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It's already been happening for a very long time. The US' "Operation Earnest Voice" happened in 2010/2011[0] And it's not just state actors. Anyone who was onl

• CGMthrowaway 2mo ago
  Why are you being downvoting for sharing this relevant truth, complete with sources?
  • culi 2mo ago
    All threads that have... certain keywords... are like this. Talk about meta. Looks like I'm now in the positive (+5) after being in the negative just a moment ago. Anyways, I got really interested in this topic around mid 2010s because of some really interesting reporting by Codastory[0] covering Russian "troll factories" especially used to influence opinion in eastern Ukraine, but also in many other circumstances. In Houston in 2016, Russian troll accounts planned both an ANTI Muslim rally AND a counterprotest to that rally all on Facebook.[1] Hundreds of real human beings showed up! Russia got a ton of attention for their use of troll farms but the truth is that the US and certain allies have actually been using stuff like this for far longer and, imo, with much more success. In fact, Coda Story itself is funded by the NED which is a massive pillar of global US, uh, "soft power". [0] https://www.codastory.com/ https://www.codastory.com/ [1] https://www.npr.org/2017/11/01/561427876/how-russia-used-facebook-to-organize-two-sets-of-protesters https://www.npr.org/2017/11/01/561427876/how-russia-used-fac...
    • Paradigma11 2mo ago
      For me the main difference is if the activity is clandestine and meant to deceive/hide the origin. Everybody tries to influence things their way. Doing it covertly is a hostile act. That does not mean that I would not condone hostile acts against my/our enemies but it is something take into account. And regarding your Russian examples, it showed for how long they have seen the west as enemies and conducted hostile acts.
      • smalllangmodel 2mo ago
        [flagged]
        • kakacik 2mo ago
          Thats rather simple to understand, for somebody coming from eastern Europe. russian mentality permeated entire region during their enslavement of what is now eastern EU bloc for +-40 years, to have a battleground for nuclear war with west that never came. It happens when all your politics is orchestrated in moscow and you have almost a million soldiers deployed in bases all over the place for decades, with nuclear weapons and all that. See, russians have massive inferiority complex. Against everybody, but mostly the more successful ones, meaning west in many aspects. Their approach to, well, everything is vastly ineffective, corruption, nepotism and similar stuff grinds any attempt at progress to almost halt. Just go there and see for yourself, they have money literally sticking out of ground left and right yet outside moscow and st petersburg you are in central Africa in terms of development. All this, propagated to 21st century where everybody seems to go ahead of them. A lot of frustration, envy and schadenfreude. A (correct) feeling russia is left behind and becoming insignificant local force at best, and laughing stock of whole world more realistically. Plus, human life is generally almost worthless there, its mafia state pyramid to the core. With all that, its vastly easier to keep reinventing enemies that are always guilty at damaging poor old russia, rather than cleaning up that clusterfuck and actually owning the shit they created for themselves. Its enough for general population. There is not much more actual stuff to the question 'why west', rest is just PR for simpler folks. A dictator never wants smart, strong and free population, double that for russia. Downtrodden, hopeless desperate folks are much easier to manage and manipulate.
  • eli_gottlieb 2mo ago
    You're not supposed to acknowledge that think-tanks are sort of endemically propaganda outlets. You're supposed to think it's special this time.
  • friendzis 2mo ago
    Because cognitive biases are one of the hardest things to even acknowledge, let alone suppress. All the media out there has such a strong bubble effect, because people hate being challenged and love to stay in their comfy echo chambers. Remember labubu? Bao buns certainly do not. There have been so many bot armies exposed over the years that one would think every narrative being pushed should be considered to be backed by bots. Some state-level actors even operate their narrative-pushing campaigns openly, yet people still happily deny their entire existence. HN is very much not an exception to this rule. It's very hard to accept that maybe some thoughts you have were actually installed.
    • derefr 2mo ago
      > people still Maybe a few are just “people” (i.e. the same people who normally post in the community.) But in most cases I’d suspect any such botting campaign brings along with it a few human agitprop agents embedded onto each target platform, well-positioned to deny and discredit anyone pushing back on the narrative the bot farm is spreading. (Sometimes this is pretty obvious — a lot of accounts coming out of the woodwork to deny Chinese bot farms have a conspicuous “English as learned as a second language in Beijing, to a competent but not fluent level” writing style that does not often otherwise crop up in other discussions in those same communities. But other times it can be far more subtle, making use of operatives hired from within the community’s own majority-culture rather than relying on foreign nationals playing the part of same.)
      • Beretta_Vexee 2mo ago
        A Chinese and Russian troll farm employs people from French-speaking Africa for their French-language operations. There are many Ivorians and Senegalese promoting the CCP’s ‘Community of common destiny’ on Reddit, for example. Edit: Community of common destiny for mankind/‘Community of Nations’
        • redsocksfan45 2mo ago
          [dead]
  • Beretta_Vexee 2mo ago
    There’s bots that automatically downvotes certain topics on HN. I post at times that often coincide with the middle of the night in North America, and I get 3–5 downvotes within the next 5 minutes. Talking about a country that sets up fake think tanks is a good way of triggering them.
