Network of Scottish X accounts go dark amid Iran blackout
heraldscotland.com
heraldscotland.com
It seems to me most social platforms (not just big tech, smaller UGC sections like the BBC) have many puppet accounts that are triggered by certain content.
Anecdotally looking at BBC comment sections of Scottish content, the "highest rated" comments are almost unilaterally pro-British/anti Scottish National Party which deviates a long way from historical voting preferences. The SNP have performed very well in Scottish and Westminster elections and the weakest barometer for them is/was the 45%/55% vote split in the Scottish independence referendum 12 years ago. I think if anyone took a "sentiment score" of what's there vs how people generally think or behave there'd be a large deviance.
More generally, any platform seems to have systemised abuse and this pattern goes all the way back to generic content management systems being abused in the early 2000s.
I do wonder, are these accounts being accessed via proxy? i.e. someone claiming to be from the UK and having a residential IP- if the platform doesn't care about the location of access, maybe start checking for latency?
IIRC it's been a long time since anyone has commanded a >50% of the vote share.
Do they? Since Independent Scotland is very likely to rejoin EU it seems to me Russia & co would be interested in keeping it on the sinking ship that is post-brexit UK(economy wise).
And while I certainly think it's fair to describe the UK economy as a sinking ship, I also think that blaming that on Brexit is, to put it politely, "starting with your conclusion". UK growth has been higher than France, Germany or Italy since 2016. Brexit has obviously had impacts, but they haven't all been negative (the City in particular has zero enthusiasm to fall back into any EU alignment) and I think the COVID lockdown shambles and the Homerically inept current government have been bigger factors.
I found this a decent recent overview on the common analytical takes, if you're interested: https://julianhjessop.substack.com/p/what-the-nber-gets-wron...
Covid has been global, lockdowns have been everywhere, UK is not unique and did not even have the worst of it in terms of lockdown strictness. While "averaged out" UK economy post-brexit/pre-covid might not look that much worse than EU, if you look into specifics the picture gets far uglier with entire economy sectors going bankrupt, all in all it was a spectacular self inflicted damage that will be felt for decades to come, especially now that US is becoming a hostile actor.
The Scottish independence referendum was in 2014, two years before the Brexit referendum.
I have lived in UK during the referendum, I remember it vividly, nobody seriously believed that it would actually go through, it seemed THAT absurd.
I am still convinced that brexit is one of the first big wins of Russian meddling campaigns.
Though its notional deficit would be far higher and break EU rules IIRC (which have been broken numerous times by existing EU states).
If anything it would force UK back into the EU, further strengthening it.
Scotland is of enormous strategic importance due to its location relative to Russia's naval ports. An independent Scotland with no other backing would have minimal resources to monitor and deter Russian naval activity.
I note that if you're looking for a weakly defended EU country reachable from the North Atlantic and quietly relying on the UK defence umbrella without admitting it, Ireland is already there.
I'm also not talking about the defence of Scotland itself, I'm noting that monitoring and curtailing Russian naval activity in the Baltic Sea corridor is of wider strategic importance. If Scotland became unable to do this, Russia would have an easy exit path for naval vessels from its Baltic Sea ports.
In your example, Ireland as an EU member has significantly more access to military resources than otherwise.
That is in no way clear because Spain has previously (during the Scottish independence referendum) indicated they would veto such a thing (because they don't want to give Catalonia any ideas or hopes).
But in any case, a Scottish independence would force the UK to find, and invest a lot in, a new base for its nuclear submarines. Scotland is also the most important UK part of GIUK gap, where there is a lot of infrastructure to catch and track Russian assets entering the North Atlantic. UK losing access to that is not good for it nor for the US with their special relationship.
A Scotland in the EU can also create tensions between the UK and the EU, which would also be good for Russia.
At least for several decades after independence
The level of integration of everything, including trade and supply chains and finance etc, is so big as to be almost total.
