Comment by throw0101d | Hacker News Reader

Comment by throw0101d | Hacker News Reader

With regards to the section on Flooding:

> We characterize the contemporary Russian model for propaganda as “the firehose of falsehood” because of two of its distinctive features: high numbers of channels and messages and a shameless willingness to disseminate partial truths or outright fictions. In the words of one observer, “[N]ew Russian propaganda entertains, confuses and overwhelms the audience.”[2]

> Contemporary Russian propaganda has at least two other distinctive features. It is also rapid, continuous, and repetitive, and it lacks commitment to consistency.

[…]

> The experimental psychology literature tells us that first impressions are very resilient: An individual is more likely to accept the first information received on a topic and then favor this information when faced with conflicting messages.[13] Furthermore, repetition leads to familiarity, and familiarity leads to acceptance:

* https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PE198.html

Reminds me of what the Church of Scientology did to USENET's alt.religion.scientology newsgroup[0].

More generally, I think the Internet is unusually useful for this kind of attack. The netheads that built it had a very specific political view - namely, that censorship is network interference with a political motive. "The Internet views censorship as damage and routes around it", and all that. Ergo, all we have to do to have free speech is build better networks.

Censorship by free speech - i.e. flooding / sporgery / etc - is the "GPL judo move" of dictators. You want unimpeded network traffic? Heheh, sure. Fine. We can have 'free speech'. Free speech for me and my twenty billion alts all saying the same thing, too!

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sporgery

Usenet was useful for this kind of attack, the internet allows you to create moderated forums that can withstand it.

Except it's increasingly obvious that moderation doesn't scale, and the attack it wishes to prevent does

USENET had moderated newsgroups, too - and there's web forums that are wholly unmoderated (or not meaningfully moderated).

Doesn't matter, though. This isn't an attack that can be solved with moderators, because the attack is not the content of the message. It's who's sending it. Our Russian dictators assume thousands if not millions of identities in order to spam the world - you as a moderator only see a randomly-generated humanoid and an unusually common sentiment. Yes, you could just ban the sentiment, but now you're accidentally censoring legitimate speech by unrelated parties.

Meta comment: this is the second comment within a couple of weeks that's critical of Scientology that's fairly quickly attracted down votes.

Ironic?

Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading. - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Worse, when the GP comment eventually gets upvoted (as happened above), replies like this one become dangling references to a situation that no longer exists. HN threads have no GC!

It's interesting that this take on Russian propaganda is itself a becoming a little outdated - flooding makes sense externally given you have external channels for it and internally, where the channels might be a given but the regime does not want to appear overly coercive.

Russia now has fewer external channels than it did in 2016 (your link) and 2021 (posted link). It's more coercive internally and a more coercive (but reasonably rational) regime needs more consistent internal messaging so that people know where the line of trouble is - defining the limits of public behaviour and expression becomes a more important part of the propaganda. There's still 'flooding' but it isn't sufficient.

There is still plenty of flooding, but it looks more like these days it's about social media account creation that generates content to get picked up by superspreaders. At least for foreign consumption this seems more effective.

https://www.youtube.com/@RyanMcBethProgramming talks about this on a number of his videos.

> a shameless willingness to disseminate partial truths or outright fictions

I remember an informative presentation about Russian history and culture which seems to go along with this, in particular the bit about "two words for the truth and three for the lie".

https://youtu.be/kF9KretXqJw?t=2257 (time-stamped at the relevant portion but the whole talk is good)

Well I don't know about Finns but in Western Europe Russians are often considered to be a bit too direct or even blunt. Kinda contradicts the "lying culture" hypothesis.

EDIT. I watched the video a bit more and I could not take it seriously after seeing the part about "technological backwardness" that apparently always was there. That's just charged propaganda and there is nothing to discuss.

Finns still sore about losing the Winter War. Which they lost. They were defeated. They had to tap out. It’s just that they were smart enough to concede and trade a good chunk of their territory for continued statehood. A lesson lost in time.

> a lesson lost in time

What exactly are you implying?

HN’s supposed to be a well-informed crowd but somehow the last half-year of Ukraine-related doom and gloom in Western mainstream media simply hasn’t registered. Since you’re asking.

Knowing when to quit—it’s a lesson for everyone, of course. Knowing that when you take a gamble you could lose it all.

I knew what you were implying of course, I just wanted to see it written explicitely.

It's funny to see a russian sockpuppet under an article about propaganda.

Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

PS: https://twitter.com/CatSmarterThanU/status/16631726141167616...

Can’t say I know any Poles irl but that certainly matches the impression one gets on-line.

Not going to disagree that the person is coming from a certain bias but the information I'm referring to is factual about words that are understood by Russians. I don't consider that all Russians are part of a lying culture but there are words which Russians use to distinguish the nuances of lying, and even the nuances of telling truths; that says something about the messages they tend to hear.

In English one could also use different words for that:

- that's right/true/сorrect

- that's wrong/false/incorrect

Does this imply anything? The synonyms he talks about are very similar e.g. a noun from "right" and a noun from "true".

> The synonyms he talks about are very similar e.g. a noun from "right" and a noun from "true".

If that's the case, I see where you're coming from. I was interpreting the meaning as similar to differences between "lie" and "bullshit" and "gaslight" in English. They all mean roughly "an untrue statement" but they still have their own nuances; "bullshitting" and "gaslighting" are just specific ways of "speaking untruths".

> Does this imply anything?

This does not imply to me that people who understand these words are bad or evil or anything like that. It suggests, instead, that they're used to being lied to in subtle ways such that they've developed tools for discussing these lies amongst each other in their native language. Similar to how citizens of English-speaking nations use words like "bullshit" and "gaslight".

This is extremely effective in an age where people will only read headlines, and often barely even that.

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