10 ms·

Understanding Foreign Interference [pdf]

104 points by physicsgraph 7y ago

buraequete 7y ago
Can't social media enforce a harder stance to eliminate fake accounts? Forcing real info & phone number usage, constant re-validation on suspected accounts, asking real photos, with real IDs, confirmation by others etc.. I think many trolls would simply disappear if their identities are public. Maybe anonymity shouldn't be a thing in social media? Though such enforcements are also not the best, then the tech companies are given too much power. Hard topic, but just asking people to be careful is never going to be enough, so much passion out there, people will reply. Or real discussion will be watered down when real people are called bots.
- joelx 7y ago
  I agree, social media should require validation that you are a real person.
  - buraequete 7y ago
    Most social media platforms I use already do, but maybe not enough, or maybe most can be tricked easily. Another problem is that those platforms do not care at all since they value the # of users, regardless of them being fake or not. Time to time they do these "clean-ups", just to save face it feels like.
- a3n 7y ago
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nymwars https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nymwars There are arguably legitimate reasons not to use your real name online, including "I don't wanna."
  - buraequete 7y ago
    I agree, anonymity is really important online, but for social media, maybe it should not be the case? One can go and be anonymous in different platforms already, and if it is a really big concern, they can just evade social media altogether. Why allow fake account pollution in bigger networks, that are affecting so much of our real life politics today? So much trolling and social engineering are being done through fake accounts, the best solution is a very harsh validation.
    - probably_wrong 7y ago
      Leaving aside the reasons mentioned above about why being anonymous is really important, there's another reason: money. I think it is wildly accepted that major social networks are full of ghost and/or inactive accounts. If companies cracked down on those, everyone would see that their numbers are not accurate and their valuation would take a big hit. Some CEOs would lose their jobs for sure. So it is not in the big networks' self-interest to change that. You could make a network from scratch, were identity is baked in from the start. But who would sign up? If Google+ thought us anything it's that people really hate giving their real names (and rightfully so, IMHO). Sure, some services managed it, but they are not as influential as the big ones. So no new service has the network effects to pull it off, no big network wants to lose money on doing it, and users don't want it.
      - coldcode 7y ago
        There needs to be anonymous accounts on the internet because of safety. However someone you need to be able to derive a system that permits you to validate you are an individual internally to the system, but also allow for anonymity externally. This way the anonymous speaker is protected, but you still know that it is a real person, just not for you to know who. Of course the anonymous person could be a bad actor (whatever you define that to be) but at least its not a bot.
    - missosoup 7y ago
      > One can go and be anonymous in different platforms already, and if it is a really big concern, they can just evade social media altogether. Anonymity is a hard requirement of free speech. Free speech is a hard requirement of democracy. Some topics can only be safely discussed under anonymity. Some opinions can only be expressed anonymously, especially today in the age of outrage cancel culture where angry mobs seek to shut down and de-platform any views they are opposed to. Ultimately, de-platforming anonymous speech is a pretty heavy-handed form of censorship. The tool to combat social media manipulation is education and promotion of critical thinking. Not censorship.
- dmckeon 7y ago
  Perhaps more that the apparent “reality” of an online identity could be correlate-able with opinions expressed by the identity. I would be more interested in posts by a verified identity in a forum on political topics than in those from an unverified identity. On the other hand, in a forum about some fictional work, quality of content would be of more interest. Problems arise when supposedly “real” identities misrepresent their actual identity, location, allegiance, etc. in a context where those things are expected to be trusted, and then abuse that trust.
  - mola 7y ago
