanguard class nuclear submarines that can launch the Trident.
[0] - https://www.royalnavy.mod.uk/locations-and-operations/bases-...
Moreso when Russia and friends are putting their finger on the scale.
After all it certainly doesn't make economic sense.
Countries aren’t just economies. Scotland was colonized by England and it’s reasonable for them to want to be independent. It’s also reasonable for them to want to remain in the UK. Trying to paint one side as the one Russia supports is an ugly way of treating a decolonization movement.
"Scotland was colonized by England"
That's not really true, it was a union agreed by both sides - hence the name.
The British East India Company’s colonization of India also involved negotiated treaties.
Aren't you a German? (Maybe I am mistaking you for someone else.) If so, I would like to remind you of the German saying „Nicht alles, was hinkt, ist ein Vergleich“.
Your analogy is very, very stretched. One can definitely say that suppression of Highlanders after the defeat of the last Jacobite Uprising was somewhat similar to other British military actions, including those in India, but that was the standard of the day in the 18th century.
Scotland was in no meaningful way "colonized". The local elite kept their power, their property, and got adequate representation in the common British Parliament, which meant real influence over the legislative process and formation of governments.
Can you name any Indian MPs sitting in the Westminster back then and co-determining the next budget and the next Prime Minister? No.
comments on the person of a comment are not allowed on YNews by the guidelines here
... too bad there's no precedent for some part of an island around there uniting with this fancy free trade group of maverick countries!
Yes, a foreign adversary can only really leverage existing stressors. Iran could not really radicalize for an issue which the country was either totally unified on, or else is totally apathetic about.
agit-prop sure loves to try tho
Jade Helm, Obama's tan suit, etc.
most don't stick, which means you need to hammer "real" issues, even if they're only real to 10% of the population or less, e.g. "wedge issues" etc.
Right. You're always going to be able to press on racial tensions, but just try manipulating the mass study of advanced calculus. The latter is just going to be impossible.
Obviously, but how is that relevant in the context here with the Iran internet blackout?
> Russia and friends would seem to have an interest in Scottish independence as it undermines the UK.
Famously, Alex Salmond (at the time, the leader of the Scottish National Party) was given a regular programme on Russia Today. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Alex_Salmond_Show
Say what you want about Scottish independence (its for the Scots to decide), but a break up of the UK would serve Kremlin interests no end.
I actually think that the process around Scottish independence actually demonstrates that the UK is actually relatively sane - a part of the country wanted to consider independence, the government at the time said "OK you can have a referendum", the referendum was held and Scotland voted to stay in the UK.
I was, and still am, a support of Scottish independence but I how the whole thing was handled reflects pretty well on the UK as a whole.
I'll certainly give you that. We have a (reasonably!) healthy democracy in Blighty, despite our grumblings.
Though it's fair to say that had the referendum been held more recently, Russian interference would have been orders of magnitude more severe. I'm not sure what the solution is to protect against such interference. (That is, interference in the worlds democracies, not just ours).
Politics is a bit like the roads in that it depends on manners, trust, mutual respect and a sense of fair play.
That has been called the "Good Chap" theory of government:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%22Good_chap%22_theory
I do believe that if people have good "unofficial" unwritten/unspoken manners and customs, pretty much any official "system" can work. Conversely, if the unofficial stuff is not on point, you'll have all sorts of trouble even with a theoretically good system.
It's like "Thinking Fast and Slow". Fast, unofficial, unconscious part of decisions and actions versus the slow, official, conscious part. The unconscious is more important in many cases.
> I'm not sure what the solution is to protect against such interference. (That is, interference in the worlds democracies, not just ours).
Do to them what they do to us. Make "FAFO" a thing again.
We once upon a time stopped supporting the Russian opposition and it cost us dearly.
As for "what can we do now" - for every attributed or even suspected action of interference by Russia, Ukraine gets handed another few billion dollars worth of ammunition. When something gets attributed to Iran, give some nice toy to Israel. When something gets attributed to China, how about some missiles for Taiwan. We don't need to engage in wars ourselves, but we can put serious impedances against their plans.
The only ones I can't think of a solution are the North Koreans because they're so isolated and have the unique advantage that for anything we do they can shoot ballistics onto South Korea.
Relatively sane just says how bad it is elsewhere, as in we probably wouldn't descend into civil war.
As a fellow Scot, I watched the commentary unfold while I lived in Canada and to me the what would you call it, blatant, slant on things meant the vote would go a particular way. I think it all boiled down to the uncertainty of negotiations with Westminster. Pensioners were scared about their pensions disappearing and whatnot.
All the same, it's true that Scotland runs a deficit much the same as the rest of the UK does, relying on London generated revenue.
That seems to me a stark reality of independence, which some voters were willing to pay. Point being anyway, online algos are readily manipulating opinions and spreading false information.
> I actually think that the process around Scottish independence actually demonstrates that the UK is actually relatively sane - a part of the country wanted to consider independence, the government at the time said "OK you can have a referendum", the referendum was held and Scotland voted to stay in the UK.
You cannot ignore the influence of EU membership, both to the referendum vote for Scottish independence, and post-Brexit attitudes. The Scottish independence referendum was impacted by it becoming clear that an EU membership would not be automatic nor even possible (Spain would veto); Brexit happening means that part of what motivated Scotts to remain in the UK was taken from them (they voted overwhelmingly for the UK to remain in the EU).
Then you had the insane Brexit referendum which was non-binding but considered binding, where the "leave" vote could mean any number of things, and blatant nonsense was allowed to be used as slogans (that famous Boris bus), with the government failing to communicate on what the EU is.
I guess in my world the IndyRef was in the good old days before the breaking of the world that was Brexit.
Many "remain" votes in IndyRef were predicated on the UK remaining in the EU - Brexit was specifically a bait and switch.
Talk of referendum's being "non-binding" is a red herring and a distraction.
The Scottish independence referendum was also non-binding, because that is how things work in the UK.
.. Of course there was a complication in the Scottish case as the Edinburgh Agreement (2012) was necessary to hold it, and the UK government was politically bound to honour the result - but that's the same as the UK brexit vote. All parties were politically bound to honour the result, but not legally bound.
> but a break up of the UK would serve Kremlin interests no end.
Like Brexit did.
The SNP have won a lot of seats through the voting system because the other parties split the non-independence vote. The SNP have never had a majority of votes, even with an overwhelming majority of parliamentary seats.
It has been quite a long time since a Westminster party has won with a vote share of over 50%, and the SNP vote share at Holyrood is higher than those of parties that win Westminster elections. The Westminster electoral system (nb to non-Brits: all the UK constituent bodies run different voting systems for no good reason) delivers majorities at the cost of legitimacy.
which voting system? There's one for Holyrood and one for Westminster.
IIRC it's been a long time since anyone has commanded a >50% of the vote share.
A survey of online posts is usually not representative of a population at large, either within the online community or the society as a whole. There are so many biasing and selection effects at work, even before talking about anything deliberate which is probably also going on.
Usually over-representative of the unemployed, angry, lonely and obsessed
I'd go for "retired, angry, lonely and obsessed"
Edit: I'm 60 in case anyone thinks I'm being ageist
That spells out "ORAL" which is very fitting for a vocal minority.
Presumably BBC comments also contain comments from English people who might not follow the same 45/55 split on Scottish indeoendence as Scottish people do?
>Makes sense. Russia and friends would seem to have an interest in Scottish independence as it undermines the UK.
Do they? Since Independent Scotland is very likely to rejoin EU it seems to me Russia & co would be interested in keeping it on the sinking ship that is post-brexit UK(economy wise).
I don't think that's a given, or even necessarily a strong likelihood. A majority of Scotland's trade is with the rest of the UK, unlike the Brexit situation where a shrinking minority of the UK's trade was with the rest of the EU, the only EU member for which this was the case. Scotland is accustomed to deficit spending and to large subsidies from the rUK, neither of which would be epecially palatable to EU finances.
And while I certainly think it's fair to describe the UK economy as a sinking ship, I also think that blaming that on Brexit is, to put it politely, "starting with your conclusion". UK growth has been higher than France, Germany or Italy since 2016. Brexit has obviously had impacts, but they haven't all been negative (the City in particular has zero enthusiasm to fall back into any EU alignment) and I think the COVID lockdown shambles and the Homerically inept current government have been bigger factors.
I found this a decent recent overview on the common analytical takes, if you're interested: https://julianhjessop.substack.com/p/what-the-nber-gets-wron...
It would disrupt UKs defence (nuclear submarines in particular) and energy (oil fields) both of which currently are primarily based geographically within Scotlands territory. This is classic Russian tactics. Its not about whether Scotland joins EU or stays with UK, or which is economically or politically the best decision - its about seeding chaos and uncertainty within one of Russias largest antagonists.
Scotland would be a net contributor to EU finances as an EU state. Its GDP/capita is very similar to the UK's.
