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Comment by jcriddle4 | Hacker News Reader

Dear lord a dozen countries could use this style of "evidence" to support the notion that the BBC(British Broadcasting) is deeply involved in nefarious election influencing. I believe in freedom of speech including Russia's ability to talk and influence. All the evidence not directly related to hacking is just completely inappropriate. This "proof" doesn't help their case against Russia. They should be focusing a narrow remit on the like's of Gucifier and Wikileaks. What a mess.

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As a kid growing up through the 1978-79 Iranian revolution, I can tell you BBC played a crucial role. We use to gather an listen to Farsi BBC broadcast in short-wave radio. That experience has made me to be distrustful of any major media outlet.

Absolutely; UK Govt still funds the BBC directly. I do believe it's substantially independent and certainly not direct Govt propaganda, but there's no denying that it pushes a very UK-centric view.

I remember it. They used to announce demonstration schedules. And the line from the Foreign Office was "BBC is independent". What a crock of shit. And the New York Times was calling the Ayatollah Khomeini a "saint". (Let that sink in.)

https://sadbastards.wordpress.com/2013/08/08/khomeini-was-pr...

RT is clearly a propaganda organ and Russians are old hands at propaganda. That much is clear. But the germinal issue, the elephant in the room, is that corporate media in our nation serves such a thin gruel of "news" that outfits like RT or (earlier) Al-Jazeera gain a foothold and establish "credibility" simply by publishing what our media refuses to cover. Didn't they get the memo that we have thing called the internet these days and other sources are a click away?

The biggest nugget in this report, imo, is that NSA is not so hot about this assessment. Which reminds me, did the former CIA employee cum whistle blower dish out CIA's dirty secrets as well or did he just dump on the NSA?

Well then, the issue is to establish good journalistic sources, which publish the important stories, while remaining independent of propaganda motivations, including corporate ones.

How do we do that?

I don't have the answer to that question. The obvious answer is that democratic societies need to take education very seriously and provide the necessary cognitive tools for the populace, but that is not a short term remedy.

Thank you for asking the right questions!

This should be it's own topic. Can you run an "Ask HN"?

My thought would be an information system that is jointly published in by all nation states - like a broadcast Wikipedia. The idea is that out of the chaos in the reporting the facts that every nation agrees on will get through clearly, whereas the opinions, unfounded accusations and the rest will bury themselves in a quagmire of costly effort.

Yeah that's gonna run about as effectively as the UN, which is to say barely at all. I do have a scheme I'm developing for this problem but I'm not sure how practical it is.

Go ahead and contact me personally. We need to do something about this, and if algorithms can, algorithms must.

Train it on this - a great resource: http://www.gdeltproject.org/

I remain skeptical that merely flagging individual content as 'probable disminformation' will the address issue.

Propaganda is, at its core, a form of psychological manipulation. It doesn't necessarily have to involve overt lies. Omission of facts, tone, phrasing and choice of words, etc. are all effective tools.

There are patterns to propaganda. /That/ is their achilles heel.

I haven't heard of the NY Times calling Khomeini a saint. Also, I thought the BBC is a fairly good journalistic source.

The BBC being a good source doesn't necessarily mean that they are and always were super-duper 120% objective in everything.

To save effort on fact-checking the claim that 'New York Times was calling the Ayatollah Khomeini a "saint"': I believe the source of this claim is that the New York Times ran an article on February 8, 1979 with the headline "Young Praises Islam as ‘Vibrant’ And Calls the Ayatollah ‘a Saint’". You can read it here:

http://www.nytimes.com/1979/02/08/archives/young-praises-isl...

Based on my understanding, an accurate claim would be the following: "The New York Times reported that Andrew Young, the United States Ambassador to the United Nations, predicted that Ayatollah Khomeini would eventually be hailed as a saint."

The stuff about RussiaToday is in there as evidence for the hacking because it establishes intent. They use it as a proxy for Putin's opinions.

