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Comment by d4mi3n | Hacker News Reader

I really don't like PR operations like this, but here's a thought experiment:

Presumably it's OK to voice one's opinions on social media, but:

1. Is it acceptable for private interests to do the same?

2. At what point does something turn from personal opinion to propaganda?

3. Is it more problematic that a private entity (e.g. a PR firm) is _pretending_ to express an honest opinion? Would this be acceptable if this were a group of up-front political activists instead?

Personally, I'd draw the line at private interests trying to influence public opinion. Sadly, this is a process as old as the hills. Marketing and propaganda have existed for a long time, it just seems like it's become much harder to pin it for what it is in the era of social media.

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Disclaimer: I'm not saying any of these except the first has happened

- Tory Bruno (CEO of ULA) promoting ULA on reddit under his own name providing useful information: Definitely ok (thanks Tory! https://old.reddit.com/user/torybruno)

- Tory Bruno promoting ULA on reddit under a pseudonym: Almost acceptable, not the best since he has money involved and isn't disclosing it, but he probably honestly thinks most of what he is saying.

- A PR person hired to promote ULA promoting ULA on reddit under disclosing that they are a PR person: Mostly acceptable, not the best since they probably aren't at all genuine

- A PR person hired to promote ULA promoting ULA on reddit under not disclosing that they are a PR person or associated with the company: Mostly unacceptable, this isn't personal opinion but paid propaganda, and it shouldn't masquerade as personal opinion.

- A PR person hired to promote ULA promoting ULA on reddit under 10 different pseudonyms: Completely unacceptable, this should probably be made outright illegal. The only purpose of using pseudonyms like this is to trick people into thinking you have support that you do not.

The article is talking about the last case, shades of grey exist, but this one is known as pitch black.

Seems like the key (obvious?) difference between "acceptable" and "unacceptable" is the speaker's transparency about the source of the message. Disclosing who you are and your relationship to the topic: Acceptable. Hiding or obfuscating who you are or pretending to be someone else: Unacceptable.

I think it's about the divide between what a reasonable person might infer from the comment and what the person making the comment believes to be true.

1. A Senior member of this company is saying this company is awesome.

2a. A random person is saying this company is awesome

2b. Same as 2a, but the person actually posting doesn't actually think this company is awesome.

3. 10 random people are saying this company is awesome.

Being ten or fifty fake personas - pretend people who don't exist - is poisoning the limited capacity information channel that we all have available to interpret the outside world. Bad information drives out good, to paraphrase a classic.

I agree. It also fractures the human capacity for relationship, which already struggles in a forum like this.

I think there are multiple differences, some more subtle than others. Transparency about the source is an obvious one, but also:

- Authenticity of the message (does the person believe what they are saying)

- Transparency about the number of people saying it (even if you aren't transparent about the source, it's better to pretend to be 1 pseudonymous person than 10)

- Information content of the message. All else being equal Tory Bruno giving out spreadsheets making the business case for Vulkan is better than Tory Bruno repeatedly saying "Vulkan is a good idea". As a less extreme PR people giving out information about timelines is better than PR people saying "watch out for our upcoming product".

I find it pretty interesting that this comment is on HN. A few years ago, I think it was pretty widely accepted in SV that the last method you mention was just part of the grind. Maybe not the most straight-shooting approach, but still accepted. We even had a title for it: growth hacking. People hired growth hackers! I'm going to refrain from asserting a value judgement; I just thought it was interesting

I've seen the job ads, but never knew that this was what it meant. Thanks.

Are you talking about job ads on HN? I don't know what you have in mind but from the context it sounds like it must be wrong. If you clarify, I can clarify.

We ban accounts that do that. It has never been acceptable on HN, not since the beginning, and not by a long shot. People have wildly varying ideas about what is "widely accepted in SV", largely imaginary I think, but in any case not in the section of the Venn diagram that HN overlaps with. (Btw, only about 10% of HN's community is in SV.)

One case where we might not instantly ban someone is if they had a long history of using HN as intended. Then we might left them off with a strict warning not to do it again. But that's rare. Real community members tend not to do this kind of thing, and that makes it easier for the community to spot: since such comments are made by people without much experience here, they tend to stand out like a sore thumb—usually a bunch of green thumbs that turn red when whacked by a ban hammer.

Many has been the email thread in which a sheepish startup founder or manager wrote to apologize for what their "growth hacker" did and asking to be unbanned. We usually let them off if they promise not to do it again and to tell all their friends that what "growth hacking" got them on HN was a swift ban.