Though its notional deficit would be far higher and break EU rules IIRC (which have been broken numerous times by existing EU states).
Given that a sentiment for independence of Scotland has only really became an actual topic people discuss semi-seriously after the Brexit, I think it is fair to assume that there is a quite high likelihood of it, and there are quite some EU states that get preferential treatment budget wise, no reason to assume that Scotland cannot become that.
Covid has been global, lockdowns have been everywhere, UK is not unique and did not even have the worst of it in terms of lockdown strictness. While "averaged out" UK economy post-brexit/pre-covid might not look that much worse than EU, if you look into specifics the picture gets far uglier with entire economy sectors going bankrupt, all in all it was a spectacular self inflicted damage that will be felt for decades to come, especially now that US is becoming a hostile actor.
> Given that a sentiment for independence of Scotland has only really became an actual topic people discuss semi-seriously after the Brexit
The Scottish independence referendum was in 2014, two years before the Brexit referendum.
And? Sentiment has changed drastically after brexit.
I have lived in UK during the referendum, I remember it vividly, nobody seriously believed that it would actually go through, it seemed THAT absurd.
I am still convinced that brexit is one of the first big wins of Russian meddling campaigns.
An independent Scotland or Wales would have pretty much the same trading relationship with the EU, as England has.
At least for several decades after independence
The level of integration of everything, including trade and supply chains and finance etc, is so big as to be almost total.
In addition, I'm pretty sure that EU would not welcome another hard border with England, it's already waisted far too much time and effort on the issue in Ireland. I'm sure it doesn't want to have to go through that again.
An independent Wales is a non-starter and I say that as a Welshman… Wales is just to reliant on subsidies from London (as is Scotland and the majority of England)
Scotland heavily subsidises England.
That might have been true in the time of peak North Sea oil but it's not true anymore
The EU has not yet set a precedent for allowing breakaway states into full membership, so it's far from a given that an independent Scotland would be able to rejoin the EU.
Scotland is of enormous strategic importance due to its location relative to Russia's naval ports. An independent Scotland with no other backing would have minimal resources to monitor and deter Russian naval activity.
The precedent is now the promise to allow Ukraine into the EU.
I note that if you're looking for a weakly defended EU country reachable from the North Atlantic and quietly relying on the UK defence umbrella without admitting it, Ireland is already there.
That is an interesting precedent. However, Ukraine is not a breakaway state from an existing EU member state (or a state which has been in the EU). There are numerous regions in the EU on a similar path, and none have yet succeeded (including Kosovo, which has been independent since 2008).
I'm also not talking about the defence of Scotland itself, I'm noting that monitoring and curtailing Russian naval activity in the Baltic Sea corridor is of wider strategic importance. If Scotland became unable to do this, Russia would have an easy exit path for naval vessels from its Baltic Sea ports.
In your example, Ireland as an EU member has significantly more access to military resources than otherwise.
I think it'd make the remainder of the UK weaker and more divided if Scotland joined the EU after leaving the UK, so I'd think that serves their interests too.
Yes, but it would make EU stronger, so how does it serve their interests?
If anything it would force UK back into the EU, further strengthening it.
> Since Independent Scotland is very likely to rejoin EU
That is in no way clear because Spain has previously (during the Scottish independence referendum) indicated they would veto such a thing (because they don't want to give Catalonia any ideas or hopes).
But in any case, a Scottish independence would force the UK to find, and invest a lot in, a new base for its nuclear submarines. Scotland is also the most important UK part of GIUK gap, where there is a lot of infrastructure to catch and track Russian assets entering the North Atlantic. UK losing access to that is not good for it nor for the US with their special relationship.
A Scotland in the EU can also create tensions between the UK and the EU, which would also be good for Russia.
Assuming everyone on a BBC comment section is from the UK, that's 90% not Scottish and 10% Scottish
In 2024 the SNP got 30% of the vote, the big unionist parties having more than 2 votes for every 1 nationalist.
The problem with this argument is that it is very simplistic.
And a very simple way of de-legitimising any anti-establishment position, and protecting the status quo.
We can look at independence movements in Europe, Brexit, Trump, republicanism in the UK, any sort of heterodox economic or foreign policy.
Even if you disagree with these positions, it is helpful to you to steelman your position and your arguments. And just dismissing them as Putin's work drops you into a trap. It's arguably one reason why Trump got re-elected. People spent his entire first term assuming he'd be exposed in some complicated Russian plot and put in jail; rather than thinking hard about why he got elected in the first place. Same thing happened to some degree with the Brexit vote.
> Makes sense. Russia and friends would seem to have an interest in Scottish independence as it undermines the UK.
They also strongly support Unionism, because it also undermines the UK.
>‘Jake’ claimed that a “top BBC anchor resigned on air and was immediately detained by security services” and that “crowds have surrounded the residence of the newly appointed ‘Governor General’ imposed by London”.
>Meanwhile, ‘Fiona’ said that “protesters have seized Balmoral Estate” and “International markets are dumping UK assets as images of tanks in Edinburgh go viral”.
>‘Lucy’ claimed that "farmers have used tractors to block the A1 at the English border”, while another account called ‘Kelly’ said that “army trucks are rolling down the Royal Mile. Soldiers in fatigues are guarding the Scottish Parliament”.
Surely the number of Scottish people influenced by accounts making such outlandish claims is exactly zero.
A lot of this stuff doesn't work by changing people's mind on topic X, but rather by saturating the informational environment so that people declare epistemological bankruptcy. For example, one thing that you can quite often hear from a Russian that has been confronted with something unpleasant is "well, who knows what's true". This is usually not a figure of speech, not some kind of washing down of facts, but rather an accurate representation of their mind.
Between being fooled and being uninformed the latter is much more pleasant.
Yes, exactly by grinding people down. Making it exhausting to discern the truth, until it's not worth the energy exertion to do so.
Also perhaps it is not meant to convince Scottish people of anything, but maybe to make English people hostile to Scotland and its people etc
Exactly this. Or just obfuscating the question so much that people give up asking the question.
> but rather by saturating the informational environment so that people declare epistemological bankruptcy.
"never use big words when a smaller one will suffice"
they want to, as Bannon said, "flood the zone". or as RAND Corp calls it, "the Russian Firehose of Falsehood"
This doesn't come close to replacing the meaning of the sentence you're complaining about.
It's quite possible a lot of this stuff just doesn't work, or only has an extremely slight effect. The internet is so full of nonsense, I'm not sure how much effect you can add by tossing some more on the top of the pile.
But, these sorts of bots are fairly cheap to run, and they have time on their side to try a bunch of different ideas.
I've always heard this as "Firehose of misinformation" but Wikipedia tells me it's "falsehood".
Nonetheless... look who innovated on it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firehose_of_falsehood
I hear that sentiment from a lot of right wing friends in US fwiw. IME here it's more a coded speech and / or an escape from difficult conversations. The coded speech part steers it towards general conspiracy topics, which are often a simple way to blanket discard everything "liberal".
An actual example: "What did you think about Bill Gates climate book?" (they'd read it) -> "He was associated with Epstein, he's a creep. I don't trust anything he says". Then, "What do you think about Trumps delaying and denying of Epstein associations" -> "There's so much back and forth, who knows what to believe."
To be clear I think your take is correct, its just I think that if the space were saturated in a direction that were more convenient towards their "team", they won't have much difficulty taking a clear stance.
Maybe it’s not meant to be signal. It’s meant to be noise that makes the signal increasingly hard to distinguish. You get used to there being bullshit and now you can’t tell precisely which unlikely but maybe plausible messages are true. It helps weaken the ability for the target to be able to engage in meaningful discourse.
I hate to admit it but I failed the NPR real vs fake video quiz [1] and it is exactly because of this. There is so much fake noise out there that it is very hard to tell what is true.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2025/11/30/nx-s1-5610951/fake-ai-videos-...
Thanks for sharing this. I got all 4, but none of which were so obvious that I had absolutely no doubt. I had to reason about all of them. And I'm absolutely confident that a LOT of perfectly reasonable people can potentially score zero on this test.
Same. Managed all 4. But the differences are tiny and I'm only 70% confident. Most of my judgement is based on human reactions to a changing situation.
Yeah, I have pretty much stopped analyzing the media itself for cues, and am evaluating the scene and the actors. Are they convincing? The behaviour of the cops in the first video were entirely unconvincing. I didn't consider the video quality, artifacts, lip sync issues, etc.
Thanks for sharing. I am curious which of the four quiz questions you failed—to me they looked relatively easy to tell apart, but I follow the progression of this tech very closely.
Personally, I've mislabeled the one with the animal in the restaurant as AI generated. I might have clicked too quickly because it was looking like the animals trampolines video's. I've not really looked at the timestamps.
I'm generally good at detecting AI generated content but I might have a few false positives. :)
4/4 for me, but probably only because I knew about that tear gas incident, and that snake was way too loud and they don't tend to move like that unless it's sand.
