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Comment by SkyMarshal | Hacker News Reader

I suspect it’s at least partly that the elderly didn’t grow up with Internet, never really understood its culture, didn’t hang out on 4chan, Reddit, etc, and never developed a highly attuned BS/scam detector like more of the younger generations did.

Many of these folks don’t even really understand how the Windows UI motif works, they’ve just memorized enough procedures to get stuff done on it.

I also suspect that many of those artfully worded and subtly manipulative email forwards of the late 90s and 2000s May have been Russian psyops experimenting with viral information. They were always just a little too clever and effective while trying to look colloquial and organic, and I always suspected it was some PR outfit somewhere cranking them out, but could never divine a reason for the non-political ones. But maybe it was psyops testing and learning techniques in a long game just coming to light now.

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> I also suspect that many of those artfully worded and subtly manipulative email forwards of the late 90s and 2000s May have been Russian psyops experimenting with viral information. They were always just a little too clever and effective while trying to look colloquial and organic, and I always suspected it was some PR outfit somewhere cranking them out, but could never divine a reason for the non-political ones. But maybe it was psyops testing and learning techniques in a long game just coming to light now.

How can you possibly post comment on the elderly not having highly attuned bs detectors and then close with that paragraph? What irony!

What part of that sounds like BS?

We know they have industrial scale operations to post propaganda now. [1] Obviously this had to start somewhere. I'm pretty sure many intelligence agencies have been researching how information spread on the internet ever since it was created.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/18/world/europe/russia-troll...

The US has been running its own industrial propaganda machine since at least the end of WWII. Carl Bernstein and other journalists uncovered a number of "influencer" and cutout operations in the late 70s which placed CIA-sourced stories in the supposedly respectable and independent mainstream media.

The line between honest journalism, state propaganda, and fake news has always been a very porous one.

In fact there are different propaganda modalities for different demographics. Rather like advertising - if you think a message is transparent, clumsy, and ridiculous, that doesn't mean you're clever enough to be immune to manipulation, it means you're not the target audience for it.

>How can you possibly post comment on the elderly not having highly attuned bs detectors and then close with that paragraph? What irony!

Are you saying you think all those email forwards during that time period were all organic and none were the result of PR/propaganda/psyops operations?

I'm honestly not sure which is the null hypothesis here, and thus who owns the burden of proof.

The thing that bothered me about 4chan was that everyone pretended to be silly and insensitive but were competent people that would run the country in a few years

I always had every problem accurately solved with b from people that were lawyers and doctors or were rising up the ranks in those fields

I'm sure you remember this quote then: "a community who gets its laughs by pretending to be idiots will eventually be surrounded by idiots who think they are in good company"

This explains SO much of not just 4chan sub-groups, but a lot of internet groups, and I honestly don't think older generations can't think like this. Ironic humor doesn't occur to them; they take it all at face value. Unfortunately ideas spread on 4chan and elsewhere stop becoming memes and start becoming someones reality.

There's no better example of this than Facebook. A graveyard of dead, crappy, overused memes, and younger generations are not using Facebook anymore, it's older generations now.

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