Want to sway an election? Here’s how much fake online accounts cost | Hacker News Reader

Want to sway an election? Here’s how much fake online accounts cost

science.org

188 pointsrbanffy174 comments

Next one to look out for: 2026 Hungary. Fidesz is basically a russian backdoor in the EU and they will do everything to stay in power.

https://telex.hu/english/2025/12/11/most-hungarians-fear-rus...

They are also doing everything to bypass the no-political-ads-on-facebook ban https://telex.hu/english/2025/10/29/despite-the-ban-fidesz-c...

I've met Hungarian people in the Netherlands and they're doing everything they can to become Dutch. One Hungarian even speaks fluent with no accent, and that is quite a feat.

I think it's quite unfortunate as it will mean that Hungary will become less pro EU, simply because the really pro EU people (that are also highly educated) seem to be going out of the country according to my anecdata. It's n = 2 to be fair, but I think it's enough for it to warrant some more research since I am simply stumbling across this group of people, I'm not actively seeking it out.

Hungarian population have been declining for decades [1]. Hungary has already lost 5% of their population since 2010. For comparison their neighbour the Czech Republic has been growing [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Hungary [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_Czech_Repu...

Wow... I guess that plausibly explains why I see an n = 2 without looking for it.

For what it's worth I had a conversation with someone in the same situation just the other day. They have a Hungarian passport but currently live in the Netherlands. They're not thrilled with the prospect of having to nationalize as Dutch, just due to all the bureaucracy, but they're getting the ball rolling now vs waiting to see how things pan out.

> Fidesz is basically a russian backdoor

I love (hate) this:

Western rich people are billionaires.

Russian rich people are oligarchs.

Western-backed leaders are democratic, progressive etc.

Others are backdoors.

China is tricky because they make our iPhones. For now

----

Meanwhile, there's almost nothing on the news or social spaces about how indigenous populations are still fighting for independence from Western colonizers, such as New Caledonia, an amazing place that I was planning to visit:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6S1AFh88PE

(I don't know where else to mention this, this conversation seemed close enough to be relevant)

Russia is an interesting case as it has a president for life (China has gone this way too) and if your billions aren't available to said president you fall out a windows. The US is diving towards an oligarchy but I'm not seeing our billionaires fall out a window or disappearing when they say the wrong thing.

Yeah because in the US the billionaires actually run the country.

I wish that were true but it's not. If billionaires ran the country we wouldn't be starting trade wars and restricting immigration.

During trading war the US stock skyrocketed.

We live in an era where the wealthiest are made by devaluing fiat and moving the purchase power from average citizens to the richest ones. Creating value, if people are still doing that, is mere a byproduct now.

During the announcement of the tariffs and the subsequent period, pretty much everything I had invested dropped across the board: https://blog.kronis.dev/user/pages/blog/my-investments-in-20...

(I was doing an experiment of putting 1k into a bunch of stocks each through Revolut instead of my usual bank funds and seeing how they do after a year)

Yet it recovered afterwards. I’m certain that some transfer of wealth took place there, with at least some people panic selling.

> During the announcement of the tariffs and the subsequent period, pretty much everything I had invested dropped across the board

Noise. The drop was short lived, the news was used as an excuse to take some profits and realign portfolios, a lot of other announcements wrt tariffs looked a lot like market manipulation too.

Then the market figured that foreign competition is being stomped in the mud and the officially sanctioned inflation is the new and endless excuse for higher prices and profits without actually increasing production in a monopolized and cartelized economic environment.

the net worth of the current president is several billion dollars.

that is the same person who ran a crypto pump-and-dump scheme in their first month back in office.

billionaires may have competing interests and also act irrationally.

Not only ran a pump n dump, but he had to change laws to do it. Dude literally made it legal to scam folks within days of returning to office.

Then he scammed people.

The billionaire running the country is the one starting the trade wars and restricting immigration.

> If billionaires ran the country we wouldn't be starting trade wars and restricting immigration.