The tear gas was the only one that had me guessing. Knew the video was real, but wasn't sure it wasn't doctored just at the end with the throw. Overall, it read more real than fake, I was just sure they were going to try to "gotcha" me.
It's the firehouse technique. The films of Adam Curtis touch on this, I'd recommend HyperNormalisation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firehose_of_falsehood
The question is, is their purpose to influence scottish people, or iranian people?
It's for the Scottish. It's in Iran's interests for Scotland to become independent because that would enforce change on the United Nations Security Council. The UK ceases to exist and loses its veto, then what happens on the UNSC after that is anyone's guess.
The UK doesn't cease to exist though, it just shrinks. Plus the USSR fragmenting and Russia (as the main constituent part, the nuclear power and the country the independent republics were happy to acknowledge as the continuation of the USSR) becoming the successor state is pretty well-established precedent for what happens when states fragment, whose legitimacy Russia probably doesn't want to contest too strongly...
General disruption in the UK would help the Iranian government a little, but I managed to click on one of the accounts before it was suspended, and its most popular tweets received very interaction (and were pretty banal statements of independence support indistinguishable from stuff thousands of completely normal Scottish people posted) I assume their attempts to seed wilder rumours were low effort and had very little success.
Russia was allowed to inherit the USSR seat on 3 conditions:
- It took on all the sovereign debt from the newly independent nations.
- It relinquished nukes that were left behind in Ukraine.
- The United Nations collectively agreed to it.
I don't think any of those things would happen in the UK's case. But of course it doesn't matter what you or I think. It only matters what _Iran_ thinks will happen if Scotland gains independence.
Russia didn't lose its veto when the USSR collapsed and neither would the UK lose it in such a case. If the UK was in danger of losing its veto it would never allow Scottish independence.
If Russia kept the soviet UNSC seat when the Soviets collapsed then surely the UK keeps its seat if Scotland leaves.
It doesn’t matter whether independence is realized, what Iran wants is more time and effort spent on domestic disagreement, so less is available to support international engagement.
This is a tool of international competition and the U.S. and U.K. have been trying to do it to Iran (and others) for even longer than the reverse.
All that would happen would be Scotland would lose its influence over the veto.
The UK is a lot more then Scotland + England. The Welsh, northern Irish and Isle of Manx would like to have a word with you, to name a few.
The Isle of Man isn't part of the UK?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isle_of_Man
The Isle of Man is not part of the United Kingdom
Apparently X is entirely blocked in Iran unless using a VPN.
Perhaps they mean to influence Iranians who activity circumvent internet restrictions :-)
Doesn't Iran have a literal Complete backout where even starlink is now blocked, I don't think its of any surprise in such case that X is blocked, no?
Not Iranians - what would anyone gain by influencing Iranians' views of Scottish nationalism? My experience has been that people outside the west barely know Scotland exists and are not going to care about it anymore than the average Scot is likely to have strong feelings about Laos.
It may be aimed at Scots but sometimes be done too blatantly so slips into the implausible. It may be aimed at influencing just those prone to conspiracy theories - who might be few but more likely to extreme actions.
As a Scot, I would assume it's an attack on the UK by supporting attempts to break up the UK. That seems credible. Who's behind it, is speculative.
If their objective is to damage the UK they can do that without breaking it up. For example, for example by fostering violent Scottish Nationalism, or even just sowing hatred between the Scots and the English, or between Scots who want to remain the UK and those who do not..
Its quite unusual for separatist movements to both remain peaceful themselves, and not to be violent suppressed. Even other western democracies have not managed, nor did one other part of the UK for a long time.
My other nationality is Sri Lankan so I have seen how bad it can get. I do not think that will ever happen in the UK, but even a very small number of sufficiently nasty people can do a great deal of damage.
People leave Iran for UK. The idea is that if UK seems less attractive and stable, fewer people will be strongly inclined to pursue it. It also normalizes chaos at home.
I think there are parallels to draw to how Fox News tried to paint a picture of places in Europe being on fire and overtaken by gangs and radicals years before that became close to actual reality.
We are the target of this propaganda, and I don’t mean the Scottish independence stuff. The US and Israel are jamming the airwaves with anti-Iran propaganda to manufacture consent to attack Iran. Every day we’re being subjected to a ton of this stuff on every channel (including HN).
It’s certainly not working on me, but I fear far too many of us are just taking these stories at face value.
> outlandish claims
I dunno, have you seen US news recently?
tbf the US is a very different place where you'd have to at least double check rumours that the executive hadn't decided that tanks in cities were the best way to address crime in cities.
The UK rumour people probably believe is more likely to be "English police suppress tweets of valued contributors to the Scottish nationalist movement"...
"tanks in cities were the best way to address crime in cities"
Given the amount of tanks the UK has I think it would have to be "tank in city" - mind you tanks have been used in Glasgow! ;-)
https://euppublishingblog.com/2018/10/03/georgesquarebattle/
Or the Ruth Davidson rent-a-tank: https://news.channel4.com/election2015/04/29/update-4401/
(more seriously, let's not forget the deployment of the Parachute Regiment to Northern Ireland, although that was a while ago)
I think last time we had a tank at a protest the protestors had rented it! https://www.vice.com/en/article/yer-das-gone-rogue-guido-faw...
Northern Ireland is a big part of why the UK doesn't think the optics of deploying tanks are a show of strength and doesn't think it comes without a cost...
That's not a tank - looks like an Abbot SPG? ;-)
Interesting! There's also a Wiki article:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_George_Square
They cut the tanks up to make Irn-Bru!
I'm just nervous about you-know-who realising that Scotland is in the Western Hemisphere!
I think these accounts may not be as political as many people think. It has been observed that foreign bot accounts often support both positions on contentious issues.
Maybe they're just Russian cybercriminals chasing impulse likes and follows for the sake of building up their accounts' social currency? Once they've gotten enough real engagement that the algorithm thinks they're real people, they can pivot to something entirely unrelated to the political controversy they pushed. Change name, change style, suddenly the victim follows an account they don't remember but gives interesting advice on crypto investments.
Now, I do certainly believe Russian cybercriminals do work for the government now and then in return for tolerance. But it may be less mustache-twirling chaos farming and more plain old scams.
> Once they've gotten enough real engagement that the algorithm thinks they're real people, they can pivot to something entirely unrelated to the political controversy they pushed. Change name, change style, suddenly the victim follows an account they don't remember but gives interesting advice on crypto investments.
bingo.
you need a trail of real-looking accounts. not just for posting, too, but also to link to, or retweet, or like, etc., in ways that get algorithms to put stuff on the top of a feed.
there may be only one actual account pushing the marketing or propaganda, but you need 5k more to upvote or share -- and those accounts can be just random AI slop or reposts of something. take the top replies of a popular post and shorten it, then post it a day or two later. or repost the most popular generic post of last month, etc.
You don't actually need real looking accounts. Almost all of this stuff is done with the most superficial and obvious accounts.
You don't need any reputation at all because the sites do very little actual work to block literal nation state level information warfare campaigns (because that would cost money and reduce their metrics)
You also don't need any reputation because the real humans who will be boosting your false narrative or "information" are the type that take someone else telling them "No, that's fake because <reason>" to be high quality evidence that it is "The real truth THEY don't want you to know"
Like, these accounts will quite literally only be active from 9-5 Moscow time despite being "In the US", and yet that is apparently not a strong enough signal for companies to target them for review or bans?
"The real truth THEY don't want you to know" works best when it actually is something you don't trust people will judge as BS on their own.
> It has been observed that foreign bot accounts often support both positions on contentious issues.
Absolutely
>Maybe they're just Russian cybercriminals chasing impulse likes and follows for the sake of building up their accounts' social currency?
No, you've misunderstood. Pushing both sides isn't evidence that they aren't literally posting as information warfare. The Kremlin goal is not really any party wins in particular (though they have preferences), but to weaken a country by ensuring it spends more effort on internal struggles.
Both Iran and Russia (as well as many other nations) have known information warfare arms that actively post with the intent of stirring up shit. They really don't try to legitimize those accounts because the don't actually need the con to be hidden, because nobody fucking checks, because microblogging platforms like X are full of people who have self selected to be especially credulous, especially bad at interrogating a source of information for quality, and really really bad at recognizing how many times they have fallen for outright false info.
> Both Iran and Russia (as well as many other nations) have known information warfare arms that actively post with the intent of stirring up shit.
So we have been told. What if these are just repurposed cybercriminals, spammers and fraudsters? To me, it makes perfect sense that fraudsters try to convince their own corrupt authoritarian government, "no, we're spreading chaos and distrust, it's great for our country actually! You should protect us and pay us!" when they don't give a rat's ass whether the "distrust propaganda" is useful or not, they're just pumping their scams.
