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Yet nothing about the American spam accounts doing the same thing in American politics.
by techntoke 7y ago
Yet nothing about the American spam accounts doing the same thing in American politics.
- account73466 7y agoDear downvoters, please also let us know what you think about it.
- everythingswan 7y agoDid not downvote but the examples included on their transparency page linked from the above article only has example of american-centric propaganda. https://transparency.twitter.com/en/information-operations.html https://transparency.twitter.com/en/information-operations.h...
- account73466 7y agoThanks! Seems like all of them are pro-Trump (I am not his supporter).
- nabla9 7y agoWhataboutism. Story about one thing. But whatabout this. >It is particularly associated with Soviet and Russian propaganda.[4][5][6] When criticisms were leveled at the Soviet Union during the Cold War, the Soviet response would often be "What about..." followed by an event in the Western world https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism
- jessant 7y agoWhataboutism would be to say it is okay for other countries to do it because the US is doing it. It is not whataboutism to say that neither should do it and that the US is getting away with it. Any criticism of the US seems to be met with accusations of whataboutism.
- nabla9 7y agoYou have incorrect understanding of what whataboutism is. Whataboutism attempts to discredit position by charging them with hypocrisy.
- jessant 7y agoThat is not what is happening.
- account73466 7y agoTo understand their echo-chamber one needs to read the mentioned Wikipedia article.
- viridian 7y agoCiting whataboutism is often used as an intellectually soft way to avoid responding to claims of hypocrisy. It's pretty much always used like you are using it nabla, to sidestep a challenge of hypocritical behavior. On balance I think "whataboutism" as a defense waters down discourse and encourages tribal side taking. It's possible for two adversarial entities to actually both be wrong, or right, or engage in parallel behavior, so as a criticism it seems to me like a slight of hand trick to immunize one side against claims of hypocritical behavior.
- AnimalMuppet 7y agoWhat you say is true. And yet, a claim of hypocrisy is also often used to sidestep a charge of indefensible behavior. That, in fact, is what we call "whataboutism". Now, in this particular case, I don't think it is in fact "whataboutism". But I also think the original comment by techntoke: > Yet nothing about the American spam accounts doing the same thing in American politics. is unreasonable. It's just not whataboutism. Why is it unreasonable? Because in American politics, the American spam accounts are run by the Democratic and Republican parties and various PACs. That can certainly be propaganda and disinformation. But it's not state-backed, which is what we're talking about here. State-backed would be the CIA, say, using these techniques to manipulate American politics.
- CharlesColeman 7y ago> Citing whataboutism is often used as an intellectually soft way to avoid responding to claims of hypocrisy. It's pretty much always used like you are using it nabla, to sidestep a challenge of hypocritical behavior. No, it isn't. At its core, true whataboutism is an deliberate attempt to distract and derail [1] a thread away from its actual subject with charges of national hypocrisy. Derails of all types are definitely things that need to be resisted, because otherwise we'd exhaust ourselves talking about nothing but Donald Trump and the top 10 most controversial American geopolitical activities. That said, I think there's relatively little true whataboutism, compared to similar derails that are exactly the same in form, except they lack the deliberate intent to derail and distract. [1] https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=derailing%20a%20thread https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=derailing%20...
- dang 7y agoPlease keep canned arguments like "whataboutism" off this site. They're repetitive and never lead anywhere new or interesting. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20whataboutism&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
- 14 7y agoI was also curious about this as when I first looked at the link it said 'state-backed' which immediately put the NSA and the likes in my mind. Then it went into Saudi propaganda. But if we look at even recent HN headlines with the likes of Facebook [1] we can see that political misinformation is a big problem in the US as well and I wonder why this article focuses on the Saudis and not state backed information operations as a general world wide problem. My guess is that people don't consider your average politician buying fake news ads to swing an election to be 'state-backed' where as if the president was caught they would. [1] https://thehill.com/policy/technology/468216-zuckerberg-doubles-down-on-facebook-political-ads-policy-after-twitter-ban https://thehill.com/policy/technology/468216-zuckerberg-doub...
- CharlesColeman 7y ago> ...when I first looked at the link it said 'state-backed' which immediately put the NSA and the likes in my mind. Then it went into Saudi propaganda. > ...I wonder why this article focuses on the Saudis and not state backed information operations as a general world wide problem. This is an announcement of a specific disclosure of information related to a state-backed influence network from Saudi Arabia. Not all statements and articles about state-backed information operations need to be general, and it's actually very helpful to have ones that focus on specific instances.
- swebs 7y agoTwitter is a US based company. We will never see reports regarding CIA or NSA activity because those agencies can simply give Twitter a gag order.
- CharlesColeman 7y agoAlso, the CIA may prefer other techniques than spamming social media. There's no good reason to think they're following the same playbook as the FSB.
- techntoke 7y agoWith what we learned about the NYC FBI and from the recent IG report, why would we not assume that there are political factions within the intelligence agencies abusing their training and tools to try to help a particular candidates?
- CharlesColeman 7y ago> why would we not assume that there are political factions within the intelligence agencies abusing their training and tools to try to help a particular candidates? That has nothing to do with what I said, and is in fact completely orthogonal to it.