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Comment by jabjq | Hacker News Reader

The best, most successful political ads in social networks are not paid.

Last time I signed up for a twitter account I was IMMEDIATELY followed by a handful of accounts. I'm not sure how. Two even seemed to try to pretend to be from my local town, albeit awkwardly. They had a lot of normal-ish posts.

Then after a bit their posts turned pretty dark / lots of allusions to "new people in town". I was curious so I checked out their profile, one described themself as "a former libtard who saw the light". Those profiles pretty much went down the path you'd expect after a while.

I read about this kind of tactics. Same with Facebook groups - knitting, cooking, history: they start by gathering a mass of normal fans, then slowly turn to the original aim of spreading propaganda. And in this case it was all pro-russian anti-war good-old-communist-times garbage.

My neighbor was a part of a facebook mom's group that went that way. It was a normal group, all the discussion you'd expect, but then the person running the group pretty much took the wheel and turned it hard to the right and even tried testing the locals for their loyalty and etc. Expelling anyone even wondering what was going on and so on. It was wild.

Of course. Literally every time I search anything in my native language on incognito youtube or a fresh instagram, I immediately get suggested propaganda videos from the local far-right party. Who needs ads when you've got The Algorithm on your side?

The Algorithm is present here to, there are dedicated down-voting accounts, many of which are far-right and apparently well funded... They monitor for comments that don't fit their propaganda and down-vote them - no argument, no explanation, no interaction. It was done to your comment too, so I had to intervene.

Don't let perfect be the enemy of the good.

Hopefully a future step is enforcing airwave time limits/parity as is done in traditional media, for the countries that have such rules.

How this can be done is another question, not just from a technical standpoint...

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