I'm not sure if you're joking, so if you are, this comment is not for you.

In the current monopolized and cartelized economic environment, the only effect of trade wars is the reduction of competition due to the suppression of foreign competition - billionaires just love that because it allows them to increase prices and profits without increasing production.

Immigration wasn't really restricted for billionaires, it was restricted only for the small fish who may not be able to afford the new and not-quite-high fees. The end result is again suppressed competition which benefits the cartels and monopolies controlled by billionaires. As I've already said, they love that.

> The US is diving towards an oligarchy but I'm not seeing our billionaires fall out a window

Probably because it -IS- an oligarchy? Why would they chuck themselves out of windows?

> but I'm not seeing our billionaires fall out a window or disappearing when they say the wrong thing.

This doesn't happen overnight. You need to thoroughly corrupt the judiciary (which has not yet been accomplished, even if SCOTUS and a number of lower court appointments and many of the federal prosecutors have been) first. [1]

Or, alternatively, just go full fucking might-makes-right police state, for which ICE's blatant disregard for the law and your rights is a trial run.

If the country is ever retaken from this, the guilty will have to be punished. Deprivation of rights under color of law is, incidentally, a capital crime.

---

[1] The end-game for this sort of thing is 'Punch a nazi -> Go to a camp'. 'Nazi punches you -> Pardon and a pat on the back'. Rule of law is anathema to these people, which is why they put so much effort into corrupting it.

What Russian billionaires you have seen to fall out of a window or disappear?

If we take GP's post not quite literally, here's a useful list:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suspicious_Russia-related_deat...

It looks quite literally and "falling out of window" had been repeated many times in this thread. I believe the original meme predates 2022 and stems from this event: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/mikehayes/russian-lawye... If you can read Russian you can find that it was an accident during a house renovation with a whole bunch of people present and the person was airlifted to the hospital.

Now this is rebranded into "oligarchs" not giving money to Putin and being thrown out of the windows of their apartments. None of the people on the list is a billionaire and if a manager of a company falling out of the window constitutes some kind of dictatorship then how about this:

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/bed-bath-cfo-falls-deat...

Probably did not give money to Biden?

Equating the west, to Russia is such an unserious opinion. The west has it's problems, don't get me wrong, but generally we have liberal democracies, which are more free, successful, better on human rights, and have the capability to improve the world(as it has).

Of course, you can get an abortion across all of Russia. You can't do that in the USSA.

You can express dissatisfaction with your child's school curriculum in Russia without being interrogated by the police, not so in the UK.

Last I checked, Russia isn't having plainclothes agents of the state abduct and deport people for publicly sharing criticism of Israel, either.

Perhaps not, but in the USA you don't have a sudden fight with windows and gravity if you do something against the regime, either.

Not so sure about that

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Olson

lol not to mention the ongoing history of police brutality etc. Americans are so twisted up in their "us vs them" mentality even in this day and age it's just bizarre.

https://old.reddit.com/r/2020PoliceBrutality/

Equating two "bad" things as if they weren't worlds apart in gravity is baby's first fallacy. An ingrown toenail and the Holocaust are not the same thing.

Countries understood in the age of TV/newspapers that control of the media was a sovereignty issue. Any nation that wishes to remain truly sovereign, particularly in the English-speaking world is going to have to grasp the nettle and block or force divesture of Meta & the other US social media giants.

Cambridge Analytica was the canary, the gloves are off now. Australia's under-16 social media ban is a good first step but we need to go much further and fast, as much as government control is undesirable at least a democratic government is somewhat accountable, the nexus of US tech giants and it's sprawling intelligence services is not.

There's zero overlap between banning social media for kids and banning news from Rupert.

P.S. that soveregnity issue is not likely to be acted on because there are always a lot of people who prefer foreign influence to domestic opposition! Just ask the Roman Empire.

