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The israelis destabilizing democracy and disrupting elections worldwide
- r721 4y agoSummary thread: https://twitter.com/avischarf/status/1625734687875293185 https://twitter.com/avischarf/status/1625734687875293185
- ianai 4y ago“Timed action: When needed, the operator has an army of avatars which can be configured and timed. Thus a huge group is created, who can echo the negative message on all networks” This article is a really interesting, detailed piece on what I suspect many have suspected.
- giantg2 4y agoSeems unlikely to work in the US given that we are already highly polarized and dug in to our positions. It's also hard to tell who is a bot and who is not on most forums discussing politics due to the low quality.
- anigbrowl 4y agoThose are the best possible conditions. Ideologically committed people are easier to manipulate, in my experience.
- ianai 4y agoOne of their examples is from California.
- FredPret 4y agoIf you are right, it's ironic that the dirty information environment is effectively inoculating us against psy-ops
- brookst 4y agoZero trust. Getting there is painful but it seems to be the answer to huge systems with known actors.
- brookst 4y agoI’m not sure it would affect total opinion reversals in the US, but it might serve to radicalize existing opinions in the hopes of inciting violence. It might also help reinforce existing extremism by providing the appearance of unanimity within a subgroup (e.g. pick a random Republican and punish them for an insufficiently extreme view by creating a false consensus that “everyone knows” they are OK with Shakespeare casting men in drag).
- giantg2 4y agoThe out of context and oversensationalized use of a candidate's positions has been used forever. At this point, it could exacerbate the existing opinions, as you point out. My comment was about affecting voting outcomes. I don't see this sort of thing causing people to flip, just digging in more.
- m000 4y agoIt sounds like you consider it as disruption only when people change their vote from A to B? That's only one type of disruption. Reinforcing polarization is also a disruption.
- JumpCrisscross 4y agoAs is fomenting nihilism and thus disengagement.
- giantg2 4y agoTrue, I was talking about negative comments online affecting vote choices. There are other destabilizing things that can work to a degree.
- vinyl7 4y agoI believe all the discord and polarization that has happened over the past 10+ years have been because of psyops. I came to that realization when I read a paper from the CIA about memetics and naturally propagating ideas through a population. Social media makes it extremely easy to do. It could be russia, it could be china...but the goal is to destabilize the US
- giantg2 4y agoI'm not sure that all of it is. I know there has been some. One of the biggest known examples is Russia playing both sides of the Black Lives Matter, Blue Lives Matter issue to drive violence. My comment was mostly about voting outcomes and not other types of disruption. Following the prior example, the vast majority of people dug into the side they already supported and didn't really affect party choice.
- r721 4y ago>Following the prior example, the vast majority of people dug into the side they already supported and didn't really affect party choice. In case you missed it there was a recent paper on this topic: >Exposure to the Russian Internet Research Agency foreign influence campaign on Twitter in the 2016 US election and its relationship to attitudes and voting behavior https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-35576-9 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-35576-9 Summary thread: https://twitter.com/CSMaP_NYU/status/1612449687218397194 https://twitter.com/CSMaP_NYU/status/1612449687218397194
- HybridCurve 4y agoI'm glad you mentioned this. Everyone should take a bit of time and look through the media they were disseminating to familiarize themselves with what their approach looked like. You can find it here (Sorry, large zip files, but straight from the source): https://democrats-intelligence.house.gov/social-media-content/social-media-advertisements.htm https://democrats-intelligence.house.gov/social-media-conten... A lot of this is related to reflexive control theory applied to psyops where you are conditioning a target to respond with anger (negative emotions work best, but any emotional response is valid). The goal being to divide groups and prevent them from establishing a constructive dialogue between themselves and by eliciting predictable (again, often negative) responses to certain stimuli. This allows a malign actor to effectively paralyze a governing body by preventing the two sides from working together to accomplish even the most basic of goals. It's often used in concert with other forms of subversion such as political/legal manipulation and warfare to achieve the desired outcome. RAND and CSIS have a number of good reports and articles on this type of thing if you wish to know more.
- 2Gkashmiri 4y agoI've literally done this myself. I had a specific number of profiles that I was able to leverage them during 2010 and If I remember correctly during 2016 as well. This is not really news in India because you have the current ruling party involved with https://www.bingedaily.in/article/here-s-how-the-bjp-it-cell-creates-twitter-storms-and-fake-news https://www.bingedaily.in/article/here-s-how-the-bjp-it-cell... https://thewire.in/tekfog/en/1.html https://thewire.in/tekfog/en/1.html And this isn't even some secret, it is in the open. Everyone knows it
- slowmovintarget 4y agoThe Wire article has been retracted.
- Pegasus930 4y ago[flagged]
- apnew 4y ago> only seem to export misery. That's rather uncharitable.
- mistrial9 4y agono, you diffuse responsibility with judgement on the collective identity and not particular groups of actors; basic justice principle right?
- sowuttho 4y agoEnablers, just like in the US, are complicit.
- bilqis 4y agoWho are enablers, people who live their daily lives, go to work, have hobbies? What should they do not to be enablers, take a rifle and go die for a fine cause?
- giraffe_lady 4y ago> Who are enablers, people who live their daily lives, go to work, have hobbies? Yes. No one can force you act against you own comfort for the good of other people. But we can at least remind you that you should feel ashamed for it.
- sowuttho 4y ago[dead]
- slowmovintarget 4y agoGreen accounts... Green accounts everywhere!
- 4y ago
- 1MachineElf 4y agoArchive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20230215075835/https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/security-aviation/2022-11-16/ty-article-static-ext/the-israelis-destabilizing-democracy-and-disrupting-elections-worldwide/00000186-461e-d80f-abff-6e9e08b10000 https://web.archive.org/web/20230215075835/https://www.haare...