    A major problem with this is, that our politicians also use the same inflammatory tatics to gain power. cyber publicists also understand that being inflammatory means more clicks and interactions. So you don't need an actual "enemy" with fake accounts to inflame and degrade the conversation. The current attention economy provides perfect incentives for inflaming the conversation. I think getting rid of fake identities wouldn't matter much. Foreign manipulation only provides more fuel and maybe direct the flames where it's more suitable for the attacker. Anyway, the medium is the message. Social media is just bad for mass communication. Attention economy is bad for meaningful discourse and thus bad for democracy.
- tomohawk 7y ago
  All that does is allow these groups to draw up enemies lists, and then go after the family, livelihood, and reputations of people who support views they disagree with.
- teddyh 7y ago
  > Maybe anonymity shouldn't be a thing […]? I see that it’s time to link to this again: https://geekfeminism.wikia.org/wiki/Who_is_harmed_by_a_%22Real_Names%22_policy%3F https://geekfeminism.wikia.org/wiki/Who_is_harmed_by_a_%22Re... In short: requiring “Real Names” is a really terrible idea.
- GVIrish 7y ago
  I think social media companies can do more to eliminate fake accounts, but I would stop at the point of being too draconian about using real names. What is going to keep coming up as an issue, is how actively social media companies want to police users and content. If you take a hands off approach, trolls and government influence ops will run rampant. But moderating is tricky business and you don't want to become a sort of digital police state. Not to mention that it can be very difficult to combat fake news. Should Twitter and Facebook have fact-checking operations to prevent pernicious fake news from spreading? Consider that in Myanmar, propaganda spread on Facebook contributed to mass killings of Rohingya. Lots of tough problems to tackle.
richmunk567 7y ago
Social media bots are child's play. Here's how foreign interference really works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3lSjXhMUVKE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3lSjXhMUVKE
- DSingularity 7y ago
  This kind of bad-faith civil engagement that poses as grass roots is a bigger threat to progress than misguided opposition. At least you have a hope to convince or guide honest opposition. Groups like AIPAC are unswayable. They exist solely to enable and advance Israeli agenda w.r.t Palestine. The morality or validity of the agenda just doesn't matter. The IDF could commit its biggest crimes yet and the AIPAC lobby is unlikely to lose funding or human resources. Compare that to other groups, like the NRA for instance. The NRA is cracking at its foundation. Who wants to work for them in this climate? Who wants to take their money?
  - devoply 7y ago
    And they are succeeding and can't be stopped because American Jews are a strong part of the political establishment and have strong family and business ties with many other non-Jewish American elites. They whether whole heartedly or due to tribalism support AIPAC unconditionally and it's not going anywhere. And also you are not allowed to point out this fact for being labelled anti-Semitic but as far as I can tell it's more or less true.
- tasubotadas 7y ago
  I've tried watching the video, but this video in itself is so biased. In reality, it attempts to do the same, what Israel is doing in that very video.
  - richmunk567 7y ago
    calling everything you dont like biased without addressing the arguments isnt in the spirit of hacker news
davedx 7y ago
Step 1. Impeach Donald Trump
- farseer 7y ago
  Do you think the gun slinging rural Republicans would take one lying down? Foreign powers would love to see a circus like that.
  - chb 7y ago
    We have the largest standing army in the world. The same people you refer to as taking up arms for an insurrection are the same people who voted for the increasingly exorbitant defense budgets that made such an army possible. The DoD has a vested interest in a stable and orderly society and, in a stroke of irony, would suppress such an insurrection. Why let small bands of rural reactionaries threaten a military-industrial complex that generates tens of trillions of dollars annually?
    - jessaustin 7y ago
      I'm not sure what types of wars USA military is good at winning, because they haven't won a war in my parents' lifetimes, but these definitely don't include "impose unpopular policies on broadly dispersed heavily armed rural population". Never winning wars is no obstacle to blazing through those trillions of dollars you reference, but I imagine that killing voters and their families might constitute such... they'd need to kill these "flyover" voters in some fashion that would appeal to coastal voters enough to inspire deeper political commitment to the continued prosperity of the military-industrial complex. Frankly the whole idea seems too risky for these chickenhawk cowards.