Completely agree with this. There's a reason the FCC exists and it has nothing to do with electromagnetic frequencies. This agency, just like the Fed, needs to be broken away from politics completely. It's almost too late.

> Countries understood in the age of TV/newspapers that control of the media was a sovereignty issue.

Do you have any examples ?

The people most susceptible to consensus mirage are, by the very nature of the beast, the ones least aware of it happening to themselves. Any opinion that you find yourself praised for by any of the groups in your social circle is infinitely suspect.

> Any opinion that you find yourself praised for by any of the groups in your social circle is infinitely suspect.

It is insidious how easily we divide ourselves into rival tribes. For too many it's not enough to feel belonging within a group, they/we crave others to look down upon or fight. IMO we are our best when we can debate ideas dispassionately, without defining ourselves by them.

Just the price of the account doesn't mean much alone. The other important factor is how easily the account can get (shadow)banned from the region you are trying to influence. And for the price given we just know it's account. We don't know how sketchy it appears to the provider.

Not all accounts are created equal. For example a verified US account will be cheaper than a verified Japan account because Japan has stricter regulations around phone numbers. And then if you don't have a Japan account you might not be able to reach a potential Japanese audience due to not only antitrust of the platform, but also features that use geolocation for relevance.

Cheap accounts from other regions are equally useful for mass upvoting preferred viewpoints.

Take a look at the YouTube algorithm. If those other accounts aren't in the same cohorts as your target audience you aren't going to accomplish much. The idea that accounts are fungible like they were 2 decades ago isn't true.

That ignores a huge part of how spam detection works. It’s way more complex than buying some accounts.

You’d need thousands of IP addresses / proxies that aren’t flagged and a non suspicious phone number, plus various other signals like browser automation detection and other advanced bot detection.

There’s a reason those Asian spam offices are like slave camps. They use real people because they need to. It’s a whole sophisticated operation.

Do we have solid evidence that these accounts actually change votes?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46223522

i upvoted you, but it would be very helpful to add a description to what you’re linking rather than just dropping it with no description whatsoever.

Thanks. At least in this particular case, the question was pretty clear, so I skipped the description. Also, I wish HN would automatically expand links when the whole post has nothing else.

Of course they do. And yes there is proof for AI chatbots now, see the link in the other post, but in the last 10 years (since the Cambridge Analytica purchase by Bob Mercer) the usage was sock puppet networks and basic auto reply bots. However, they were microtargeted to individual psychology. So yes they work.

We now have multiple networks discovered in multiple countries, ie Analytica, Team Jorge in Israel, Internet Research Agency in Russia. And that's the ones we know about. Why would multiple countries double down on an idea that doesn't work?

Every right wing movement in Europe that had any contact with Bannon through his "The Movement" "data analytics" training program has all the outer appearances of running a large bot program, now using LLMs. In Portugal for the origins of the bot network they traced them in Angola. In Brasil the origin was Israel.

No.

And having worked in digital advertising for 20+ years, I'd be shocked if they are anywhere as effective as often claimed.

It's mostly clickbait/outrage for the sake of headlines & clicks.

> It's mostly clickbait/outrage for the sake of headlines & clicks.

That's just how populist messaging works, even before the internet. You say outrageous stuff on the radio and then people listen - just ask Adolf Hitler.

We know, for sure, it works - particularly when the medium is new and people haven't built up a strong sense of discernment.

Like social media. Uh oh.

Lots of people repeat the things from the manipulation campaigns, vote for them, and act on them.

I it's in the same ballpark as ads.

Or as John Wanamaker said : "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half"

They absolutely work.

I'm a vegan and its insane the number of bots, who the meat industry pays for, that promote really weird anti-vegan ideas on social media.

This stuff spreads into real life. I run into folks IRL who repeat the same lines the bots do.

What online bots are amazing for is amplification. They take an idea that already exists and blast opposition with comments promoting their misinformation. This then lends some credence to their idea so when grandma Google's it there is discourse on it, or Fox can use online quotes to say "Hey, people are talking!!"