The thing I'm arguing against is mainly that this thing works and can be stopped with aggressive censorship. I don't think that's true even if Putin and co. totally buy into the "spreading distrust" narrative. It wouldn't be the first time our spooks and their spooks agreed on a bizarre view of the world.
It's all stochastic.
The goal is to get that one lunatic to do something, that sets off the response which drains resources and makes the powers at be less nimble.
We live in a world of subtle war.
> Surely the number of Scottish people influenced by accounts making such outlandish claims is exactly zero.
But perhaps they influence American foreign policy.
I’m certain that a key pillar of Russian propaganda in the USA is to repeat the horseshit that Europe is some degenerate shithole/caliphate arresting people left right and centre for tweeting. See also the US’s total obsession with London and its supposed “no go zone” for white people. The irony is that the US is far less white than Europe is, so they really cannot point fingers at us. It’s worked fantastically at separating the US from all of its allies. We saw that at the Munich security conference last year.
In reality we are their closest and truest friends and yet they’re relentlessly shitting all over us, even threatening to invade now. The only comfort is that the USA will inevitably reap what it is sowing.
A lot of the racist and islamophobic talking points get exported from the US, then they seem to mull around in Europe for a while, and eventually the US right wing points at what the right is saying there (particularly in the UK) and reimports the rhetoric, often as if it's now solid evidence.
It happened with anti-vax as well. I remember finding it very striking when I started hearing US anti-vaxxers refer to "the jab" in 2020. That's a term we never used in American English.
Yeah this is one conspiracy I believe. There's this narrative at the moment that the UK is some dystopian hellhole where you'll get arrested for basically anything you post online. It's very pervasive to the point that fairly normal American people I follow online have repeated such things.
Now, the UK has plenty of problems, I do not deny that. But the situation is nothing like it is presented online.
My thinking is that this is meant to make people in the US feel that the rising authoritarianism isn't so bad in relative terms "well the UK is far worse!".
e.g. the 4chan meme about the Yuropean Caliphate, etc. etc.
> "army trucks are rolling down the Royal Mile"
Apart from anything else, where are they rolling 'down' from? The castle? I mean I know it's technically a castle, but it's not like there are a bunch of troops there just waiting to spring on Holyrood, no?
DATELINE 1PM - ARTILLERY FIRE HEARD OVER EDINBURGH
Aka, the one o'clock gun, which locals ignore entirely as it's every single day but always surprises a tourist: https://www.edinburghcastle.scot/see-and-do/highlights/one-o... . There is actually a small barracks on the site as well, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redford_Barracks ; the city as a whole contains a few more barracks for various units, including a signals unit conveniently located near the main telephone exchange.
Redford Barracks is quite a bit out from the centre of Edinburgh - hardly "on the site"?
.. correct, a good old fashioned non-AI mis-googling error. The castle barracks is the "New Barracks", so called because it was built in 1799, and I saw the blocky stonework construction and went "close enough". Sources are a bit vague on how currently used it is. https://edinburghtourist.co.uk/questions/who-lives-edinburgh...
Parts of Edinburgh Castle are still used by the army - I doubt there are many trucks or squaddies based there though:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edinburgh_Castle#Military_role
Yeah, fair point. I was just not sure if they have enough troops to take the parliament in any meaningful sense (not that this stuff should really be taken seriously).
Of course, if there are pipers involved, then everyone better watch out ...
I see Elon and Trump quoting and citing this level of "reporting" as "facts" all the time.
Sadly, the figure isn't zero - I know a few.
Seems totally risible stuff. On Twitter, I've mostly seen this story shared by British nationalist accounts, presumably because they think it tarnishes the cause of Scottish independence by throwing support for it into question.
Having said that, partisan people on social media are always happy to share stuff that they agree with regardless of the source. Presumably these accounts posted less loopy stuff sometimes and got retweets.
You only need look at Musk’s Twitter and right wing media outlets to hear about the U.K’s no go zones for white people — which do not exist. Accounts professing to be from Scottish people are not trying to influence Scottish people, they’re trying to influence Americans into believing that Scotland has already fallen victim to what the fearmongers say is coming for America.
It's part of their government's "Death to England" vision, which they describe as a "policy". Splitting up the UK is part of it. It's ineffective and bizarre, but this insular theocracy has a long track-record of such decision making.
> Surely the number of Scottish people influenced by accounts making such outlandish claims is exactly zero.
There are always some idiots who believe implausible claims. There are plenty of conspiracy theorists around who believe implausible things.
These are also the most extreme posts so there may be more plausible ones.
Surely the number of Scottish people influenced by accounts making such outlandish claims is exactly zero.
The accounts appear to be suspended, so it is true that Scottish people are not being influenced by these accounts.
In fact, the link in the story about tanks in Edinburgh goes nowhere. Combined with the links to suspended accounts, the article almost reads like it was written by a sock puppet...
Important thing to note - UKDefenceJournal only tracks a set of known Iran linked related accounts that could be tracked because of previous Internet blackouts in Iran.
It would be interesting to see how this applies more widely to other sets of content and countries.
From the original UKDJ article:
> The original UK Defence Journal investigation stressed in an editor’s note that “this article does not claim that Scottish independence is a foreign plot, nor does it suggest that support for independence is illegitimate, inauthentic, or driven by anything other than sincere political conviction.”
> The focus, we underlined, was not on genuine activists but on documented attempts by Iranian-linked actors to exploit authentic political debates for their own strategic purposes. Robertson’s reply arguably missed this distinction. The concern raised by analysts was not that independence itself is tainted, but that foreign actors are infiltrating the conversation, seeking to magnify division and undermine trust in democratic processes.
Not a new thing.
"a 2024 study by researchers at Clemson University has estimated that 4% of content relating to independence were linked to one Iranian-backed bot network of around 80 accounts."
Speaking as a Scot, I would expect there are those who support attempts to break up the UK who care zero about Scotland. Who's ultimately behind it is speculative.
It goes without saying that social media is causing irreparable harm to the fabric of our society.
To use an analogy: if the village idiot went to the town square and shouted hate speech, he'd be laughed at or dealt with. Now anyone has a platform to go to the town square, except it's the world, and shout hate speech. And unlike before there will be hateful people, some of them unrecognisable from real people, who will support the village idiot. They will help amplify his voice and validate him and legitimise him.
We have to find a way to stop this. The only thing I can think of is require you to attach your real identity to social media accounts, and regulate the living daylights out of it to hold the networks accountable if their owners don't want to do the right thing. Free speech isn't free.
I agree that social media is a net negative, but want to also point out that before social media it was the mainstream press and TV have been shaping society for decades. Things like buying a used car from Nixon or fighting in Vietnam etc are all mainstream press impact.
I like to think that contrary to this modern idea of media bias that the “mainstream” media as you label it has been a net benefit to society. Journalists used to challenge authority in democracies and bring out truth. It’s a lot more difficult now due to social media polluting the information space.
All together, everyone!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZggCipbiHwE
"This sharing of biased and false news has become all too common on social media"
... say the local TV presenters parroting an identical script from the Sinclair Broadcast Group, which owns or operates 193 TV stations in the USA, covering 40% of US households
You'd be mad to think that consolidated control of information, the endgame of "mainstream" media, is of benefit to society.
"Mainstream" media is financed either directly by very rich individuals, who then use their control of the thing they own (even just by controlling its hiring policies, to give like-minded people a voice) to spam their own agenda on the populace, or a generic money-making enterprise that then deals with less-affluent people who want to spam the populace (advertisers).
And who owns every social media platform, if not a few very rich individuals?
Touche. But you miss that not all social media (e.g. blogs and forums, instant messaging) are "social media platforms".
Also, the trick doesn't work with social media platforms in the same way. Rupert Murdoch bought Myspace, where is it now? He didn't get the same control and power he got when he bought The Times and The Sun and could tell the staff who wrote the content what to say to their passive readers.
The world is not America.
Do you think this doesn't happen in other countries?
Just to give an example from the UK of "state" media, the nominally independent BBC has to answer to a board, and to the regulator Ofcom. But in 2021, Boris Johnson installed Richard Sharp (Tory pary donor, Rishi Sunak's old boss) as the head of the board, and Robbie Gibb (Theresa May's head of communication) as a member, and attempted to rig the selection of the head of Ofcom, even though he's not legally allowed to do that. He still tried it. He "let it be known" he wanted Paul Dacre (former Daily Mail editor) be head of Ofcom. https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/politics/63982/boris-john...
They are all at it, to try and control public opinion and gatekeep what is seen and not seen.
Sure, but on the whole I'd argue outside of tabloids there are still real journalists doing real journalism and trying their best to hold people to account.
