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Russia amplified hurricane disinformation to drive Americans apart
- tlogan 2y agoDo we really need Russian involvement for this? Are we not capable of achieving it on our own? It feels like an insult to our society .
- senectus1 2y agoits not about if we need or want it.. its that an aggressive offensive actor IS doing it. this is an assault on your country. Its deliberately teasing out the worse aspects of your society so that you attack yourselves. Dis/Misinformation on the web has to be the #1 education subject for the world. Not scams from Nigerian princes, but the bullshit that is now being amplified by tools like AI.
- tlogan 2y agoDisinformation and misinformation are spread by all sides and campaigns at every level. Take, for example, when we were told that crime is down in San Francisco. Really? Do they think we don’t actually live here and see what’s happening.
- muglug 2y ago"Everyone does it" is a copout when one group of people is doing it 10x more than the other.
- labster 2y agoClassic whataboutism. Whether or not someone else lies doesn’t mean that this particular lie isn’t very concerning.
- whoknowsidont 2y ago>Disinformation and misinformation are spread by all sides and campaigns at every level. No it's not. Systemic and characteristic are words that you can only apply to one side here.
- selivanovp 2y agoYou think that just because you never saw the other side of the coin. Russian "troll farms" were created as a response to the same activity commited by USA and UK in Russian speaking side of internet for years. It took more than a decade for Russian government to realize what's happening and who does these things and with what instruments.
- Paradigma11 2y agoSo show us. We have metric tons of evidence of Russian troll farms working to destabilize the west, from leaked documents, video footage, phone calls......... Surely there must be similar evidence for western activities.
- freen 2y agoAhh yes, subjective anecdotes are obviously the correct epistemological foundation for public policy.
- knowaveragejoe 2y agoRussia loads the gun, Americans engrossed in conspiracy culture pull the trigger.
- akira2501 2y agoYea, the poor innocent US government, who only /looks/ bad because of things Russia says on social media. The CIA spikes the Kool-Aid, Americans engrossed in false neo liberal culture drink it readily.
- yowzadave 2y agoOur society, like all societies, has many imperfect people within it. A malign influence that amplifies our weaknesses can still be criticized and resisted. Yes, a society made up of infallible individuals would not be susceptible, but let’s deal with the reality we have?
- ryandrake 2y ago> Researchers at ISD found that Russian disinformation agents exploited weak content moderation on U.S.-owned social media platforms such as X to spread their content far and wide. Buried the important part deep in the article. It's not like Russia is conjuring some megaphone out of thin air and broadcasting their disinformation with it. US Social Media companies are handing them the megaphone and doing the amplification for them. But as for consequences? All these companies get are polite questions from the media and light scrutiny. Not even a slap on the wrist. > Unsuspecting Americans then repost and spread the content. In July, American intelligence officials warned that "unwitting Americans" were helping do Russia's work for it. We also need to stop giving these so-called unsuspecting and unwitting Americans the benefit of the doubt. At some point they need to educate themselves and stop falling for this crap. Fool me once, shame on you, fool me again and again, and again, and again... at some point I become culpable because of my own stupidity.
- akdor1154 2y agoYou're responding to an article about Russian intelligence successfully exploiting divides between groups of Americans by... blaming distinct groups of Americans. I'll take your post in good faith, it's easy to get sucked into this stuff, that's why it's working for the Kremlin. But, I think the best approach is to try to write online with empathy and not vilification.
- colechristensen 2y agoI’m not very empathetic with the people who make money off of divisiveness being bad at moderating it.
- afavour 2y agoI agreed with you before now but I'm losing my patience. Yes, social media networks should be doing a better job of moderating. Yes, the media should report more honestly. But there comes a point where individuals have to be given responsibility for being suckered into, frankly, stupid shit. If you read "Democrats are controlling the weather and generating hurricanes to suppress voter turnout" and your response is "yeah, sounds plausible" then you're just simply not thinking. You're seeing something that appeals to your biases and you're accepting it uncritically. And you deserve blame for doing so.
- revscat 2y agoAt this point I believe that any divisive issue is in the interest of Russia, if not wholly originating with it. Given this, “e pluribus unum” feels rebellious.