      - djohnston 7y ago
        you can only win a winnable war, obviously. the USA could turn afghanistan into glass if they posed an existential threat, but we keep entering conflicts with no criteria for exit with stateless foes.
moksly 7y ago
What is surprising to me is how poorly prepared western society has been to deal with this, considering we’ve been doing it ourselves for so many years through various NGOs. The EU funds so many pro-democratic programs around the world, many have been especially focused in the Russian influence sphere. How have we been caught so completely off guard when our non-democratic adversaries started doing it to us? /edit I didn't mean to put NGOs trying to spread democracy on par with staterun propaganda, I'm just wondering why noone saw it coming in time for our systems to prepare.
- samdung 7y ago
  One word - "Arrogance". When you do something well, and have been doing it for a long time, you believe you are the best and no one else can do it better than you.
- protomolecule 7y ago
  NGOs are nothing compared to American interference in the 1996 presidential elections in Russia. Yanks to the rescue: The secret story of how American advisers helped Yeltsin win. http://content.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,19960715,00.html http://content.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,19960715,00.html
  - ryacko 7y ago
    https://www.heritage.org/europe/report/russias-meltdown-anatomy-the-imf-failure https://www.heritage.org/europe/report/russias-meltdown-anat... A 1998 report from the Heritage Foundation about how the IMF was giving billions of dollars to Russia for free. >There are anecdotal reports of judges being on retainer to law offices; of judges setting their bribe amount as a percentage of the claim; of lawyers paying for judges' office supplies because the government would not do so. >The courts, moreover, lack the support structures to enforce their decisions and collect fines. Filling the vacuum left by the state, organized crime has come to play a major role in commercial dispute resolution and the enforcement of court rulings. Again, this was an important cause for the low level of foreign and domestic investment, as well as being a contributing factor in capital flight. https://www.economist.com/special/1999/08/26/crime-without-punishment https://www.economist.com/special/1999/08/26/crime-without-p... >The latest money-laundering scandal in New York confirms that the evil of organised crime is woven into Russian life—and that it is starting to infect the rest of the world
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
Hitton 7y ago
I think that blaming Russians for everything is doing more harm than good. Sometimes it's not Russia, sometimes it's just ideological opponents, conspiracy theorists or 4channers who like to watch the world burn, sometimes all of them at the same time (think Pizzagate).
- jessaustin 7y ago
  Pizzagate was so dumb. Just imagine, the possibility that lots of powerful elite dudes would be implicated in a carefully organized long-running practice of pedophilia. So conspiratorial! Definitely not realistic...
  - raxxorrax 7y ago
    It is incredible that Alex Jones was correct in the end. It just refuses to go into my head. And it was also correct about connections to the highest echelons of political power and educational facilities. We should start asking more suggestive questions about that. "Hey Apple? How many children did you get for banning Jones?" Not that I believe he is a particular sane or selfless individual or that anything else he espouses is in any way correct, far from it. But if deplatforming comes to bite them in the ass, I welcome the hit below the belt at this point. Because they deserve it for their own greed. I think we just found the popular whore house for people in high positions who don't take laws too serious. There are a lot of questions unanswered.
  - draw_down 7y ago
    Sure, but what bothers me about it is the pizza thing; that’s actually what’s farfetched about it. Pizza is probably the most popular food in the country, references to it are everywhere. Attributing significance to that is finding patterns in the clouds.
  - mistermann 7y ago
    The Epstein story, and more specifically the official reaction to it, seems to me to have had quite a significant widespread impact on a lot of people's ability to fathom the possibility that organized crime actually is possible, despite widespread popularity of the obviously incorrect "it is literally impossible for that many people to keep quite, lol" meme. I have a feeling though that to make any real difference, it would take several of these in fairly quick succession, but hopefully I'm wrong about that.