In addition, I'm pretty sure that EU would not welcome another hard border with England, it's already waisted far too much time and effort on the issue in Ireland. I'm sure it doesn't want to have to go through that again.
In 2024 the SNP got 30% of the vote, the big unionist parties having more than 2 votes for every 1 nationalist.
Edit: I'm 60 in case anyone thinks I'm being ageist
Famously, Alex Salmond (at the time, the leader of the Scottish National Party) was given a regular programme on Russia Today. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Alex_Salmond_Show
Say what you want about Scottish independence (its for the Scots to decide), but a break up of the UK would serve Kremlin interests no end.
I was, and still am, a support of Scottish independence but I how the whole thing was handled reflects pretty well on the UK as a whole.
Though it's fair to say that had the referendum been held more recently, Russian interference would have been orders of magnitude more severe. I'm not sure what the solution is to protect against such interference. (That is, interference in the worlds democracies, not just ours).
Do to them what they do to us. Make "FAFO" a thing again.
We once upon a time stopped supporting the Russian opposition and it cost us dearly.
As for "what can we do now" - for every attributed or even suspected action of interference by Russia, Ukraine gets handed another few billion dollars worth of ammunition. When something gets attributed to Iran, give some nice toy to Israel. When something gets attributed to China, how about some missiles for Taiwan. We don't need to engage in wars ourselves, but we can put serious impedances against their plans.
The only ones I can't think of a solution are the North Koreans because they're so isolated and have the unique advantage that for anything we do they can shoot ballistics onto South Korea.
It's like "Thinking Fast and Slow". Fast, unofficial, unconscious part of decisions and actions versus the slow, official, conscious part. The unconscious is more important in many cases.
You cannot ignore the influence of EU membership, both to the referendum vote for Scottish independence, and post-Brexit attitudes. The Scottish independence referendum was impacted by it becoming clear that an EU membership would not be automatic nor even possible (Spain would veto); Brexit happening means that part of what motivated Scotts to remain in the UK was taken from them (they voted overwhelmingly for the UK to remain in the EU).
Then you had the insane Brexit referendum which was non-binding but considered binding, where the "leave" vote could mean any number of things, and blatant nonsense was allowed to be used as slogans (that famous Boris bus), with the government failing to communicate on what the EU is.
The Scottish independence referendum was also non-binding, because that is how things work in the UK.
.. Of course there was a complication in the Scottish case as the Edinburgh Agreement (2012) was necessary to hold it, and the UK government was politically bound to honour the result - but that's the same as the UK brexit vote. All parties were politically bound to honour the result, but not legally bound.
As a fellow Scot, I watched the commentary unfold while I lived in Canada and to me the what would you call it, blatant, slant on things meant the vote would go a particular way. I think it all boiled down to the uncertainty of negotiations with Westminster. Pensioners were scared about their pensions disappearing and whatnot.
All the same, it's true that Scotland runs a deficit much the same as the rest of the UK does, relying on London generated revenue.
That seems to me a stark reality of independence, which some voters were willing to pay. Point being anyway, online algos are readily manipulating opinions and spreading false information.
Like Brexit did.
But so do Scottish people.
1. https://d3nkl3psvxxpe9.cloudfront.net/documents/Internal_Ind...
[1] https://ygo-assets-websites-editorial-emea.yougov.net/docume...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_on_Scottish_in...
The National certainly is.
DOI: Scotsman not in favour of independence.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Herald_(Glasgow)#Political...
After all it certainly doesn't make economic sense.
That's not really true, it was a union agreed by both sides - hence the name.
Your analogy is very, very stretched. One can definitely say that suppression of Highlanders after the defeat of the last Jacobite Uprising was somewhat similar to other British military actions, including those in India, but that was the standard of the day in the 18th century.
Scotland was in no meaningful way "colonized". The local elite kept their power, their property, and got adequate representation in the common British Parliament, which meant real influence over the legislative process and formation of governments.
Can you name any Indian MPs sitting in the Westminster back then and co-determining the next budget and the next Prime Minister? No.
