6 ms·

The YouTubers who blew the whistle on an anti-vax plot

88 points by lsllc 5y ago

underseacables 5y ago
Discussed earlier. It seems this is an opinion hit piece that is may be inappropriately abusing the upvote system. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27946430 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27946430
- lsllc 5y ago
  Interesting the URL didn't show up in the HN search because the previous submission was apparently flagged. Could you elaborate on your "It seems this is an opinion hit piece that is may be inappropriately abusing the upvote system" comment? How does it "abuse the upvote system"? EDIT: #10 on the front page after ~10 mins, so maybe you are right (although I don't grok the mechanism). EDIT2: After 25 points, 6 comments and 21 mins, it's vanished completely, can't find it anywhere! (and it's currently not flagged) EDIT3: After 33 mins and 39 points it reappeared at #27. Interesting how HN works.
  - detaro 5y ago
    > #10 on the front page after ~10 mins That alone doesn't mean much, the ranking prefers new entries. And if something makes it to anywhere on the front page early, more votes come in and push it up.
  - josephorjoe 5y ago
    yeah would love to see the history of actions on this post.
  - rbanffy 5y ago
    It was dead when I mentioned it in a different discussion (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27949787 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27949787) that may have brought a critical mass here.
- detaro 5y ago
  how is it an "opinion hit piece"? EDIT: did people seriously start the shouting because it got a single-digit number of upvotes in the first minutes? ...
  - Applejinx 5y ago
    We're being watched closely by the same people responsible for the behavior talked about in the article. Hacker News is not an oasis of free thought. It can be managed in its own way: unlike Reddit and Twitter and Facebook you can't just directly use raw power to do it, but you can keep a sharp eye on discourse and be vigilant about stamping out discourse that you don't like. And this is the only way to do it: flag positive interest, and flag anybody saying anything you don't want said. And then accuse them of being a bot army or something. Bot armies don't work on Hacker News, but false flagging does. My assumption is that the threshold for taking action is low enough to be reached by an innocent-looking number of brigaded complaints. This very article from the BBC and its multiple, stifled attempts to show up at all on Hacker News is evidence of this tactic being employed. The conversation around it's lively enough to demonstrate enough seed interest in article discussion, but just try and engage in such discussion. Somebody is stifling this topic through attempts to use the rules of Hacker News against it. Or, 'it's Tuesday'. In other words this is completely normal and to be expected given the conditions the article itself reports on. We're stuck going 'meta' even to talk about the article at all, because the management of such talk is coordinated, effective, and extensive.
    - josephorjoe 5y ago
      > Bot armies don't work on Hacker News, but false flagging does. My assumption is that the threshold for taking action is low enough to be reached by an innocent-looking number of brigaded complaints. I think it is this plus I believe hacker news penalizes 'controversial' discussions, so by ensuring that there are a large number of 'controversial' comments the trolls can kill off discussions they want suppressed.
      - Applejinx 5y ago
        It's their hard luck that to a crowd of curious and intelligent hackers and nerds in the silicon valley and social media programming space, all this is FASCINATING :) I think in many places it'd be possible to get a whole righteous indignation going that could be exploited against itself, but this is Hacker News. We are nerds and super-interested in exactly this sort of thing, to the point that there are rules against obsessively hyper-focussing on it. And so when you try to judo-flip the system, nerds immediately notice the discrepancies, and fixate upon them. And nerds can't always be depended upon to fire up righteous outrage and paint themselves the aggressors: the peculiar detachment of the nerd mind comes into play and the reflexive (exploitable) responses can't always be exploited. Mask-slips like the handling of this article are FASCINATING. It reveals a system behind the story, and the idea that the system pops up in all sorts of places (and has predictable behaviors) is like a puzzle to be solved :)
- Applejinx 5y ago
  Well, it's got my legit upvote because this is an important development, pertinent to modern warfare through manipulating information systems. I've known this was going on for a long time, and know of a number of influencers of various kinds that I'm certain are enemy action. This stuff has been happening and is still happening. This is relevant.
  - josephorjoe 5y ago
    It seems someone really doesn't want this article discussed. I saw it posted last night and the comments were strange and it got killed fast. But it is important and it is time we stopped pretending it isn't. Anonymous entities paying to spread disinformation or even unnecessary confusion about vaccines should be viewed first and foremost as attempting to keep vaccination rates lower in the places where this is happening. And then one should ask "who would want to do this? why?". And one likely won't be far wrong if one assumes the worst.
  - Ntrails 5y ago
    For me some of the problem is how hard it is to find an alternate opinion from another source. Once you click on a shared link, you are down a rabbit hole. Anyone can stick anything up on a blogpost or whatever, but whilst old information (news) sources were supposed to at least provide some manner of breadth in coverage. In theory anyway. Twisting facts is a neat trick, but ensuring people never read anything else is the real magic here imo
    - Applejinx 5y ago
      That's where the entity doing the ensuring, has to step over the line into stuff that will not look good to anybody. Hence this story. This is what goes on. Cries of 'censorship! Stop censoring my right to this pro-disease opinion!' combined with more furtive but heavyhanded censoring of shall we say alternate motivations for the 'censored' opinions that must be, yea must be heard in the free marketplace of ideas. It's not magic. It's dead simple on Reddit and places like that: brigade things with downvotes. On twitter, some voices get such a height of harassment that it's pretty much impossible to continue. Apparently on Hacker News, content gets watched very closely so it can be stifled at birth in natural-looking ways, since raw brigading would likely be too obvious.
astura 5y ago
>Social media platforms have rules that ban not disclosing that content is sponsored. In France and Germany it's also illegal. It's also illegal in the US https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2019/11/ftc-releases-advertising-disclosures-guidance-online-influencers https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2019/11/ftc-r...
- solarkraft 5y ago
