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Comment by therusskiy | Hacker News Reader

I wish they would do it for Kremlin bots as well, they do a lot of propaganda here in Russia

That's probably a requirement for twitter to stay in russia.

Why is Russia so special and unique in this regard?

I am honestly curious because there are countries with more impactful and tangible geopolitical interests (e.g. Saudi Arabia - who owns a substantial portion of Twitter), and yet it's only the comic-book villain, Putin's Russia who apparently does this.

The other alternative is that Russia does this, but so ineffectively that they stand out, but that seems unlikely because it would also imply that other countries do it so effectively that no one notices.

The third alternative I can think of is that interested parties are okay with the direction in which some foreign powers want to sway American public opinion. Those interested parties control the mainstream media - or enough of it - to be able to decide which countries' bots get reported on and which get ignored. Honestly it's this option that I find exponentially more likely.

That isn't about Russia trying to influence the US, I believe, but using bots to influence the public in Russia.

Also, I'm fairly certain that "let's influence the US public" is such a large undertaking that most small countries won't even attempt it. And you need to be strong enough to not get bombed if it becomes public, that narrows down the pool of countries a lot, so it's basically only Russia and China, possibly India (but they are allies), everyone else is either too small or too weak (ignoring Europe, they are much too close to the US).

Smaller / weaker countries might try to just buy influence, like Saudi Arabia, by hiring a PC agency and printing fancy brochures, or using lobbyists.

There's really nothing special about how Russia does this. I'd say Russia is mediocre at best in all this propaganda warfare. But since accusing other party of propaganda warfare is a part of propaganda warfare, whoever does this the best won't be the main talking point on the subject, usually.

And, yes, of course all other countries do that. And of course it would be silly to say that "nobody notices".

Because Russia's 50,000 dollar Facebook ad budget doesn't toe the line. There is tremendous propaganda (billions and billions worth) coming from everything from Israel to the BBC. But since that is roughly in line with the views of US media owners, it's not "manipulation" or "interference". It isn't anything.

It's not the miniscule ad budget. It's the thousands of troll accounts and the email hacking.

Russia was experiencing democratic protests against their czar and might have had a peaceful transition to democracy in 1918. German-supported propaganda ended up ruining their 20th century. Russia is copying that playbook.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/19/opinion/was-lenin-a-germa...

The Germans definitely sent Lenin because he would pressure whichever government Russia ended up with to withdraw from the war. It's wrong to call Lenin a German agent the same way it's disingenuous to call Corbyn a Russian agent in the UK just because he's a critic of NATO.

Anyway, it's a fallacy to think that Russia would be fine without the Revolution. Peaceful transitions to liberal democracy are an exception that only happen on very particular cases.

I think you have it opposite. Aren't there far more examples of peaceful transitions to liberal democracies (ie, almost every country who had a monarchy in Europe and or were under control of said countries... and now has a parliament/republic).

Albeit it took longer and it was "gradual" but few of them had the hyper-violent post "vanguard" revolutions events that resulted in some of the worst tragedies in history?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Purge (note famous french liberal Jean-Paul Sartre attempted to cover up news of this event in the west because he thought it would hurt the spread the revolution to the global "politeriat")

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Revolution

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reign_of_Terror

Almost all violent revolutions have resulted in a stain on world history. Yet the (less news worthy) numbers who gradually adopted independent courts and shifted from monarchy to republican/parliamentary power are much higher, and none of them had awful mass murders of people whose ideas weren't "in line" with the revolutionary ideology, not long after the revolutions.

> comic-book villain, Putin's Russia

These activities aren't what makes Putin's Russia a villain. They're just cited as more evidence in a book that was written long ago. How many dissidents have been murdered by the Kremlin?

Also, there's that whole thing about how Russian intelligence phished and leaked the email of a US presidential campaign manager. But that's only bad if you didn't win, apparently.

> Why is Russia so special and unique in this regard?

I’m with you, if it’s as comically easy to undermine American elections as has been reported (just takes a few hundred thousand bucks worth of Facebook ads), it’s only logical to assume that China or literally any other country with an axe to grind is doing the same thing as Russia.

But to answer the question, Russia is a great scapegoat (as apparently the only country in the world engaging in disinformation campaigns) because the villains are white. If you were to accuse, say, China of doing what Russia is doing (which let’s face it, they probably are), the argument could instantly be shot down with “that’s racist.”

The Russians are somewhat unique in that their Soviet predecessors studied and were very effective at these types of tactics in the old world.

The West did this type of thing, but sucked at it — western powers usually backed traditional or incumbent people in power, and usually for a more specific purpose.

What these guys do now is just push narratives of fringe or divisive people, with or without cooperation or knowledge of the principals. The goal is chaos. Normal, more effective political figures Having oddballs like Trump, Jill Stein, Sanders, etc in positions of fleeting or lasting prominence happens when messages get magnified and legitimized.

The parent poster claimed to be a Russian citizen complaining about Kremlin shills manipulating people in Russia itself, not ones trying to sway Americans.

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