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Comment by dr_kiszonka | Hacker News Reader

> There's a lot of people summarizing this whole situation as "the candidate who should have won didn't so they cancelled the election".

I wonder if there is any Russian influence on HN too.

(I am also curious whether Dang et al. use any relevant monitoring tools.)

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It certainly has a strong Randian influence, despite that particular ideological leaning being beneficial only to a tiny fraction of the population. That could be indicative of tech culture in general though and not necessarily outside influence.

TBH I'd be surprised if any high-traffic public forum isn't heavily influenced by foreign or ruling-class interests at this point.

Libertarianism is rampant here but it's due to demographics: geeks, (actual or wannabe) entrepreneurs, skewing young and male.

It kinda comes with the territory :-)

It's primarily due to the high net worth or high income of people here. Right-libertarian ideology is more than just a set of economic views, it's also a moral framework that places them at the top. It tells them they are intrinsically good for accruing as much wealth as possible. People seek out tribes that morally elevate themselves, and then retrofit made-up reasons.

Depends on what you consider "influence". There are certaimly pro-Russian, or at least anti-American, posters. As for the idea that it is being targeted by a campaign of bots or payrolled humans, this seems unlikely - HN is good at sniffing out LLMs and to date we have no indication that Russia can find and afford competent English writers in bulk.

There is a curious human tendency since the earliest days of the internet to refuse to believe in the possibility of organic disagreement. The most stereotypical and funny instance of it are perhaps 4chan arguments carried out by insinuating that all opposing posts are actually made by the same person (or, recently: organised by some Discord channel), but the belief that niche comment sections all over the world are flooded by Chinese or Russian government farm comment slaves who are perfectly literate in the local language and culture and would never stand out were it not for their talking points is now being affirmed even by (formerly?) respectable mainstream institutions. I guess this produces the convenient effect that your populace gets strong memetic antibodies against any dissident positions, even as the proposition is transparently absurd. Where are all those people supposed to come from? Even lifelong techies from Russia have telltale quirks in their LKML posts, and little needs to be said about English text in Chinese docs.

Bound to be some - I was debating a pro Russian guy a couple of days ago. But there doesn't seem to be an organised campaign as such as far as I can tell.

Keep in mind that there are plenty of "useful idiots" willing to recite straight up Russian agitprop, usually associated with more extreme political views. On the far right, there's a whole subculture of people who seem to sincerely believe that Russia is some kind of "proper Christian country", whatever that means. On the far left, some people will simp for anyone and anything so long as it is anti-US and anti-West - in that retelling, Russia is somehow "anti-imperialist".

In Russia itself there's also no shortage of people who genuinely support the government and its outlook, and some of those people hang out on Western platforms (often, ironically, using VPN).

Which is to say, you're certainly bound to encounter a certain amount of rabidly pro-Russian takes even in the absence of any deliberate targeting.

>pro Russian

doesn't necessarily mean

> Russian influence

Don't know about the latter, but I notice your question seems mighty grey… I'd be shocked if HN, of all places, was exempt from internet meddling. It seems to me to be fruitful ground for manipulation, and for years now I've seen an interesting 'double face' of Hacker News: on the one hand, inclined towards techno-optimism, but on the other hand, the pressure to manipulate viewpoints seems nearly Reddit-like in its focus and determination. It's a bit like Fight Club: the first rule of downvoting suggestions of interference is that you must downvote any suggestion of coordinated interference even before you use voting to push any other desired purpose.

I think this is salient to the question and to the fact that it's a discussion on the subject of interference causing a Romanian court to annul the results of an election, but I'll accept correction if my observations are out of line even in this conversation :)

Based on my reading of many controversial threads around elections, politics and the Russo-Ukrainian war, the entire internet, including HN is infiltrated either by Russian agents or their useful idiots.

The more likely reality which is confirmed by votes to anti-establishment candidates is that many people in Europe and the US don’t like the political direction, no matter how much it’s presented as moral and democratic.

HN is full of all kinds of fun influence, and Dang swears it doesn't exist.

Are you aware that every HN user account associated with a YCombinator company is visible as an orange username to every other HN account associated with a YCombinator company? They sell this as a "Perk". It's a secret club.

"and Dang swears it doesn't exist."

Citation needed. I am aware of statements, that influence campaigns are not as elaborated, as you would expect. Not that it does not exist.

>I wonder if there is any Russian influence on HN

What exactly is the worry? Undeserved downvotes?

> What exactly is the worry? Undeserved downvotes?

The Russkies must not get our precious bodily fluids.

I think the steelman for this would be something like: people hear factually incorrect assertions with enough frequency from enough different sources and become convinced that these assertions are true. This is basically of the idea of sockpuppeting/astroturfing. Given that both major political parties in the US deploy such tactics, it is not unreasonable to think that they are effective. And when these tactics are deployed by a hostile foreign power we should be even more upset than when they are used by domestic sources.

OTOH, looking for subtle signs of Kremlin influence in every comment is not without its costs either, one of which is that it tends to make people impervious to evidence or arguments that our policy is too hostile towards the Kremlin.

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