Jade Helm, Obama's tan suit, etc.
most don't stick, which means you need to hammer "real" issues, even if they're only real to 10% of the population or less, e.g. "wedge issues" etc.
For Scottish independence- well Adam Smith, David Hume et al set up the modern world. There's a definite Scottish identity. For others in Scotland it's a UK identity and they still identify as Scottish.
[0] - https://www.royalnavy.mod.uk/locations-and-operations/bases-...
Sure. But the point is they don't. Moving nuclear weapons (and building a new submarine base) is difficult, disruptive and expensive. (Having a non-nuclear power on the same landmass as a geopolitical competitor is also nice. If there is an underlined vision of this millenium shared by the world's great and regional powers, it's that nuclear sovereignty trumps the conventional kind.)
Do you want a nuclear weapons site 20 miles from your largest city?
If you’re nuking a submarine port you’re nuking other port infrastructure. And if the UK is under strategic nuclear fire, any population center is going to be leveled.
(I understand the NIMBY argument. I don’t want to live next to nuclear weapons more due to accident risk than targeting.) And I understand the non-proliferation one when it worked.)
eg: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trident_(UK_nuclear_programme)
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astraea_(nuclear_warhead)
There are / have been other nuclear warheads and bombs in the UK of both UK and US origin.
And a very simple way of de-legitimising any anti-establishment position, and protecting the status quo.
We can look at independence movements in Europe, Brexit, Trump, republicanism in the UK, any sort of heterodox economic or foreign policy.
Even if you disagree with these positions, it is helpful to you to steelman your position and your arguments. And just dismissing them as Putin's work drops you into a trap. It's arguably one reason why Trump got re-elected. People spent his entire first term assuming he'd be exposed in some complicated Russian plot and put in jail; rather than thinking hard about why he got elected in the first place. Same thing happened to some degree with the Brexit vote.
They also strongly support Unionism, because it also undermines the UK.
>Meanwhile, ‘Fiona’ said that “protesters have seized Balmoral Estate” and “International markets are dumping UK assets as images of tanks in Edinburgh go viral”.
>‘Lucy’ claimed that "farmers have used tractors to block the A1 at the English border”, while another account called ‘Kelly’ said that “army trucks are rolling down the Royal Mile. Soldiers in fatigues are guarding the Scottish Parliament”.
Surely the number of Scottish people influenced by accounts making such outlandish claims is exactly zero.
It may be aimed at Scots but sometimes be done too blatantly so slips into the implausible. It may be aimed at influencing just those prone to conspiracy theories - who might be few but more likely to extreme actions.
Its quite unusual for separatist movements to both remain peaceful themselves, and not to be violent suppressed. Even other western democracies have not managed, nor did one other part of the UK for a long time.
My other nationality is Sri Lankan so I have seen how bad it can get. I do not think that will ever happen in the UK, but even a very small number of sufficiently nasty people can do a great deal of damage.
I think there are parallels to draw to how Fox News tried to paint a picture of places in Europe being on fire and overtaken by gangs and radicals years before that became close to actual reality.
General disruption in the UK would help the Iranian government a little, but I managed to click on one of the accounts before it was suspended, and its most popular tweets received very interaction (and were pretty banal statements of independence support indistinguishable from stuff thousands of completely normal Scottish people posted) I assume their attempts to seed wilder rumours were low effort and had very little success.
- It took on all the sovereign debt from the newly independent nations.
- It relinquished nukes that were left behind in Ukraine.
- The United Nations collectively agreed to it.
I don't think any of those things would happen in the UK's case. But of course it doesn't matter what you or I think. It only matters what _Iran_ thinks will happen if Scotland gains independence.
Or as some wags have put it, when Northern Ireland unifies with the Republic of Ireland, and Scotland joins the EU as an independent state, the Rump UK (1) becomes the "Former United Kingdom of Wales and England" (2), or "FUK-Wangland" for short.
