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Comment by whearyou | Hacker News Reader

It’s a minor effort compared to the hundreds of millions Iran, China, and Russia have spent for a decade on influence operations.

Those get little air time in hard progressive or far right spaces since these anti liberal influence operations mostly promote hard progressive and far right perspectives.

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Whatever Iran, China, and Russia have done is also a minor effort compared to the billions spent by the US on influence operations.

Doubtful.

Depends how broadly you define it.

America literally produces movies about "Captain America", a heroic do-gooder who has superhuman strength, speed and endurance and who wears a flag as an outfit. In these movies he saves the entire planet. America spends like a hundred million dollars every year on that alone.

If by "America" you mean private companies rather than government, by private decision rather than at government direction, and paid for by private citizens voluntarily purchasing the results rather than government contract, then sure.

So methods and tools developed to combat global extremism during the War on Terror weren't used by US tech companies at the behest of an in-power political party against opposition speech?

Is that not what the senate subcommittee has been discussing for the past two years?

Correct, they weren't. It's ridiculous paranoia.

Doubtful how? They have a legal system for it and they do it in the open... They're at 4.26 billions now(*), plus whatever they spend under the table.

(*) https://www.statista.com/statistics/257337/total-lobbying-sp...

Domestic lobbying by domestic interests is vastly different than the (foreign) influence operations we were discussing. You can't look at the total spend on lobbying and claim to be making a relevant comparison.

How is that relevant in a discussion about Israel enabling cyber crimes and also having a massive propaganda wing that is working over time online?

Also, Russia and China aren't seen as allies by basically anyone in the west. But yeah, sure then we should treat Israel like we do Russia and China though, but I'm not sure you would.

Can you give some examples or “hard progressive” influence ops that have come out of China, Russia or Iran?

That’s really in direct opposition to their stated aims and it just seems like a false equivalence.

Struggling to imagine what a "hard progressive" space might look like or even why this is a bad thing.

(Twitter tankies are annoying, but mostly on their own initiative)

Lemmy ml. Go there and you will understand why it might be a bad thing.

anti liberal influence operations do not promote hard progressive perspectives.

Their main goal is to break the wests spirit and culture. Russia is very culture driven in its policy and goals, with ukraine being largely ideological https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/comment/topic/2024/06/29...

Wild guess: they could because the best way to make people more conservative is to make liberals look more and more extreme. These things go in cycles, when the pendulum shifts too far to the left or to the right, it tends to swiftly move back the other way, and so the cycle continues.

Example: the far right tries to depict the left as degenerates who want to make all children gay just because they support introducing LGBT+ friendly material to the school education. I'm sure some people buy that and hence become more inclined to reject the left, as who wants to "force" children to become homosexual, or transgender, right?!

Now, whether China/Russia are doing it or not, I have no idea, and I suspect no one here does. But even if they do, I have trouble seeing how they would be more capable than Europe and the US, who clearly also try pretty hard to promote their own values elsewhere, so they can hardly complain about others doing it.

Russia actually works both sides to become more heated. During the 2016 election they created facebook groups for pro and anti abortion groups and organised them to be in the same city at the same time.

I think they're also trying to break the wests spirit in terms of faith in democracy and the state of the world right now for policy and political/military advantage. In my eyes the US is currently one big foreign infleunce experiment right now via facebook

What would Russia gain from a US that is split and lack of faith in democracy? I don't doubt you're right, I just don't see what's the motivation here?

It's not like the USA will stop interfering with the world if they succeed, which I suppose may be their motivation? To the contrary, a messed up USA is incredibly dangerous. It could end up in the hands of extremists (well, it kind of already did before) who have no qualms starting a war against Russia, which would be completely devastating for Russia (maybe also for the USA, but from Russia's point of view, that wouldn't matter much).

The media makes it look like Russia is some teenager hooligan in the world stage, doing destructive things without motivation just for the sake of it, which just doesn't make sense to me at all.

Hundreds of millions, you say?

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/feb/10/sheldon-adel...

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/republican-mega-donor-adels...

I'm pro-Israel, but the current Israel government is widely called far right by the mainstream media, so I don't not know what to make of your comment at all.

If you talk about general influencing: It has been known for decades that the USSR and its successors have influence operations. No need to mention it. It would be interesting though to follow the money: Perhaps your innocent "liberal" mainstream operation that is anti-meritocracy and therefore undermines the West is financed by Russia.

Does the current government seem to be the one its voter base voted for? I'm acutely aware of the backlash it's getting but I'm interested to know.

And anti meritocracy seems to be a very effective idea to push, I was more considering shattering faith in the future and changing policy personally.

Also account created 2 hours ago and only comment is on this israel post^

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