vigenutis 7y ago
An interesting thought experiment is to look at all the "for-fun" online communities that you've been a part of. For instance, game forums, enthusiast subreddits, etc., and see how the discussion there varies from discussion on political things. Of course it will be different, but I think I have started to see factionization in the larger online communities that I am a part of. However, it's hard to know whether this is human nature, or something learned from other sources. (For example, a user who visits political subreddits and then takes that attitude to the Hearthstone subreddit.)
nimbius 7y ago
I appreciate how absolutely sophomoric and naive this propaganda is. The US has played this game in Italy, Iran, Guatemala, Brazil, Viet Nam, and Iraq just to name a few of the literally dozens of foreign victims of US coups and regime changes bought about by their "foreign influence." Now the DHS, an agency thats only 17 years old, thinks a pictograph about pizza is going to somehow help bolster Americans from other nations doing the same thing? It wont. This tactic worked for the Tobacco industry in the seventies, it worked for the cola industry in 2006, and it continues to serve diligently for oil and energy companies during climate change. This model of disinformation has also helped spread measles throughout the developed world through the anti-vax movement. The problem is American education. You cannot spend 40 years cutting public education to the bone and turning colleges into profit mills without some sort of brain-drain. We've arrived in 2020 with a nation of citizens that lack the capacity for intelligent argument and critical analysis of ideas. This is also in large part due to the nature of how we get our information, namely as a "bleeds and leads" info-tainment format where our opinions are cultivated as a product of either 0 or 1, red or blue, liberal or conservative. The american opinion is largely an accessory of corporate advertisement in 2019.
- mc32 7y ago
  Presumably Europe funds education better than we do, yet measles are as much a problem there as here. It’s not education. Marin county, one of the best educated counties in the country with high tertiary education, have one of the highest proportions of anti-vaxxers. Misinformation isn’t countered with education. It’s countered with counter propaganda -i.e. it’s not in a facts and figures type of way for you to make up your mind by attentively and discerningly studying data. No, it’s someone else offering ready to eat counter propaganda.
  - dsalso 7y ago
    Furthermore, one has to distinguish education vs schooling. The upper classes always have access to education, the rest might have access to schooling but not education. The reasons for this are old (19th century Prussia) and tied to the origins of public education systems and their ideologues. Just as an example of what is typically taught as schooling, deference to authority (media nowadays). Just consider doctors and vaccines, what makes you think that the doctor received any particularly deep understanding of this topic, it is not like they are any more critical of what they might have read in a textbook than you. Btw, I would have you reconsider your careless use of the word antivaxxers, if anything ask yourself why is it so heavily promoted in media and what biases it carries? Again, I'm not against vaccination, but there is a lot to investigate about the context of how it is carried out. Kinds of conservation chemicals, optimum schedule, frequency and side effects of all this. You will find there is still quite some debate around this from more scientifically minded doctors.
Based_Detroiter 7y ago
Orange Man Bad!
linksnapzz 7y ago
I'm not convinced that "the GRU has access to Facebook!" is a larger internal security concern to the US than the fact that more than a third of the residents of the most populous state could legally be considered citizens of a separate country....
peterkelly 7y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_regime_change_in_Latin_America https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:CIA_activities_in_the_Middle_East https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:CIA_activities_in_the... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:CIA_activities_in_Africa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:CIA_activities_in_Afr... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:CIA_activities_in_Asia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:CIA_activities_in_Asi... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:CIA_activities_in_Russia_and_Europe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:CIA_activities_in_Rus...