1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rump_state
2) See FYROM: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Macedonia#Naming_dispute
This is a tool of international competition and the U.S. and U.K. have been trying to do it to Iran (and others) for even longer than the reverse.
Perhaps they mean to influence Iranians who activity circumvent internet restrictions :-)
But perhaps they influence American foreign policy.
In reality we are their closest and truest friends and yet they’re relentlessly shitting all over us, even threatening to invade now. The only comfort is that the USA will inevitably reap what it is sowing.
It happened with anti-vax as well. I remember finding it very striking when I started hearing US anti-vaxxers refer to "the jab" in 2020. That's a term we never used in American English.
Now, the UK has plenty of problems, I do not deny that. But the situation is nothing like it is presented online.
My thinking is that this is meant to make people in the US feel that the rising authoritarianism isn't so bad in relative terms "well the UK is far worse!".
There are always some idiots who believe implausible claims. There are plenty of conspiracy theorists around who believe implausible things.
These are also the most extreme posts so there may be more plausible ones.
Apart from anything else, where are they rolling 'down' from? The castle? I mean I know it's technically a castle, but it's not like there are a bunch of troops there just waiting to spring on Holyrood, no?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edinburgh_Castle#Military_role
Of course, if there are pipers involved, then everyone better watch out ...
Aka, the one o'clock gun, which locals ignore entirely as it's every single day but always surprises a tourist: https://www.edinburghcastle.scot/see-and-do/highlights/one-o... . There is actually a small barracks on the site as well, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redford_Barracks ; the city as a whole contains a few more barracks for various units, including a signals unit conveniently located near the main telephone exchange.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2025/11/30/nx-s1-5610951/fake-ai-videos-...
I'm generally good at detecting AI generated content but I might have a few false positives. :)
I dunno, have you seen US news recently?
The UK rumour people probably believe is more likely to be "English police suppress tweets of valued contributors to the Scottish nationalist movement"...
Given the amount of tanks the UK has I think it would have to be "tank in city" - mind you tanks have been used in Glasgow! ;-)
https://euppublishingblog.com/2018/10/03/georgesquarebattle/
(more seriously, let's not forget the deployment of the Parachute Regiment to Northern Ireland, although that was a while ago)
Northern Ireland is a big part of why the UK doesn't think the optics of deploying tanks are a show of strength and doesn't think it comes without a cost...
Between being fooled and being uninformed the latter is much more pleasant.
"never use big words when a smaller one will suffice"
they want to, as Bannon said, "flood the zone". or as RAND Corp calls it, "the Russian Firehose of Falsehood"
Also perhaps it is not meant to convince Scottish people of anything, but maybe to make English people hostile to Scotland and its people etc
Nonetheless... look who innovated on it:
An actual example: "What did you think about Bill Gates climate book?" (they'd read it) -> "He was associated with Epstein, he's a creep. I don't trust anything he says". Then, "What do you think about Trumps delaying and denying of Epstein associations" -> "There's so much back and forth, who knows what to believe."
To be clear I think your take is correct, its just I think that if the space were saturated in a direction that were more convenient towards their "team", they won't have much difficulty taking a clear stance.
But, these sorts of bots are fairly cheap to run, and they have time on their side to try a bunch of different ideas.
The accounts appear to be suspended, so it is true that Scottish people are not being influenced by these accounts.
In fact, the link in the story about tanks in Edinburgh goes nowhere. Combined with the links to suspended accounts, the article almost reads like it was written by a sock puppet...
Having said that, partisan people on social media are always happy to share stuff that they agree with regardless of the source. Presumably these accounts posted less loopy stuff sometimes and got retweets.
Maybe they're just Russian cybercriminals chasing impulse likes and follows for the sake of building up their accounts' social currency? Once they've gotten enough real engagement that the algorithm thinks they're real people, they can pivot to something entirely unrelated to the political controversy they pushed. Change name, change style, suddenly the victim follows an account they don't remember but gives interesting advice on crypto investments.