- churchill 2y agoOf course - and why not? I know I might be downvoted heavily for this, but regime change through social unrest has been one of America's greatest exports. Libya, Syria, Iraq, etc. Problem is, the opposition quickly learns your tactics & turns it on you. And, because the US is a democratic state that can't just make people disappear, you'll have a harder time coping. Roughly half of all Americans believe the last election was stolen and are gearing up for unrest if this one doesn't go their way. But, everyone conveniently forgets that US agents deliberately spread anti-China propaganda, encouraging countries not to accept China's vaccines. Who knows how many died as a result? So, instead of blaming this on the Russians (& Chinese), maybe America should do some soul-searching? It's just like how NATO's Libya & Syria intervention caused a migrant explosion. It's okay to dislike illegal migrants, but you need to address why they suddenly became a pressing problem after living in their countries all this while. Russian propaganda has found a home in America's Right that believes it is persecuted. It won't leave, but will keep festering until something gives.
- nathanaldensr 2y agoYou're asking for humility in a world of selfishness and out of control egotism. I completely agree with you, but we'll never force humility on others; they have to go on a soul-searching mission first and learn to reject the false dichotomies of red vs. blue, left vs. right, Republicans vs. Democrats, etc.
- IAmGraydon 2y agoRussia has been doing this for a very long time. That's not the concerning thing. The concerning thing is that the US Government is apparently asleep at the wheel when it comes to protecting the US population from these attacks.
- reducesuffering 2y agoThe US Gov isn't asleep. But half the populace deny it's happening (by their enemy #1 for their entire lifetime until 20 years ago) just because it helps them.
- ChumpGPT 2y agoIt is amazing how soon half the folks who lived through the cold war don't realize it never ended. We are in the midst of a war right now with the same old foes and most of America doesn't get it but, they will soon enough. the next President is going to have lead the country through an incredibly long and difficult war. Book mark it...
- ericb 2y agoAgreed. From a game theory perspective, this needs to be tit-for-tat. Implement a fund dedicated to toppling hostile regimes and creating chaos for them via disinfo in their own countries. Then, measure disinfo operations in the US, and allocate the funds to retaliation in-kind as exactly as possible.
- IAmGraydon 2y agoThat's sort of a digital MAD. An interesting idea. Beyond that, US sites which willingly allow the spread of misinformation should be heavily fined. Reddit, for example, is a complete cesspool of foreign influence campaigns. It's not like it's hard to pick up on. They target populations that are already likely to believe misinformation and conspiracies. The conspiracy subreddit, for example, is rife with obviously foreign accounts that come out of nowhere, post divisive misinformation tens or even hundreds of times per day, and the posts get thousands of upvotes out of nowhere. The idea is that if you seed a small contingent of the population with misinformation, they will do the rest of the work and spread it for you in the rest of the population. No, Reddit cannot do away with 100% of this, but it is absolutely clear that they aren't even trying to control it. That has to stop. A simple change like requiring phone verification before you can create an account (and not allowing Google voice numbers) would do a lot to quell this. They don't care. They just want the traffic.
- ginkgotree 2y agoLOL, Tip of the iceberg. Anything divisive in the US is mostly Russia at this point
- bestouff 2y agoI think you underestimate the internal divisions that showed during the civil war. They're still there.
- eesmith 2y agoIt's not like the Compromise of 1850 erased all previous internal divisions. Jackson's "Our Federal Union! It Must Be Preserved!" vs Calhoun's "Our Federal Union — next to our liberties the most dear!" was 1830.
- Eddy_Viscosity2 2y agoThe russians aren't creating divisions, they are strengthening existing ones. Any existing division can be blown up to be all en-compassing. Very easy to tap into into everyone's deep wired in-group / out-group behavior. With enough effort and fuel you can have people willing to secede from the USA because of very strongly held feelings about pineapple on pizza.
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- an_guy 2y agoNo links to the "research" that proved Russian interference. This looks like damage control trying to shift blame and make legit criticism looks like Russian interference
- rich_sasha 2y agoThey probably did. Just as I'm sure CIA was amplifying stories of Putin having cancer, or trying to humiliate Fidel Castro. It's so cheap and so effective, I'm sure everyone does it.