104 points by physicsgraph 7y ago

Can't social media enforce a harder stance to eliminate fake accounts? Forcing real info & phone number usage, constant re-validation on suspected accounts, asking real photos, with real IDs, confirmation by others etc.. I think many trolls would simply disappear if their identities are public. Maybe anonymity shouldn't be a thing in social media? Though such enforcements are also not the best, then the tech companies are given too much power. Hard topic, but just asking people to be careful is never going to be enough, so much passion out there, people will reply. Or real discussion will be watered down when real people are called bots.

joelx 7y ago
I agree, social media should require validation that you are a real person.
- buraequete 7y ago
  Most social media platforms I use already do, but maybe not enough, or maybe most can be tricked easily. Another problem is that those platforms do not care at all since they value the # of users, regardless of them being fake or not. Time to time they do these "clean-ups", just to save face it feels like.
a3n 7y ago
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nymwars https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nymwars There are arguably legitimate reasons not to use your real name online, including "I don't wanna."
- buraequete 7y ago
  I agree, anonymity is really important online, but for social media, maybe it should not be the case? One can go and be anonymous in different platforms already, and if it is a really big concern, they can just evade social media altogether. Why allow fake account pollution in bigger networks, that are affecting so much of our real life politics today? So much trolling and social engineering are being done through fake accounts, the best solution is a very harsh validation.
  - probably_wrong 7y ago
    Leaving aside the reasons mentioned above about why being anonymous is really important, there's another reason: money. I think it is wildly accepted that major social networks are full of ghost and/or inactive accounts. If companies cracked down on those, everyone would see that their numbers are not accurate and their valuation would take a big hit. Some CEOs would lose their jobs for sure. So it is not in the big networks' self-interest to change that. You could make a network from scratch, were identity is baked in from the start. But who would sign up? If Google+ thought us anything it's that people really hate giving their real names (and rightfully so, IMHO). Sure, some services managed it, but they are not as influential as the big ones. So no new service has the network effects to pull it off, no big network wants to lose money on doing it, and users don't want it.
    - coldcode 7y ago
      There needs to be anonymous accounts on the internet because of safety. However someone you need to be able to derive a system that permits you to validate you are an individual internally to the system, but also allow for anonymity externally. This way the anonymous speaker is protected, but you still know that it is a real person, just not for you to know who. Of course the anonymous person could be a bad actor (whatever you define that to be) but at least its not a bot.
  - missosoup 7y ago
    > One can go and be anonymous in different platforms already, and if it is a really big concern, they can just evade social media altogether. Anonymity is a hard requirement of free speech. Free speech is a hard requirement of democracy. Some topics can only be safely discussed under anonymity. Some opinions can only be expressed anonymously, especially today in the age of outrage cancel culture where angry mobs seek to shut down and de-platform any views they are opposed to. Ultimately, de-platforming anonymous speech is a pretty heavy-handed form of censorship. The tool to combat social media manipulation is education and promotion of critical thinking. Not censorship.
dmckeon 7y ago
Perhaps more that the apparent “reality” of an online identity could be correlate-able with opinions expressed by the identity. I would be more interested in posts by a verified identity in a forum on political topics than in those from an unverified identity. On the other hand, in a forum about some fictional work, quality of content would be of more interest. Problems arise when supposedly “real” identities misrepresent their actual identity, location, allegiance, etc. in a context where those things are expected to be trusted, and then abuse that trust.
- mola 7y ago
  A major problem with this is, that our politicians also use the same inflammatory tatics to gain power. cyber publicists also understand that being inflammatory means more clicks and interactions. So you don't need an actual "enemy" with fake accounts to inflame and degrade the conversation. The current attention economy provides perfect incentives for inflaming the conversation. I think getting rid of fake identities wouldn't matter much. Foreign manipulation only provides more fuel and maybe direct the flames where it's more suitable for the attacker. Anyway, the medium is the message. Social media is just bad for mass communication. Attention economy is bad for meaningful discourse and thus bad for democracy.
tomohawk 7y ago
All that does is allow these groups to draw up enemies lists, and then go after the family, livelihood, and reputations of people who support views they disagree with.
teddyh 7y ago
> Maybe anonymity shouldn't be a thing […]? I see that it’s time to link to this again: https://geekfeminism.wikia.org/wiki/Who_is_harmed_by_a_%22Real_Names%22_policy%3F https://geekfeminism.wikia.org/wiki/Who_is_harmed_by_a_%22Re... In short: requiring “Real Names” is a really terrible idea.
GVIrish 7y ago
I think social media companies can do more to eliminate fake accounts, but I would stop at the point of being too draconian about using real names. What is going to keep coming up as an issue, is how actively social media companies want to police users and content. If you take a hands off approach, trolls and government influence ops will run rampant. But moderating is tricky business and you don't want to become a sort of digital police state. Not to mention that it can be very difficult to combat fake news. Should Twitter and Facebook have fact-checking operations to prevent pernicious fake news from spreading? Consider that in Myanmar, propaganda spread on Facebook contributed to mass killings of Rohingya. Lots of tough problems to tackle.

richmunk567 7y ago

Social media bots are child's play. Here's how foreign interference really works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3lSjXhMUVKE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3lSjXhMUVKE

DSingularity 7y ago
This kind of bad-faith civil engagement that poses as grass roots is a bigger threat to progress than misguided opposition. At least you have a hope to convince or guide honest opposition. Groups like AIPAC are unswayable. They exist solely to enable and advance Israeli agenda w.r.t Palestine. The morality or validity of the agenda just doesn't matter. The IDF could commit its biggest crimes yet and the AIPAC lobby is unlikely to lose funding or human resources. Compare that to other groups, like the NRA for instance. The NRA is cracking at its foundation. Who wants to work for them in this climate? Who wants to take their money?
- devoply 7y ago
  And they are succeeding and can't be stopped because American Jews are a strong part of the political establishment and have strong family and business ties with many other non-Jewish American elites. They whether whole heartedly or due to tribalism support AIPAC unconditionally and it's not going anywhere. And also you are not allowed to point out this fact for being labelled anti-Semitic but as far as I can tell it's more or less true.
tasubotadas 7y ago
I've tried watching the video, but this video in itself is so biased. In reality, it attempts to do the same, what Israel is doing in that very video.
- richmunk567 7y ago
  calling everything you dont like biased without addressing the arguments isnt in the spirit of hacker news

