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If you ever wonder about the extent of Russia's online efforts consider that the comments on this HN thread might be part of things. Not saying anything in her
by actionscripted 6y ago
If you ever wonder about the extent of Russia's online efforts consider that the comments on this HN thread might be part of things.
Not saying anything in here is good/bad/other but you rarely see this level of flagged and down-voted comments in a HN thread.
- creaghpatr 6y agoSeems like that's exactly what you are insinuating.
- osipov 6y agoI'm training a machine learning model that honeypots commenters like you with provocative news articles. Next, the comments section is cleaned up to eliminate commenter spam. It works amazingly well!
- dang 6y agoGood grief. You posted this 7 times. That's obviously abusive and obviously a bannable offense. I'm not going to ban you because I understand how crazy-making it is to represent a minority view and feel surrounded. But please don't do it again. Also, you were posting unsubstantive and flamebait comments more than once before that. Can you please not? We're trying for something better than that here. The idea here is: if you have a substantive point to make, make it thoughtfully; if you don't, please don't comment until you do. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- Razengan 6y ago> you rarely see this level of flagged and down-voted comments in a HN thread. Did you somehow miss all the Apple vs Epic posts over the last few weeks?
- Buwuystai 6y agoSo let's drink to this comrades. I know I do; with all the trucking Russians everywhere. Novojstai! Let's drink buddies. Let's run the planets to the grounds. Davoi!. Let's drink vodka(s). Trucking russians..... EDIT: I literally drink heavily due to the fucking russians. Russia and china should be nuked to the ground. Fucking basic tactics. Fuck these pieces of shits. oh lol Dang is a russian operative. What could be better. My fucking post is flagged already. What could be worse. Fuck this network; ruled by russia and china, it seems. ADIOS. Good win fuckstar communist cockholes.
- chokolad 6y agoEvery comment different from mainstream narrative is downvoted into oblivion. Russia's online effort is seriously strong here /s.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- TheAdamAndChe 6y agoPerhaps, but implications of astroturfing don't really contribute anything to the conversation. If you are worried about astroturfing, you might email hn@ycombinator.com. They're pretty good overall at taking care of this kind of stuff.
- nefitty 6y agoI think it’s helpful to people who might not have otherwise considered the possibility. The idea that there may be propagandists in the comments presumably changes the way a person consumes the thread.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- ogogmad 6y agoI think many Russian people, especially those who watch or read mainly Russian news, hold such views with complete sincerity. The internal propaganda is quite effective.
- sam_lowry_ 6y agoThe events in Belarus recently demonstrated that you are wrong. I ran a small (1 mln pageviews/month) online Russian-speaking community since 2003 and since 2014, my main preoccupation are Kremlin bots. The population in Russia is mostly anti-Putin, they just do not speak up, because the state made sure they feel isolated.
- dilyevsky 6y agoNot a secret russian government spends considerable resources on online astroturfing but there are large constituency of closet (or not so closet) putin supporters even among tech folks of 30yo and older (basically people who were alive and old enough to remember 90s and 80s)
- siliconvalley1 6y agoWhy would you think that there is a large number of Pro-Putin Pro-Political Assassination tech workers? This seems like a ridiculous statement.
- dilyevsky 6y agoIt’s quite anecdotal but my sampling is rather large as I’ve worked with those people over multiple years and still have contacts there. Nobody would admit they approve of this assassination obviously same as mh17 but as long as putin maintains plausible deniability they’d be ok with supporting him
- actuator 6y agoNot that I don't believe you, but how would you back such statement when you say "majority".
- sandworm101 6y agoRussian fanboys, sure. Actual Russian security forces, doubtful. They aren't idiots. They aren't going to pick a fight on HN were things are so easily moderated/downvoted/flagged. The real agents work deep inside their facebook/twitter/whatsapp nests. What we have here are pro-russia but nevertheless amature activists.
- notdang 6y agoI also thought that the security forces aren't idiots. But after seeing this, I have some doubts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Retlia2xT8A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Retlia2xT8A
- bubersson 6y agoIt just takes one nudge here and there. I think the work can be quite subtle and effective even on HN.
