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Comment by TameAntelope | Hacker News Reader

Maybe I'm paranoid, but I assume 100% of Russian content on Reddit is manufactured. Their government has just invested so much into psyops that it successfully undermined legitimate engagement (for me).

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Russia has a population of a 140 million people.

It is utterly preposterous to believe not a single one uses Reddit AND doesn't agree with their government.

Not to mention, where do you think those people would go?

Maybe Reddit? Maybe that actually makes a ton of sense?

I'm confused; where did I say I believed literally zero people from Russia who also disapprove of Putin use Reddit? I said I assume that to be the case, which is foundationally different; I don't know of a way to tell which is which, so in order to predict outcomes most accurately, I default to the position that I don't accept Reddit as a source for this.

Did you see what's going on r/Russia? You can be banned not for your comment there but for the fact you are on another subreddit. No, not for your comment there! It's enough that others are against the Russian invasion.

This is typical in reddit, never liked it, but it's not something they invented.

I believe this subreddit is extremely harmful. Example:

https://www.reddit.com/r/russia/comments/t1ya3b/memo_to_the_...

Is there a way to stop it? This is propaganda in the open.

I don't follow that line of reasoning. If a few Russian kids express "no hatred against Ukraine" and claim to actually feel powerless at the oligarchic structure of their country (Russia), in which way do you feel this could be manufactured psyops? What purpose could this serve as propaganda, "Russians kids don't like Putin or the ruling system"?

Wouldn't propaganda look more like "our country means Ukraine no harm, but in this case we are right because [reasons]"?

It's being used right now to soften the perception of Russia ("See look, the Russian people don't approve of this!" as a way of implicitly arguing against sanctions) right now, that seems valuable.

Also "chaos" has value. It's a big thing in how PsyOps works (from my limited understanding); when you sew chaos, you can get away with more.

> "see look, the Russian people don't approve of this! Don't punish them with sanctions!"

But there have already been demonstrations against this war in Russia, with detainees and video footage showing this. And if you don't trust the footage, I'm sure someone knows someone in Russia who can attest to this.

So we know at least some people in Russia don't support the invasion.

More importantly, in my opinion: that kind of thinking is a trap. When your hypothesis is unfalsifiable, "all Russians online are lying, no matter what they say, and even when they agree with me" how is discourse possible at all? You cannot tell honest speech from propaganda because, by definition, all speech is propaganda?

I A) said I was probably paranoid and B) I didn't say they were lying, I said I assume they are. I'm describing an effective heuristic to help me accurately predict the future. I believe using data from Reddit users purporting to be Russian teenagers seems too easy to exploit and therefore unhelpful, predictively.

> I'm describing an effective heuristic to help me accurately predict the future.

Accurately predict the future, huh? Are you a fortune teller?

What you’re describing is nothing more than a hurtful bias, and please call it as such.

You can tell lies by saying nothing but the truth :) One example that comes to mind is the time of Solidarity revolution in Poland.

It was a time where most Poles only had two TV channels (own by communists) and handful of radio stations (also controlled by communists) to choose from. Now, before the strike in Gdansk docks happened TV or radio did not cover crime rates at all. After the strike started, media started filling the news with reports of every murder, rape, burglary they could find. This created the impression that Solidarity pushed the country into total chaos, paving the way to introducing martial law, while the truth is (you can check that in police statistics from that time) the crime rates actually went DOWN significantly during that period.

Now, did those TV channels lie or not? Every single crime they reported in the news was 100% truth, but the aggregate impression they created was 100% false.

I understand lies by omission.

But in this case we are being suspicious of alleged Russian teenagers saying they don't hate Ukraine but feel powerless to condition their own government in Russia. I mean, that's almost an anti-Putin statement, how can it be misconstrued as pro-Putin psyops?

Well, for one it creates an impression that "common people" of Russia are against Putin (which is false, he regularly gets 70+ percent approval ratings [1]), and this might discourage more severe economic sanctions against Russia (because sanctions would affect those "common people" more than they would affect oligarchs)

[https://www.statista.com/statistics/896181/putin-approval-ra...]

I don’t understand this logic. How is it in interest of the propaganda machine to make it appear that common people are against Putin? Surely they want to portray that majority like him and support his actions (which is also why they manipulate these stats you linked).

Also, Putin and his elite don’t actually give a damn about sanctions affecting “common people” (see eg post-Crimea sanctions), so I don’t see why they’d worry so much about it as to fabricate every single post on Reddit.

I think Russia has enough control over their home media that it actually can produce two separate narratives: one for the West, other domestic.

More and more I start to believe most of communications are really noise to make the less aggressive camp pause and think if this makes sense at all, while the other camp marches on.

Most of the propaganda is much more obvious than that, for the most part it ends up downvoted on Reddit. In this context, the messages are more like "give up and flee, it's inevitable" (alternately: staged video of a pile of bodies, seen yesterday; large formations deploying from Chechnya, etc), "the war is because of NATO expansion", "Nazi government". Just to name a few themes.

I would also guess that 90% of propaganda you see is primarily people spreading it for ideological and non-monetary reasons, it just has to be seeded enough for the messages to be spread.

One of the fascinating trends is that the most rapidly spreading stuff is purely visual, short video. The dominance of short clips is incredible, and allows for so much subtly misleading content.

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