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> Russia is corrupt, but they lack the sophistication and resources to apply effective propaganda.
The interesting thing about information warfare is that it d
> Russia is corrupt, but they lack the sophistication and resources to apply effective propaganda.
The interesting thing about information warfare is that it doesn't require sophistication and much resources at all. Set up a bunch of troll farms, pay tech-savvy teenagers to do your dirty work, give them some vague talking points, and let them loose on social media.
If you really want to scale this cheaply, deploy AI instead. Russia might not have those capabilities yet, but China certainly does.
BTW, I'm not picking sides here. Just pointing out that it would be absurd to think Russia or China aren't engaging in this type of warfare. They would actually prefer it, given that they can't compete with traditional physical might.
I have a side. The truth. The most links in this rabbit hole point to the operations of the USA agencies as a whole.
Russia has crumbled in the 90s and now is just starting to wake up.
If I have to measure threat and I am an American, I would ask: How on earth China has developed this enormous economical advantage over all of the world?
Who financed this growth? Who benefited the most? And why, after living through the Cold War, we are heading in a similar direction?
The russian troll factories are pretty well documented by now [2,3,4,5,6]. You seem to deliberately downplay this.
Their boss even famously got killed this year [1].
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Research_Agency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Research_Agency
2: https://edition.cnn.com/2023/02/14/europe/russia-yevgeny-prigozhin-internet-research-agency-intl/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2023/02/14/europe/russia-yevgeny-pri...
3: https://www.severreal.org/a/priznannyy-smi-inoagentom-zhurnalist-bi-bi-si-andrey-zaharov-uehal-iz-rossii/31627984.html https://www.severreal.org/a/priznannyy-smi-inoagentom-zhurna...
4: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/apr/02/putin-kremlin-inside-russian-troll-house https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/apr/02/putin-kremlin-...
5: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/18/world/europe/russia-troll-factory.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/18/world/europe/russia-troll...
6: https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2018/03/15/594062887/some-russians-see-u-s-investigation-into-russian-election-meddling-as-a-soap-ope https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2018/03/15/594062887/...
These are your sources? And please, the leader in information technology and psychology warfare is known to the whole world.
Practically all the listed sources are part of the complex of disinformation.
On the grand scale of things, the troll farms of Russians are a joke.
USA has more than 900 official military bases outside the territory of the country.
Can you imagine the logistics? The agents? The infrastructure supporting this global operation? The budgets?
> These are your sources?
Indeed.
> And please, the leader in information technology and psychology warfare is known to the whole world.
I am not arguing against USA doing psyops. I am simply stating that Russia is, too. You keep downplaying it.
> On the grand scale of things, the troll farms of Russians are a joke.
I disagree. See the linked sources as to why.
> Can you imagine the logistics?
How is that relevant here?
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> Of course, much of the widely shared "Russian troll agency" and other bot-related research was later shown to be total bunk.
Source: a link you posted to HN in 2020 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22223177 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22223177)
> Of course the IRA exists, but its influence is totally irrelevant
Source: you
> Moreover, the whole "foreign disinformation" narrative is simply being used to lay the groundwork for the idea that people cannot self-govern.
Source: you
> How on earth China has developed this enormous economical advantage over all of the world?
It hasn't.
> Who financed this growth?
900 million Chinese people and Deng Xiaoping.
> Who benefited the most?
More or less everyone. But not anymore.
> Russia might not have those capabilities yet
Apparently Russia does (as well as a pretty developed sense of humor and awareness):
https://rumble.com/v43fa28-project-grandpa-on-a-leash-biden-gets-russian-software-update.html https://rumble.com/v43fa28-project-grandpa-on-a-leash-biden-...
> source: a link you posted to HN in 2020
Is it surprising that someone interested enough to post in this thread would have had a past interest in the subject as well? It's hard for me to understand how this is a good-faith, thoughtful response. There have been many other takedowns and a lot of other reporting as well, but the link provides some decent insight with a level of detail that an HN reader would appreciate. The tl;dr: most of the "Russian bots" research was, as I summarized, bunk, and pushed by people such as Bill Kristol and other establishment people behind prior false propaganda. I am not sure what "look, you posted this before" is supposed to mean.
> Source: you
Here is an article published in Nature.
Finally, we find no evidence of a meaningful relationship between exposure to the Russian [specifically the IRA] foreign influence campaign and changes in attitudes, polarization, or voting behavior.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-35576-9 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-35576-9
> Source: you
Sure, but you can find op-eds and comments everywhere opining that the "new" nature of disinformation and misinformation on the Internet requires corporate-state collusion to censor and repress, lest those people who are susceptible to these campaigns (never, of course, the experts or the people in government) vote the wrong way.