The thing is, the internet was supposed to democratise, but it's ended up centralising (and therefore distorting) discourse
A good example is publishing: until relatively recently, books were how most knowledge was distributed, and publishers were able to gatekeep it
Back in the 1990s, one of the promises of the internet, was that it could break this stranglehold. The argument was that instead of 10-ish major publishers, we could have ten billion
What we've ended up with is 5 or so major platforms. Their algorithms now distort, not only the distribution of information, but the production of knowledge itself (click chasing)
An argument I'm sympathetic to, is that the internet hasn't just been a neutral medium, but has actually accelerated this centralisation
The other aspect is the shrinking role of non commercial institutions, like public sector broadcasters, universities, scientific orgs. These entities had their own biases and groupthink. But they added diversity to the media landscape and helped set useful norms
I just want to be able to talk and not be suppressed as hate speech for being critical of Israel.
> To use an analogy: if the village idiot went to the town square and shouted hate speech, he'd be laughed at or dealt with. Now anyone has a platform to go to the town square, except it's the world, and shout hate speech. And unlike before there will be hateful people, some of them unrecognisable from real people, who will support the village idiot. They will help amplify his voice and validate him and legitimise him.
As usual the problem is the commoner idiot, not the group of sociopaths that now have the means to astroturf their agendas efficiently.
Especially puzzling since this submission is about exactly the latter.
> We have to find a way to stop this. The only thing I can think of is require you to attach your real identity to social media accounts, and regulate the living daylights out of it to hold the networks accountable if their owners don't want to do the right thing. Free speech isn't free.
Think harder then.
The village idiot could move and reinvent himself as a respectable fellow. Basically, pre-digital we naturally had different personas; there was no Panopticon that could ever hope to know all our associations. Digital tools have changed that. And inventing the fiction of “one single persona” to tie back to what you said five years ago, ten years ago, thirty years ago, is a terrible idea, and I would argue (based on intuition) very unnatural.
I sometimes wonder how much your own beliefs change consuming some content online even if you consciously disagree with it. Like a slight subconscious erosion that you don't even realise is happening until you have been radicalised. Ironically I think people who are more honest or empathetic might be more susceptible to this as they try and take in other people's view points without crudely dismissing it.
This is 100% a real factor in shaping opinions. Every piece of information we encounter affects us - that's how we're built & how we can learn. But this also makes us easy to influence by consistently repeating lies, like we've seen with the "Flood the zone" technique, as well as basically the whole rise of the right over the last decade. It's all lies and misinformation, but it works because of how we're built & because there are not enough counter operations.
Yes, that's what social media is - a battle ground for nudging opinions.
60% of the internet will disappear if the same would happen in Russia.
US would probably have a large impact as well, of course because lots of internet-users are from the US, but also because the US likes to astroturf as well.
tiny example: https://web.archive.org/web/20160406094911/http://www.reddit..., Most addicted city (over 100k visits total) Eglin Air Force Base, FL
let's not lose ourselves in cold-war propaganda too much and act like russians and chinese are the only ones astroturfing online.
I can confirm that when I blocked a huge swathe of mobile broadband providers in Russia and Israel, something like 95% of the spam on the forum I run stopped instantly.
It seemed like a messy and obvious approach - sign up with a clearly bot-generated gmail account, hit the activation link sent by email an average of 100ms, and immediately post in every thread something along the lines of "WHEN WE'VE FINISHED IN KHARKIV / GAZA WE'LL BRING THE GAS CHAMBERS TO ENGLAND", all in under about ten seconds.
I don't think it's Russians or Israelis behind it, necessarily, but that's where the annoying noise has been coming from.
During the Prigozhin uprising / coup attempt, internet was cut off in parts of Russia, and there was a noticeable slowdown in comments on multiple popular subreddits. I don't know if any studies have been done to evaluate this empirically though
Russia is a waning superpower with a low GDP but a powerful enough internal economy to wage a conventional invasion of a large European country. The US is a much richer country, the leading superpower, and an IT powerhouse. But for some reason the first thing that pops into people’s mind when they hear propaganda bots is “Russia”.
(I would buy China, too. A huge country with a powerful economy.)
That in itself looks like a programmed response.
Of course Russia uses bots and propaganda. But the focus on Russia seems completely out of proportion.
Its hardly surprising as we already know there are people who (for both commercial and political motives) have very fake social media accounts.
This guy claims to have made $300k posting racist content posing as British: https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2025-11-16/kin...
This is why my FB feed is full of misinformation, strawman arguments, sweeping conclusions and no nuance. it does not matter what they are arguing about of which side they are on, the stupidity is constant. Left and right, theists and atheists, pro and anti-immigration. Anything else you can think of. All things I am happy to have an interesting argument about, but what social media offers is engagement bait of one kind or another - from rage bait to feigned ignorance.
Networks were full of this stuff before the bot armies were a glimmer in whoever's eye.
I don't doubt bots are a factor in the sheer volume of it, but human nature on network debates was bad when it was only fairly smart, educated people, and it only got worse as the AOL-to-Facebook pipeline demographic became politicised.
Glinner isn't a bot, just to pick one example of somebody who - irrespective of the merit or not of his argument - simply behaves like an asshole, constantly.
I'm sure regulation would be more complex than "Feeds must be chronological and only what you're explicitly following" - hammer out the details - but yeah, basically, that
It doesn't help matters when the initial founding was less than innocent https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1692122
Ooh, this is a great idea. There’s probably a lot that can be detected by measuring usage drop. I wish the same analysis was attempted in my country.
"At the time, disinformation analysis firm Cyabra claimed that as much as “26% of profiles discussing Scottish independence were fake”.
Unsurprising given there is no true Scotsman.
This made me stop and laugh for a minute.
What we actually have here is a classic case of Yes False Scotsman.
Lots of reasons to be skeptical about this article
- I can’t find any of the accounts
- geolocation feature is hard to crack so they must have been identified as Iranian when this feature was released
- these don’t seem to be high profile accounts
Good job being skeptical, it's a good first instinct to have with any media. However, reading the actual article is a good choice as well.
- They link to several of the accounts (now suspended) in the article. - The geolocation was easily spoofed with a VPN, as stated in the article. - They never claim these account have any significant standing, only that they have "thousands of followers", likely in aggregate.
The news here is that they were previously known to be Iranian-linked. This blackout is further evidence, because they all stopped posting when Iran went offline.
"‘Lucy’ claimed that "farmers have used tractors to block the A1 at the English border”, while another account called ‘Kelly’ said that “army trucks are rolling down the Royal Mile. Soldiers in fatigues are guarding the Scottish Parliament”."
Very convincing stuff. We must fast-track the shutdown of X in the UK to stop this ultra-persuasive disinfo from brainwashing our citizens.
I wonder, when the USA closes down the internet, how many Iranian X accounts will go dark.
I think folks attempting to build a unicorn could just do what nextdoor did -- require a modicum of proof of life -- but for clones of twitter, reddit, etc.
The idea that I might get in a fight with a robot or some state agent on -- gasp -- Hacker News... it makes me want to pull my hair out. I would happily receive a postcard with code once every few years to quasi-prove my location.
Wait until people find out this is true of separatist movements in every country.
Not surprising at all. Wasn't most of pro-Trump content during 2016 election campaign actually generated by some kids in Macedonia who figured out how lucrative fake and sensationalized news can be ?
Social media is increasingly the poison of the society.
I really wish Reddit would turn on a feature to show where the account came from. Of course the troll farms would just use VPNs.
Man if Russia went dark like half of all politics X and Reddit would probably go dark. I bet it would be both ends of the horseshoe.
There is no incentive to implement such a feature. Bots and paid social media workers drive engagement. Also social media sites are designed to avoid any triggers that make users click away (like showing origin flags that would allow a user to easily dismiss a thread as fake). This is the same reason why Youtube removed dislike counts.
10+ years ago I had a job which involved developing/testing geo-restricted software in another country. Eventually each VPN exit point would get marked up as such, and I would have to switch to another.
So if posts were marked with the country of origin or VPN, that might be enough for most people to evaluate the intent of the post.
Of course things have changed. There might not be so many IPv4 addresses around to trade, but IPv6 has probably changed that. And it's probably hard to know how long an address was used by a VPN before being traded back to a telco.
What pockets of reddit do you suspect of being heavily Russia-influenced?
My experience of reddit is that it is wildly anti-Russian since the invasion, sometimes to an almost cartoonish degree (e.g. r/worldnews).
I think Russia did, successfully for quite some time, attempt to direct anger towards the countries supporting Ukraine. Russia would drop a bomb on Ukraine and 90% of the comment section would hate the West for it. The goal was to fuel defeatism and infighting. The latter they encouraged from the start. Reading Reddit, you would have thought Germany had attacked Ukraine from the western flank. In the days and weeks before every major pending Ukraine decision in the US, you could see a noticeable uptick of Russian-friendly talking points. Before the US election, a suspicious amount of Redditors claimed that Trump would give Ukraine more weapons than Biden. These days, they are encouraging the Europe is weak rhetoric. If a toy drone gets spotted somewhere, the only acceptable response is nuking Moscow and EU should disband if they don't dare - that inane take to me is also trolling.
