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Comment by saagarjha | Hacker News Reader

No they're not. You're the top comment on this post, despite contributing very little to this discussion. Israel and the geopolitics around mercenary spyware coming out of that country is a very regular occurrence on this site. Despite a few instances of people trying to downplay the connection or redirect the conversation, there is ample discussion of this topic. I know this because I follow this topic closely and read discussion of almost every single one. I have yet to see any evidence of any widespread or coordinated effort to brush away these issues.

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It obviously wasn't the top comment when I posted it. When I came into the discussion most were about not attributing it to the state in question despite no evidence either way, and downplaying it. And, the fact that my comment has come to the top means that it has seemingly resonated with a lot of users with similar experiences (~+70pts).

If you do actually follow the topic very closely, or read one or two comments further down in this thread you would have come across this link to pro-israeli astro turfing zoom call tutorials by the idf https://www.leefang.com/p/inside-the-pro-israel-information and many other examples

It doesn't matter the country. When any country is accused of hacking its always "how do you know, it can all be faked, its a flase flag". It's weird deflections and pretending hacking is a ghostly nightmare done by geniuses never seen by the light of day. The reality is so much more humble: it's a desk job done by above average workers with a couple smart ones captured by nation states. They make mistakes and thus can be tracked. But nope, each time every discussion has to rehash a sophomoric discussion on the nature of truth and knowledge.

Unless it's the US as hacker. Then no one is inpressed.

There is a large difference between "Israel participates in online propaganda" and "Hacker News conversation about spyware shies away from discussing the country it originated from".

might I suggest that 'allowed discussion' isn't at all a metric by which to judge whether or not there are efforts to delegitimize a topic.

might I also suggest that sufficiently skilled efforts to direct a conversation will not be detected by most conversation participants.

In that case I would suggest that 't0lo provide us with receipts considering that most of us are not skilled enough to detect these efforts

To adequately address this claim, we (the general HN public) would need to be able to access all of the metrics regarding censored/downvoted-into-oblivion articles on HN related to Israel/Mossad/Gaza/War Crimes/etc., and we all know that there is only one individual with such power, and its not exactly in their job description to reveal to this audience just how far and wide the obfuscation/censorship goes ..

Again: I keep track of mercenary spyware pretty closely. Almost all major stories in this area end up on the front page within hours or days of them breaking, especially if they have significant new information in them. I am not an expert on any topic that touches Israel but this is the one I watch and I see no reason to believe there is suppression of this topic. If someone is acting to try to keep this away from the site, then they are evidently fairly ineffective at it.

> If someone is acting to try to keep this away from the site, then they are evidently fairly ineffective at it.

Keeping away, no. But they are trying hard and mostly succeed to deviate the discussion.

>might I also suggest that sufficiently skilled efforts to direct a conversation will not be detected by most conversation participants.

.. and, even more importantly, the censorship cannot be considered successful on the part of the agency doing the censorship unless a) the victim audience do not know the censored information, and b) never know that things were censored.

It would appear that attempted obfuscation over this very issue can be observed in a multitude of forms ...

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