  • actionfromafar 2mo ago
    These 2 sources say nothing about Heard using bots, only Depp.
  • Forgeties79 2mo ago
    > Why are you being downvoting for sharing this relevant truth, complete with sources? Agreeing with something doesn’t make it 100% unambiguously true/correct. There are also many reasons people downvote, you don’t know the nature of the objections. It’s not worth getting upset over.
  • red-iron-pine 2mo ago
    this is what online discussion will look like in the future thanks to AI, and a handful of hyperwealthy oligarchs controlling said AI
• saidnooneever 2mo ago
  this has been happening since the dawn of information-communication systems basically. because ever since, people have had the ability to listen in, copy, learn from etc. - so there's always been incentive to spread disinformation for some parties. brand defence, nation-state influence operations. There are many different flavors of the same thing, trying to mislead competitors or enemies. Or to dupe consumers ofc... Since the tech is more and more available, now also 12 year olds can run insanely large influence campaigns, to boost their streaming profiles or other somewhat benign things, but obviously modelled after what larger players have been doing forever. The first transatlantic commercial transatlantic phoneline (TAT-1) was immediately tapped on both sides by UK/US... before that it went over radio, which was simply intercepted. Because of that nature of the coms system being easily listened in on, just like they do/did with the lil mirror-beam-splitters at GCHQ etc.., its been natural effect to then provide disinformation over those channels. perhaps even use those channels exclusively for disinformation, and have a secure channel to do _actual_ coms. So as you can imagine there has been many decades now of practice in why and how to share disinformation effectively to undermine other peoples work or processes.
  • order-matters 2mo ago
    the particular danger now is not that the outside influence is new, but that more and more people are depending almost entirely on the information communication systems for all of their information. the war against in person gathering and the family unit has been pretty successful, as they were pretty sloppy ways to exchange information to begin with. but at the very least you knew you were getting an actual opinion from someone, and you had context of their personhood and background for which to base that opinion.
  • vcryan 2mo ago
    Yes, but when your trying to cover up a genocide it's a bit different
    • culi 2mo ago
      I mean, the US has always done this. Look at the atrocities in Indonesia. Just 20 years after saying "never again" to the Holocaust and we have Goodyear using actual slave labor from death camps. It was the US doing too. A mass killing on the scale of the Holocaust. The "Jakarta Method" was then exported all around the world, especially to South America.
• ____mr____ 2mo ago
  Both of their legal teams utilized bots to drive online discussions[1][2] Neither of these sources support this claim as none of them include any discussion on Amber Heard('s legal team) using bots?
  • red_admiral 2mo ago
    Indeed, seeing how slanted online discussion was, I suspect one side had many more bots, and I'm not sure if the other side had any.
    • locknitpicker 2mo ago
      [flagged]
      • WickyNilliams 2mo ago
        Is there any writing outside of your recollection that says the Heard side was using bots? Afaik all reporting suggested it was one sided, and not her side
        • locknitpicker 2mo ago
          [dead]
          • WickyNilliams 2mo ago
            It's not disingenuous? The person you responded to linked to articles which said it was one sided. You said the other opposite, but provided no sources. I asked for some. It's a simple request that was made politely --- The whole response is bizarre tbh. Talking about my "sudden" interest. I made one comment. "Deep in the chat". It's quite shallow. I am assuming this is a bot
            • red_admiral 2mo ago
• MSFT_Edging 2mo ago
  I have been yelling about the thinktank "truth laundering" industry for years now. They were instrumental in the whole "Uyghur genocide" thing where the only proof was Adrien Zenz suggesting there would be a possible future decline in population growth and called it a "cultural genocide". The US State department has been running things like "Radio Free Asia" as state propaganda mills for decades. This has broken out into an industry of insiders getting board seats on various think tanks and churning out essentially policy desires as "studies". These studies are then used as citations for actual news articles to launder the policy desires into something that seems like a reliable source. Then people say "Look! this is really happening!" while 100s of articles are written citing the same untrustworthy sources, laundered through dozens of thinktanks funded by the DoD and state dept.
• rbanffy 2mo ago
  I think the big difference is that before the internet you'd need to be a Murdoch to be able to do something like this. A good PR firm could fool a number of news outlets into thinking something is legit, but it was a lot harder to convince a professional journalist than it is to convince the average Faux News watcher.
  • consensus1 2mo ago
    I used to believe that, but too many times I have been proven wrong. Remember when the "professional journalists" were screaming about a terrorist plot against the UN last year and it was just a garden variety SIM farm running fraud?
  • red-iron-pine 2mo ago
    even with the internet you need a marketing company with the reach and ability, and social media platforms to use and abuse the maturity of those platforms, their "we need to make big money" drive to allow obviously bad actors to work their magic, and the ability to automate is what has weaponized it