6 ms·

Although there is some organic support, there is a lot of coordinated astroturfing. It’s apparent if you watch the discussions across platforms, there are obvio

Although there is some organic support, there is a lot of coordinated astroturfing. It’s apparent if you watch the discussions across platforms, there are obvious shared talking points that come in waves. Governments (and a few companies) really want this.

paulryanrogers 8mo ago
> Governments (and a few companies) really want this. The cynic in me fears they don't want a privacy-preserving solution, which blinds them to 'who'. Because that would satisfy parents worried about their kids and many privacy conscious folks. Rather, they want a blank check to blackmail or imprison only their opponents.
- mcmcmc 8mo ago
  That’s not cynicism, it’s reality.
- phendrenad2 8mo ago
  I think Larry (not, not that Larry, the other one) spilled the beans in 2024: "Citizens will be on their best behavior, because we’re constantly recording and reporting everything that is going on" - Larry Ellison (I seem to recall from the context of the quote, he isn't saying this is the future he wants, but it's a future he's not particularly opposed to) But the real threat is "accidental" database leaks from private websites. Let's say you live in a state where abortion isn't legal, and you sign up for a web forum where people discuss getting out-of-state abortions. As soon as that website is required to collect real names (which it will be), it becomes unusable, because nobody can risk getting doxxed.
  - hellojesus 8mo ago
    Maybe the US gov needs more tor users and is therefore doing this to drive more traffic to the onion network.
- throw__away7391 8mo ago
  This is not a cynical take, it is blindingly obvious. Right now, governments around the world are watching, salivating over what is effectively remote control over the literal thoughts of and total surveillance over their entire population. They are itching insatiably to get control over these systems.
  - klsdjfdlkfjsd 8mo ago
    In my state, I caught a circuit court judge shilling on a certain well known "social media" site for the establishment of a lottery in our state. He framed it as a "We the People vs the corrupt politicians" issue--with him being firmly on the side of We the People of course. When I challenged him on his rhetoric, my comment INSTANTLY disappeared. I thought maybe it was a fluke, so I tried again, and the next comment insta-disappeared also. Soon thereafter I was locked out of the account and asked to provide a "selfie" to confirm my identity. (I declined.)
    - inigyou 8mo ago
      Which social media? Which judge? You're posting here on a throwaway, so you're safe.
- anjel 8mo ago
  Add to this that more and more sites and services are hostile to VPN connections and obfuscated email address for account registration. Worse still is that for existing accounts introducing ID req'ts, the next step in these changes is your prior anonymous activity could easily become a retro-liablit.y
  - inigyou 8mo ago
    [dead]
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
cyanydeez 8mo ago
"A few"? "Real" user verification is a wet dream to googlr, meta, etc. Its both a ad inflation and a competive roadblock. The benefits are real: teens are being preyed upon and socially maligned. State actors and businesses alike are responsible. The technology is not there nor are governments coordinating appropiate digital concerns. Unsurprising because no one trusts gov, but then implicitly trust business? Yeah, so obviously, its implementation that will just move around harms.
delusional 8mo ago
> there is a lot of coordinated astroturfing. It’s apparent if you watch the discussions across platforms, there are obvious shared talking points that come in waves. Is that really evidence of astroturfing? If we're in the middle of an ongoing political debate, it doesn't seem that far fetched for me that people reach similar conclusions. What you're hearing then isn't "astro-turfing" but one coalition, of potentially many. I often hear people terrified that the government will have a say on what they view online, while being just fine with google doing the same. You can agree or disagree with my assesment, but the point is that hearing that point a bunch doesn't mean it's google astroturfing. It just means there's an ideology out there that thinks it's different (and more opressive seemingly) when governments do it. It means all those people have a similar opinion, probably from reading the same blogs.
- zug_zug 8mo ago
  Well the hard thing about astroturfing is that only the people running the platform have the hard data to prove it beyond any reasonable doubt. But I don't think we need 99.99% confidence -- isn't even acknowledged that 30% of twitter is bots or something? I think it's safe to conclude there's astroturfing on any significant political issue. Also as far as documented cases, there were documented cases of astroturfing around fracking [1], or pesticides [2] 1. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2057047320969435 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2057047320969435 2. https://www.corywatson.com/blog/monsanto-downplay-roundup-risks/ https://www.corywatson.com/blog/monsanto-downplay-roundup-ri...
  - iamnothere 8mo ago
    An ex friend of mine was once involved in some thing where they got paid to astroturf for Monsanto. Despite living in the city, they suddenly developed deeply informed opinions about glyphosate and how important it is for agriculture, and they would share these opinions aggressively in online discussions along with pro-Monsanto articles. It was disturbing to watch because the behavior was completely uncharacteristic (and seemingly in conflict with their core beliefs). One day they quit doing it just as suddenly. This was before the heyday of influencer culture, so I can only imagine how sophisticated things are nowadays. It’s not always bots. I recommend the book Trust Me, I’m Lying for a deep but somewhat dated look at the online influence industry.
nostrebored 8mo ago
> It’s apparent if you watch the discussions across platforms, there are obvious shared talking points that come in waves This is true of basically any issue discussed on the internet. Saying it must be astroturfing is reductive
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
EarlKing 8mo ago
More than a few companies. Nothing would allow advertisers to justify raising ad rates quite like being able to point out that their users are real rather than bots.
bilbo0s 8mo ago