- erenyeager 4y agoI remember there was a piece about universities in the Uk and collaboration with Mossad agents to suppress pro-Palestine student movements. Additionally, if you’ve heard of the “canary list” it’s a website dedicated to dragging students and activists in the mud by associating them with horrible things. I remember a professor at my university about whom a fake website claiming he sexually harassed a student was created. Of course the claims were false but because he was an advisor for the Palestine club his name was dragged through mud. Since a previous comment chain with sources has disappeared for some reason, I’ve posted sources for further reading here: https://www.aljazeera.com/amp/news/2017/1/11/exclusive-israel-lobby-infiltrates-uk-student-movement https://www.aljazeera.com/amp/news/2017/1/11/exclusive-israe... https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20210602-bbc-sparks-outrage-after-removing-content-following-pressure-from-pro-israel-lobby/amp/ https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20210602-bbc-sparks-outrag... Also see the US anti-boycott laws: https://www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org/2018/07/take-action-stop-unconstitutional-attack-freedom-boycott/amp/ https://www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org/2018/07/take-action-stop... https://www.salon.com/2022/02/02/anti-bds-law-in-texas-free-speech-rights-rules_partner/ https://www.salon.com/2022/02/02/anti-bds-law-in-texas-free-...
- CommanderData 4y agoCan you cite this as it sounds horrible.
- ethotool 4y agoI believe he is referring to this https://canarymission.org/ https://canarymission.org/
- erenyeager 4y agoYes, I’ve sourced some in another comment under my thread but here is some reading on the canary list: https://theintercept.com/2018/11/22/israel-boycott-canary-mission-blacklist/ https://theintercept.com/2018/11/22/israel-boycott-canary-mi... https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2018-10-04/ty-article/.premium/official-documents-prove-israel-bans-young-americans-based-on-canary-mission-site/0000017f-e5c4-df2c-a1ff-ffd5b4150000 https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2018-10-04/ty-article/.p...
- kneebonian 4y ago[flagged]
- eternalban 4y agoTheir operation must have the blessing of Israeli intelligence. Not a word about ops in the home country iirc.
- mschuster91 4y agoYou don't shit where you eat, to put it colloquially - a common tactic employed by bad actors worldwide, I remember reports about malware disabling itself should it detect a Russian keyboard layout way over a decade ago.
- names_are_hard 4y agoThere were a few words about it, actually. TFA mentions that "someone familiar with the matter" told the journalists that a secret Israeli agency once purchased supposedly hacked financial data from Jorge but the data turned out to be useless forgery. Which seems wild to me, that he would try to scam the people who have the most power to stop him. There's also comments from one of the team that seems to indicate that they aren't involved in such shenanigans locally, but they're not pretending it isn't happening. He still votes because he has "faith".
- rutte476 4y agoThis happens in the US all the time. Political consulting groups have been doing this for a very very long time. It's part of the fabric of our society.
- grugagag 4y agoYou just made an HN account to say it’s all fine and dandy? Are you part of this or something similar?
- mikelovenotwar 4y agoFrom TFA :P > Timed action: When needed, the operator has an army of avatars which can be configured and timed. Thus a huge group is created, who can echo the negative message on all networks
- rootusrootus 4y agoA competent bot operator would create the accounts far enough in advance that they wouldn't show up as green. Even so, I wouldn't mind a user preference toggle to hide green posts.
- leo8 4y agoNot fishy at all.
- yieldcrv 4y ago> Some of the activity, Jorge casually admitted, is used to inflate the value of cryptocurrency. I know of some farm operators too and this tracks. Theyll equally do campaigns for or against NGOs, and any political party anywhere. Getting those contracts are lucrative but the crypto ones are faster. Like I would say them approaching a crypto project is top of the funnel. And then as customer relationship they also know everyone is in a country they want to influence.
- gdsdfe 4y agoisn't it amazing that the US is giving them a few billions of dollars in aid every year
- mikelovenotwar 4y agoWhile denying basic health care to American citizens.
- rootusrootus 4y agoGiven that we send something like 4B to Israel, but spend 800B on Medicaid alone, I don't think one has much to do with the other.
- Kukumber 4y agothe US is doing the same, CIA and mossad are working together with the MI6 how do you think they managed to plant all these military bases all around the world?
- AzzieElbab 4y agoReally weird timing. Israel itself is currently in the midst of protests with multiple foreign Jewish orgs involved. There is even a petition to Supreme Court calling it to remove Netanyahu submitted by an Israeli org that would have been considered a foreign agent in the US due its funding
- dilawar 4y agoThis was a sad read.
- skrowl 4y ago[flagged]
- sudosysgen 4y agoThat's completely incorrect. The most common reason is that Jews were refusing to give up their culture and religion, which the authorities saw as destabilising. That's not the fault of the Jews, that's the fault of the authorities being unable to deal with diversity. Your comment is highly antisemitic.
- yakireev 4y ago> The most common reason is that they were intentionally destabilizing their country and/or governments The most common cited reason, you probably wanted to say. Compare: "the most common reason for content removal in Chinese internet is dissemination of fake news" vs "the most common cited reason for content removal in Chinese internet is dissemination of fake news"
- dang 4y agoThat's beyond the pale. I've banned the account. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
- ecommerceguy 4y agoI'm not sure how this is much different than what David Brock / DNC and Shareblue did and still does, or the Isreali army does, or Russia. Sounds like Musk was right when saying Twitter was full of bots. Instagram is easiest to manipulate. Again, nothing ground-breaking here at all.
- ecommerceguy 4y agoFor the downvoters: https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-clinton-digital-trolling-20160506-snap-htmlstory.html https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-clinton-digital-troll... There are literally hundreds of articles about Shareblue and their army of avatars. Not fake news. Very proven.