Hacker News Reader

Comment by johndoe90 | Hacker News Reader

Do you think this could really have any impact on the elections?

I don't see how any of those images or texts could change my opinion on who I want to be the president. Why would anyone take them into consideration?

P.S. I'm Russian. I'm no fan of propaganda and I just want to figure out whether our government really wanted Trump to be the president and if so, then why? I might have missed something, but I don't see that the decisions Trump making are any good for Russia. I see the opposite.

For example, Trump wanted to remove the oil production limit, which would have affected Russian economics.

View on HN

Clinton was campaigning on policy of starting a war with Russia in Syria (establishing a "no fly zone" i.e. by shooting down planes that were flying). Trump was saying he'd make peace with Russia. So there is a motive.

However, I think this sort of article raises more questions than answers.

Firstly what makes them think this was the work of the Russian government vs private sector Russians with an interest in US politics? The only evidence seems to be the use of a particular payment service and the rest is assumption.

Secondly, how are these ads meant to benefit Russia specifically? What are these ads supposed to achieve? The evil plan being to "sow division in society"? US society is already very divided and has been for ages. It's very hard to imagine any government signing off on the purchase of a bunch of stupid Jesus arm wrestling memes, especially as there's no coherent theme to any of this.

The whole Russia-American-election story continues to look to me like a huge set of suppositions and dubious mental leaps. It's all very clearly an attempt to get Trump impeached. Motivated reasoning is bound to follow.

PS. I am not Russian.

>Firstly what makes them think this was the work of the Russian government vs private sector Russians with an interest in US politics?

The opposite reasoning also works. Why assume this is a private sector Russian with an interest in politics, when there is a more simple/straightforward answer in who would create something like this?

I do agree that Russians should have been interested in the election, as most of the world should for a country that has a large impact on the socioeconomic fabric, but any time you begin to input your own time/money into something, you immediately become obviously vested in the outcome of something you have no right in influencing.

>Secondly, how are these ads meant to benefit Russia specifically? What are these ads supposed to achieve? The evil plan being to "sow division in society"?

Come on, it should be very clear to you why these are beneficial to a supposed Russian effort to affect the election. Demonization is a classic, and effective strategy to influence opinion, and while I do agree that this meme is a very ineffective rhetorical strategy to you/me when we look at it in a more skeptical light than normal, just seeing this on your Facebook feed randomly could be very effective to many people.

>The whole Russia-American-election story continues to look to me like a huge set of suppositions and dubious mental leaps.

It's an investigation that hasn't been finished yet, so I do understand a skittishness in the veracity of some of the claims made so far in the dossier, but the idea that the entirety of the Russian collusion saga has just been trumped-up charges is a joke. Two men have been indicted, and another plead guilty to crimes that are at least casually related to a possible Russian collusion.

>It's all very clearly an attempt to get Trump impeached. Motivated reasoning is bound to follow.

Politically it's absolutely an attempt to impeach Trump, yet day after day more information is released/revealed/found that is more and more damning to the idea that something illegal didn't happen in the 2016 election.

Remember, the idea of Russian collusion isn't something that was just made up after Trump became President. There has been a natural build up of evidence/steam that has slowly shed more light on possible activities by those strongly linked with Trump, or by Trump himself.

>PS. I am not a Russian.

Neither am I. It doesn't matter.

There isn't a fraction of a fragment of evidence that Russia influenced the election.

Why assume this is a private sector Russian with an interest in politics, when there is a more simple/straightforward answer in who would create something like this?

I don't agree it's more simple or straightforward. Governments don't do anything without signoff in triplicate. For a government to end up buying large quantities of Jesus memes would require a fairly large number of people to be involved, and they would have to justify themselves to the hierarchy. This seems extremely implausible to me. For one, if this was even slightly effective, wouldn't we be seeing all governments at it against each other?

In contrast people in the private sector spending their own money can do what the hell they like, without having to justify to anyone.

In fact the original perps don't even have to be Russian. They could just be paying a firm in Russia to do it.

Come on, it should be very clear to you why these are beneficial to a supposed Russian effort

No, I'm afraid you'll have to enlighten me. Generic "sowing division" - if it had any benefit to foreign powers at all - would benefit lots of countries simultaneously, i.e. any country that wanted the USA to stay out of their own politics which is most of them. How would they scope the benefit to just Russia? And if it can't be scoped in this way, what's the evidence that it's them?

Two men have been indicted, and another plead guilty to crimes that are at least casually related to a possible Russian collusion

So what? I don't trust the US establishment to be even slightly sane in regards to this. As you admit large parts of it want Trump gone and have been throwing around overblown accusations for the past 18 months to try and get that.

Remember, the idea of Russian collusion isn't something that was just made up after Trump became President

I'm afraid that's not how I remember it. I remember it being very much something that came out of nowhere after Trump won. After a month or two of trying to pin Trump's victory on sexists and racists, I think the Democratic establishment realised that attacking Trump voters directly wasn't going to work and alienating half the country wasn't great politics even if it did work. So they shifted their efforts to a new strategy - imply the election itself was illegitimate, imply that people who voted for Trump aren't really people deep down, they were just brainwashed by dank memes. That allows direct attacks on Trump without direct attacks on his voters.

Since then I've watched as every day the Russia/Trump conspiracy reaches new ludicrous heights. If the USA doesn't get a collective mental grip it may end in civil war.

> Governments don't do anything without signoff in triplicate.

Once a broad strategy and objective for a sensitive covert operation is signed off from the top, yes, they often do things with considerably less bureaucratic oversight and control than the same government would apply to less sensitive operations.

Compartmentalization isn't just a thing for non-governmental criminal/terrorist/rebel groups (in fact, many of those, particularly in the latter two categories, were taught it by their government sponsors.)

And governments where the executive isn't subject to effective legislative and judicial oversight frequently are fairly slapdash with controls even outside of covert operations on issues where the leadership is more focussed on the perception of progress than specific documented accountability.

I totally agree there is no way these had any real impact on voter turnout. To me these read more like sowing the seeds of division in general than anything else.

So I thought about it.

There is a way that I could rethink of my candidate. If someone (a paid troll for instance) was targeted against me. If they would have been talking to me and sending proofs I could believe in, then, probably, I could even change my opinion.

And you know what? Russia has trolls. It's even worse, it's centralized troll factory — a house of paid trolls.

But even if those trolls were told to “make America great again” with Trump, they wouldn't have impact big enough to change anything.

Clinton was going to be worse.

But keep in mind that a weak and divided America is the first goal. Keeping Washington dysfunctional.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com