The BBC is very open about their government ties. RT is not.

Oh?

https://www.rt.com/usa/rt-government-broadcasting-radio/

The seem to be very open about their funding from the Russian government. In fact, comparing it exactly to the BBC.

Hacking, internet based propaganda, and disinformation are all elements of asymmetric warfare, and Russia has used all these, in a spectrum from hacking infrastructure in Ukraine, to spreading disinformation and supporting a racist, fascist right in Europe and the US.

This does not diminish the case against Russia. They have helped turn a political fringe into a force in the US, France, UK, Poland and elsewhere. Unless you truly believe open society and liberalism is wrong, Russia is throwing a wrench in the works, and deserves to be punished for doing so.

Hacking, internet based propaganda, and disinformation are all elements of asymmetric warfare, and the USA has used all these.

What's your point?

Is there a point to your relativism? I can hold that Russia is partly to blame, and should be punished for enabling a minority of Americans to elect a highly damaging president, AND I can hold that the US is heavy-handed in, for example, managing "democracy" in Turkey and that leads to problems.

And the USA should be punished for it's mischievousness?

You left that out both times.

It feels like a lot of US folk are still in the blame-somebody-else stage of grieving.

Is it Russia's fault the US electoral college system allows a minority to elect the president?

Should the US be punished? One could conclude that the coup in Turkey failed because many Turks thought so. Similarly, Russia should not get away with pumping up our racists.

What does that have to do with anything?

If an external country convinced 60% of a population to vote against its establishment (and for the sake of argument, their (the voters) own self interest), it is immune from punishment because it convinced a minority?

We now want to punish countries that say different things than Americans agree with? Speaking Pro-Trumps and Anti-Clinton statements is VERY different than false propaganda.

Internet based propaganda and disinformation are protected by freedom of the press, and should remain protected. It is up to the reader to parse and verify truth. No one says the "flat earth society" or the "moon hoax" people should be punished. While I disagree with what many people say online and have different views, the freedom to publish anything, including propaganda and disinformation is sacred and should be protected.

>the freedom to publish anything

Including libelous material?

I agree, up to a point - where the disinformation represents a concerted attempt to suppress factual information or delegitimize truthful sources, and the degree of political instability creates an existential threat, for example, or where the publication of information will result in injury with no discernible public benefit, as in the dissemination of child porn.

In any case, freedom of the press is already very robust in the US, unlike some other countries.

I doubt very much that "freedom of the press" as guaranteed by the First Amendment in the United States applies to the right of foreign nations to engage in propaganda.

I also doubt that any country in has ever accepted foreign propaganda, Manchurian candidates who subvert their electoral processes (speaking generally, not about any particular candidate) and mass manipulation of its populace (the fact the the US has engaged in this sort of activity does not make it right either).

This report presents conclusions, not evidence. There are quite a few commenters in this thread decrying the "absence of evidence," but that is simply the burden of proof fallacy.

I've performed my own analysis of election memes and I independently confirmed a staggering amount of Trump-related traffic with significantly above-average upvotes across several major media platforms.

https://iandennismiller.github.io/election-memes/

I wrote this 2 weeks before the election and even then, I was already looking closely at bot/sock puppet activity. I didn't connect everything at the time, but I now view the shockingly pro-Trump traffic in an even-more-skeptical light.

For some, there will never be enough evidence to prove social media were subverted for the purpose of influencing the election. For my purposes, however, I appreciate the PDF linked in this thread because it is actually relevant to my social media research. I am happy to cite the intelligence report as context for the social media findings I reported on.

I do not consider the book to be "closed" on this matter, but I do condemn all the commenters in this thread who are attempting to shut down the conversation by claiming there's not enough "evidence."

In closing, I quote from the report:

> This report is a declassified version of a highly classified assessment; its conclusions are identical to those in the highly classified assessment but this version does not include the full supporting information on key elements of the influence campaign.

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