Now, I do certainly believe Russian cybercriminals do work for the government now and then in return for tolerance. But it may be less mustache-twirling chaos farming and more plain old scams.
bingo.
you need a trail of real-looking accounts. not just for posting, too, but also to link to, or retweet, or like, etc., in ways that get algorithms to put stuff on the top of a feed.
there may be only one actual account pushing the marketing or propaganda, but you need 5k more to upvote or share -- and those accounts can be just random AI slop or reposts of something. take the top replies of a popular post and shorten it, then post it a day or two later. or repost the most popular generic post of last month, etc.
You don't need any reputation at all because the sites do very little actual work to block literal nation state level information warfare campaigns (because that would cost money and reduce their metrics)
You also don't need any reputation because the real humans who will be boosting your false narrative or "information" are the type that take someone else telling them "No, that's fake because <reason>" to be high quality evidence that it is "The real truth THEY don't want you to know"
Like, these accounts will quite literally only be active from 9-5 Moscow time despite being "In the US", and yet that is apparently not a strong enough signal for companies to target them for review or bans?
Absolutely
>Maybe they're just Russian cybercriminals chasing impulse likes and follows for the sake of building up their accounts' social currency?
No, you've misunderstood. Pushing both sides isn't evidence that they aren't literally posting as information warfare. The Kremlin goal is not really any party wins in particular (though they have preferences), but to weaken a country by ensuring it spends more effort on internal struggles.
Both Iran and Russia (as well as many other nations) have known information warfare arms that actively post with the intent of stirring up shit. They really don't try to legitimize those accounts because the don't actually need the con to be hidden, because nobody fucking checks, because microblogging platforms like X are full of people who have self selected to be especially credulous, especially bad at interrogating a source of information for quality, and really really bad at recognizing how many times they have fallen for outright false info.
So we have been told. What if these are just repurposed cybercriminals, spammers and fraudsters? To me, it makes perfect sense that fraudsters try to convince their own corrupt authoritarian government, "no, we're spreading chaos and distrust, it's great for our country actually! You should protect us and pay us!" when they don't give a rat's ass whether the "distrust propaganda" is useful or not, they're just pumping their scams.
The thing I'm arguing against is mainly that this thing works and can be stopped with aggressive censorship. I don't think that's true even if Putin and co. totally buy into the "spreading distrust" narrative. It wouldn't be the first time our spooks and their spooks agreed on a bizarre view of the world.
The goal is to get that one lunatic to do something, that sets off the response which drains resources and makes the powers at be less nimble.
We live in a world of subtle war.
It’s certainly not working on me, but I fear far too many of us are just taking these stories at face value.
It would be interesting to see how this applies more widely to other sets of content and countries.
From the original UKDJ article:
> The original UK Defence Journal investigation stressed in an editor’s note that “this article does not claim that Scottish independence is a foreign plot, nor does it suggest that support for independence is illegitimate, inauthentic, or driven by anything other than sincere political conviction.”
> The focus, we underlined, was not on genuine activists but on documented attempts by Iranian-linked actors to exploit authentic political debates for their own strategic purposes. Robertson’s reply arguably missed this distinction. The concern raised by analysts was not that independence itself is tainted, but that foreign actors are infiltrating the conversation, seeking to magnify division and undermine trust in democratic processes.
"a 2024 study by researchers at Clemson University has estimated that 4% of content relating to independence were linked to one Iranian-backed bot network of around 80 accounts."
Speaking as a Scot, I would expect there are those who support attempts to break up the UK who care zero about Scotland. Who's ultimately behind it is speculative.
To use an analogy: if the village idiot went to the town square and shouted hate speech, he'd be laughed at or dealt with. Now anyone has a platform to go to the town square, except it's the world, and shout hate speech. And unlike before there will be hateful people, some of them unrecognisable from real people, who will support the village idiot. They will help amplify his voice and validate him and legitimise him.