Although I am reluctant to even mention it due to its politicization, the Hunter laptop story is a fine example; claiming the story was Russian disinformation with a total lack of evidence (a claim that persists in some quarters to this day!) damaged the credibility of news institutions and intelligence agencies more than any actual Russian disinformation. The fact the actual story was largely a nothingburger makes it even worse. It gives the appearance that people in positions of influence and power attempted to repress a story that did nothing more than paint someone related to the President in a bad light. Indeed, it's incredible and shameful that the NYT took years to print stories like this [1] which could have been used to refute people quoting the "don’t worry unlike Pop I won’t make you give me half your salary" text because they preferred to leave responsible people with the impression that it was all total fiction and Russian disinformation. Rather than trusting the electorate, the NYT, Twitter, and government intelligence agencies believed it was better to mislead them rather than risk them voting incorrectly. In other words, people are not capable of self-government.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/22/us/politics/hunter-biden-texts-impeachment-republicans.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/22/us/politics/hunter-biden-...
> https://michaelkreil.github.io/openbots/ https://michaelkreil.github.io/openbots/
That link is merely disputing the argument that bots were involved in disinformation campaigns. This is irrelevant in the discussion that such campaigns were conducted, which you agree with yourself, and the fact that they're wildly successful.
We know this because of their use in influencing elections in dozens of countries by companies like Cambridge Analytica. They certainly weren't the first nor will be the last, just the ones that got the most exposure.
We also know that social media is filled with bot accounts that spread disinformation. This also isn't new, and you don't need to be a researcher to verify it.
We also know that Russia and China don't have the military capability to fight the US, but they certainly have a technological one to conduct these operations. This war is not new, as you say, but with the advent of the internet it has become the most efficient and effective way to destabilize a nation.
So, by the powers of deduction, and without using any biased sources, we can conclude that a) information warfare exists and the US and its enemies are taking part in it, b) a US election would be a major event prime for attack, and c) it would be trivial to deploy bots to run these operations.
Reaching any alternative conclusion would be delusional, and evidence that counter propaganda does indeed also work.
> This is irrelevant in the discussion that such campaigns were conducted, which you agree with yourself, and the fact that they're wildly successful.
I absolutely dispute the fact they were "wildly successful." People want to make this claim because it conveniently makes their political opposition ignorant tools befuddled by foreign powers rather than legitimate dissent. One might argue that nothing is more "destabilizing" than the polarizing idea your domestic opposition is brainwashed by foreign enemies.
>? We also know that social media is filled with bot accounts that spread disinformation. This also isn't new, and you don't need to be a researcher to verify it.
Except we keep finding the alleged bots aren't bots at all. My own Twitter account was, according to these groups, a bot. Perhaps we don't really "know" that at all. Perhaps most actual bot accounts have close to zero engagement.
> This war is not new, as you say, but with the advent of the internet it has become the most efficient and effective way to destabilize a nation.
No amount of Facebook ads can destabilize a nation, and nothing out of the Internet-era has come even close to the impact of past influence campaigns, although no doubt as t -> infinity, we'll see something.
> I absolutely dispute the fact they were "wildly successful." People want to make this claim because it conveniently makes their political opposition ignorant tools befuddled by foreign powers rather than legitimate dissent.
You're disputing this based on... what exactly?
The effectiveness of propaganda is widely studied and known, so it's unsurpising that an industry that applies it using modern tools would be very profitable. Companies like Cambridge Analytica have been successful all around the world for decades now. See https://www.propagandamachine.tech/ca-map https://www.propagandamachine.tech/ca-map
How instrumental their impact was in achieving a specific result in elections is debatable, simply because the effects of propaganda are difficult to quantify by definition. But it's ignorant to claim that this impact is negligible, or that the current sociopolitical climate can be explained by "legitimate dissent".
> No amount of Facebook ads can destabilize a nation, and nothing out of the Internet-era has come even close to the impact of past influence campaigns
How do you reach this conclusion? The internet is the greatest propaganda delivery method the world has ever seen, and we've known the effects of propaganda for a long time. It doesn't take a genius to put two and two together, yet you're actively claiming otherwise without a shred of proof.
> How instrumental their impact was in achieving a specific result in elections is debatable, simply because the effects of propaganda are difficult to quantify by definition.
But people have tried.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-35576-9 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-35576-9
> Finally, we find no evidence of a meaningful relationship between exposure to the Russian foreign influence campaign and changes in attitudes, polarization, or voting behavior
> It doesn't take a genius to put two and two together, yet you're actively claiming otherwise without a shred of proof.
The burden of proof is on people claiming that foreign countries doing the same thing they've always done with a new delivery mechanism has changed anything. And given the amount of bad faith disinformation already put out by the primary actors insisting this is the case - not people in comment threads, I mean organizations like New Knowledge and other sources used by NYT and USGov - the burden of proof is pretty high. If you have to blatantly make stuff up, your credibility goes down.
> that the current sociopolitical climate can be explained by "legitimate dissent".
Why?
This seems like a very puzzling statement when considering the past century. Aside from the impacts of increasing atomization and social disintegration related to population churn and mass media (not news, but movies, TV, Instagram, etc.), the only really unusual thing about today's socio-political environment is the degree to which dissent is not tolerated and treated as fundamentally subversive. And even that's not too unusual; for example, the pacifists and isolationists today are Russian bots, the pacifists and isolationists of yesteryear were Nazi apologists, secret communists, etc.