  I think it’s illegal basically everywhere.
pelasaco 5y ago
Intriguing.. however I don't believe that spreading FUD about anti-vax will make any country start to buy Sputnik-V..Germany and France didn't buy it in the beginning, and they won't do it now - or at least while it didn't get approved in the respective countries, which Russian is trying pretty hard in Brazil at least.
- detaro 5y ago
  It damages overall trust in the state, which might very well be in someones interest. And also potentially causes downstream political changes. This noise also spreads internationally, so bad press in let's say UK, France and Germany might very well lead to "look, in the places they make those vaccines they don't trust them, why should we have them then?!" in countries where it is an open question.
- jfengel 5y ago
  Russian troll farms appear to be mostly about creating dissension and confusion, rather than turning a profit. It's a more long term strategy without immediate dividends. Or so it seems. It's always hard to tell. But that would make more sense in this case than trying to market their vaccine, and more consistent with past behavior.
  - pelasaco 5y ago
    that I agree with you. Destabilization, confusion specially in France and German, Countries with lower vaccine acceptance among the population. Vaccine now is their "black lives matter" in the sense that it will definitely be used to divide the population. Brazil however has a high vaccine acceptance, around 95% of the population want to be vaccinated, therefore Brazil has a huge market for vaccine (internal market and as distribution hub for south America) and in that case, I see how market their vaccine would make sense, specially now that there is a strong lobby there trying to get it approved by the Brazilian Health Regulatory Agency (Anvisa) https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/brazil-health-regulator-anvisas-technical-staff-recommend-against-importing-2021-04-26/ https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/brazil-health-regulat... https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/brazil-health-regulator-technical-staff-recommend-conditions-any-approval-2021-06-04/ https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/brazil-health-regulat...
guilhas 5y ago
The pressure to vax plot is 1000x worse, celebrities, government people, online influencers... People should make their own decision and not feel pressured either way
- pcbro141 5y ago
  You think being pressured to get the vaccine will have a 1000x worse effect than being pressured to not get the vaccine? Based on what data?
  - guilhas 5y ago
    That is dumb comment, you are talking about the outcome, which we don't know since we are injecting experimental vaccines The post and original comment is just about the pressure to get, or not get, vaccinated, not the outcome
    - pcbro141 5y ago
      We don't know if the vaccine is effective at decreasing the chance of death from covid? Based on what data?
      - guilhas 5y ago
        Another dumb comment. It does decrease the chance of death in the short term, but that is not the outcome since it might get everyone killed next winter or in 3 years with some effect condition caused by the experimental vaccine that we do not comprehend now The outcome is lets says in 10 what is the excess death compared to before we started covid vaccination, or unvaccinated people
        solarkraft 5y ago
        Issues with vaccines are typically caught within months, in the first few trials. No reason this should be different.
mqus 5y ago
The agency searching for the youtubers was not very smart or selective about the youtubers it chose (afaict). At least the first german youtuber that was mentioned is paid by public broadcasting agencies (for producing internet content) and his most prominent channel is called "Mr Wissen2Go"[1] (Wissen=Knowledge), meaning that this is a somewhat respected channel known for high-quality science and informational content without bullshit. Why would someone like that betray his viewers (and burn a view bridges) for a measly 2k Euros? [1]https://www.youtube.com/c/MrWissen2go/about https://www.youtube.com/c/MrWissen2go/about
- solarkraft 5y ago
  > MrWissen2Go Holy shit, that’s hilarious. That channel is not only well known for integrity, they (it‘s multiple channels run by a team now) also recently followed a spam e-mail looking for ghost writers and have made multiple videos on vaccines. That was about the worst place to hit. I wonder how many people they contacted - the number of known cases is so small that it looks like they should’ve selected well.
  - Applejinx 5y ago
    Why would this be the only instance of this behavior? I would call it 'over-reach'. Having done this exact exploit on a wide variety of targets fruitfully, in this case they reach too far and try to get a channel that's unlikely to respond positively. Over-ambition. Or, 'they already got everybody get-able, and had to keep going into more dangerous territory, with entirely predictable results'.
- rbanffy 5y ago
  I now wonder if it could have been deliberate. If the goal is to create confusion and mistrust, that’s one interesting way of doing it.
bArray 5y ago
> Fazze is a part of AdNow, which is a digital marketing company, registered in both Russia and the UK. The BBC reporters attempt to use this as a way of linking the misinformation campaign back to Russia - but this just simply means that Russians happened to have been involved. I'm sure we can find shady people willing to accept money from any source, living in any Country. This in itself is not even remotely close to strong evidence for a Russian-based misinformation campaign. > Omid Nouripour, the foreign policy spokesman for the German Green party has suggested looking to Moscow for the motivation behind the Fazze campaign. > He said: "Bad-mouthing vaccines in the West undermines trust in our democracies and is supposed to increase trust in Russia's vaccines, and there is only one side that benefits and that is the Kremlin." Only one side that benefits? I believe anybody who supports a vaccine other than Pfizer would benefit. China for example would also see a benefit from such a campaign. The UK produces the AstraZeneca vaccine and the ad company is UK based, why aren't we pointing the finger at the UK? There is simply not enough information here to draw the conclusions that they suggest. They started off with a conclusion and worked backwards towards a justification. This is quite irresponsible by the BBC and probably what I would expect from a politician. > "If you want to manipulate public opinion, especially for young people, you don't go to TV" says French YouTuber Léo Grasset. > "Just spend the same money on TikTok creators, YouTube creators. The whole ecosystem is perfectly built for maximum efficiency of disinformation right now." It appears to be true. The irony is, by demonetizing creators for 'misinformation' in their content, creators have now resorted to accepting funding from random private third parties with lots of cash. These platforms have entirely removed themselves from the advertising loop whilst increasing disinformation.