- JumpCrisscross 6y ago> Actual Russian security forces, doubtful. They aren't idiots They're not the most competent, either [1]. It's been two decades since Putin first came to power. That sort of cronyism corrodes any bureaucracy. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrey_Lugovoy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrey_Lugovoy
- levleontiev 6y ago>They aren't idiots Petrov and Boshirov with very similar travel documents and a lot of different evidences aren't idiots?
- knolax 6y agoAgain with the blanket accusations of astroturfing without any proof. Crying shill whenever you encounter an opposing opinion is not something a rational and free-thinking person does. What you're basically doing is refusing to engage intellectually on certain viewpoints which just so happen to go against the interests of your home country's government. From the perspective of an outsider, it looks a lot like the result of brainwashing.
- yorwba 6y agoI agree with you in principle, but the way you expressed it reads too much like a personal attack for my taste. I don't think it's a good way to make the discussion more rational after the initial accusation of astroturfing.
- knolax 6y agoAnd accusing fellow commenters of being foreign shills isn't a personal attack?
- yorwba 6y agoOf course it is, but responding to a personal attack with another personal attack doesn't negate the original one, it just adds another on top. If you want to be able to have a calmly rational discussion, you need to be able to resist responding to disruptive comments in kind, otherwise it only takes a single person to derail an entire conversation and ruin it for everyone.
- knolax 6y agoBeing unable to engage with certain viewpoints to the point of bringing up foreign infiltrators every time you see it is a sign of brainwashing. I stated that as calmly as possible. I have received far worse replies on this forum. What really derails the conversation is needlessly tone-policing people. People have a tendency of only doing that to opinions they disagree with; so in practice it's just another way to start a flamewar.
- Zenst 6y agoUntil we have evidence that would carry in a court of law and assign blame at a person/country - divides in opinion will prevail and assigning those divides into categories serves no constructive purpose beyond distract from debate upon the facts.
- WhompingWindows 6y agoJust wondering, do you think it more likely that: A) Russian-sympathetic people post their own sincere views B) Russians for hire in Russia are brought in on all forums/social media C) Russians use bots or non-Russian farms for the B)'s purpose?
- levleontiev 6y agoB. Also it's named "Lahta" by the region where their office is .
- relaxing 6y agoAll of the above? All are well documented.
- dang 6y agoThis comment breaks the site guidelines: "Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Sinister insinuation about astroturfing is the internet's favorite pastime. The overwhelming majority of this, as far as we can tell from countless hours looking at the data, is pure imagination. Is it possible that the manipulation is so sinister and so clever that it leaves no traces we can see in the data, and yet thousands of internet commenters see what we don't? Sure it's possible. But following that path means abandoning evidence. That way leads to the wilderness of mirrors. The only sane way to look at this is to require some evidence, some objective peg of some kind (we'll take anything!) to hang your suspicions on. The presence of opposing viewpoints, downvotes, and flags on divisive issues is no evidence at all. It just means that the community is divided. As far as I can tell, the psychological phenomenon driving this phenomenon is that people are deeply reluctant to take in how wide the range of legitimately opposing views is. We're probably hard-wired to see the world as much smaller than it is. Bring us all, with that hard-wiring, into a community of millions of people on the internet, and the inevitable result is that people see spies, shills, astroturfers, and foreign agents everywhere. No—what you're seeing is that there are a lot of humans with very different backgrounds from yours. And on any issue with an international dimension, multiply that phenomenon by a hundred. I've written about this a zillion times: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix=true&page=0&query=astroturf%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme.... See also https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20wilderness%20of%20mirrors&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... and https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20backgrounds&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... for how often I repeat myself.
- BrianOnHN 6y ago> countless hours looking at the data Will you provide that data for independent review? Edit: it's not that you shouldn't be trusted. The issue is the old “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” For example, what if a large segment of the user base, that regularly contributed extraordinarily positive engagements, existed solely for the opportunities to frame certain conversations, even in the slightest, or even in preparation for something in the distant future.
- throwaway4good 6y agoI doubt what you are seeing is "state-sponsored downvoting". This is just a controversial subject as it is nationalistic and related to US politics in a roundabout way (Russian election meddling in the 2016 election). Besides I really doubt that it matters very much what anyone writes and up/downvotes in an internet forum.