We have to find a way to stop this. The only thing I can think of is require you to attach your real identity to social media accounts, and regulate the living daylights out of it to hold the networks accountable if their owners don't want to do the right thing. Free speech isn't free.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZggCipbiHwE
"This sharing of biased and false news has become all too common on social media"
... say the local TV presenters parroting an identical script from the Sinclair Broadcast Group, which owns or operates 193 TV stations in the USA, covering 40% of US households
You'd be mad to think that consolidated control of information, the endgame of "mainstream" media, is of benefit to society.
"Mainstream" media is financed either directly by very rich individuals, who then use their control of the thing they own (even just by controlling its hiring policies, to give like-minded people a voice) to spam their own agenda on the populace, or a generic money-making enterprise that then deals with less-affluent people who want to spam the populace (advertisers).
Also, the trick doesn't work with social media platforms in the same way. Rupert Murdoch bought Myspace, where is it now? He didn't get the same control and power he got when he bought The Times and The Sun and could tell the staff who wrote the content what to say to their passive readers.
Just to give an example from the UK of "state" media, the nominally independent BBC has to answer to a board, and to the regulator Ofcom. But in 2021, Boris Johnson installed Richard Sharp (Tory pary donor, Rishi Sunak's old boss) as the head of the board, and Robbie Gibb (Theresa May's head of communication) as a member, and attempted to rig the selection of the head of Ofcom, even though he's not legally allowed to do that. He still tried it. He "let it be known" he wanted Paul Dacre (former Daily Mail editor) be head of Ofcom. https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/politics/63982/boris-john...
They are all at it, to try and control public opinion and gatekeep what is seen and not seen.
A good example is publishing: until relatively recently, books were how most knowledge was distributed, and publishers were able to gatekeep it
Back in the 1990s, one of the promises of the internet, was that it could break this stranglehold. The argument was that instead of 10-ish major publishers, we could have ten billion
What we've ended up with is 5 or so major platforms. Their algorithms now distort, not only the distribution of information, but the production of knowledge itself (click chasing)
An argument I'm sympathetic to, is that the internet hasn't just been a neutral medium, but has actually accelerated this centralisation
The other aspect is the shrinking role of non commercial institutions, like public sector broadcasters, universities, scientific orgs. These entities had their own biases and groupthink. But they added diversity to the media landscape and helped set useful norms
As usual the problem is the commoner idiot, not the group of sociopaths that now have the means to astroturf their agendas efficiently.
Especially puzzling since this submission is about exactly the latter.
> We have to find a way to stop this. The only thing I can think of is require you to attach your real identity to social media accounts, and regulate the living daylights out of it to hold the networks accountable if their owners don't want to do the right thing. Free speech isn't free.
Think harder then.
The village idiot could move and reinvent himself as a respectable fellow. Basically, pre-digital we naturally had different personas; there was no Panopticon that could ever hope to know all our associations. Digital tools have changed that. And inventing the fiction of “one single persona” to tie back to what you said five years ago, ten years ago, thirty years ago, is a terrible idea, and I would argue (based on intuition) very unnatural.
tiny example: https://web.archive.org/web/20160406094911/http://www.reddit..., Most addicted city (over 100k visits total) Eglin Air Force Base, FL
let's not lose ourselves in cold-war propaganda too much and act like russians and chinese are the only ones astroturfing online.
(I would buy China, too. A huge country with a powerful economy.)
That in itself looks like a programmed response.
Of course Russia uses bots and propaganda. But the focus on Russia seems completely out of proportion.
It seemed like a messy and obvious approach - sign up with a clearly bot-generated gmail account, hit the activation link sent by email an average of 100ms, and immediately post in every thread something along the lines of "WHEN WE'VE FINISHED IN KHARKIV / GAZA WE'LL BRING THE GAS CHAMBERS TO ENGLAND", all in under about ten seconds.
I don't think it's Russians or Israelis behind it, necessarily, but that's where the annoying noise has been coming from.
This guy claims to have made $300k posting racist content posing as British: https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2025-11-16/kin...