I think we should be careful of writing off this sea change as simple professional influence campaigns. That kind of thinking is just what got Trump to the Whitehouse, and is currently getting the immigrants rounded up. Things that didn't seem likely to have broad support previously, now are seen as acceptable. In the 90's no one could envision rounding up immigrants. No one could envision uploading an ID card to use ICQ. No one could envision the concept of DE-naturalization or getting rid of birthright citizenship. Today, in the US for instance, there are entire new generations of people alive. And many, many people who were alive in the 90's are gone. Well these new people very much can envision these things. And they seem to have stocked the Supreme Court to make all these kinds of things a reality. All because the rest of us keep dismissing all of this as just harmless extreme positions that no one in society really supports. We have to start fighting things like this with more than, "It's not real."
- ReptileMan 8mo ago
  >In the 90's no one could envision rounding up immigrants. Both Clinton and Obama deported way more people than Trump.
  - co_king_5 8mo ago
    [dead]
    - ReptileMan 8mo ago
      Ineffective. Too much noise, too little removals.
      - co_king_5 8mo ago
        [dead]
        ReptileMan 8mo ago
        Trump's first term was a total failure for many reasons. He didn't implement nothing of his agenda successfully.
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
reliabilityguy 8mo ago
> there is a lot of coordinated astroturfing. Interesting. Are you saying all the concerns raised by the proponents of ID verification are invalid and meritless? For example, 1. Foreign influence campaigns 2. Domestic influence campaigns 3. Filtering age-appropriate content I’m sure there are many other points with various degree of validity.
- hellojesus 8mo ago
  If you drive out everyone with identity filters, those folks will naturally flock to sites run in nations without the same controls. I don't think you really solve anything except to push traffic elsewhere. Instead it would be more appropriate to let sites pass headers, such as "we have adult content", thst you could filter on the network or client side. It's still voluntary, of course. Anyone will just visit sites that don't have the checks if necessary.
- inigyou 8mo ago
  [dead]
- simoncion 8mo ago
  > Interesting. Are you saying all the concerns raised by the proponents of ID verification are invalid and meritless? In the US, #1 and #2 are invalid and meritless. Wholly and without reservation. One of the huge reasons for the First Amendment is to ensure that people are able to counter lies uttered in the public sphere with truth. #3 is handled by parental controls that have existed in mainstream OSs for quite some time now. [0][1][2] However, those preexisting parental controls don't justify additional expansion of the power and influence of authoritarians, so here we are. [0] <https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/family-safety https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/family-safety> [1] <https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/set-up-content-and-privacy-restrictions-mchl8490d51e/mac https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/set-up-content-and-...> [2] <https://support.google.com/android/answer/16766047?hl=en-rw https://support.google.com/android/answer/16766047?hl=en-rw>
  - reliabilityguy 8mo ago
embedding-shape 8mo ago
> It’s apparent if you watch the discussions across platforms, there are obvious shared talking points that come in waves. How do you know what is "shared talking points" vs "humans learning arguments from others" and simply echoing those? Unless you work at one of the social media platforms, isn't it short of impossible to know what exactly you're looking at?
- iamnothere 8mo ago
  It could be, and you’re right that I can’t prove anything beyond a doubt. But there is an entire industry built around professionally manipulating public opinion for money, and the groups most interested in deanonymizing the internet are well resourced. Simple inductive reasoning will tell you that a portion of the support is likely astroturfed.
parineum 8mo ago
> there are obvious shared talking points that come in waves. Groups of people who wake up at the same time of the day often have a tendency to be from a similar place, hold similar values and consume similar media. Just because a bunch of people came to the same conclusion and have had their opinions coalesce around some common ideas, doesn't mean it's astroturfing. There's a noticeable difference between the opinions of HN USA and HN EU as the timezones shift.
dang 8mo ago
What are some links to HN comments that you (or anyone else) feel is "coordinated astroturfing"? The site guidelines ask users to send those to us at hn@ycombinator.com rather than post about it in the threads, but we always look into such cases when people send them. It almost invariably turns out to simply be that the community is divided on a topic, and this is usually demonstrable even from the public data (such as comment histories). However, we're not welded to that position—if the data change, we can too.
- pessimizer 8mo ago
  > What are some links to HN comments that you (or anyone else) feel is "coordinated astroturfing"? I don't think that there is any definitive way to prevent or detect this anymore. The number of personnel dedicated to online manipulation has grown too much, and the technology has advanced too far. These are now discussions that states and oligarchs have interests in, not Juicero or smart skillet astroturfing. And this remains a forum that people use to indicate elite support for their arguments.
  - dang 8mo ago
    There's never been a definitive way and yes, the bar is probably rising. All is not lost, though: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=sufficiently%20smart%20manipulat%20by%3Adang&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
    - junofan 8mo ago
      You have a goal, eg “ChatGPT recommends my zero-knowledge ID verification company to people looking to comply with EU law xyz”, a set of “money queries” you track weekly, eg “what are people on hacker news saying about age verification,” “what are people on Reddit saying about age verification,” “how to comply with age verification 2026,” etc. The citations from a hit on one money query informs the content to create for the next. It gives you information about what a model finds “citable.” You repackage that. A more organic discussion would maybe include W3C Verifiable Credentials, the various ISO standards, official implementations and their tradeoffs, etc. But that would link to authoritative sources that would already be cited. I guess the new thing here is you don’t need popularity on HN so much as info on what models cite. You make contributions motivated by “money queries” you track. This is an area of huge commercial interest, eg “what leggings should I buy? Lululemon isn’t as good as it used to be,” so it’ll probably be packaged and sold over time by providers and sourced organically through user interactions.