A lot of the weird shit Trump talks about is bot-promoted misinformation. Like, A LOT.

There have been whole subreddits that are just bots and paid PR folks promoting weird stuff or they try to "disprove" things like solar panels or vegan diets.

With online bot stuff it isn't about quality. It's about repetition until the ideas land with someone. It's very cheap to blast people with negativity. Eventually it lands.

So, it totally works when used correctly. I think to most people that's pretty obvious.

The fact countries(state sanctioned) pour a good amount of money and resources into these bot farms proves they work.

They don't need to directly change votes. It can be much more indirect.

For example, you can associate an unpopular celebrity or sports team with a political movement, driving its approval down.

Also, you don't need _those_ accounts to change votes, you need to create small viral effects that will cause people to start spreading ideas.

Thats forcing a claim that wasn’t made in the article.

If that is as easy as the comments suggest, EU should just pay couple euros to sway elections in Hungary, Russia, Belarus, etc.

They’d probably have to outsource it. It’d be very expensive hiring thousands of people to do it in Europe full time and they have to be native Russian/hungarian speakers to not get immediately caught. They’d have to be connected to the pulse of the local culture.

Popular posts on Twitter, Facebook etc have tens of thousands of likes and comments. It’d be a major operation to do it and might not push the needle.

The scale of the Russian one caught in the US in 2016 was pretty small. They were spent about $400k on FB/twitter while the campaigns spent about $2 billion and PACs spent $4 billion (about 15,000x more).

There is a reason why Russia bans Facebook..

I have witnessed obvious and systematic synthetic upvotes of HN posts. Over and over. I don't think the site has enough protections in place.

Maybe have YC invest in some startups combatting this using machine learning?

(Given the focus of HN it's typically some product being pushed, though. Not a politician.)

It is machine learning, not machine telepathy or machine precognition. Without causality you just automate superstition.

In the US, it's relatively inexpensive to buy up radio and TV stations and newspapers in low population states, then flood the zone with must-run pieces aimed at manufacturing consent for a particular worldview. That delivers a voting majority of a minimum of 1 representative and exactly 2 senate primed to favor a particular set of values and political objectives. Doesn't even require cheating by racial gerrymandering. (Political gerrymandering was legalized by SCOTUS in the 2019 Rucho case.)

When Citizens United was a big deal, I was torn over the premise of the concern for election integrity. Ideally, voters would make rational, informed decisions. They'd see ads, but know they all have an agenda, so they'd do their own research and come to a conclusion. Worrying about biased or inaccurate noise influencing elections means you think people can't be trusted to vote. Which might be true, and if it is, it's a bigger problem than corporate speech and fake accounts.

This is “why are we going to space when we haven’t cured cancer” reasoning.

Other western democracies go further than the U.S. with campaign restrictions, including restrictions to campaign financing. One might say they protect the functioning of their democracies more with these additional restrictions, protecting voters.

And one might ask why we don't want to protect ours more.

I'll swing wildly in the other direction with campaign financing and point out Bloomberg's run for president. He outspent everybody and won American Samoa. He wasn't unqualified, either. He was mayor of NYC.

Are you saying that one billionaire's loss in the primaries indicates money is not a problem in U.S. politics?

I was thinking of things like the 2015 study referenced in this article [0] that looked at 1,800 policy change polls over three decades indicating that elites got their way twice as often as the majority, and the majority never - not a single time - got something the elites didn't support.

In the other direction, the article gave examples of things the elites wanted that were passed into law, even thought he majority opposed. Like NAFTA, the Bush tax cuts, and the repeal of Glass-Steagall banking laws.

It appears that politicians pay more attention to voters with money.

btw, I agree with you that ideally voters are rational and informed. I guess that's a separate question than the influence of money.

[0] https://www.minnpost.com/eric-black-ink/2015/05/disturbing-d...

Money matters on an s curve. The bigger the election the more you tend to spend, but it reaches a saturation point. This said in the average election this saturation point is a lot of money.

