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Comment by techntoke | Hacker News Reader

Yet nothing about the American spam accounts doing the same thing in American politics.

I was also curious about this as when I first looked at the link it said 'state-backed' which immediately put the NSA and the likes in my mind. Then it went into Saudi propaganda. But if we look at even recent HN headlines with the likes of Facebook [1] we can see that political misinformation is a big problem in the US as well and I wonder why this article focuses on the Saudis and not state backed information operations as a general world wide problem. My guess is that people don't consider your average politician buying fake news ads to swing an election to be 'state-backed' where as if the president was caught they would.

[1] https://thehill.com/policy/technology/468216-zuckerberg-doub...

> ...when I first looked at the link it said 'state-backed' which immediately put the NSA and the likes in my mind. Then it went into Saudi propaganda.

> ...I wonder why this article focuses on the Saudis and not state backed information operations as a general world wide problem.

This is an announcement of a specific disclosure of information related to a state-backed influence network from Saudi Arabia. Not all statements and articles about state-backed information operations need to be general, and it's actually very helpful to have ones that focus on specific instances.

Twitter is a US based company. We will never see reports regarding CIA or NSA activity because those agencies can simply give Twitter a gag order.

Also, the CIA may prefer other techniques than spamming social media. There's no good reason to think they're following the same playbook as the FSB.

With what we learned about the NYC FBI and from the recent IG report, why would we not assume that there are political factions within the intelligence agencies abusing their training and tools to try to help a particular candidates?

> why would we not assume that there are political factions within the intelligence agencies abusing their training and tools to try to help a particular candidates?

That has nothing to do with what I said, and is in fact completely orthogonal to it.

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