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Comment by monocle | Hacker News Reader

In China the government hires people to sway public opinion. In the US, special interests and those with money do it. Is it worse that the Chinese government does it to "keep the peace", while those in the US do it to get your money? Super PACs, political activists, pharmaceutical companies, Reddit power users, brigades and pay-for-votes services... not sure if there's any real difference.

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In the UK, the government hires people, via the GCHQ, to sway public opinion.

"Among the core self-identified purposes of JTRIG are two tactics: (1) to inject all sorts of false material onto the internet in order to destroy the reputation of its targets; and (2) to use social sciences and other techniques to manipulate online discourse and activism to generate outcomes it considers desirable. "

https://theintercept.com/2014/02/24/jtrig-manipulation/

In the US it seems like the stuff that really goes viral is just bullshit schemed up by people trying to make a few bucks: http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2016/11/23/503...

And as the stories spread, Coler makes money from the ads on his websites. He wouldn't give exact figures, but he says stories about other fake-news proprietors making between $10,000 and $30,000 a month apply to him.

Here's a great example of the effect these stories can have:

He was amazed at how quickly fake news could spread and how easily people believe it. He wrote one fake story for NationalReport.net about how customers in Colorado marijuana shops were using food stamps to buy pot. "What that turned into was a state representative in the House in Colorado proposing actual legislation to prevent people from using their food stamps to buy marijuana based on something that had just never happened," Coler says.

Longer (audio) version of the story here: http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/12/02/504155809/episo...

As much as that author may wish to take all the credit, "Poor/Black people using food stamps to buy things that anger conservatives" is a long established genre in certain media circles, and it's clear he just put a small twist on it.

The most recent one I saw was people using food stamps to buy food from Amazon. I don't even understand why that's a bad thing, but someone wrote a story trying to gin up some outrage over it.

http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2017/01/16/amazon-be...

http://www.infowars.com/amazon-to-accept-food-stamps-under-n...

The "logic" probably goes that somebody with internet access is well-off enough to not need food assistance.

(Internet access still being seen as a luxury rather than a necessity to participate in modern society/economy.)

It's my opinion that attempts to sway public opinion are spitting in the wind, but normally in the same direction as the wind, resulting in an illusion of efficacy. You can see their lack of real impact when they desperately try (and fail) to turn the public. Cf Trump.

Control of ideas is massively oversold by both proponents and opponents, who both have a vested interest in believing it works. The reality is that the public has beliefs which are more cultural than anything else, and so do the "influencers", and so they tend to push in the direction the public was already going. And the opponents find it easier to blame influence rather than a cultural rejection of their ideas.

No, they're not, it is highly effective--I saw it firsthand during the run up to the Gulf War in 2003. I was on a message board and suddenly there would be all these "pro war" type members showing up posting basically propaganda and giving people a hard time and mostly creating chaos.

The latest time I saw this behavior was on Reddit during the just completed 2016 elections. And then my suspicions were validated when Correct The Record was outed as the group doing it.

This is ugly, ugly behavior--propaganda of the nastiest kind.

"I don't know how Nixon won, nobody I know voted for him". People live in bubbles. When you encounter a cultural clique with contrary ideas it can look like a villainous conspiracy simply because it's assumptions are so alien and yet so strongly held. Surely they must be shills, trolls, etc? No, generally not. People actually do have those beliefs and consider them worth grouping up and fighting for. Not the people you hang with, but elections in particular are great puncturers of bubbles; they count the real numbers.

So paid-for propaganda in online comments didn't happen?

Probably happened on a number of sides, as well as group organising on a voluntary basis to do propaganda, and individuals who were just that motivated, and so on.

My main point being though, black hat or white, pro Trump or pro Hillary, they were all spitting in the wind.

Your point is off the mark, propaganda works, it cost Hillary the election; that last minute FBI story swayed people and secured Trump as the winner despite the story being false.

It made the numbers move, but those are the same numbers that predicted a Hillary win. Clearly those numbers reflected more factors than absolute voting intention. For example: how acceptable it was to oppose Hillary in public.

Nobody gets to rerun the election in a Comey-less alternate universe and see if he changed it all. Pretending you can is self delusion.