I've had a thought in my mind recently. There's been a sudden push in Western countries towards "think-of-the-children" online age gating, and hence online verification tools, and any age verification tool that works can verify other things, like whether the user is a real person or not. The "that works" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there, but we should assume that the politicians pushing for this at least believe it's possible.

Of course, any push for new legislation like this has many factions, and I'm sure there's a large faction who genuinely want better CSAM scanning tools, and another large faction who want to spy on and control what people can say online.

But those factions have always existed. Why is this push coming so strongly now in so many countries, and getting so much traction, when it previously failed?

Perhaps it's because politicians have recognized this existential threat. If they can't control what fake AI accounts say online to their real citizens, and the cost of running those fake accounts is trending down to the point where they'll vastly outnumber real people, then western civilization is lost. Democracy only works when there's a reasonable amount of signal in the noise. When it's basically all noise, and the noise is specifically created to destroy the system, the system is dead.

So perhaps there's another faction for whom this think-of-the-children stuff is a way to get verification normalized, and that's a way to get real humans verified online. This would not be accepted if it was done directly (or at least, politicians believe that people wouldn't accept it, and I tend to agree).

I personally react strongly again almost any kind of online control. But for the first time in my life, where we're no longer faced with troll centers that required real humans to work, but we're instead facing millions or billions of AI agents that are rapidly becoming indistinguishable from real humans, and are specifically designed to fight a hidden war against western civilization, I don't really see any other good option either.

Small forums with strong moderation like HN are great, but they don't scale. At best they'll be small enclaves of resistance, but most people will be using larger services that are overrun by fake accounts. And realistically, if we fast forward ten years where I can spin up a few thousand (or million) fake accounts for $1000, that are indistinguishable from real humans and tell them to target any small forum of my choice, I don't think any moderation team can survive that.

The future of the internet is a dark forest

The conclusion that an account being cheap is the problem as a reason for regulation is a disturbingly wrong-headed on multiple levels. It essentially says. "If only superpowers can use it would be a-okay!". A monopoly on manipulation is a bad thing for the same reasons allowing only incumbents to run political ads would be.

running political ads is in and of itself value neutral, tools for manipulation aren't. Just having them in the hands of fewer people is a straight up win in the same way having bioweapons in the hand of fewer people is. "I wish everyone had Sarin gas to level the playing field" isn't really a great idea.

I think a minimum pricing on accounts, even if it's just a buck or two on most social media sites would do very little to hinder genuine participation but probably eliminate or render transparent most political manipulation.

Arguably the primary reason nobody does it is because it would reveal how fake their stats are and how little value there actually is in it

There are whitehat reasons to use these services with regards to creating private accounts for common digital software services. I'd be interested to know what % of usage is for that vs. sentiment manipulation.

It’s notable and interesting this research is coming out of University of Cambridge. Cambridge Analytica spun out of academia there too? Question for folks here who may be familiar: it seems like there’s a strong connection to research (and in the case of CA, commercial application of said research) around social media manipulation and propaganda in the digital age.

Is there any six-degrees type connection to the people doing this research and those involved with the roots of CA? Not as in the same bad actors (which, tbh yes, I consider CA to have been), but as in perhaps the same department and/or professors etc.

CA was not spun out of Cambridge University. There's even a statement from the university about this: https://www.cam.ac.uk/notices/news/statement-from-the-univer...

> Cambridge Analytica has no connection or association with the University of Cambridge whatsoever.

Thanks for the clarification. I wasn’t sure if I was right about that hence the question mark.

The _Science_ paper linked is paywalled, is anyone aware of a preprint?

I find it a bit curious that they've chosen to use SMS verifications as a proxy for the difficulty of creating an account, when there are similar marketplaces for selling the actual end product of bulk-created accounts. Was there some issue with that kind of data? SMS verification is just one part of the anti-bulk account puzzle, for both the attacker and defender.

