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Comment by giobox | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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