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Comment by UncleOxidant | Hacker News Reader

Who finds this surprising? (don't get me wrong, it's good to see reporting on this)

It's still newsworthy to have evidence, c.f.:

> The Kremlin instruction resulted in thousands of social media posts and hundreds of fabricated articles, created by troll farms and circulated in Ukraine and across Europe

I mean, would you prefer this not be reported simply because you aren't personally surprised? Where does that logic end? The German invasion of France in 1940 was hardly a surprise either.

No, that wasn't my intent at all. I was only pointing out that this is not surprising because this is how Putin has always played the information warfare game. It's definitely good to report on it.

The playbook: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundations_of_Geopolitics

> The United Kingdom, merely described as an "extraterritorial floating base of the U.S.", should be cut off from Europe.[9]

We can only wonder how much influence did Kremlin had over people voting for Brexit.

not at all. They must have people and a budget, they are going to do their job. The result was very close. It would have been cheap and take little effort. They must have people to estimate the obvious.

By what weird mechanism would people imagine all of them could not do the job they are hired for with their superiors being fine with it?

You were pointing out it's not surprising, but I don't see anybody expressing surprise.

I'm more surprised that it is the top comment. I may be misreading, but I'm not quite sure how your comment is promoting discussion.

One of the things I find surprising about propaganda is that so many people think they are immune to it but do not ask why it is so effective. I think the obvious bad propaganda is propaganda to make you feel like you are good at recognizing it while enabling more subtle propaganda to sneak in the back door.

I believe that was more of a rhetorical question than an actual question.

The Kremlin.

Or at least, if you asked them or anyone doing their work, they'll profess lots of surprise, not to say disbelief.

That's because they are obligated to express surprise or disbelief, not because they are actually surprised or skeptical. If you tell a US government worker about the contents of the Manning leaks, they will also express surprise and disbelief.

Mostly surprising are 50% of the HN comments, the "what-about", "but the west...", etc.

A quote which applies well "...Some men just want to watch the world burn."

Some men just care about their own tribe at the expense of all others, and other men care about truth and justice.

I mostly see men who care about someone else's truth and justice, while having this huge leeway for things happening in their own backyard, which they objectively cannot affect.

People who care about justice are not hypocrites. People who claim to care often are.

It's possible to care about your own tribe (if you didn't, it wouldn't be your tribe, would it?), denounce things other tribes do, and also denounce things your own tribe does.

Its also possible not to see humanity as being composed of competing tribes.

It is not surprising when you don't assume that HN has not become a target of the intelligence agencies running mentioned campaign. Considering the potential of the crowd here it is actually rather unsurprising.

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