And yet a lot of services claim they are keeping the phone number as a requirement for registration to “prevent fraud and abuse”, pro tip, it is not, the real reason is to link your real identity to your digital one, and even that number can be tracked with cellular towers. So never trust any service who sells itself for privacy and all and still requires a phone number, and that includes Signal.

And Anthropic, which is why I don’t use Claude.

$100 for 4400 twitter verifications. That explains a lot.

Interesting. How to counteract these online imposters?

> Taylor Swift’s Last Album Sparked Bizarre Accusations of Nazism. It Was a Coordinated Attack [0]

I am not a fan of her music, but it was so transparent that when she indicated some political ideas that were not aligned with the one true party, all kinds of astroturffing against her suddenly appeared. This is but one example.

What's really interesting about this technique is that some of her fans got on-board with the scheme very readily.

[0] https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/taylor-swifts-...

How were elections swayed before the internet?

How much do fake supporters, protestors etc cost? What can be done about them?

By establishing two party systems and normalising them.

There was tons of research happening in the space of online misinformation after Cambridge Analytica scandal. But NSF cancelled all the existing grants for misinformation research based on Trump's January 2025 EO. They will not fund anything related to this going forward: https://www.nsf.gov/updates-on-priorities#misinformation

Fund? Forget the funding, they will not let people working in the field to enter US

deny visas to factcheckers and content moderators https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/dec/05/trump-admini...

I am utterly terrified of elections finally. I didn't expect that to be in my timeline. The masses are really crazy.

Even if just 30% is crazy it seriously messes up elections, especially with low overall turnout.

Not sure if mandatory voting is the answer either.

The old way of “only landowners” voting is arguably highly unfair but might also have held a tiny grain of wisdom.

We don’t allow just anyone to drive a car, practice medicine, or give legal advice. But can’t imagine how a “voting license” could be implemented either.

The key is to keep turnout low. That is shockingly easy with just a phrase or two.

Paid DNC (US Democratic Party) staffers were caught swaying/manipulating some of the largest political and regional subreddits: https://archive.is/XfL8h

Interesting, but this is still done inefficiently by a relatively small group of actual humans.

The damage that a Thiel/Musk owned industrial bot swarm can do is much greater imo. I've seen Discord bots (shapes.ai) that can converse responsively in gen Z slang, react emotionally when praised or insulted, display great political astuteness, and are virtually indistinguishable from real people. Someone with enough money can deploy those at massive scale and keep the operation secret.

62 day old account with 12 karma making claims that are patently bunk and then linking to a dubious website that seems to want to run a whole buncha scrips...

low hanging fruit of shillbots

>62 day old account with 12 karma

"No wrongthink heretics allowed!"

>making claims that are patently bunk

The claims are patently factual that you can verify.

>linking to a dubious website that seems to want to run a whole buncha scrips...

"We must preserve the narrative! Any website right of Stalin must be shut down!"

>low hanging fruit of shillbots

FUD comment placed, $0.05 have been deposited to your account. Great job, comrade!

Hacked voting machines are a problem... unless our guys do it.

Fake online accounts are a problem... unless our guys do it.

Totalitarian measures like persecuting people for social media posts and forcing digital id are a problem... unless our guys are in power.

It was a good run for democracy. What was it, 200 years? I wonder comes is next. Techno-feudalism? Well, I'm sure it won't be a problem as long as it's our guys.

How is this little "both sides bad" rant related to the article at all?

> What was it, 200 years?

Rant aside, I'm curious where you pin the start of this.

It was known to the Attic Greeks that democracy had a fatal bug: a system that entrusts ultimate authority to the masses will predictably privilege persuasion over knowledge, passion over judgment, and populism over excellence.

It just couldn't be exploited effectively until now. Thanks, Mark and Elon.

No, mass media had been around much longer than just a couple years.

But also, that bug is why our government was initially set up with the structure it was. And why you'll occasionally see complaints about parts of the structure being "undemocratic".

