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Comment by xupybd | Hacker News Reader

So Russsia is partially behind the current left vs right / Black vs white tension going on in the USA?

Mostly via amplification.

The issue is that Russia is taking natural tension and then using AI, bot farms, propaganda and shills to wind the volume up to 11.

Most people are not even aware that they are under attack let alone have the tools to resist this level of hostile action.

I strongly suspect that a LOT of the Bernie/Hilary discord was mostly Russian in origin. When I actually queried people as to why they disliked a candidate vs why they liked a candidate you got VERY discordant viewpoints--totally off-scale divergence.

This is new in politics--at least to me--and I had to be careful not to fall into the trap myself.

It has never appeared to me as though the people who take part in that needed any help. On Twitter especially, it looks like the non-Russians get bored hourly and go looking for trouble.

They're certainly inflaming it.

Trying to inflame it. I haven't seen any evidence it was effective. It's not as if there was a shortage of outrage on Facebook or Tumblr.

Although you're going to get down-voted, that's an actual problem. We don't know the full state of discourse before interference, during interference, or currently so it's a bit hard for anyone to say 'this is specifically what they changed'.

It's a bit analogous to having a server that lots of people access. Then you notice that a bunch of people have been accessing it with write permissions that weren't supposed to write to it, but the data's totally disorganized, you don't have a backup to compare it to, and reconstructing the changes they made is a pain.

That being said, there's been quite a bit of individual changes identified at this time by going back and looking which are evidence that changes were made, but as far as how any of the changes add up to significant functional differences, we don't know.

Are you shitting me? It was a critical hit.

Surely you can point me to some sort of evidence of its effectiveness then?

The exact outrage you mentioned noticing. The outrage didn't stop it, the outrage IS it. Russia doesn't care if we know they're meddling, it works just fine at generating instability anyways. It might even work better that way. Look at us, here we are still talking Russia. It's going to continue to work for as long as people let it so easily outrage them.

It was already a gasoline-soaked pile of wood scraps and leaves, piled up higher and higher for decades (if not centuries). The social network meddling is the lit cigarette flicked into it.

It was always burning Since the world's been turning

Russia allegedly organized a BLM anti-Trump rally in July of 2016.

http://www.businessinsider.com/russians-organized-pro-anti-t...

I'm a little suspicious when people call it black vs white.

What’s the correct way to phrase it? I just mean there seems to be more racial friction now than say a decade ago. Not sure if there is more but it seems that way in the media.

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