- AtlasBarfed 2y agoThe Russians, or the Putin administration in particular, are in an existential war at this point. Of course totalitarian regimes exist to keep the totalitarian regime in power, at the expense if necessary of everything else. But the Russian state is comprised of the core ethnic Russian territory, which we think of as Russia, but then also have a VERY large population and land exposure of the -Stans as vassal states to be exploited. None of those stans want to be with Russia. Of course for Russia, losing control of those provinces will mean exposure on all sides from continental invasion, a massive loss of resources and wealth, and worst of all would motivate the regime to be toppled as weak. It would be foolish to think the Russians aren't doing it. There was demonstrable evidence of them interfering in the Clinton-Trump election. There is hints of substantial dark money sloshing around Washington from China and Russia. Why would there not, when Saudi (notice how almost every President goes to Saudi Arabia to kiss ass at the end of their terms?) and Israeli already is, although those are more clear geopolitical interests. Because the quiet agreement on both sides of the aisle is "don't stop any money trains", there isn't the proper attention on this influence, but the Ukraine funding holdup, which was really funny money accounting of valuing old stockpiles being pulled from warehouses that was going to just be scrapped in the near future anyway, was a bizarre political event. To me that really felt like Russian dark money, because the Ukrainians were basically kept without ammo for months and months and the Russians made substantial gains. Why would they not? Regardless, the current administration is still showing weakness and taking it. The Russians are constantly escalating the war, and are now shipping in foreign North Korean troops, and NATO should respond in kind with its own direct troop assistance. The Russians have for decades bragged about fomenting discontent in foreign powers, ironically as their country has economically and demographically faded. We supposedly have invested in state of the art information warfare, but the weakness is that we SUPPOSEDLY can't turn those weapons on our population, while our main opponents can use their capabilities at will domestically or internationally.
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- fuoqi 2y ago"Russian disinformation" is so overused, it started to loose most of the meaning. Russia gets attributed to anything politicians do not like. It's an old trick of shifting blame from internal failures to external enemies. Remember the "Russian disinformation" about Hunter's laptop? And then people are surprised by the falling trust in government and mainstream media. Russia/China/Iran/North Korea/etc. certainly try to play on potential weaknesses of the US, but, let's be honest, they are amateurs compared to the US actions across the globe. But the root issue is with existence and expansion of various weakness points, not with hostile actors pressing on them.
- fluorinerocket 2y agoThe Russian disinfo thing does seem to be blown away out proportion
- wakawaka28 2y agoThe Hunter Biden laptop was real. Even the MSM admitted it 3 years after US citizens were censored for sharing the story at the behest of the US government. The Russiagate story on the other hand was pure fiction. Hillary paid for the Steele Report to be written, and even paid a fine for election interference. If the media was worth a hoot these facts would be common knowledge.
- Paradigma11 2y agoThe republican lead Mueller investigation sounds rather different: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mueller_report https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mueller_report "The Mueller report found that the Russian government "interfered in the 2016 presidential election in sweeping and systematic fashion" and "violated U.S. criminal law".[11][12][75] The report relayed two methods by which Russia attempted to influence the election." "Social media campaign The first method of Russian interference was done through the Internet Research Agency (IRA), waging "a social media campaign that favored presidential candidate Donald J. Trump and disparaged presidential candidate Hillary Clinton".[26] The IRA also sought to "provoke and amplify political and social discord in the United States"." "The second method of Russian interference saw the Russian military intelligence agency GRU hacking into email accounts owned by volunteers and employees of the Clinton presidential campaign, including that of campaign chairman John Podesta, and also hacking into "the computer networks of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) and the Democratic National Committee (DNC)". As a result, the GRU obtained hundreds of thousands of hacked documents, and the GRU proceeded by arranging releases of damaging hacked material via the WikiLeaks organization and also GRU's false personas "DCLeaks" and "Guccifer 2.0"." "The investigation found there were at least 140 contacts between Trump or 18 of his associates with Russian nationals and WikiLeaks, or their intermediaries, though the contacts were insufficient to show an illegal conspiracy.[" "Ryan Goodman has examined the Mueller report's findings on collusion. He described the findings as "a series of activities that show strong evidence of collusion. Or, more precisely, it provides significant evidence that Trump Campaign associates coordinated with, cooperated with, encouraged, or gave support to the Russia/WikiLeaks election interference activities." "
- EE84M3i 2y agoIsn't there basically a team in Russia that has a stand-up meeting every morning and decides what topic to focus their disinformation campaign on every day? Not that surprising they would choose the biggest news event.
- ValveFan6969 2y agoWhat does a London based organization know about dialog in America? Ah, must be the Russian fairies in my head giving me these doubts...
- tharmas 2y agoTime for another Muller Investigation and report. Lol.
- nathanaldensr 2y agoPlease stop polluting Hacker News with low-effort political flamebait just before the US election. It's transparent and lame. Go to Reddit.