It was set up the way it was because the founders didn't trust voters. Voters don't always make optimal choices. Nobody said democracy was perfect. It's just a lot better than every other system we've ever tried. Benevolent dictatorship is good in theory, but quite rare in practice.

> Nobody said democracy was perfect. It's just a lot better than every other system we've ever tried.

This has bugged me for a long time: Why do people repeat this ?

I mean this on the fundamental core of it: not on the merit of the argument[0], or whether people deeply believe it, but on making the argument in these terms in the first place.

I don't remember people running around saying Christianism isn't perfect, but better than every other religion _we tried_. Or using the same rhetoric for Object Oriented programming. Or touting as a mantra that frying chicken isn't perfect but better than every other cooking method we tried.

IMHO we usually don't do that kind of vague, but short and definitive assertion. The statements would usualy be stronger with specific limitations, or an opening for what we don't know yet. Why did it take this form in particular for political system? (I am aware of the starting quote, but it wouldn't have caught on if people didn't see a need to repeat it in the first place. I think it hit on a very fundamental need of people, and I wish I knew why)

I feel understanding that would give insights on why we're stuck where we are now.

[0] We're two centuries in western democracies, and many other regimes lasted longer than that. I personally don't think there is any definitive answer that could bring such strong statements, but that's not my point.

> The statements would usualy be stronger with specific limitations, or an opening for what we don't know yet. Why did it take this form in particular for political system?

It's claiming an empirical fact, rather than pure opinion (cooking preferences) or a fact with a well-characterized theory behind it (OOP, anything physics, ...).

> empirical fact

The phrasing is way too blurry for it to be a reasonable fact. The original quote came from a politician, and how people convey it today are as vague as it was initially.

For instance, thinking for a minute about "who". Who are we talking about and who is judging the results ? When did the experiments happen and what do we actually know about it ? On the "what", What other forms are we referring to ? What period are looking at ? etc.

It would be the same for the theory. Which well know political theory do you see related to this ? Political science doesn't deal in "better" or "worse", and I'm not even sure there is any consensus on the different systems.

IMHO, the more you think about it the stranger it becomes. I invite more people to get on the journey.

Mass media wasn't enough to wreck the whole concept of democracy.

It was almost enough, admittedly... but not quite. The coup de grace was administered by social media.

It wasn't? That's the reason why religion was and in many places still is the major part of the state.

> It just couldn't be exploited effectively until now.

Are you saying until Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022 there were no effective election interference problems?

Politics isn't Newton's Third Law of Motion. Prior to Musk's takeover, there absolutely and unequivocally was no "equal but opposite" deliberately biased system in place like there is now.

This is a classic playbook in U.S. politics. Conservative media gins up a conspiracy theory (e.g., Hollywood is biased, universities are biased, mainstream media is biased, social media is biased, etc. etc.) and then they use these imaginary foes as justification for actual retribution. There was no purposeful and systematic bias at Twitter under Jack Dorsey (himself, a pretty conservative character, having backed Tulsi Gabbard and RFK Jr in the past election, both of whom both now work in the Trump administration).

Your youth is showing.

The US manipulation of mass media playbook has been on repeat since before executive order 1602.

Again: yes, of course. But mass media wasn't enough. See also the other comment about religion. That wasn't enough to bring it down, either. Democracy was still viable -- still the best way forward -- despite the best efforts of preachers, popes, and publishers.

But it can't survive social media, which has turned us into an archipelago of competing cults.

  * Athenian Democracy (c. 508–322 BCE)
  * Roman Republic (c. 509–27 BCE)
  * Dutch Republic (c. 1500?)
  * French and American Revolutions and constitutional monarchies (c. 1770-ish-present?)

Most of the population was disenfranchised in those examples. Peasants, slaves, urban poor and women generally weren't allowed to vote. Some very brief exceptions aside, universal suffrage only really emerged about 100-200 years ago (like you said). But clean elections without some kind of elite manipulation have arguably been nonexistent or extremely rare.