paulryanrogers 8mo ago

> Governments (and a few companies) really want this. The cynic in me fears they don't want a privacy-preserving solution, which blinds them to 'who'. Because that would satisfy parents worried about their kids and many privacy conscious folks. Rather, they want a blank check to blackmail or imprison only their opponents.

mcmcmc 8mo ago
That’s not cynicism, it’s reality.
phendrenad2 8mo ago
I think Larry (not, not that Larry, the other one) spilled the beans in 2024: "Citizens will be on their best behavior, because we’re constantly recording and reporting everything that is going on" - Larry Ellison (I seem to recall from the context of the quote, he isn't saying this is the future he wants, but it's a future he's not particularly opposed to) But the real threat is "accidental" database leaks from private websites. Let's say you live in a state where abortion isn't legal, and you sign up for a web forum where people discuss getting out-of-state abortions. As soon as that website is required to collect real names (which it will be), it becomes unusable, because nobody can risk getting doxxed.
- hellojesus 8mo ago
  Maybe the US gov needs more tor users and is therefore doing this to drive more traffic to the onion network.
throw__away7391 8mo ago
This is not a cynical take, it is blindingly obvious. Right now, governments around the world are watching, salivating over what is effectively remote control over the literal thoughts of and total surveillance over their entire population. They are itching insatiably to get control over these systems.
- klsdjfdlkfjsd 8mo ago
  In my state, I caught a circuit court judge shilling on a certain well known "social media" site for the establishment of a lottery in our state. He framed it as a "We the People vs the corrupt politicians" issue--with him being firmly on the side of We the People of course. When I challenged him on his rhetoric, my comment INSTANTLY disappeared. I thought maybe it was a fluke, so I tried again, and the next comment insta-disappeared also. Soon thereafter I was locked out of the account and asked to provide a "selfie" to confirm my identity. (I declined.)
  - inigyou 8mo ago
    Which social media? Which judge? You're posting here on a throwaway, so you're safe.
anjel 8mo ago
Add to this that more and more sites and services are hostile to VPN connections and obfuscated email address for account registration. Worse still is that for existing accounts introducing ID req'ts, the next step in these changes is your prior anonymous activity could easily become a retro-liablit.y
- inigyou 8mo ago
  [dead]
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]