davedx 7y ago

Step 1. Impeach Donald Trump

farseer 7y ago
Do you think the gun slinging rural Republicans would take one lying down? Foreign powers would love to see a circus like that.
- chb 7y ago
  We have the largest standing army in the world. The same people you refer to as taking up arms for an insurrection are the same people who voted for the increasingly exorbitant defense budgets that made such an army possible. The DoD has a vested interest in a stable and orderly society and, in a stroke of irony, would suppress such an insurrection. Why let small bands of rural reactionaries threaten a military-industrial complex that generates tens of trillions of dollars annually?
  - jessaustin 7y ago
    I'm not sure what types of wars USA military is good at winning, because they haven't won a war in my parents' lifetimes, but these definitely don't include "impose unpopular policies on broadly dispersed heavily armed rural population". Never winning wars is no obstacle to blazing through those trillions of dollars you reference, but I imagine that killing voters and their families might constitute such... they'd need to kill these "flyover" voters in some fashion that would appeal to coastal voters enough to inspire deeper political commitment to the continued prosperity of the military-industrial complex. Frankly the whole idea seems too risky for these chickenhawk cowards.
    - djohnston 7y ago
      you can only win a winnable war, obviously. the USA could turn afghanistan into glass if they posed an existential threat, but we keep entering conflicts with no criteria for exit with stateless foes.

moksly 7y ago

What is surprising to me is how poorly prepared western society has been to deal with this, considering we’ve been doing it ourselves for so many years through various NGOs. The EU funds so many pro-democratic programs around the world, many have been especially focused in the Russian influence sphere. How have we been caught so completely off guard when our non-democratic adversaries started doing it to us? /edit I didn't mean to put NGOs trying to spread democracy on par with staterun propaganda, I'm just wondering why noone saw it coming in time for our systems to prepare.

samdung 7y ago
One word - "Arrogance". When you do something well, and have been doing it for a long time, you believe you are the best and no one else can do it better than you.
protomolecule 7y ago
NGOs are nothing compared to American interference in the 1996 presidential elections in Russia. Yanks to the rescue: The secret story of how American advisers helped Yeltsin win. http://content.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,19960715,00.html http://content.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,19960715,00.html
- ryacko 7y ago
  https://www.heritage.org/europe/report/russias-meltdown-anatomy-the-imf-failure https://www.heritage.org/europe/report/russias-meltdown-anat... A 1998 report from the Heritage Foundation about how the IMF was giving billions of dollars to Russia for free. >There are anecdotal reports of judges being on retainer to law offices; of judges setting their bribe amount as a percentage of the claim; of lawyers paying for judges' office supplies because the government would not do so. >The courts, moreover, lack the support structures to enforce their decisions and collect fines. Filling the vacuum left by the state, organized crime has come to play a major role in commercial dispute resolution and the enforcement of court rulings. Again, this was an important cause for the low level of foreign and domestic investment, as well as being a contributing factor in capital flight. https://www.economist.com/special/1999/08/26/crime-without-punishment https://www.economist.com/special/1999/08/26/crime-without-p... >The latest money-laundering scandal in New York confirms that the evil of organised crime is woven into Russian life—and that it is starting to infect the rest of the world

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

Hitton 7y ago

I think that blaming Russians for everything is doing more harm than good. Sometimes it's not Russia, sometimes it's just ideological opponents, conspiracy theorists or 4channers who like to watch the world burn, sometimes all of them at the same time (think Pizzagate).