The numbers didn't have time to move, that was the point of the late release, and why the polls were off, they didn't have time to adjust to the new information.

> Nobody gets to rerun the election in a Comey-less alternate universe and see if he changed it all. Pretending you can is self delusion.

I'm not pretending anything, you pretending that news didn't change the outcome of a close election is you being delusional.

The poll numbers did move. But polls are just polls. The election is the real count but it only happens once, you can't draw trend lines.

Polls take time to move, some moved, some weren't re-polled before the election, and no polls aren't just polls; poll are a statistical sampling of the electorate and do allow you to draw a trend line and notice things like hey, that piece of news made a different in the outcome. That elections happen only once is not relevant, it doesn't invalidate the poll data that shows minds were changed.

Whether Comey influenced it or not is also a moot point, since Comey was a high-profile public servant making an official statement to the mainstream media, not a bunch of anyonymous forumites and Tweeters arguing with other anonymous forumites and tweeters across random internet backwaters.

I think it's more than a little unlikely the US government was so obsessed with making the case for war it launched (and successfully concealed from the public) a massive campaign to troll online forums without even being able to do basic stuff like make the official case for war a bit more competently and "discover" some WMDs to vindicate themselves afterwards.

It's not like there's any reason to believe that the millions of US citizens who passionately believed in the necessity of bringing down the "Axis of Evil" or just enjoy trolling liberals would recuse themselves from online debate in the build up to the war

Influencing opinion online is many orders of magnitude easier to accomplish than faking WMD's in Iraq.

Paying enough people to troll enough web forums for there to be a non-trivial possibility the OP was interacting with several of them without being rumbled doesn't really seem orders of magnitude more difficult than paying a couple of "weapons experts" to lie for you, or getting some material your military possesses into a territory your military controls.

They tried that mate. But it turns out it's hard to find credible weapons experts that are total hacks with no qualms about lying. When it became clear that their chosen expert was going to expose the fact that there were indeed NO WMD's, he promptly died shortly before his report was due to be published: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Kelly_(weapons_expert)

By comparison, posting on online forums can be done very easily by anyone of any character.

>Not the people you hang with, but elections in particular are great puncturers of bubbles; they count the real numbers.

An "election" that just "counts" which propaganda campaigns were more effective is worthless. You're really going to have to do better than just claiming that it's all bubbles and there are no propaganda campaigns.

I'm saying that everyone's propaganda campaign was equally ineffective. Opinions weren't swayed.

I think the burden of proof lies on people making extraordinary claims like "people that disagreed with me in 2003 did so only because they were part of an enormous, undiscovered government conspiracy"

I remember the gulf war, I remember long established members of the boards I inhabited at the time, usually but not always with a right-wing lean, going absolutely bananas at the time. And even the more reasonable ones basically lost the plot. If you really want a conspiracy theory, I'd point to the government and Fox news being desperate to pivot from 9/11 to one of the wars they'd been planning.

I also remember Reddit during the last election. Political sub-reddits that only had Bernie fans and internet libertarians during non-election years suddenly got swamped by "normal" people, and the regulars started conspiracy theories about who all these people were with their "weird" opinions.

The fact is, reddit's demographics skew young & educated, any outside observer would expect them to be more liberal than the average American, and they mostly are, even accounting for the male skew and the pockets of reactionaries that make their home there.

The whole Correct the Record thing is on a par with pizzagate. I'm always saddened that I can't tell the difference between those who've been naively sucked in and those who repeat these things out of a political motive. I used to assume they were mostly in-the-know, but my faith in humanity has ebbed and I can no longer attribute to malice what is adequately explained by them mostly being brainwashed by the most feeble of conspiracy theories.

>The whole Correct the Record thing is on a par with pizzagate.

Do you mind clarifying in what respects they were similar to you? I haven't heard much in the way of specifics re CtR, but pizzagate was just... zero percent true. Was CtR similarly untruthful, or were they similar in some other dimension you find relevant?

Was it now :) Boy, are you in for nasty surprises once the truth hits the fan for real. It didn't bother you a tiny bit that the whole stinking pile of bullshit peddlers went into panic mode to cover everything up asap?