This is why my FB feed is full of misinformation, strawman arguments, sweeping conclusions and no nuance. it does not matter what they are arguing about of which side they are on, the stupidity is constant. Left and right, theists and atheists, pro and anti-immigration. Anything else you can think of. All things I am happy to have an interesting argument about, but what social media offers is engagement bait of one kind or another - from rage bait to feigned ignorance.
It doesn't help matters when the initial founding was less than innocent https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1692122
I don't doubt bots are a factor in the sheer volume of it, but human nature on network debates was bad when it was only fairly smart, educated people, and it only got worse as the AOL-to-Facebook pipeline demographic became politicised.
Glinner isn't a bot, just to pick one example of somebody who - irrespective of the merit or not of his argument - simply behaves like an asshole, constantly.
Man if Russia went dark like half of all politics X and Reddit would probably go dark. I bet it would be both ends of the horseshoe.
My experience of reddit is that it is wildly anti-Russian since the invasion, sometimes to an almost cartoonish degree (e.g. r/worldnews).
So if posts were marked with the country of origin or VPN, that might be enough for most people to evaluate the intent of the post.
Of course things have changed. There might not be so many IPv4 addresses around to trade, but IPv6 has probably changed that. And it's probably hard to know how long an address was used by a VPN before being traded back to a telco.
Unsurprising given there is no true Scotsman.
- I can’t find any of the accounts
- geolocation feature is hard to crack so they must have been identified as Iranian when this feature was released
- these don’t seem to be high profile accounts
- They link to several of the accounts (now suspended) in the article. - The geolocation was easily spoofed with a VPN, as stated in the article. - They never claim these account have any significant standing, only that they have "thousands of followers", likely in aggregate.
The news here is that they were previously known to be Iranian-linked. This blackout is further evidence, because they all stopped posting when Iran went offline.
Very convincing stuff. We must fast-track the shutdown of X in the UK to stop this ultra-persuasive disinfo from brainwashing our citizens.
I get suspect everytime an online socialist overuses famous socialist terms (or supposed socialist terms) before segueing into a conjunction. “Of course I want the socialist utopia just as much as all of us, comrades, but...”
The idea that I might get in a fight with a robot or some state agent on -- gasp -- Hacker News... it makes me want to pull my hair out. I would happily receive a postcard with code once every few years to quasi-prove my location.
Social media is increasingly the poison of the society.
I heard on the grapevine that X is consistently number 1 on the app stores for News content ...
X ... the home of Truth ... and where the team would get rid of bots and bot networks once and for all !!!
Elon ... you're a fucking genius ...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet%2C_nobody_know...
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/48612/48612-h/48612-h.htm#:~...
> The [STASM] formula works best in the treatment of monitored materials of which the source is known. First point to note is the character of the source. There are several choices on this: the true source (who really got it out?) and the ostensible source (whose name is signed to it?); also, the first-use source (who used it the first time?) and the second-use source (who claims merely to be using it as a quotation?). Take the statement: "Harry said to me, he said, 'I never told anybody that Al's wife was a retired strip-teaser.' Mind you, I don't pretend to believe Harry, but that's what he said, all right." What are the possible true sources for the statement of fact or libel concerning Al's unnamed wife? What are the alternatives on ostensible sources? First use? Second use? The common sense needed to analyze this statement is of the same order as the process involved in analyzing the statement: "Reliable sources in Paris state that the visit of the American labor delegation has produced sensational repercussions in Moscow, and that Moscow, upon the basis of the American attitude, is determined to press for unification of the entire German labor movement."
> It is soon evident that the mere attribution of source is a job of high magnitude.
I'm not sure what we were using 2 watts worth of cerebellum for before sophisticated language, but afterwards source attribution sounds like it'd sure soak up the cycles...
(he also has technical terms for what we now call a "sock puppet")
Can you share more? I read his book years ago, but haven't heard/read anything since.
Most political manipulation of influential people isn't sophisticated at all, it's 3rd grade bullying level. For instance, getting invited to an exclusive meaning as proof of your importance/"seriousness". Brazen flattery, but it works.
