Comment by myegorov | Hacker News Reader

Comment by myegorov | Hacker News Reader

Looks like the CIA is screwing the public by mutual consent. The public is demanding more of the same, just as long as it's directed at whoever is out their favor. Here're the two topmost comments on NYT at the moment[0]:

  karma2013 New Jersey 3 hours ago
  If anyone still has doubts that Wikileaks and the Russians   
  are working together to undermine and destabilize our    
  government institutions, erode public confidence in our 
  government, and generally wreak havoc in our country, this 
  latest document dump should erase all doubt. We are under 
  attack by an adversarial nation, with a President here at  
  the helm who seems not to take any of this seriously.
  Spy agencies spy, this should come as no shock -- this is 
  how they infiltrate potential terrorist plots against 
  America and keep us safe. We are less safe today thanks to 
  Wikileaks and Assange's unholy alliance with Putin..

  Thomas Marin County, CA 3 hours ago
  Where's the hacking of trump's taxes and his Russian 
  connections??
  This information is needed NOW!

[0]https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/07/world/europe/wikileaks-ci...

If you've spent anytime on twitter or reddit lately, there's an increasingly large amount of political astroturfing from special interest organizations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Cent_Party

http://www.sfgate.com/technology/businessinsider/article/US-...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smith-Mundt_Modernization_Act_...

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-op...

Have you noticed this trend on HN? Because I see essentially the same sentiment in this thread. Little if anything is effected purely by overt or tacit collusion.

There's certainly been a handful of very overt political troll commentators with talking point narratives which I've noticed on HN in the last few weeks.

Thankfully HN has a better reputation system in place. News website comments have 0 barrier to entry, and Twitter and Reddit are clearly prone to mass bot'ing. It helps that there's access to an API for transparency on those sites but the persona astroterfing ops are getting more advanced tactics like copying random user comments to build up an appearance nearly indistinguishable from a normal user's history at first glance.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybil_attack

Interesting. I was actually joking about HN. I can't think of an example where hangers-on or bots or engagée interest groups have ever been able to sway the popular opinion en masse. Not saying the special interest groups won't take bids from any interested takers or have negligible effect. Luckily for the rest of us, it takes more than a marketing campaign to bring Putin to power or turn the tide against Trump. From my observations, the NYT (and HN) comments are symptomatic of the US popular opinion as of today that looks favorably on mass spying in the face of ISIS or Russia or whatever it is they feel requires the military/special agents to intervene.

There's certainly significant efforts intended to dilute and distract discourse in reddit threads and infiltrating influential moderator positions on the main subreddits.

/r/undelete logs many instances of some of the weirdness.

Check any popular political tweet and you'll likely notice the first or top replies are coming from trolls pushing empty narratives.

The assumption here is that those people are part of the public and are not shilling a 'more correct record'.

Just for your own knowledge, Correct the Record was dissolved after the election and the primary internet PR organization is now called "Share Blue"

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