Probably the explicitly anti west left and the racist, fascist, and trad right. The groups you’d want to push to destabilize the West.
I guess one side effect of shutting down the internet is the government troll accounts can no longer post.
It's about half a dozen accounts, it could just be the very strange hobby of a single person in Iran. I don't know why all the other comments are acting like this is evidence of a huge misinformation campaign by Russia.
Because the story itself is part of a propaganda operation, intended to manufacture support for US/Israeli attacks on Iran. And it's working.
On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog. Or a bot. Or an Iranian disinformation agent.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet%2C_nobody_know...
Decades before the internet, in 1948, Linebarger's textbook on Psychological Warfare notes, in its section on propaganda analysis, that:
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/48612/48612-h/48612-h.htm#:~...
> The [STASM] formula works best in the treatment of monitored materials of which the source is known. First point to note is the character of the source. There are several choices on this: the true source (who really got it out?) and the ostensible source (whose name is signed to it?); also, the first-use source (who used it the first time?) and the second-use source (who claims merely to be using it as a quotation?). Take the statement: "Harry said to me, he said, 'I never told anybody that Al's wife was a retired strip-teaser.' Mind you, I don't pretend to believe Harry, but that's what he said, all right." What are the possible true sources for the statement of fact or libel concerning Al's unnamed wife? What are the alternatives on ostensible sources? First use? Second use? The common sense needed to analyze this statement is of the same order as the process involved in analyzing the statement: "Reliable sources in Paris state that the visit of the American labor delegation has produced sensational repercussions in Moscow, and that Moscow, upon the basis of the American attitude, is determined to press for unification of the entire German labor movement."
> It is soon evident that the mere attribution of source is a job of high magnitude.
I'm not sure what we were using 2 watts worth of cerebellum for before sophisticated language, but afterwards source attribution sounds like it'd sure soak up the cycles...
(he also has technical terms for what we now call a "sock puppet")
How many? 3?
> The account, which describes itself as “a proud Scottish lass” and “passionate about Scotland's independence & our right to self-determination”, is based in Europe (according to X’s location data).
I get suspect everytime an online socialist overuses famous socialist terms (or supposed socialist terms) before segueing into a conjunction. “Of course I want the socialist utopia just as much as all of us, comrades, but...”
And the way we all collectively get to utopia is by forcing more money out of people to spend on me talking at fancy dinners
Ahh, quality content on X confirmed once again.
I heard on the grapevine that X is consistently number 1 on the app stores for News content ...
X ... the home of Truth ... and where the team would get rid of bots and bot networks once and for all !!!
Elon ... you're a fucking genius ...
When I read wildly insane comments on a mildly contentious issue here on HN (e.g. as a very mild example, posts on electric cars always draw out someone who needs to state they drive 1000 miles a day and so electric cars will never work for anyone) I wonder how many sock puppets accounts there are here. There must be some. The radicalization of, e.g., Marc Andreessen was very useful to some group, so there is no reason they wouldn't try more of the same in this venue.
When you do the job we do, and spend hours each day looking at the discussions and the data, it becomes fairly easy to spot inauthentic actors on HN. It stands out when newly registered accounts (which appear in green) or older accounts without much posting history, suddenly start posting comments in support of a particular position.
This is another reason why HN's primary purpose – gratifying intellectual curiosity – is so important. Curious conversation is hard to fake. You can't really be inauthentically curious, at least not for long. So the more we can succeed at nudging the community's conduct towards curious conversation, the more it stands out when accounts are acting to promote a particular agenda, and the faster we can weed them out.
I'd like to think HN is generally better at this than most communities, but it's hard to imagine we're immune.
It's also important to remember that (rightly or wrongly) a lot of these culture war issues are really touching a tribalism nerve rather than really touching on the issues themselves. To a lot of people, the EV debate amounts to "those _other_ people trying to force a change on _me_." Mind you, I'm not suggesting this is the right way to look at these sorts issues, but I think that's how it plays out for a lot of people. I had a real-life friend who was very anti-environmentalist, and his view was effectively that it was all made up, and was just an excuse for the left to push things on people.
> I'd like to think HN is generally better at this than most communities, but it's hard to imagine we're immune.
This is a zero-barrier-to-entry forum (not even an email required!) that has the eyes of a people prone to being involved with startups. Why would you think in any way this would be better than an average equivalent? Because you don't personally notice it?
There's little barrier to entry, but for the most part the community does good internal policing. Stupid emotional comments are pushed down, and the worst ones are flagged. (I've had a few moments of weakness here, so I'm not trying to be sanctimonious here)
I see a lot of people who conflate "my opinion, which is the correct opinion just won't fly here, so how can you say the community does a good job of self-policing?" I really don't agree with this. Any community is going to hold some opinions you disagree with, and will hold some bad or even wrong opinions. What I generally (but not always) see is HN upvoting comments that are thoughtful and intelligent, not necessarily ones that I think might be correct.
Partisan tribalism is such an odd phenomenon, and it has a very obvious deranging effect on people. They no longer pay attention to principle or policy. Instead, everything becomes a matter of some vacuous “groupism”. Parties become little jingoist nations unto themselves. Our of weakness, people are unable to maintain a position rooted in honesty and truth, and instead search for some Borg cube to join in order to receive “protection”, as long as they chant the party’s mantras. Very often, it crosses over into cult of personality territory. People make idols of the party and the party leader.
The tragedy of it all is that it completely misses the point. Politics is in service of the common good of the polity. True loyalty is to that common good as an objective good. Loyalty to a party is a false loyalty, as parties are not proper objects of loyalty. They are merely convenient political instruments, not the objects of the good pursued. Things become doubly absurd when this party loyalty remains intact despite a party’s errors.
> it was all made up, and was just an excuse for the left to push things on people
The fact is that environmental issues - like almost any political issue - can be used by any party to push an agenda in parallel to the actual issue. So, here, environmental concerns can be used by any party as a cudgel and an instrument, whether negatively (e.g., painting all environmental concern as subterfuge in order to push through policies aimed at private profit at the expense of quality of life) or positively (e.g., stopping critical projects proposed by a political opponent by commissioning bogus ecological studies to create impediments).
Of course, that’s different than the extreme position that all environmental concern is part of some conspiracy (the Left has its own share of analogous conspiratorial crackpottery).
> I'd like to think HN is generally better at this than most communities, but it's hard to imagine we're immune.
We're much, much worse. "Most communities" are built around consensus. Show up at your Facebook group organized around your favorite hobby and you'll find that everyone has a bunch of similar opinions about most things, and that's the way most people like it. Walk off the reservation and try to pick fights over something controversial and you'll find the community walks away.
That sounds bad, right? What if consensus is wrong? Don't we need free thinkers?!
HN is an enclave of antisocial nerds[1] who think they're smarter than the rest of society. We live for disagreement. Discovering that we disagree with our peers isn't a mark of shame, it's evidence that we've discovered a Magical Great Truth, that our "peers" at HN are all sheep, and that we're therefore smarter than the herd.
Sure, Facebook fishing groups or knitting sites or whatever breed senseless group think. But on the whole "group think" usually works out pretty well and keeps people from wandering off into the scarier weeds of the thoughtscape.
HN? We breed radicals. And therefore we're more susceptible to deliberately radicalizing sockpuppetry, not less.
[1] To wit: we're basically 4chan but with an older demographic and industry cred.
Doesn’t that also create a kind of immunity, though? If what I see is a cacophony of differing views, then I am unlikely to be influenced by any particular sock puppet account.
Whereas a community that tends towards groupthink might have a narrower range of views, but if those views begin to shift in a particular direction then it’s much harder for those who are disadvantaged by that shift to resist, because to do so requires violating the norms of groupthink.
I’m not sure which is better. My own preference is to tolerate a wide range of views in return for robust disagreement being the norm, but I can imagine some (most?) people preferring the opposite.
About your last point, you hit the nail for me. HN is 4chan without the pure chaos, with people talking smartly. Here you can find all the political spectrum (including nazis), but people will try to not be as inflammatory as 4chan users (most of the time, at least). There's no limit to what people will defend here. I don't think that it's something necessarily bad for HN, but it opened my eyes about how tech billionaires are a bunch of HN users that got a lot of power.
Its really ironic that I read the term radicalism in Hackernews as being against tech billionaires and this is the sentiment that I usually see here reasonably (atleast in my opinion)
But your comparison to HN radicalism to equating tech billionaires as HN users themselves flips my whole comment upside down.
I don't know much about the political biases here but I like to think that most people are pro open source and that they dislike the manipulative characteristics deployed by some infamous tech billionaires or those companies. Usually I think that's the case unless of course someone might have a bias themselves I suppose.
That is something we are susceptible to indeed. Our job is to grok complex systems, and that easily leads us to hubris like we can push historians and sociologists away. I think the same can be observed in econometric circles, where I see inevitable complexity arising from human social dynamics, be it historic, cultural, sociological, or religious in nature, often gets ignored.