Another case where we incline to mercy is when the underlying article is good work and something the community would normally find interesting, and it's clear that the "growth hacking" was happening out of naivete. Usually this is because someone had the mistaken idea from afar that it was "widely accepted in SV" that this is how you do startups. Ironically they usually turn out to be classic technical types who are clumsy at marketing and influenced by the wrong kind of blogs. I say ironically because if they would just be themselves and present their work in a direct way, they'd more likely do well on HN. In this case the cure is to educate and hopefully make real community members out of them.

>We ban accounts that do that. It has never been acceptable on HN,

I think he meant that it was an acceptable methodology, not that the various platforms condoned it. I don't think any platform has ever condoned that sort of use, or at least none that I can recall.

That's a fair point, but I'd still like to get the word out that doing it on HN will get your accounts and sites banned.

A similar point here if anyone is curious: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21439027

> I don't think any platform has ever condoned that sort of use

I feel like Reddit came pretty close to condoning this sort of "growth hacking" when one of the founders confessed that they got the site off the ground by creating lots of fake accounts: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/z4444w/how-reddit-got-hug...

I find this confession to be on a par with Zuckerberg's famous "dumb fucks" quote. While Reddit did go on to become a useful site, I consider their success to be permanently tainted. I applaud dang's efforts to ban users who attempt similar deceptions.

> A few years ago, I think it was pretty widely accepted in SV that the last method you mention was just part of the grind

Not just SV but everywhere.

>A PR person hired to promote ULA promoting ULA on reddit under 10 different pseudonyms: Completely unacceptable, this should probably be made outright illegal. The only purpose of using pseudonyms like this is to trick people into thinking you have support that you do not.

Isn't this how Reddit itself became a platform? I understand they had no traffic/users and the Reddit Platform was seeded with bots to post, comment, upvote, etc... This false illusion of a user base and community gave the platform the credibility it needed to gain real users.

I've worked with organizations that encouraged their staff to promote their company on social media. This seems fine. However if that staff member then went out and created 10 profiles for made up people, that would be different. So I think that's where I'd draw the line. Are you posting as yourself on social media, or as a bunch of sock puppets?

Its sort of the Citizens United argument we've had the US. Does money = speech? I would say it doesn't and democracy depends on opinions being represented in good faith, and not just who can purchase the biggest megaphone.

Citizens United totally slipped my mind. Excellent point on the money = speech argument.

A thought I had reading your comment was that what money != speech, money _does_ = reach (sock puppets, marketing campaigns, etc). That said, I have no idea how we can really disentangle the two while we're hearing about things from our own social circles.

Personal take: any government that can selectively silence speech is too powerful. Troll farms are a problem, but government is a horrible solution to that problem. What we need is a mechanism for digital proof-of-human. Ideally this would be decentralised, but there's no obvious way to do this well (I consider the web of trust model easily exploitable if used at scale). Estonia has a system for verifying humans that's available to non-citizens, but then we're trusting the Estonian government. The best solution I have to propose would be a series of independant governments/corporations identifying people, and an open source system for checking credentials against the APIs provided by a group of these institutions. If you're verified by Estonia, Russia, Facebook, and WeChat, you're unlikely to be a fake human. If Facebook is refusing to verify humans that seem real and get verified by other sources, we can drop them from the list of verifiers. I want a better solution, but this is the best I have so far.

Not Estonia, but Lithuania has a process to combat "fake news". Per last week's Economist [0] :

"Demaskuok, which means “debunk” in Lithuanian, is a piece of software that searches for the patient zeros of fake news. It was developed by Delfi, a media group headquartered in Lithuania’s capital, Vilnius, in conjunction with Google, a large American information-technology company. It works by sifting through reams of online verbiage in Lithuanian, Russian and English, scoring items for the likelihood that they are disinformation. Then, by tracking back through the online history of reports that look suspicious, it attempts to pin down a disinformation campaign’s point of origin—its patient zero."

[0] https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2019/10/24/...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Residency_of_Estonia

What's acceptable depends entirely on the terms of service for each specific social media platform. It's not reasonable to discuss all of social media in aggregate.

What you say is true if I'm running a FaceBook/Twitter/whatever, but I believe the issue here is a bit broader: What do we as a global society believe is an acceptable level of disclosure when voicing opinions that are not our own?

Individual platforms can self-regulate (hah!) if they feel the need, but I think many people will have strong feelings on what are and are not acceptable ways of influencing public opinion.

With this stuff there's no such thing as a global society. Any regulations will be imposed by individual countries, or maybe the EU.

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