I don't know man, I think people disappove of voting fraud and sockpuppeting rather unilaterally.

> forcing digital id are a problem... unless our guys are in power.

Digital government ID based mandatory auth, properly implemented or not (read: anon via zk vs. tracking), does not "properly remediate" [0] this issue. You'd limit identity forgery to those who administrate identities in the first place.

[0] if that is even possible, which I find questionable

To simply "disapprove" of voting fraud and sockpuppeting isn't enough when people disagree if something counts as that.

I've encountered people who dispute that what happened on Jan 6 was an attempted self-coup.

I read their comment a bit differently; I interpreted what they wrote as a combination of a number of things:

- what you're saying: that people will happily distort the meaning of words and events given enough desperation and/or interest in doing so - i agree

- that people do this commonly with these two topics: i do not see that at all, not from this framing at least - i think if people asked themselves if they disapprove of these things, they'd generally say yes. i think people generally do genuinely believe they are against these.

- that people are doing this maliciously (~ this is exclusively or near exclusively interest driven rather than desperation): i just plain don't think so. i think those who suspect election fraud do by and large legitimately believe it happened or happens. same for your example.

And so what I was more pushing back on was #2 and #3. Like it's not that I don't think the phenomenon of semantic distortion isn't real, I just find focusing on it and framing things around it this way in this context is reductive and asinine, and it overplays it; it implies en-masse intentional malice without evidence. I could do this to their comment just as easily: I could start opining about how they're intentionally publishing divisive ragebait, when maybe they 100% just fully believe what they wrote and have just reached the (a?) boiling point after reading the above article and vented. I cannot actually know.

Long story short, yeah, people do be acting ill faith from time to time, but hyperfocusing on that doesn't make anyone's day better, nor does it help against it. It just plays right into it. That's the whole problem with it in the first place, it's anti-social. I'm pretty sure they could have picked a less instigating framing at least - your comment delivers the same idea but in a much less inflammatory manner, for example.

I'm from the Netherlands. That is slightly relevant given that we have 20+ parties here, so I'm coming in with that mindset. I understand that Americans have a 2 party political system which makes things a lot more entrenched.

The political parties I've voted for (all across the board) have never felt to me like "our guys". They simply felt like the most sane option at the time.

Not everyone sinks into political tribalism.

I simply want a sane democratic voting process.

And I find first past the post voting to be insane. It seems that a country is then doomed into having a 2 party system.

From a CS course called distributed systems, we know that if you only have a single source of failure, that's a vulnerability right there. A 2 party system can be a single source of failure if one of the two political parties is corrupted and gains too much power. To be fair, that could also happen when there are 20+ parties, but it is less likely.

Yeah. It's complicated. See Veritasium's "Why Democracy is Mathematically Impossible" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qf7ws2DF-zk

And also Idiocracy. This one is becoming more relevant. In all countries and all races.

Thank you for that link. This put proof to a gut feeling I had re. ranked voting.

>It seems that a country is then doomed into having a 2 party system.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s_law

Plenty of people were pointing out that voting machines had poor security for about two decades. Even before that, there was the mechanically disastrous Bush vs Gore Florida ballot.

America being what it is, with endless Voting Rights Act lawsuits required to keep the southern states running vaguely fair elections, it was impossible to get a bipartisan consensus that elections should actually be fair. And so the system deteriorates.

>Hacked voting machines are a problem... unless our guys do it.

If they hack voting machines, they're not my guys, friend.

Technofeudalism? In feudalism, the lords need the peasants. In an automated society they don't. Technocracy, yes, technofeudalism, no.

It now appears that we took the understanding of democracy, the scientific process, and other basic tenants of our modern society for granted. But, it was a good run.

It's so crazy to me that people who built their fortunes on the foundations of the previous paragraph are now doing their best to destroy those foundations.

It was only recently that I realized that "may you live in interesting times" was a curse, and not a blessing.

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