cyanydeez 8mo ago

"A few"? "Real" user verification is a wet dream to googlr, meta, etc. Its both a ad inflation and a competive roadblock. The benefits are real: teens are being preyed upon and socially maligned. State actors and businesses alike are responsible. The technology is not there nor are governments coordinating appropiate digital concerns. Unsurprising because no one trusts gov, but then implicitly trust business? Yeah, so obviously, its implementation that will just move around harms.

delusional 8mo ago

> there is a lot of coordinated astroturfing. It’s apparent if you watch the discussions across platforms, there are obvious shared talking points that come in waves. Is that really evidence of astroturfing? If we're in the middle of an ongoing political debate, it doesn't seem that far fetched for me that people reach similar conclusions. What you're hearing then isn't "astro-turfing" but one coalition, of potentially many. I often hear people terrified that the government will have a say on what they view online, while being just fine with google doing the same. You can agree or disagree with my assesment, but the point is that hearing that point a bunch doesn't mean it's google astroturfing. It just means there's an ideology out there that thinks it's different (and more opressive seemingly) when governments do it. It means all those people have a similar opinion, probably from reading the same blogs.

zug_zug 8mo ago
Well the hard thing about astroturfing is that only the people running the platform have the hard data to prove it beyond any reasonable doubt. But I don't think we need 99.99% confidence -- isn't even acknowledged that 30% of twitter is bots or something? I think it's safe to conclude there's astroturfing on any significant political issue. Also as far as documented cases, there were documented cases of astroturfing around fracking [1], or pesticides [2] 1. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2057047320969435 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2057047320969435 2. https://www.corywatson.com/blog/monsanto-downplay-roundup-risks/ https://www.corywatson.com/blog/monsanto-downplay-roundup-ri...
- iamnothere 8mo ago
  An ex friend of mine was once involved in some thing where they got paid to astroturf for Monsanto. Despite living in the city, they suddenly developed deeply informed opinions about glyphosate and how important it is for agriculture, and they would share these opinions aggressively in online discussions along with pro-Monsanto articles. It was disturbing to watch because the behavior was completely uncharacteristic (and seemingly in conflict with their core beliefs). One day they quit doing it just as suddenly. This was before the heyday of influencer culture, so I can only imagine how sophisticated things are nowadays. It’s not always bots. I recommend the book Trust Me, I’m Lying for a deep but somewhat dated look at the online influence industry.

nostrebored 8mo ago

> It’s apparent if you watch the discussions across platforms, there are obvious shared talking points that come in waves This is true of basically any issue discussed on the internet. Saying it must be astroturfing is reductive

deleted 8mo ago

[deleted]

EarlKing 8mo ago

More than a few companies. Nothing would allow advertisers to justify raising ad rates quite like being able to point out that their users are real rather than bots.

bilbo0s 8mo ago

I think we should be careful of writing off this sea change as simple professional influence campaigns. That kind of thinking is just what got Trump to the Whitehouse, and is currently getting the immigrants rounded up. Things that didn't seem likely to have broad support previously, now are seen as acceptable. In the 90's no one could envision rounding up immigrants. No one could envision uploading an ID card to use ICQ. No one could envision the concept of DE-naturalization or getting rid of birthright citizenship. Today, in the US for instance, there are entire new generations of people alive. And many, many people who were alive in the 90's are gone. Well these new people very much can envision these things. And they seem to have stocked the Supreme Court to make all these kinds of things a reality. All because the rest of us keep dismissing all of this as just harmless extreme positions that no one in society really supports. We have to start fighting things like this with more than, "It's not real."