jessaustin 7y ago
Pizzagate was so dumb. Just imagine, the possibility that lots of powerful elite dudes would be implicated in a carefully organized long-running practice of pedophilia. So conspiratorial! Definitely not realistic...
- raxxorrax 7y ago
  It is incredible that Alex Jones was correct in the end. It just refuses to go into my head. And it was also correct about connections to the highest echelons of political power and educational facilities. We should start asking more suggestive questions about that. "Hey Apple? How many children did you get for banning Jones?" Not that I believe he is a particular sane or selfless individual or that anything else he espouses is in any way correct, far from it. But if deplatforming comes to bite them in the ass, I welcome the hit below the belt at this point. Because they deserve it for their own greed. I think we just found the popular whore house for people in high positions who don't take laws too serious. There are a lot of questions unanswered.
- draw_down 7y ago
  Sure, but what bothers me about it is the pizza thing; that’s actually what’s farfetched about it. Pizza is probably the most popular food in the country, references to it are everywhere. Attributing significance to that is finding patterns in the clouds.
- mistermann 7y ago
  The Epstein story, and more specifically the official reaction to it, seems to me to have had quite a significant widespread impact on a lot of people's ability to fathom the possibility that organized crime actually is possible, despite widespread popularity of the obviously incorrect "it is literally impossible for that many people to keep quite, lol" meme. I have a feeling though that to make any real difference, it would take several of these in fairly quick succession, but hopefully I'm wrong about that.

vigenutis 7y ago

An interesting thought experiment is to look at all the "for-fun" online communities that you've been a part of. For instance, game forums, enthusiast subreddits, etc., and see how the discussion there varies from discussion on political things. Of course it will be different, but I think I have started to see factionization in the larger online communities that I am a part of. However, it's hard to know whether this is human nature, or something learned from other sources. (For example, a user who visits political subreddits and then takes that attitude to the Hearthstone subreddit.)

nimbius 7y ago

I appreciate how absolutely sophomoric and naive this propaganda is. The US has played this game in Italy, Iran, Guatemala, Brazil, Viet Nam, and Iraq just to name a few of the literally dozens of foreign victims of US coups and regime changes bought about by their "foreign influence." Now the DHS, an agency thats only 17 years old, thinks a pictograph about pizza is going to somehow help bolster Americans from other nations doing the same thing? It wont. This tactic worked for the Tobacco industry in the seventies, it worked for the cola industry in 2006, and it continues to serve diligently for oil and energy companies during climate change. This model of disinformation has also helped spread measles throughout the developed world through the anti-vax movement. The problem is American education. You cannot spend 40 years cutting public education to the bone and turning colleges into profit mills without some sort of brain-drain. We've arrived in 2020 with a nation of citizens that lack the capacity for intelligent argument and critical analysis of ideas. This is also in large part due to the nature of how we get our information, namely as a "bleeds and leads" info-tainment format where our opinions are cultivated as a product of either 0 or 1, red or blue, liberal or conservative. The american opinion is largely an accessory of corporate advertisement in 2019.

mc32 7y ago
Presumably Europe funds education better than we do, yet measles are as much a problem there as here. It’s not education. Marin county, one of the best educated counties in the country with high tertiary education, have one of the highest proportions of anti-vaxxers. Misinformation isn’t countered with education. It’s countered with counter propaganda -i.e. it’s not in a facts and figures type of way for you to make up your mind by attentively and discerningly studying data. No, it’s someone else offering ready to eat counter propaganda.
- dsalso 7y ago
  Furthermore, one has to distinguish education vs schooling. The upper classes always have access to education, the rest might have access to schooling but not education. The reasons for this are old (19th century Prussia) and tied to the origins of public education systems and their ideologues. Just as an example of what is typically taught as schooling, deference to authority (media nowadays). Just consider doctors and vaccines, what makes you think that the doctor received any particularly deep understanding of this topic, it is not like they are any more critical of what they might have read in a textbook than you. Btw, I would have you reconsider your careless use of the word antivaxxers, if anything ask yourself why is it so heavily promoted in media and what biases it carries? Again, I'm not against vaccination, but there is a lot to investigate about the context of how it is carried out. Kinds of conservation chemicals, optimum schedule, frequency and side effects of all this. You will find there is still quite some debate around this from more scientifically minded doctors.

Based_Detroiter 7y ago

Orange Man Bad!

linksnapzz 7y ago

I'm not convinced that "the GRU has access to Facebook!" is a larger internal security concern to the US than the fact that more than a third of the residents of the most populous state could legally be considered citizens of a separate country....

peterkelly 7y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_regime_change_in_Latin_America https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:CIA_activities_in_the_Middle_East https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:CIA_activities_in_the... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:CIA_activities_in_Africa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:CIA_activities_in_Afr... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:CIA_activities_in_Asia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:CIA_activities_in_Asi... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:CIA_activities_in_Russia_and_Europe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:CIA_activities_in_Rus...