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Comment by beaconstudios | Hacker News Reader

so 4chan once again gamed the internet using bots, for their own amusement, to attempt to help the campaign and to irritate people they see as political enemies. We've seen this so many times now, why is it still surprising or attributed to nebulous groups ("it's the Russians!") rather than a well known group of internet rabble-rousers? Not that this article does so, but the wider press often seems to.

It wouldn't be half the impact if every time they did something like this, the wider media brushed it off as "4chan did something that was meant to be provocative again".

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4chan (really, just /pol/) is one of many communities doing this. The Russian government is another entity that's doing this. There's no reason it can't be both.

absolutely, but I guess I'm seeing way too much attribution going towards the Russians. If some twitter account with an anime avatar tweets some blatantly incendiary stuff it's "Russian troll accounts" now. It's a bit OTT even for the scope and scale of the Russian interference, which was grand.

Yes, and that was partly the point all along: to spread FUD about people being Russian agents, events being Russia-manipulated, and ideas being Russia-propagated. Russian intelligence has surely succeeded on that front.

The rational people out there aren't throwing around any such accusations, though. Instead, they rely on the documented instances of proven Russian trolls, as uncovered by law enforcement, the intelligence community, and Facebook and Twitter's security teams. Accusing an account of being on the Kremlin's dime is pretty absurd without forensic evidence. Very obviously, the vast majority of pro-Trump accounts out there are either organic, or not organic but operated by Trump-supporting US nationals.

There's also no particular reason that those two groups should be assumed to be disjoint.

Yes, I'm sure the Russian government has some level of activity on 4chan and may attempt to influence their discussion, and in turn they may also pick up some ideas from 4chan. But if by not disjoint you mean that /pol/ is somehow being paid by the Kremlin in a general sense, then that's almost definitely not even close to true.

Russians run a troll factory which targets both domestic and foreign audiences. That is, they have industry with paid people spouting bullshit online with an agenda. Now, if some of those people are dispatched to troll in say /pol/, how does that not mean that Russia pays /pol/ to be the way it is? They pay money to actors which bring certain influence in online communities.

These days Russians largely run the American conspiracy theorist scene, including people like Alex Jones and networks of similar influencers and their affiliates. One might word this in milder terms as American conspiracy theorist scene being in bed with Russia (or rather, has been infiltrated by Russian operatives long time ago). Its all the same however, it works to weaken US' presence, role and status from within. And these people call themselves patriots? Talk about pinnacle of absurdity, considering the importance of true patriotism during times like these.

I didn't say Russia isn't paying some people to post on /pol/ and other places, just that /pol/ in general is very likely more self-propelling rather than firmly in the control of any one group, including Russian intelligence/trolls.

>These days Russians largely run the American conspiracy theorist scene, including people like Alex Jones and networks of similar influencers and their affiliates

Do you have proof?

the 4chan crowd does chaos for free

"The Russian government" isn't a very nebulous group.

perhaps not nebulous, but they have once again become the boogeyman. And of course, there has been some proof of Russian attempts to skew the election, like the revelation that the Clinton hack was performed by a Russian agent. But from my perspective the media seems to want to attribute any and all manipulation or gaming of e.g. twitter to them when clearly so much of at least the social media botting was done by 4chan.

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