Just like there really is a Ping Pong pizza restaurant, there is a Super PAC called "Correct the Record"

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correct_the_Record

As the name suggests, they thought that trolls spreading lies was a problem, and they tried to "correct the record".

In the darker corners of Reddit on the other hand, every opinion that disagrees with them is written by a shill funded by George Soros, who in their version is a Nazi collaborator, rather than a victim of the Nazis.

The fact is that the average American is fairly "liberal" by many measures. Lots of Democrat policies have broad support. Democrats have been winning the popular vote for a while. Elections with high turnouts favor Democrats etc. etc. Republicans win via the standard political strategies rather than by reflecting the will of the people.

And that's all Americans. Reddit is obviously going to have even more liberal voices due to the demographics. We don't need to invoke a conspiracy theory to figure out why someone would call out a false right-wing talking point on Reddit.

An important part of the political theory behind pluralism is to do with managing certain realities beyond just individuals. You will have multiple power centres within societies (corporations, universities, trade unions, NGOs etc.). Allowing them a free voice has many benefits. Particularly it helps keep the peace, it makes power structures more obvious and it allows legitimate concerns to be surfaced more quickly and reliably.

Just because it's not the weakest member of society controlling things in either system doesn't make both systems the same.

I wouldn't feel so safe from US Gov't backed propaganda either. The US recently enacted the "Countering Disinformation and Propaganda Act," which, in following recent bill naming history in the US, seems to be more about the opposite of its title: setting up the gov't infrastructure to push it's own propoganda and controlling speech it deems as sourced from "enemies".

That all sounds like fear mongering hyperbole. I just read over the text of the bill here (https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/house-bill/5181...) and nothing in it suggests that would happen. Most of it is purely about identifying foreign propaganda.

I see the directive "to develop, plan, and synchronize, in coordination with the Secretary of Defense, the Director of National Intelligence, the Broadcasting Board of Governors, and other relevant departments and agencies, to ... proactively advance fact-based narratives that support United States allies and interests"

I see no reporting requirements for public oversight of exactly what narratives are advanced, nor does the cast of officers listed particularly hint that such information would be forthcoming, nor are there requirements to identify that its the government doing the pushing when a particular narrative is being advanced to the American public.

While there is value in countering foreign propaganda, I feel that to do it in secret is US propaganda and of less lasting value than doing it in the open.

One major difference is how concentrated the special interests are. In the case of the Chinese government, public opinion is being swayed by a single entity. In the US, a large number of interest groups are all competing to try to sway public opinion. In the latter case, I think it's harder (at least in principle) for any one group to have a large effect on its own.

Except in the common intersection of their interests.

Except, centralization of wealth means that the opinions of a relatively few people control the seeming surface diversity of "influencers" in the USA by holding the purse strings (when the proles resort to crowd funding they can break out of this to an extent, Bernie being an example).

The elites rig the elections and the public sphere, while the proles use the one election where they can still sway the vote to vote for dangerous populists as a protest.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=trrqslUpfdw

Old republican values are relegated to the dustbin, and a civilization becomes a shadow of its former self. This has happened before, and will happen again.

This seems to play out in practice—in the US, the issues that have the most lobbying and airplay tend to have strong voices on both sides. Sometimes it's companies on one side and activist groups on the other, but often it's a mix of different activists and companies on both sides. They're not always matched evenly, but few things are entirely one-sided.

The really scary lobbying is the sort that stays out of the public opinion and tries to influence the government in niche areas the average person doesn't know or care about (like very specific industry regulations). That's where companies get away with the most egregious things, at least until something finally brings the issue to the public conscience.

The other major differences is that political cultures that place high value on free expression of political views and public political participation generally don't have to bother paying people to reason, brigade or troll for their preferred political cause

Totally disagree, in the US as in China there is a ruling wealthy elite. Both are roughly the same proportion of the population, and both are pushing their agendas.

The one meaningful difference is that in the US they still pay lip service to the idea of free speech.

I think the difference is that we can choose not to buy products, but we can't choose a different government. So one stifles competition but the other stifles reform.

Ummm, in the US the government hires people to sway public opinion too.

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