Comment by jrochkind1 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jrochkind1 | Hacker News Reader

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In general, I prefer when people posting on HN post the URL to the original reporting, rather than one of the many summaries different venues write riding their coat-tails.

In this case, the first sentence ends in "internal documents leaked to MIT Technology Review reveal", with a link -- why not just post the MIT Technology Review article in the first place?

[Also, just as an aside, don't forget that obviously many Christians are Black people].

[And also, as far as your original question, if you scroll down in the MIT Tech Review article to the charts from which the headline of this re-report come from, you'll see that the troll farms were particularly successful in their "Christian" positioning, with 19 of the top 20 pages. The other groups targetted, they didn't achieve that level of penetration. This is notable, but I agree the other groups they were targetting is also notable!]

To me, seeing a Christian media outlet cover the story is interesting in itself, so I think this is sufficiently different from the MIT Technology Review article to merit its own post. However, since I don't know what kind of reach Relevant Magazine has among American Christians (and I suspect it's very little) I'm surprised to see it on the front page.

It seems like the original reporting was posted two weeks ago, and generated little to no discussion. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28565121

>Troll farms reached 140M Americans a month on FB before 2020 elections

I can imagine most of HN sees a headline that boils down to "lots of stuff on facebook is fake" and not care. A headline with a clear subject that people can love/hate is much better clickbait.

A little late here but just want to add, the original MIT article is paywalled if you’ve read more than your 2 free monthly stories there. The Relevant magazine story is not.

Also it is of interest that a Christian culture magazine is reporting on this, as that’s the kind of thing that needs to happen en masse to fix this problem. It needs to become a main topic of discussion in the communities being targeted by troll farms, and not just in tech circles.

That this article shows that is happening is newsworthy in and of itself.

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