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Comment by XCabbage | Hacker News Reader

Hasn't the majority of the criticism of Facebook been about enabling communication? Indeed, hasn't that been the cause of most of the Left's pearl-clutching about social media's influence on politics over the last few years? Many, if not most, of the complaints about Russian "interference" in the US election and Brexit that I've seen the Left being so distressed about consisted primarily of Russians saying things about politics on Twitter.

Advocating for outright bans on voicing disfavoured viewpoints is so obviously illiberal and thuggish as to be politically unpopular, which is why it is always platforms targeted rather than individual speakers, and why there is always some rationalisation for the complaint other than the viewpoint being expressed (Russian bots! Fake news! Algorithms optimising for rage! Harassment!) but in the end the root cause of the complaint is always that someone said something that progressives didn't like.

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No, a key part of this is misrepresentation: Russians saying things about politics as themselves would be one thing, but Russians pretending to be Americans en masse with thousands of fake accounts and promoting obviously false rumours and driven by audience-targeting ad technology starts to become a problem.

(This is not an argument against anonymity; I don't need to know where these accounts really live. I do need to know where political advertising is funded from, because there are laws about that.)

I'm still really unconvinced by this whole "Russians influenced the election" narrative. I doubt a few articles written in poor English about how Hillary runs pedophile sex rings would have had a greater influence on the electorate than Hillary being actively endorsed by nearly every respectable establishment media outlet.

People really wanted to hate Hillary, and to some extent this was because she was endorsed so heavily by the media. So they latched onto every little thing that could be used against her.

There's really two parts to the populist wave: "establishment politics isn't delivering what we need" and "we must turn to what seems like a Man of the People". The first has some extremely valid points, the second has (mostly) been a total disaster.

> Russians pretending to be Americans

While I don't claim to have researched this issue in depth and it's worth taking this with a pinch of salt, I'm yet to see any evidence of this, nor has it been a part of most of the leftist reporting I've seen. The only instance I've heard of where a specific Twitter account has been accused of being a Russian misrepresenting their nationality was ian56789, and that accusation was false, as he demonstrated by going on Sky News and giving an interview.

An example of the sort of thing I mean: https://www.ft.com/content/333fe6bc-c1ea-11e6-81c2-f57d90f67... (in this case Macedonians, not Russians, but where did the money come from?)

Paywalled.

Similar story from Wired? https://www.wired.com/2017/02/veles-macedonia-fake-news/

What counts as "misrepresenting their nationality"? I'm sure russian bots aren't going around saying "I, John Smith, an American citizen, think that Hiliary is bad". It's probably going to be some user named @johnsmith2009 saying "Hilary is bad".

If your name is Misha Ivanovich, you're working out of Moscow, and you've got an American flag avatar, post mostly about US politics, and go by the name @johnsmith2009 on Twitter, I'd say it's clear you're doing some deliberate misrepresentation.

> Hasn't the majority of the criticism of Facebook been about enabling communication?

Enabling horizontal communication, not controlled by the Mainstream Mass Media.

It's ironic, because FB, Twitter are famous for censoring conservatives for years and promoting liberal worldviews. Suddenly they are the biggest enemy of liberals in the US.

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