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Comment by hnuser1234 | Hacker News Reader

Giant media corporations owned by billionaires, run by millionaires, and overwhelmingly staffed by members/partisans of a single political party pump out propaganda on all of their mediums 24/7 and totally dominate and saturate public opinion but we are supposed to understand that "bots" are a threat to democracy? As someone who has been deemed a "bot" by people who do not wish to hear information they do not like on more occasions than I can recall, I note an insidious aspect of this emphasis on "bots" is that it allows the ready dismissal of any individual expressing heterodoxy and glorifies/sanctifies the "official" media previously described. Yet we saw this past week that social media users were able to win a rare victory in bringing the "official" media to heel for their lies and manipulation in setting upon a group of innocent schoolchildren. The official media hates it when their marks push back and thus we get propaganda like this study.

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Well we also had social media users falsely doxing some family because they thought one of the kids was involved in the events in said video:

https://www.dailywire.com/news/42442/leftist-mob-wrongly-ide...

And there have been attacks on media sites, blogs, etc that admit their previous coverage was wrong and their attitudes towards the kids unwarranted.

So sometimes its the public bringing the media to heel, sometimes its the other way around, and sometimes it both groups acting like idiots and not doing any research whatsoever.

But yeah, there is definitely an undertone of disdain towards the internet, freedom of expression, outsider journalists and news sources, etc from the established corporate ones. And a lot of the 'initiatives' I've seen for monetising news sources, tackling bots and 'fake news', etc definitely seem very anti consumer/anti rights.

Yes, the giant media corporations bleat about the importance of a "free and independent press" out of one side of their mouths whilst simultaneously shitting all over the mediums that are most accessible to the average person and allow him or her to amplify his voice.

People have organized protests based on Internet chats, FB groups etc, I know because I’ve attended several such protests in the last couple of years based on FB alone. Nowadays it’s pretty hard to gather people on the streets using “traditional” media like TV, radio and print press. Not impossible, just harder, at least an order of magnitude harder. As such controlling the internet means controlling democracy, i.e. the power (kratos) of the people (demos).

> Giant media corporations owned by billionaires, run by millionaires, and overwhelmingly staffed by members/partisans of a single political party pump out propaganda on all of their mediums 24/7 and totally dominate and saturate public opinion but we are supposed to understand that "bots" are a threat to democracy?

Yes? At least if we're talking about hostile nation-state sponsored bot networks and influence campaigns. Domestic media companies and personalities are perversely incentivized to polarize us, in order to make a buck, but still have vested interests in the stability and health of the nation, at the end of the day. The social harm resulting from that dynamic is just a side-effect of plain old greed or agendas. Its a problem that also needs addressing.

But hostile nation-states are something else entirely, they have very different motivations - social harm and instability are direct goals, not simply side-effects - and these actors are out of reach of our legal system and domestic regulation.

> Yet we saw this past week that social media users were able to win a rare victory in bringing the "official" media to heel for their lies and manipulation in setting upon a group of innocent schoolchildren. The official media hates it when their marks push back and thus we get propaganda like this study.

I mean.. social media (twitter, in this case) is where the video was shared and then amplified. We'll see how things develop, but some investigative reporting so far is suggesting that it may have come from an "inauthentic" account and amplified by a bot network. If that's the case, it will be interesting to find out if it was a foreign or domestic network.

>At least if we're talking about hostile nation-state sponsored bot networks and influence campaigns.

typical mumbo-jumbo of ominous sounding buzzwords that hinge on nothing but a laughable DHS report and the same intelligence agencies that have repeatedly lied to the american public to further their global agenda inherited from the cold war. unless you were referring to the bots that systematically post toxic nonsense within seconds of every single one of trump's tweet?

>in order to make a buck, but still have vested interests in the stability and health of the nation, at the end of the day.

are we reading the same news? are we really going to pretend this nonstop media hysteria is driven by greed and not near fanatical ideology? they are interested in maintaining the status quo, that is a very different concept than the stability of a nation as a whole. if things were going so well we wouldn't be here to begin with.

"Russian bots" has become the new Orwellian way of dismissing dissidence.

> typical mumbo-jumbo of ominous sounding buzzwords that hinge on nothing but a laughable DHS report and the same intelligence agencies that have repeatedly lied to the american public to further their global agenda inherited from the cold war.

Independent researchers, journalists and the social networks themselves are all contributors in the ongoing effort to understanding the scope and nature of social media manipulation, so no - this all doesn't hinge on any single report.

But even so, the big bad intelligence agencies actually do work in the national interest, at least some of the time - so there's nothing particularly wrong or stupid with considering information sourced from them. As tempting as it is to mainline the kind of hardcore conspiratorial cynicism that would make one believe otherwise, it can result in a distorted, simplistic view of the world.

> unless you were referring to the bots that systematically post toxic nonsense within seconds of every single one of trump's tweet?

I don't read Trumps tweets or their comments, but possibly yes.

Unfortunately the wider issue here of state-sponsored social media manipulation has been co-mingled wrongly with the various politicized Russia/Trump collusion narratives. But these strategies were being deployed before Trump and will continue after Trump, and are aimed at causing civil unrest via tribalism - the kind of tribalism on display in the whole Convington protest video controversy, and possibly in comments on Trump's tweets - everyone is a target.

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