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Comment by ng12 | Hacker News Reader

So the Russian bots are posting left-wing content? How does that work?

EDIT: Looking for clarification, here. Not sure why I'm being downvoted.

If they’re simply trying to create unrest of any kind, you play each side off of each other.

They don’t need to support one side to weaken us. Making our political systems grind to a halt through a lack of agreement is something we’re already good at. Perhaps they’re just trying to push our buttons to get us into that gridlock again.

If the sources I read were itself not fake, the idea is that they simply try to increase the gap between left and right. Decrease mutual understanding, prevent dialog between sides, increase mistrust.

I'm not entirely sure how that can benefit the Russian government though. But hey, I have no idea what their end game is. I'm sure someone here has ideas.

> I'm not entirely sure how that can benefit the Russian government though.

Decreases the will of the US to effectively achieve its aims, which run counter in many ways to the Putin regime. If congress is spending its days shouting at each other, then they can't do awkward things like, e.g., provide substantial support in rhetoric and materials to the Ukraine to address Russia's invasion.

Foundations of Geopolitics by Durgin lays out the groundwork for Russia's current western strategy. Putin's been implementing it word for word.

Interesting to note that Amazon seems to have removed this book https://www.amazon.com/Foundations-Geopolitics-Geopolitical-...

There's quite a few old and freshly minted Kremlinologists who have been studying Russia their whole life that you can read. (As opposed to random strangers on this forum!)

E.g.: Mark Galleotti

The Russians also ran the #NotMyPresident campaign after Trump was elected. The Russians trolls do not care who is in office they just want to cause mayham.

I'm nitpicking here, but I dislike that commenters and media alike so liberally use "The Russians" for this. It's the Russian government and their benefactors. There are 150 million Russians and, like anywhere, they're by and large good people with good intentions. Let's not blame an entire people for their government's decisions.

Eg if I would blame "the Americans" for the CIA torture program, I'f rightfully get backlash here.

I apologise. I completely agree with you.

BTW I didn't mean to single you out. You weren't doing anything out of the ordinary :-)

Also, "The Russians" narrative contributes to the idea that there is singular state actor doing this. I'd wager that they're not even the most sophisticated one.

It's always safest to assume that every state actor is doing whatever it can (get away with) to advance their interests.

> There are 150 million Russians and, like anywhere, they're by and large good people with good intentions

I'm not sure I'd let them off the hook so easily. They elected Putin and, if independent polling is to be believed, seem to still support him. This doesn't make them complicit in his ever crime. But it does remove their total independence.

> They elected Putin and, if independent polling is to be believed, seem to still support him.

Independent polling showing strong support for the existing leadership in a country that has a long history with (perhaps) brief interruptions of being a heavily monitored authoritarian state with both overt and covert reprisals, not infrequently including fatal ones, against dissidents cannot be trusted for reasons which ought to be obvious.

Which is not to say Putin doesn't have strong support, just that polling can't be relied on to assess that.

> Which is not to say Putin doesn't have strong support, just that polling can't be relied on to assess that

Reputable firms try to correct for the biases you mention [1]. We have more evidence for the claim that Putin is domestically supported than otherwise. Which makes sense, given he's stabilized and relatively-competently managed their economy [2]. (Cf: Oil prices are up.)

[1] http://www.pewglobal.org/2017/06/20/president-putin-russian-...

[2] http://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/natosource/what-is-the-...

> Reputable firms try to correct for the biases you mention

The problem with that is you hve to measure how those biases change; even if you somehow of a good baseline adjustments, when you get new better numbers is it the regime being more popular or people being more afraid that criticism of the regime will be detected and punished?

Also, the survey you link doesn't actually describe any method of correcting for biases; implicitly, I suppose you could say that the art of options (some vs. a lot of confidence) and how they are treated (only “a lot” really treated as a positive signal) is a weak effort to mitigate the of bias at issue.

> when you get new better numbers is it the regime being more popular or people being more afraid that criticism of the regime will be detected and punished?

I agree that the data are imprecise. It is impossible to confidently answer "is Putin more popular today than a year ago?" But they are good enough to answer "does at least half the population support him?" Contrast that to oppressive regimes in Egypt or Venezuela, where the regimes do not appear to have popular support.

> They [..] seem to still support him.

With Putin controlling the media and, well, much of public life, what else did you expect? It's not like you can just go do an anti-Putin demonstration without fear for your future.