88 points by lsllc 5y ago

Discussed earlier. It seems this is an opinion hit piece that is may be inappropriately abusing the upvote system. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27946430 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27946430

lsllc 5y ago
Interesting the URL didn't show up in the HN search because the previous submission was apparently flagged. Could you elaborate on your "It seems this is an opinion hit piece that is may be inappropriately abusing the upvote system" comment? How does it "abuse the upvote system"? EDIT: #10 on the front page after ~10 mins, so maybe you are right (although I don't grok the mechanism). EDIT2: After 25 points, 6 comments and 21 mins, it's vanished completely, can't find it anywhere! (and it's currently not flagged) EDIT3: After 33 mins and 39 points it reappeared at #27. Interesting how HN works.
- detaro 5y ago
  > #10 on the front page after ~10 mins That alone doesn't mean much, the ranking prefers new entries. And if something makes it to anywhere on the front page early, more votes come in and push it up.
- josephorjoe 5y ago
  yeah would love to see the history of actions on this post.
- rbanffy 5y ago
  It was dead when I mentioned it in a different discussion (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27949787 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27949787) that may have brought a critical mass here.
detaro 5y ago
how is it an "opinion hit piece"? EDIT: did people seriously start the shouting because it got a single-digit number of upvotes in the first minutes? ...
- Applejinx 5y ago
  We're being watched closely by the same people responsible for the behavior talked about in the article. Hacker News is not an oasis of free thought. It can be managed in its own way: unlike Reddit and Twitter and Facebook you can't just directly use raw power to do it, but you can keep a sharp eye on discourse and be vigilant about stamping out discourse that you don't like. And this is the only way to do it: flag positive interest, and flag anybody saying anything you don't want said. And then accuse them of being a bot army or something. Bot armies don't work on Hacker News, but false flagging does. My assumption is that the threshold for taking action is low enough to be reached by an innocent-looking number of brigaded complaints. This very article from the BBC and its multiple, stifled attempts to show up at all on Hacker News is evidence of this tactic being employed. The conversation around it's lively enough to demonstrate enough seed interest in article discussion, but just try and engage in such discussion. Somebody is stifling this topic through attempts to use the rules of Hacker News against it. Or, 'it's Tuesday'. In other words this is completely normal and to be expected given the conditions the article itself reports on. We're stuck going 'meta' even to talk about the article at all, because the management of such talk is coordinated, effective, and extensive.
  - josephorjoe 5y ago
    > Bot armies don't work on Hacker News, but false flagging does. My assumption is that the threshold for taking action is low enough to be reached by an innocent-looking number of brigaded complaints. I think it is this plus I believe hacker news penalizes 'controversial' discussions, so by ensuring that there are a large number of 'controversial' comments the trolls can kill off discussions they want suppressed.
    - Applejinx 5y ago
      It's their hard luck that to a crowd of curious and intelligent hackers and nerds in the silicon valley and social media programming space, all this is FASCINATING :) I think in many places it'd be possible to get a whole righteous indignation going that could be exploited against itself, but this is Hacker News. We are nerds and super-interested in exactly this sort of thing, to the point that there are rules against obsessively hyper-focussing on it. And so when you try to judo-flip the system, nerds immediately notice the discrepancies, and fixate upon them. And nerds can't always be depended upon to fire up righteous outrage and paint themselves the aggressors: the peculiar detachment of the nerd mind comes into play and the reflexive (exploitable) responses can't always be exploited. Mask-slips like the handling of this article are FASCINATING. It reveals a system behind the story, and the idea that the system pops up in all sorts of places (and has predictable behaviors) is like a puzzle to be solved :)
Applejinx 5y ago
