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Comment by meowface | Hacker News Reader

"Highly opinionated think pieces trying to present their views as being unbiased reporting" are a major problem in the US and around the world, but let's at least consider why RT is a special case here.

RT is not only owned by a foreign state but is specifically owned by a state which attempted to deceptively influence Google's home country's elections, partially with the help of RT. RT is undoubtedly Russian propaganda and can't be anything else; anyone at RT who genuinely wants to provide a view that isn't uniformly pro-Russian risks retaliation from the government.

If the scenarios were flipped and Voice of America were peddling propaganda to influence Russia's next election (which they probably actually are doing), Yandex would have a pretty valid reason to lower the rankings of Voice of America stories.

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I don't largely disagree with some of the concerns I question the motives and timeliness of the decision to de-rank a media outlet like RT. It's not something that is done for the reasons presented and the whole Russian influence on the election has so many holes to be a proven credible threat. People are ignorant of media outlets and think stations like Al Jazeera are Al Quaida driven so I am highly skeptical that any party is doing any censoring for legitimate reasons or valid concerns. They aren't looking out for your best interests when it comes to presenting the news.

>and the whole Russian influence on the election has so many holes to be a proven credible threat

I'm not sure the impact so much matters as the intent. Even if it wasn't really a big threat, and even if Trump would've won without any sort of interference (which probably is the case, but it is and will be impossible to truly know), the fact that they did it at all shows they're trying to game the system, partly by gaming Google. Google is now going to make it harder to game.

It is a bad precedent to de-rank results in this way, but I think this is a special circumstance. I agree that a better approach would be to provide warnings and context rather than merely trying to push things down.

> I'm not sure the impact so much matters as the intent.

I think some of the election-related stuff is mostly politicization. If you follow some of the hearings on the subject of Russian propaganda (cspan has some) it seemed more that they were targeting and prodding cultural divisions.

Organizing anti-immigration rallies at the same time and location as Muslim rallies and pushing racial and cultural divides. It seems like their focus is to polarize people and try to promote extremism.

Yes, this was undoubtedly one of the Russian government's goals, but the US IC also came to the definitive conclusion that their goal was not only this but also to get Donald Trump elected. It was an open question for some time: were they merely trying to cause chaos and increase the divide, or did they specifically want one candidate in office? The answer, at least according to 17 US intelligence agencies, is both. And this isn't a huge shock considering Putin's well-known long-standing grudge against Clinton and Trump being considerably more pro-Russian than she was during the election cycle.

What exactly did Russia do to influence US elections?

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