Don't forget that in all of Russia's history, they've never been a functioning democracy, never had proper free speech for a decent stretch of time. Putin is just the next one in a long line of, well, czars. If, for millennia, an entire country's ethos includes "well, the boss is the boss, innit? what are we gonna do about it?" then reelection is a self-fulfilling prophecy. That does not make the Russians bad people. It just makes them stoic pessimists :-)

At the end: nobody held a gun to your head. Both in US and Russia.

Americans elected Trump.

Russians "elected" Putin.

IMHO each people is responsible for their leader.

WRT polling, Putin had a 80%+ approval since at least Crimea (2014). Full stop.

Russian elections are a massive fraud fest at this point, so their results are meaningless for any purposes.

Now, it's true that the majority still supports the government. But it's nowhere near as overwhelming as the elections would let you believe (think 50% rather than 80%). And, of course, this still means that there are literally millions of people who 1) are Russian, and 2) don't support it.

I've already started seeing some rhetoric on the left that is explicitly invoking McCarthy in a positive way. That's not a good sign. Please dial it down.

It's looks like HN is infected too, so they downvoted you. They are not only posting content, they also trying to ban or dismiss their opponents too (or just kill most annoying ones, as in my case).

Yeah, Russia was also pumping up the Bernie Bros and the Jill Stein campaign.

Not that there weren't plenty of people who legitimately wanted to see Bernie win but the goal of the Russians was to do whatever made Hillary lose - hurting her campaign directly with hacking, as well as pumping up both her Republican and Democratic competitors. In the US system, spoiler candidates hurt their competitor more than their opponent, so pumping up Bernie is another way to hurt Clinton.

The whole "they just want to cause chaos" trope is true in a sense, but they were very obviously going about it by sandbagging Clinton and pumping up her competition wherever they could. Clinton was very obviously the major-party candidate that would have produced the strongest, most stable US out of that election, and that's really what Russia was trying to avoid, that's the whole "chaos" trope. It's not truly random in the sense of uncontrollable monkeys, it's whatever they think will cause the most damage, and keeping Clinton out of the White House was a specific and key objective. It was quite obvious that Trump was a moron (and very possibly in the early stages of Alzheimer's) and that he'd be the candidate that caused the most chaos.

(Sorry Bernie Bros, but if Bernie had won the primary, he would have been an easy target for Trump and the Russians as well, and even if he won the general the country would have been highly polarized, even if his actions would have been a lot better than Trump's. People in that timeline wouldn't have gotten to see the mess Trump caused in this one. His continued campaign sandbagged Clinton into the general and was a major contributor to Trump winning. The primary was obviously over and Bernie dragging it out was doing nothing but weakening Clinton. And I say this as someone whose personal politics most closely align with Bernie's, out of the three, and who voted for him in the primary.)

> Bernie Bros

I think this (blatantly sexist) term is just as divisive as anything the Russians did.

SMH. No.

A girl can be a "bro" or a "dude" just as much as a guy.

A group of girls can be "guys".

English language is peculiar!

I am just amazed nobody Godwin'd this thing so far.

Context matters and in context the term is decidedly male. The article Wikipedia credits with coining the term has this to say:

> The Berniebro is not every Bernie Sanders supporter. Sanders’s support skews young, but not particularly male. The Berniebro is male, though. Very male.

> The Berniebro is someone you may only have encountered if you’re somewhat similar to him: white; well-educated; middle-class (or, delicately, “upper middle-class”); and aware of NPR podcasts and jangly bearded bands.

Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/10/here-co...

Just for perspective:

When I hear "Berniebro".. .

I think of gym bros, frat bros, New Jersey residents, surfer "brahs", and not sexism.

Do you think of women when you think of those terms or only men? If those terms were used in a dismissive, derogatory way, would you not agree that the term is sexist?

I think of the "bro"/"brah" stereotype.

Yes, almost all of the bros who fit the stereotype are male, but I've seen a few skateboard and surfer ladies who are just as "bro" as the men.

If there was a term for girl Bernie supporters, would that make this better?

Berniechick?

One can't win this. Man is gonna be argue about genders until the Second Cumming.

I like how nobody replies to this thread with anything except "Bernie Bros is sexist! Just as bad as a foreign power throwing an election!".

A+ discussion, guys. Say, isn't that a copy of Pravda over there? What, did you read a script?

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