Don't forget that HN is a cold house for women and young men are much more likely to be radicalised.
I feel like people are radicalizing in Hackernews because partially tech is becoming at forefront of finance for many cycles and this combination of tech and finance [for better or for worse] and they are very predatory for the average person (Crypto scams, AI bubbles and the list goes on)
They are also very sneaky in their predatory nature at times so the average person either doesn't know the extent or doesn't look out for alternatives (Open Source) and other issues
Most people on Hackernews are able to realize predatory nature of Big tech (I think) and are usually very supportive of Open source.
Personally I may be wrong but one of the most common things we can discuss in Hackernews is the extent that big tech or such aspects genuinely harm the average person.
If we try to talk about this nuance or other related topics with friends and family, they suffer from the same issue and as such Hackernews becomes a place where people discuss this more frequently
I don't know if this counts as radicalism but a lot of my political viewpoints stand from that one of the easiest ways to bring as such good points is when country can support Open source and can fight against unethical practices in a fair and square way in general.
> [1] To wit: we're basically 4chan but with an older demographic and industry cred.
Teenager from High school here. 4chan is genuinely a cesspool where trolling is the key purpose. I feel like hackernews is much more on the knowledge side of things so much so that I feel more confident about knowing certain projects or gluing things together and just this make shift attitude of make things work and curiosity with great influence to Hackernews and I cannot be thankful of it enough
Perhaps I try to be more agreeable though and see other person's perspective because I may be wrong I usually am and I think I just get this kick in having an agreeable conversation in the end. I think I can treat hackernews as a book for open source projects which are cool and interesting tidbits. I have found some really really great software which I must not have found if it were not for Hackernews and I am grateful for it
Ooh I got a question
Let's rephrase it this way, What would you prefer more, if your child used HackerNews or used tiktok?
Not being flippant: who _isn't_ radicalizing these days?
I 100% agree and I wanted to write something like this but In the end I chose not to, to point out all the other issues first
The reality of the situation is that in many places like Reddit or even twitter which are radicalized, firstly they become echo chambers and secondly, instead of being radical for bringing change for all people (Think focus on open source but I think its not a radical idea but still) but what ends up happening in those places is that they literally treat each other as another species and the rift grows even further and secondly that they also mostly don't have ideas but rather ideologies to implement.
In this sense, Hackernews is far more effectively radical atleast in my opinion. I must admit that I am a little surprised about the comment of HN being radical because usually, its mostly knowledge based and sure there are some political comments but nobody's forcing somebody to acknowledge those
So in essense, a lot of people are being radicalized, either some just dont know how to approach things or they try to focus absolutely on the us vs them dynamic where the major systemic issues are just not focused on (inequality,poverty etc.)
The world is radicalizing also because its leaders are usually radicalizing it too.
I must admit that the world feels like on the brink of war and no this time its not hyperbole. There are systemic issues in world and instead of addressing them, we are trying to force the focus outside these by all the recent political issues happening and I am not even sure if somethings can be done or the domino has fallen already and I am sure I must not be alone in this when we see massive wars erupt all around the world.
> Not being flippant: who _isn't_ radicalizing these days?
To be deliberately flippant but making a much more serious point than it should be: migrant laborers in the USA.
For the most part they're just honest folk trying to make a buck while a bunch of cosplaying superheroes wander the streets trying to hunt them down.
> Teenager from High school here. 4chan is genuinely a cesspool where trolling is the key purpose.
Middle aged curmudgeon here. And the older I get the more I realize that the hyperliterate technomagical credential flinging you see in the comments here is... basically just trolling. We do it to make ourselves feel smart.
Sure sure, we all want to imagine ourselves geniuses changing the world with the power of our intellect. But that's hard, and most of us settle for getting in a good barb or three in the comments.
Yes, you might be right. Still I feel like there are people who share some genuine info on products and other interesting projects for fun.
I think I can agree with you that perhaps sometimes comments might be getting barbs (first time I heard this phrase, I guess a still lot to learn xD) but also that this behaviour isn't rewarded in the context of an article or anything usually.
Most articles are about coding related software and the pretext around it thus makes comments mostly helpful, or atleast have genuine reasons that one can weigh against
And that behaviour is what's rewarded even in somewhat political posts on HN as compared to something like reddit which might not be helpful in a general stance and especially so in its political posts (or anything related to it)
> drive 1000 miles a day and so electric cars will never work for anyone
Whenever I see one of those I like to post Yong-heum Lee, who really did 500 miles a day in an Ioniq 5: https://www.hyundaimotorgroup.com/en/story/CONT0000000000176...
But as you say, facts are of limited use in debates any more.
> who really did 500 miles a day in an Ioniq 5
To be clear, that's an average of about 500 miles a day, for almost 3 years.
Any site that becomes sufficiently popular will attract sock puppets, shills, paid agitators, paid astroturfers, spammers, scammers, people paid to warm up accounts and to vouch for their alternate accounts, accounts pretending to ask questions with alternate accounts that suggest a solution that they own and operate and many many other shenanigans. There are also no shortages of people that try to influence the thinking of others or trick them into buying something or voting a particular way. Some of them get nullified in /newest by some of us. Some make it through. Some even get massive responses and that is is a chance they are rolling the dice on.
> radicalization of, e.g., Marc Andreessen
Can you share more? I read his book years ago, but haven't heard/read anything since.
He explains their pivot with Ben to GOP in this podcast episode.
The main argument was that democrats policies were detrimental to their business.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_sNclEgQZQ&t=11s
Mr. Andreessen has been involved with high level politics for a long time. This is not "random radicalization". I will not comment on the quality of the politics but it feels fairly deliberate.
Just search and you'll find a million articles about his "dark enlightenment" (or whatever stupid name is used) views. I think "Chatham House" was the name of a private group chat he was in that helped this process along, and there are several articles about this.
Chatham house are famous for the rule that if you're invited, you agree that if you talk about what they talked about in their meetings, you must not say who said it.
Most political manipulation of influential people isn't sophisticated at all, it's 3rd grade bullying level. For instance, getting invited to an exclusive meaning as proof of your importance/"seriousness". Brazen flattery, but it works.
And the secrecy grooms them into betraying outsiders in favor of insiders. It's not such a big betrayal to give cover to powerful people's ugly opinions, but it's a start. And once you've done one bad thing with the gang, you're easier to persuade to do worse things with the gang. Again, really banal stuff.
Remember in Snowden's biography, he mentioned being involved in a plot to get some diplomatic person to drunk drive, so they could swoop in and "help" him. That wasn't just targeted at the diplomat. It was also targeted at rookie CIA agent Ed: first do iffy things with us, so that you have firmly rationalized and justified it to yourself once we ask you to do uglier stuff.
This post really reads like a C.S. Lewis novel - the whole fear of being an outsider and laughed at, and the gradual but slippery slope towards more substantial clearly bad stuff.
Chatham House is openly the sort of "inner ring" Lewis warned about.
To get the topic back more on topic for HN, I think that the fear of AI manipulation of the public is misplaced. Not because it can't be a thing, but because private AI-fueled manipulation will be far more destructive. If you fake a video of some horrific crime and post it on the internet, a thousand people will be examining it for mistakes - and a thousand people will claim mistakes which aren't there, and it'll create a lot of noise and certainly that's not a small problem. But if you fake a video and show it to your super-exclusive private circle and explain to them that of course you must not talk about this for the sake of the victims etc. then it's far less likely the mistakes will be spotted. Our leaders can be radicalized by propaganda we're not even allowed to see - that scares me.
It does sound a lot like the antagonist organization in The Space Trilogy novels...
It's pretty much all laid out on Wikipedia.
He initially supported the Democratic Party but because of crypto and AI he donated millions to super PACs for Trump, supported DOGE and said that children are now being readicalized to hate capitalism as well as directly messaging the Trump administration to put pressure on Universities like NSF, SU and MIT because of DEI or something like that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Andreessen#Political_view...
One can support a party and then change to not supporting a party for a variety of reasons. Such as disagreeing with the direction the party is going, especially locally, or even as simple as eschewing the previously supported party because you are betting the other one will win and need to curry favor.
Sure, but why argue the abstract when we have Andreessen’s views and actions on record?
I haven't studied Andreessen's views and actions, so I was just positing a strategic reason for a change in political support for a high profile person. (as opposed to a drastic change in their thoughts which is what I take to mean as "radicalized")
For example, I have always preferred most of Democrats' positions on the national level, but on the local/state level, especially in California/Oregon/Washington, I disagree with a lot of the Democrat leaders, more and more since 2010 (I would say my views have not changed much, but the party's priorities at the state and local level have).
Of course, I'm nowhere near as influential as Andreessen nor do I have interests that would warrant a say in national politics, but I can see why if one is against local leadership, they would cozy up to someone who they think can help you fight against them, without being "radicalized", per the above definition.
