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Comment by lopmotr | Hacker News Reader

That's interesting to analyze and everything, but it's surely inconsequential compared to what real people say and all their misinformation, rhetoric and general bias. What's the difference between a popular influencer with a public persona spreading politically biased stories and an faceless account doing the same thing?

It sounds like they're looking for someone to blame for right wing candidates' success in the same way people blamed Russian bots for Trump's success because they can't believe that real people could possibly be voting for such obviously "wrong" candidates of their own free will and they must surely have been fooled into it by clever tricksters.

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Didn't the FBI and the Mueller report pretty thoroughly lay out the massive scope of Russian social media influence on the 2016 election and beyond? I thought this was a decided issue but maybe I'm wrong.

Yes they did.

Yet people (even here on HN) refuse to look at the evidence and pass around things like the Seth Rich conspiracy as facts[1].

The same thing happened here with the Comet Pizza conspiracy theory.

Facts don't matter, and they just act as ways to polarize people.

Edit: and see how the voting goes on this and the parent comment, and on the thread I linked. The battle for facts is lost, and partisanship is all that is left.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19997995

Those reports laid out Russian attempts to influence. We have no way to determine whether they actually influenced the behavior of any voters.

> We have no way to determine whether they actually influenced the behavior of any voters.

What conclusions can we draw from this fact?

The report is publicly available here. [1] This is mostly covered on pages ~22-26. Quite a short read since it's redacted like crazy. The 'massive influence' seems to have been a company that setup some fake accounts on Facebook with a total advertising spend of $100k, and one that also had a few thousand spam bots on Twitter that 1.4 million people had "been in contact with" - a phrase which was left undefined.

[1] - https://www.justice.gov/storage/report.pdf

Thanks for the link, but it mostly disproves your dismissive attitude: according to the report, posts generated by accounts controller by the Russian company reached 29 million people on Facebook alone (and " may have reached an estimated 126 million people."), with hundreds of thousands of direct followers for several individual accounts. That is not nothing.

It's not nothing, but it's interesting to note that the amount they spent is dwarfed by the amounts currently being spent by top democrats (and Trump's re-election campaign), several of which are in the low millions of dollars.

> According to Facebook, the IRA purchased over 3,500 advertisements, and the expenditures totaled (sic) approximately $100,000

I think everyone would like to know how much actual influence it had in the election but I'm not sure we will ever know definitively.

You need to put things in context. Facebook sells advertising or "reach." Countless groups, and obviously the campaigns themselves, were spending millions on similar ads. $100k is going to provide a proportional level of influence, which is to say not much. The same thing is true on Twitter where you can buy followers from a wide array of third party sources. The main reason this is an issue is because of politics. It's Benghazi, 2016 version. That comparison is particularly apt as it's not to say nothing untoward happened - it obviously did. But the issue itself is/was amplified tremendously for partisan political purposes.

Wasn't that thorough. ODNI report from 2017 was broader in scope (https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/ICA_2017_01.pdf). The 2019 Mueller report looks restricted to areas where there was possible collusion (just some of the social media stuff that was retweeted by Trump campaign people/stuff related to the DNC hacks/etc.).

This report might be interesting as well.

https://disinformationreport.blob.core.windows.net/disinform...

The two biggest caveats about it in my mind are that 1) all the data was provided voluntarily by the tech companies, with no indication of how they determined what was a Russian account, and 2) they don't really have any way to measure what actual impact it had on the election, or how effective the disinformation campaigns were

> It sounds like they're looking for someone to blame for right wing candidates' success in the same way people blamed Russian bots for Trump's success because they can't believe that real people could possibly be voting for such obviously "wrong" candidates of their own free will and they must surely have been fooled into it by clever tricksters.

Since the media consumed by EU voters is so disjoint because of language barriers, this should be somewhat possible to test. If one could show a correlation between the amount of "trickery" present in media consumed by voters in a country and that country's election outcomes, you could get an answer to whether voters really are fooled into voting for right wing candidates.

We recently had an Australian election in which there was a lot of fake news around a "death tax" imposed by one of the parties. That party lost in a close election in which at polling booths one of the top 3 issues was the death tax.

Trickery works. It's why everyone keeps doing it.

The Australian election wasn't particularly close. The two-party-preferred margin was 3.2%, which is the mid-range in terms of margins this century (7 federal elections since 2000, 3 have had higher margins and 3 lower).

Yes the "death tax" was an outright lie. But there were lots of factors which went into that margin.

Also it's important to clarify that (for the most part - except possibly on some WeChat groups) - this wasn't a foreign campaign. It was mostly old fashioned paid advertising by the Liberal party itself.

You would never be able to control for other factors that differ between countries. They already have different left-right leanings to begin with and that's changing with time.

The difference is that those faceless accounts are in many occasions coming from foreign entities. Some of whom have no motivation other than to sow discord and cause chaos.

And nobody is attributing right wing success purely to bots. That's just some strawman that you invented. The issue is that is a significant factor and is causing polarisation and distrust in institutions. And you need those instutitions to work in order to solve the hardest problems e.g. mass migration, ageing population, climate change etc.

Rightwingers see pro-migration and liberal organisations like the UN and the EU as wanting to sow discord and disrupt society though. So this type of argument goes both ways. The distrust of institutions is already there.

Foreign anti-western forces feed off of that, because the modern western right is essentially anti-western from the start.

I never understood that foreign influence complaint. The whole world is sharing opinions and misinformation about the EU elections, just as the whole world was sharing opinions and misinformation about the US elections. How is it worse if it comes from someone in another country and is a bot compared to a real person in another country or a bot in the local country? Do you really think that these political bots are there to create chaos rather than either to generate ad revenue or get their preferred candidate elected?

No purely. But people certainly attribute it to bots or they wouldn't be concerned about bots if they believed they had no effect.

Yes, some of the fake accounts - not necessarily bots - are there to create chaos. Russian political influencers have publicly boasted about this.

Of course this is no different to the US and the rest of the West using the media and social networks in other countries to promote their own agenda.

The difference is we're supposed to be immune from having it done to us - and of course we aren't. Because it's no different in principle from a fake advertising and promo campaign, or a fake pro-corporate stage-managed PR campaign - just larger in scope, and weaponised as opposed to financialised.

In reality troll and Tweet farms are incredibly cheap compared to other propaganda vectors, and incredibly cost effective.

At some point knowingly misleading the public for political or financial gain is going to have to become a criminal offence.

Currently consumers/voters have more protection from fake claims about a toaster than they do from fake claims made by a president or a hostile foreign power.

If you're trying to be a genuine democracy, that's a bad place to be.

When you say weaponized, do you mean done for a foreign government's interests rather than a person's financial gain?

You seem to believe that people can't be trusted to think for themselves and must be shielded from lies to protect them from their own stupidity. I agree on the first part, but not the second which is arrogant authoritarianism. In democracy, the voters are also the ones who experience the consequences of their decisions and them having the ultimate power over themselves is what protects them from extremes. They might hurt themselves a little bit but it's still themselves doing it, so they won't go too far and can change their mind next election if they made a mistake.

If there's something new and unique about social media that actually breaks democracy worse than anything since the ancients Greeks, then perhaps you'd have a point, but I don't see any evidence of that. I think people will adapt to false information and learn to decide what to believe, just like they currently make decisions about how much to trust any stories they hear. There's nothing wrong with having a few conspiracy theorists or people who believe a wrong version of history. They keep everyone else on their toes and we can't really be sure that it's not us who's wrong. Remember when God obviously created the world and anyone who disagreed was punished for spreading dangerous fake knowledge?

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