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Comment by djsumdog | Hacker News Reader

That's not at all what people were screaming for the past four years. Even if Russian "meddled" in the US elections, so did Boeing, BASF, Microsoft, Facebook, Northrop Grumman, Softbank, YCombinator .. anyone who bought a fucking ad or funded one campaign.

What the Russian/2016 narrative really was: Americans are too stupid to make up their own minds and fall for propaganda. There has been a four year campaign to condemn every single Trump supporter as some kind of racist, white supremacist Nazi, and it's been big media and big tech (FOX/MSNBC/CNN/YouTube/Facebook/Twitter/NYTimes/etc.) that's literally been pouring petrol on the American people and the world.

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I worked in Dem political tech. The Russian Troll Farm/Cambridge Analytica/social ads scandal is mostly noise and no signal. But you’re missing something important: Russian state sponsored hackers spearfished and stole data from the RNC, DNC, and the Clinton circle. They deliberately released the latter two and withheld the first. Those releases don’t define the entire election, but they had a demonstrable and empirically validated impact on voters. Those deliberate and asymmetric releases probably changed the outcome of the election.

Russia really did interfere in that election and you’ve ignored this crucial fact.

> Those deliberate and asymmetric releases probably changed the outcome of the election.

How is it possible to draw a causation from the releases to the election outcome? I am curious if there are academic studies to support this claim.

That’s not very accurate and makes a lot of unproven assumptions. They found that an old, disused RNC domain from years prior was compromised. There’s no reason to believe they withheld anything material, and even if they did, it’s not really relevant. All they did was show the public authentic emails. If anyone actually changed their vote based on having additional facts, which I doubt happened in any significant way, then it was for the right reasons.

If your wife-to-be was having an affair and this was dumped before the wedding day, would you be mad at the hacker, or at your partner? Blaming Russia for showing truth never made any sense to me. Are we to believe that the process has more integrity when we cast our votes with less information?

Believe it or not, there's a whole host of laws around and against foreign involvement in American elections, going back basically forever. Comparing Boeing and Russia is pretty ludicrous.

I am curious what these laws are, and what constitutes involvement. Am I allowed to comment on American elections even if I am not American?

A lot of people here are talking about interference, which sounds like a very nefarious thing. But in reality, what they mean by 'interference' is just posting on the internet about why one candidate (let's be real, probably Trump) is better.

The two big categories in my mind are foreign campaign contributions (usually misdirected through others, so sometimes also fall out as fraud and money laundering charges) and failure to register as a foreign agent.

As a reminder, both of these categories have seen grand jury charges and subsequent guilty pleas by Trump associates. These have often paired nicely with 'lying to prosecutors' charges, which help clarify that they knew they were up to no good...

https://int.nyt.com/data/documenthelper/1886-indictment-giul...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Flynn#Investigations_a...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Manafort#Indictments_and_...

>That's not at all what people were screaming for the past four years.

Why would you feel the need to lie about something so clearly untrue? I'm sure you can find a group of people on the internet somewhere that might have made this claim, in the same way that you can find people claiming the earth is flat.

But this fabrication that everyone was claiming Russians hacked the votes is just nonsense.

> Americans are too stupid to make up their own minds and fall for propaganda.

Don't we see history examples of lots of people falling for propaganda? Germany 1930-s comes to mind.

Godwin's Law and you're done.

But baring that, how do you know which side is propaganda? Is it FOX/CNN/MSNBC or is it Newsmax/DailyWire/NYPost/Blaze/Crowder? Which side is the propaganda and which is the capitol T Truth?

Well, there are facts which are either hard to argue or everybody is agreeing upon, like the public presentations of politicians. Given those facts, sometimes - not always - it's a matter of values to choose sides.

It's not always easy, yes. But still critical thinking goes a long way.

Godwin's Law can be used as a tool to suppress valid comparisons. Don't fall for that.

You are absolutely, factually incorrect. Your opinion is also unfortunate, to equate adversarial nation-state "meddling" with domestic corporate campaigns, though the latter is also woeful.

That Trump was elected is a harbinger of American decline, that so many people think his persona, "intellect" and view on leadership are worthy of consideration as leader of this country. It's an indictment of our electoral and voting systems, that any good faith Republicans felt they "had" to vote for such an awful leader in order to avoid the centrism of a Democratic administration.

But I don't think every Trump voter is a racist nazi. I think they were just okay with Trump being an awful human being and a terrible leader, so long as they could prevent poor people from getting health care or acknowledging climate change.

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