Well, it's got my legit upvote because this is an important development, pertinent to modern warfare through manipulating information systems. I've known this was going on for a long time, and know of a number of influencers of various kinds that I'm certain are enemy action. This stuff has been happening and is still happening. This is relevant.
- josephorjoe 5y ago
  It seems someone really doesn't want this article discussed. I saw it posted last night and the comments were strange and it got killed fast. But it is important and it is time we stopped pretending it isn't. Anonymous entities paying to spread disinformation or even unnecessary confusion about vaccines should be viewed first and foremost as attempting to keep vaccination rates lower in the places where this is happening. And then one should ask "who would want to do this? why?". And one likely won't be far wrong if one assumes the worst.
- Ntrails 5y ago
  For me some of the problem is how hard it is to find an alternate opinion from another source. Once you click on a shared link, you are down a rabbit hole. Anyone can stick anything up on a blogpost or whatever, but whilst old information (news) sources were supposed to at least provide some manner of breadth in coverage. In theory anyway. Twisting facts is a neat trick, but ensuring people never read anything else is the real magic here imo
  - Applejinx 5y ago
    That's where the entity doing the ensuring, has to step over the line into stuff that will not look good to anybody. Hence this story. This is what goes on. Cries of 'censorship! Stop censoring my right to this pro-disease opinion!' combined with more furtive but heavyhanded censoring of shall we say alternate motivations for the 'censored' opinions that must be, yea must be heard in the free marketplace of ideas. It's not magic. It's dead simple on Reddit and places like that: brigade things with downvotes. On twitter, some voices get such a height of harassment that it's pretty much impossible to continue. Apparently on Hacker News, content gets watched very closely so it can be stifled at birth in natural-looking ways, since raw brigading would likely be too obvious.

astura 5y ago

>Social media platforms have rules that ban not disclosing that content is sponsored. In France and Germany it's also illegal. It's also illegal in the US https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2019/11/ftc-releases-advertising-disclosures-guidance-online-influencers https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2019/11/ftc-r...

solarkraft 5y ago
I think it’s illegal basically everywhere.

pelasaco 5y ago

Intriguing.. however I don't believe that spreading FUD about anti-vax will make any country start to buy Sputnik-V..Germany and France didn't buy it in the beginning, and they won't do it now - or at least while it didn't get approved in the respective countries, which Russian is trying pretty hard in Brazil at least.

detaro 5y ago
It damages overall trust in the state, which might very well be in someones interest. And also potentially causes downstream political changes. This noise also spreads internationally, so bad press in let's say UK, France and Germany might very well lead to "look, in the places they make those vaccines they don't trust them, why should we have them then?!" in countries where it is an open question.
jfengel 5y ago
Russian troll farms appear to be mostly about creating dissension and confusion, rather than turning a profit. It's a more long term strategy without immediate dividends. Or so it seems. It's always hard to tell. But that would make more sense in this case than trying to market their vaccine, and more consistent with past behavior.
- pelasaco 5y ago
  that I agree with you. Destabilization, confusion specially in France and German, Countries with lower vaccine acceptance among the population. Vaccine now is their "black lives matter" in the sense that it will definitely be used to divide the population. Brazil however has a high vaccine acceptance, around 95% of the population want to be vaccinated, therefore Brazil has a huge market for vaccine (internal market and as distribution hub for south America) and in that case, I see how market their vaccine would make sense, specially now that there is a strong lobby there trying to get it approved by the Brazilian Health Regulatory Agency (Anvisa) https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/brazil-health-regulator-anvisas-technical-staff-recommend-against-importing-2021-04-26/ https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/brazil-health-regulat... https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/brazil-health-regulator-technical-staff-recommend-conditions-any-approval-2021-06-04/ https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/brazil-health-regulat...

