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Comment by mm321 | Hacker News Reader

Now how is this different from a Russian or Chinese troll factory? All these puppeteers playing political technologists, bother. Are they really thinking this stuff is changing hearts and minds over to the right cause?

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From my perspective, as a British person, the difference is that this is being done by British people to support British interests. As a person who lives in Britain, and by extension the west, and who supports the general values on which my society is based, I'm not interested in relativist comparisons. If the information war must be fought, I'd like us to win it.

And as an American I’d rather the British be doing it than the Russians or Chinese.

As an american, I don't see a difference. The UK has been as blatantly evil as the rest. I would argue russians enjoy more freedom. I think this UK favoritism is simply racism by another name.

As a skeptic, I don't think any of you are real people. Just bots optimized to ddos my attention.

Why racist? Russia has interests and an agenda it pursues. The west including the US and UK have interests and an agenda they pursue. Conflict is all-but-inevitable. Choosing a side is not racist; it's rational. You can, of course, choose to support the other side because you think the West irredeemably evil and that Isis or Russia or China are morally superior. Many have taken that path. Most people, though, choose their communities, their families, their friends, and their country.

As another British person I'm unconvinced that "British interests" include the interests of most British voters.

Historically we've seen the British state infiltrate and influence organisations that it considers hostile to it.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/ng-interactive/2018/oct/...

What stands out is the trivial nature of most of these groups, which surely fall squarely within a general democratic right to assemble and protest.

What also stands out is that right-wing groups don't seem to have had anything like the same level of oversight.

So if - hypothetically - the military and/or GCHQ ran a campaign to influence a British election, or a public referendum, would that align with "British interests" or not?

This isn't a hypothetical. It's obvious from the comment sites of most newspapers and also from posts on FB interest groups that industrial-level opinion-shaping is being attempted.

If it's originating from hostile foreign powers, the UK's cyber response seems inexplicably ineffectual. If it's originating from closer to the home, that's clearly a non-trivial problem for our "general values."

Some of those are appalling, especially spying on the trade unions and having workers blackballed. But most of them are loonies of the left or right, animal rights extremists, or have connections to Irish terror orgainzations. Exactly the people the police should be infiltrating.

I'm not convinced "Britain" is in the interest of most voters.

That's a charming degree of trust you have in our intelligence services to be acting in your interests.

Their track record doesn't support it very well though, unless your interests happen to align with the economic elite and social conservatives.

I'm just a firm believer that falling short of perfection is not a reason for total condemnation. In general, over time, the intelligence services do act in the interests of the country. In specific cases, they may not, and in those cases, the organizations and individuals concerned should be properly punished.

And yes, I'm in favor of organizations that defend the nation's institutions, because without them we'd be fucked.

It’s often not even a battle for hearts and minds en masse. Given the polarised state of many western democracies today it’s often just a few percent or less of the electorate one would need to influence to affect outcomes. Given this, with sufficient investment and scale, it seems alarmingly doable to me.

I think the dirty secret of all this is that it really doesn't matter much. I remember when Usenet was a thing; basically, nation states are acting like people did when they were first exposed to arguing on Usenet.

IT does if your caught up in a riot - you have heard of the lynching's in India caused by social media.

And a few years ago in the Rwandan genocide old school radio was a key instigator, 1 million dead in 100 days

Great explanation, now all this action seems to be targeted at young people between twenty and thirty (the older ones are watching TV)

Fascinating, correct me if I am wrong: so young people these days are no longer glued to the tube, so they do 'grassroot media' to attract them, but by doing so they now openly make propaganda for the state.

Or maybe it is because young people are no longer tied into the consensus (as memories of the new deal/welfare state are all gone by now), so they have to spend more effort to integrate them. Go figure.

(and i saw the movie 'Ralph Breaks the Internet' with my kids the other day, nice movie if you read between the lines)

We've actually come full circle from "ok Grandma, I won't believe everything I see on TV" to "grandma, stop sending me articles about how Hillary had Seth Rich murdered from totallynotfakenews.mk"

Another question: what will be the editorial slant/bias of these guys when a close election has to be decided? What kind of oversight exists for these guys? Are they only accountable to their managers at GHCQ ?

77 Brigade [0] would be operationally managed by military commanders (Joint Forces Command [1] for a specific op), not GCHQ.

[0] https://www.army.mod.uk/who-we-are/formations-divisions-brig...

[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/joint-forces-com...

I imagine they are semi open because maybe they exist only to counter things like for example:

Imagine we were using our armed services to provide purely humanitarian assistance in a theater(is that the right word?). And Russian troll farms are pumping out news saying we are invaders, and actually killing and kidnapping people who try to get help from them.

This directly puts our guys on the ground at even greater risk.

Even people at home and in allied countries start to believe it. It makes life harder for them in the future in many ways, politically and global politically.

It could be they exist purely to dispel actual myths/lies, and are kinda like the snopes of armed forces news.

At least this is what I hope the intention is..

The simultaneously flippant and serious answer is that the Queen sorts things out. For any one constituency, a dead heat will be decided by drawing the short straw, and then it's up to Parliament to come up with someone who can command a majority.

I don't think the Queen actually has any power to do anything anymore. She's more of a figurehead and I would guess is nowhere near deciding anyone's fate (if she ever was) much less deciding political races.

Same way all the other national security orgs are.

Depends on what you call the right cause. If you’ve joined the British army we can assume you think the UK’s interests are the right cause.

If everyone else is doing this they can’t very well not it too, it would be like not having an army when everyone else around you does.

One difference is the Russians have massive malware networks available from their criminal operations they can use for certain information operations, e.g. https://www.trustwave.com/Resources/SpiderLabs-Blog/Bedep-tr.... I have not seen anything on western governments doing anything close to that sort of thing.

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