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Comment by lovelyviking | Hacker News Reader

Well I’ve noticed work of russian propaganda professionals here. This is very worrying and must be stopped.

For those who think it’s not a big deal I wish to warn you that those come in numbers with the time an exhaust real people with all kind of malicious tactics including switching topics, twisting facts , personal attacks and even threats.

They never tired and take by numbers promoting designed narrative making any meaningful discussion impossible. There farms of those and I see dangerous development here because they are not stopped even though they break all the rules here.

example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36238790

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Dunno so much about Russia propaganda, but comments jumping to the defense of the CCP have been a staple of HN for about as long as I've been reading it. In that sense, I haven't noticed anything different.

Did you flag their posts?

I think it is a sad reality, but responding to someone you disagree with implicitly upvotes and elevates their status (it's hard not to, it really is). Responding to someone implicitly says "this thing I am responding to is worth my time," even if that is not your intent.

This property could be seen in America's election with trump where his bad behavior got him incredible amounts of attention which implicitly gave him authority and therefore a "dominant" status. It was the moderate media that elevated trumps message and played it in front of people who otherwise wouldn't have experienced so much exposure to it. The end result was the message that many Americans got was not that trump is evil and wrong, but that trump is not part of the establishment. "Trump is an enemy of the establishment" was the idea that ultimately propelled him into the white house and it was his enemies who ultimately put him there.

If I were you I would spend a few hours on you tube with Timothy Snyder and read his book 'On Tyranny: the illustrated version."

He has a lot to say about Russian propaganda on youtube.

Here is his speech to the UN that you will almost certainly like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uBz9EeLeQ8w

Here is what he would say about your post in the form of a reading from his book On Tyranny: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=laRIf1QXYek

> Did you flag their posts?

yes but I do not know how it helps.

> Responding to someone implicitly says "this thing I am responding to is worth my time," even if that is not your intent.

I would agree and yet if you aren’t responding they pollute the space and talk to each other simulating a real discussion and creating an effect that many are agree with them. Naive people unaware of their tactics were literally telling me “ this is what majority think”. So only after my explanation about how it works they were more questioning it. But some people were still arguing: No, no , I’ve heard it from real people the same …. And you can imagine where those ‘other people’ were taking ideas from.

It’s a huge problem and I am still looking for a proper solution.

> Here is what he would say about your post in the form of a reading from his book On Tyranny:

I would probably agree with his ideas but my general impression from this is : too little too late.

I was kind of doing what he suggests but an effect is incomparable with enormous influence of online activity by propaganda.

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