guilhas 5y ago

The pressure to vax plot is 1000x worse, celebrities, government people, online influencers... People should make their own decision and not feel pressured either way

pcbro141 5y ago
You think being pressured to get the vaccine will have a 1000x worse effect than being pressured to not get the vaccine? Based on what data?
- guilhas 5y ago
  That is dumb comment, you are talking about the outcome, which we don't know since we are injecting experimental vaccines The post and original comment is just about the pressure to get, or not get, vaccinated, not the outcome
  - pcbro141 5y ago
    We don't know if the vaccine is effective at decreasing the chance of death from covid? Based on what data?
    - guilhas 5y ago
      Another dumb comment. It does decrease the chance of death in the short term, but that is not the outcome since it might get everyone killed next winter or in 3 years with some effect condition caused by the experimental vaccine that we do not comprehend now The outcome is lets says in 10 what is the excess death compared to before we started covid vaccination, or unvaccinated people
      - solarkraft 5y ago
        Issues with vaccines are typically caught within months, in the first few trials. No reason this should be different.

mqus 5y ago

The agency searching for the youtubers was not very smart or selective about the youtubers it chose (afaict). At least the first german youtuber that was mentioned is paid by public broadcasting agencies (for producing internet content) and his most prominent channel is called "Mr Wissen2Go"[1] (Wissen=Knowledge), meaning that this is a somewhat respected channel known for high-quality science and informational content without bullshit. Why would someone like that betray his viewers (and burn a view bridges) for a measly 2k Euros? [1]https://www.youtube.com/c/MrWissen2go/about https://www.youtube.com/c/MrWissen2go/about

solarkraft 5y ago
> MrWissen2Go Holy shit, that’s hilarious. That channel is not only well known for integrity, they (it‘s multiple channels run by a team now) also recently followed a spam e-mail looking for ghost writers and have made multiple videos on vaccines. That was about the worst place to hit. I wonder how many people they contacted - the number of known cases is so small that it looks like they should’ve selected well.
- Applejinx 5y ago
  Why would this be the only instance of this behavior? I would call it 'over-reach'. Having done this exact exploit on a wide variety of targets fruitfully, in this case they reach too far and try to get a channel that's unlikely to respond positively. Over-ambition. Or, 'they already got everybody get-able, and had to keep going into more dangerous territory, with entirely predictable results'.
rbanffy 5y ago
I now wonder if it could have been deliberate. If the goal is to create confusion and mistrust, that’s one interesting way of doing it.

bArray 5y ago

> Fazze is a part of AdNow, which is a digital marketing company, registered in both Russia and the UK. The BBC reporters attempt to use this as a way of linking the misinformation campaign back to Russia - but this just simply means that Russians happened to have been involved. I'm sure we can find shady people willing to accept money from any source, living in any Country. This in itself is not even remotely close to strong evidence for a Russian-based misinformation campaign. > Omid Nouripour, the foreign policy spokesman for the German Green party has suggested looking to Moscow for the motivation behind the Fazze campaign. > He said: "Bad-mouthing vaccines in the West undermines trust in our democracies and is supposed to increase trust in Russia's vaccines, and there is only one side that benefits and that is the Kremlin." Only one side that benefits? I believe anybody who supports a vaccine other than Pfizer would benefit. China for example would also see a benefit from such a campaign. The UK produces the AstraZeneca vaccine and the ad company is UK based, why aren't we pointing the finger at the UK? There is simply not enough information here to draw the conclusions that they suggest. They started off with a conclusion and worked backwards towards a justification. This is quite irresponsible by the BBC and probably what I would expect from a politician. > "If you want to manipulate public opinion, especially for young people, you don't go to TV" says French YouTuber Léo Grasset. > "Just spend the same money on TikTok creators, YouTube creators. The whole ecosystem is perfectly built for maximum efficiency of disinformation right now." It appears to be true. The irony is, by demonetizing creators for 'misinformation' in their content, creators have now resorted to accepting funding from random private third parties with lots of cash. These platforms have entirely removed themselves from the advertising loop whilst increasing disinformation.