ReptileMan 8mo ago
>In the 90's no one could envision rounding up immigrants. Both Clinton and Obama deported way more people than Trump.
- co_king_5 8mo ago
  [dead]
  - ReptileMan 8mo ago
    Ineffective. Too much noise, too little removals.
    - co_king_5 8mo ago
      [dead]
      - ReptileMan 8mo ago
        Trump's first term was a total failure for many reasons. He didn't implement nothing of his agenda successfully.

deleted 8mo ago

[deleted]

reliabilityguy 8mo ago

> there is a lot of coordinated astroturfing. Interesting. Are you saying all the concerns raised by the proponents of ID verification are invalid and meritless? For example, 1. Foreign influence campaigns 2. Domestic influence campaigns 3. Filtering age-appropriate content I’m sure there are many other points with various degree of validity.

hellojesus 8mo ago
If you drive out everyone with identity filters, those folks will naturally flock to sites run in nations without the same controls. I don't think you really solve anything except to push traffic elsewhere. Instead it would be more appropriate to let sites pass headers, such as "we have adult content", thst you could filter on the network or client side. It's still voluntary, of course. Anyone will just visit sites that don't have the checks if necessary.
inigyou 8mo ago
[dead]
simoncion 8mo ago
> Interesting. Are you saying all the concerns raised by the proponents of ID verification are invalid and meritless? In the US, #1 and #2 are invalid and meritless. Wholly and without reservation. One of the huge reasons for the First Amendment is to ensure that people are able to counter lies uttered in the public sphere with truth. #3 is handled by parental controls that have existed in mainstream OSs for quite some time now. [0][1][2] However, those preexisting parental controls don't justify additional expansion of the power and influence of authoritarians, so here we are. [0] <https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/family-safety https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/family-safety> [1] <https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/set-up-content-and-privacy-restrictions-mchl8490d51e/mac https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/set-up-content-and-...> [2] <https://support.google.com/android/answer/16766047?hl=en-rw https://support.google.com/android/answer/16766047?hl=en-rw>
- reliabilityguy 8mo ago

embedding-shape 8mo ago

> It’s apparent if you watch the discussions across platforms, there are obvious shared talking points that come in waves. How do you know what is "shared talking points" vs "humans learning arguments from others" and simply echoing those? Unless you work at one of the social media platforms, isn't it short of impossible to know what exactly you're looking at?

iamnothere 8mo ago
It could be, and you’re right that I can’t prove anything beyond a doubt. But there is an entire industry built around professionally manipulating public opinion for money, and the groups most interested in deanonymizing the internet are well resourced. Simple inductive reasoning will tell you that a portion of the support is likely astroturfed.

parineum 8mo ago

> there are obvious shared talking points that come in waves. Groups of people who wake up at the same time of the day often have a tendency to be from a similar place, hold similar values and consume similar media. Just because a bunch of people came to the same conclusion and have had their opinions coalesce around some common ideas, doesn't mean it's astroturfing. There's a noticeable difference between the opinions of HN USA and HN EU as the timezones shift.

dang 8mo ago

What are some links to HN comments that you (or anyone else) feel is "coordinated astroturfing"? The site guidelines ask users to send those to us at hn@ycombinator.com rather than post about it in the threads, but we always look into such cases when people send them. It almost invariably turns out to simply be that the community is divided on a topic, and this is usually demonstrable even from the public data (such as comment histories). However, we're not welded to that position—if the data change, we can too.

pessimizer 8mo ago
> What are some links to HN comments that you (or anyone else) feel is "coordinated astroturfing"? I don't think that there is any definitive way to prevent or detect this anymore. The number of personnel dedicated to online manipulation has grown too much, and the technology has advanced too far. These are now discussions that states and oligarchs have interests in, not Juicero or smart skillet astroturfing. And this remains a forum that people use to indicate elite support for their arguments.
- dang 8mo ago
  There's never been a definitive way and yes, the bar is probably rising. All is not lost, though: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=sufficiently%20smart%20manipulat%20by%3Adang&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
  - junofan 8mo ago
    You have a goal, eg “ChatGPT recommends my zero-knowledge ID verification company to people looking to comply with EU law xyz”, a set of “money queries” you track weekly, eg “what are people on hacker news saying about age verification,” “what are people on Reddit saying about age verification,” “how to comply with age verification 2026,” etc. The citations from a hit on one money query informs the content to create for the next. It gives you information about what a model finds “citable.” You repackage that. A more organic discussion would maybe include W3C Verifiable Credentials, the various ISO standards, official implementations and their tradeoffs, etc. But that would link to authoritative sources that would already be cited. I guess the new thing here is you don’t need popularity on HN so much as info on what models cite. You make contributions motivated by “money queries” you track. This is an area of huge commercial interest, eg “what leggings should I buy? Lululemon isn’t as good as it used to be,” so it’ll probably be packaged and sold over time by providers and sourced organically through user interactions.