Is he wrong? The mayor of NYC is a socialist elected by young voters.
Yes, because he's basically the only candidate that isn't overtly a crook and/or a lunatic. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46597024
Fair, but it's everywhere. 'Smash capitalism' sent from my iPhone. The billionaire tax that they are already repealing.
It’s only “everywhere” on social media feeds that prioritize content that outrages you.
He’s a “sewer socialist”, his most radical pitch is… making buses free. It’s easy to get outraged by labels but when you strip them away and look at the actual politics it’s all pretty middling. Which is a large part of why he won.
His actual policies aren't that radical to be honest. Yeah the subsidized grocery store idea is one thing, but making busses free or telling hedge fund centibillionaires that it might be a good thing for American capitalism long term if they paid another 2-5 million dollars in tax isn't exactly the workers taking complete ownership of the factories.
For all intents and purposes, he's a milquetoast centrist who wants his city to be a bit better, and thinks it could be a bit better by doing things like making transportation cheaper.
You don't see him advocating for firebombing the NYSE or arresting Met Gala attendees.
And fuck, he's trying. God forbid someone care about their constituents, or their own city. Nope, let's smear him for not kowtowing to a country on the other side of the planet. Eric Adams just wanted to line his own pockets. Bloomberg wanted to line his own pockets. And now we blast a dude who grew up in NYC who just wants to do some really basic things to try to make life a bit better?
How is that related to the claim that "children are now being radicalized to hate capitalism"?
Isn't the core tenet of Socialism replacing capitalism?
They're different economic philosophies, but most Western countries have a mixed system incorporating elements from both. Voting for Momdani doesn't necessarily mean you want total public ownership of the means of production. His manifesto is only moderately more socialist than the status quo.
No, not at all. Socialism is a reaction to extreme capitalism, and basically a call for socialism today is just saying "capitalism is cool and all, but there needs to be some guardrails so capitalism doesn't eat itself".
People voted for the mayor in NYC because capitalism started to eat itself in NYC, and the non-billionaires who actually make up the vast majority of the city wanted a change.
A simple, and reasonably small increase in taxes on the wealthiest of the wealthiest (who are in NYC because its a world class city and their businesses couldn't really "make it" as easily elsewhere) is not socialism. It's saying to the hedge fund billionaires "hey - we don't appreiciate that you're operating your businesses here yet refusing to help pitch in financially in order to keep our world-class city world-class". If Ken Griffin can afford to drop a quarter billion dollars on an apartment he spends ~25 days a year in, or Bill Ackman wants to continue to hire people educated at Colombia and NYU, they can afford to pay another 2-5 million dollars a year in tax".
> The mayor of NYC is a socialist
> the core tenet of Socialism replacing capitalism
You can say Mamdani is a socialist. You can say the core tenet of socialism is replacing capitalism. But you can't say both. If Mamdani is a socialist, then replacing capitalism is not the core tenet of socialism. If the core tenet of socialism is replacing capitalism, then Mamdani is not a socialist. Those two things do not go together.
“Radicalization” to the OP likely means swinging from vaguely left-leaning to right-leaning.
I remember a time when entire discussion threads were swiftly culled from HN based on the magnitude of their political content.
These days, it’s pretty clear that the direction matters a lot more than the magnitude, and “flamebait” is only a problem when the flames blow a certain way.
extremely anecdotal but whenever I see a racist on Twitter, there's a non-insignificant likelihood that I click on their profile and see Marc Andreesen following them.
Looking at various discussions, I'd say there's enough to attempt to steer narrations. In some cases users bury comments from such accounts rightfully with downvotes. But it's not just discussions - there are accounts submitting nothing but single-themed content to spread particular themes.
My account isn't that much old but I was lurking around for years and I can say that quality of content and comments has significantly dropped in last 5 years. I'd guess it's because people running away from reddit settled here, because HN serves more generic stuff - with help of notorious spammers who surely get paid for uploading content from big media outlets every few hours.
If there are sock puppets around here they are probably native internet crazies or maybe lazy covert software salesman. Most of the posters just represent the wide variety of opinions on a planet with 8 billion people competing with each other. There isn't much evidence of it and political propagandizing of HN through bots is pointless anyway - most readers have practically no money or power, there aren't that many of them and they aren't trying to coordinate to achieve anything politically interesting.
> The radicalization of, e.g., Marc Andreessen was very useful to some group, so there is no reason they wouldn't try more of the same in this venue.
He's a billionaire. They come pre-radicalised and detached from reality by default. A body don't get to be a billionaire by just going with the flow and not having any particular interest in influencing the world around them.
This place allows throwaway accounts, although it also greentexts them so they're easy to spot, and if they get controversial they tend to get downvoted/flagged. HN basically restricts politics to a narrow drip feed of one or two stories a day, a situation which has advantages and disadvantages.
Sock puppeting is different from a throwaway account.
Are you? Reveal yourself!
I've been outed! I am but the humble servant of my cat!
Whether or not this is true, it's also true that a very popular way to dismiss someone and their beliefs is to insist they're one of these accounts. Happens to me all the time.
Unfortunately, yes there are. This is a interesting demography. But I think there are also cases of genuine stubborn blindness. For example, discussion topics that are critical of political state of things like ICE and the marriage of tech and fascism often get actively flagged.
For some, reality can't fit in their belief systems, and they have to suppress any challenging information. "Everything is fine/Don't make me think". For others, it is highly inconvenient, because they have a stake in it. I think for something like the YCombinator audience in general it is a hard subject, as the business model seeks to pick out the winners to take it all. The monopolist playbook is so deeply ingrained and normalized, that it cannot face the higher order effects of this modus operandi.
So bots and sockpuppets yes, but I think some of the stupid flagging, the obvious poor argumentation and general context blindness also can be explained as people being unable to adjust their belief systems.
I don't much like MA. I want more from our VCs than the glib one-liner-and-no-thought-beyond-that EdwardSnowdenIsATraitor. Especially if they're going to fund multiple companies
There are likely very very many - to the point that I'm pretty sure >50% of posts I read are sock puppets or agents.
Edit: At this time this is my most heavily downvoted post. I'll leave it up because I think that itself is interesting.
Indeed, this thread is very contentious. Although my top-level post has a lot of upvotes, one of my comments is bouncing up and down. Very strange to me.
Do I agree with your post? No, I think >50% is too high. Do I think you should be downvoted? No, I don't think your comment is in bad faith or inflammatory.
When I refresh this post your thread is either at the very top or bottom, it is odd.
Try saying anything negative about Musk. Instant downvotes.
One man information is another one bot.
The Herald information comes from ukdefencejournal. They don't tell us exactly where the information comes from originally, despise talking about the company Cyabra later in another context.
But the Jewish Telegraphic Agency tell us that the information about Iran also comes from Cyabra (1)
Cyabra? The Tel-Aviv based company, with important customers as the USA State Department, informing us about Iran?
What could possible go wrong?
(1) - https://www.jta.org/2025/07/14/global/when-irans-internet-we...).
Lol, I just about guessed this was what was going on. Anti-Iran influence operations are on an absolute tear right now.
As someone who doesn’t use these products (FB, TikTok, Twitter, &c) I think it’s very clearly time to require proof of citizenship and formal ID verification to at least post content.
I’m not suggesting all of the Internet needs to go that way, but for large social media platforms I don’t see why not. You can argue that journalists need anonymity but I’m confident we can find a workaround or solution there.
I understand there’s this hacker spirit of doing things anonymous and I get it, and agree with it, but these platforms are the most mainstream things imaginable and they are way past the point of having gotten out of control.
You can’t have MAGA/Hamas/Iran/Antifa/Russia/Cuba/China/India/Pakistan all participating in shaping public opinion and sowing disinformation without contest. I’m surprised that western countries have been somewhat resilient to all of this BS by and large (nothing is collapsing, just degrading), but for how long?
Maybe they can work out some ZKproofs of ID thing and it becomes more palatable. I know there’s people in the crypto world trying to solve problems like that. At the moment kyc results in private data later being stolen or sold - and buying stolen ids to register is too easy. But maybe oneday we can prove who we are (or prove unique human) without needing to trust the authority of the site owner at the same time
I think that's a good idea for the verification mechanism so we don't expose data unnecessary. But I think it should have to be your literal name, city of residence, place of employment, &c *. on your posts. No hiding. People should know who they're talking to or who they're dealing with. There's some interesting discussion to be had about people who have something to lose moderating their opinion, a group of people who don't care about their reputation attacking people online and offline, &c. but those items can be worked and talked though I think.
Alternatively, if you don't want to do that just don't use the platforms. As someone who doesn't, it sucks that I have to sit here and watch people get radicalized or become confused about reality and then go and affect my daily life with their lunacy. It's annoying.
* I'm open-minded on the details, just using these as examples or discussion items.
Is that not what this is? This is out of my wheelhouse, so genuine question.
https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/technology/safety-secu...