And the secrecy grooms them into betraying outsiders in favor of insiders. It's not such a big betrayal to give cover to powerful people's ugly opinions, but it's a start. And once you've done one bad thing with the gang, you're easier to persuade to do worse things with the gang. Again, really banal stuff.
Remember in Snowden's biography, he mentioned being involved in a plot to get some diplomatic person to drunk drive, so they could swoop in and "help" him. That wasn't just targeted at the diplomat. It was also targeted at rookie CIA agent Ed: first do iffy things with us, so that you have firmly rationalized and justified it to yourself once we ask you to do uglier stuff.
To get the topic back more on topic for HN, I think that the fear of AI manipulation of the public is misplaced. Not because it can't be a thing, but because private AI-fueled manipulation will be far more destructive. If you fake a video of some horrific crime and post it on the internet, a thousand people will be examining it for mistakes - and a thousand people will claim mistakes which aren't there, and it'll create a lot of noise and certainly that's not a small problem. But if you fake a video and show it to your super-exclusive private circle and explain to them that of course you must not talk about this for the sake of the victims etc. then it's far less likely the mistakes will be spotted. Our leaders can be radicalized by propaganda we're not even allowed to see - that scares me.
He initially supported the Democratic Party but because of crypto and AI he donated millions to super PACs for Trump, supported DOGE and said that children are now being readicalized to hate capitalism as well as directly messaging the Trump administration to put pressure on Universities like NSF, SU and MIT because of DEI or something like that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Andreessen#Political_view...
For example, I have always preferred most of Democrats' positions on the national level, but on the local/state level, especially in California/Oregon/Washington, I disagree with a lot of the Democrat leaders, more and more since 2010 (I would say my views have not changed much, but the party's priorities at the state and local level have).
Of course, I'm nowhere near as influential as Andreessen nor do I have interests that would warrant a say in national politics, but I can see why if one is against local leadership, they would cozy up to someone who they think can help you fight against them, without being "radicalized", per the above definition.
> the core tenet of Socialism replacing capitalism
You can say Mamdani is a socialist. You can say the core tenet of socialism is replacing capitalism. But you can't say both. If Mamdani is a socialist, then replacing capitalism is not the core tenet of socialism. If the core tenet of socialism is replacing capitalism, then Mamdani is not a socialist. Those two things do not go together.
People voted for the mayor in NYC because capitalism started to eat itself in NYC, and the non-billionaires who actually make up the vast majority of the city wanted a change.
A simple, and reasonably small increase in taxes on the wealthiest of the wealthiest (who are in NYC because its a world class city and their businesses couldn't really "make it" as easily elsewhere) is not socialism. It's saying to the hedge fund billionaires "hey - we don't appreiciate that you're operating your businesses here yet refusing to help pitch in financially in order to keep our world-class city world-class". If Ken Griffin can afford to drop a quarter billion dollars on an apartment he spends ~25 days a year in, or Bill Ackman wants to continue to hire people educated at Colombia and NYU, they can afford to pay another 2-5 million dollars a year in tax".
For all intents and purposes, he's a milquetoast centrist who wants his city to be a bit better, and thinks it could be a bit better by doing things like making transportation cheaper.
You don't see him advocating for firebombing the NYSE or arresting Met Gala attendees.
And fuck, he's trying. God forbid someone care about their constituents, or their own city. Nope, let's smear him for not kowtowing to a country on the other side of the planet. Eric Adams just wanted to line his own pockets. Bloomberg wanted to line his own pockets. And now we blast a dude who grew up in NYC who just wants to do some really basic things to try to make life a bit better?
These days, it’s pretty clear that the direction matters a lot more than the magnitude, and “flamebait” is only a problem when the flames blow a certain way.
The main argument was that democrats policies were detrimental to their business.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_sNclEgQZQ&t=11s
Mr. Andreessen has been involved with high level politics for a long time. This is not "random radicalization". I will not comment on the quality of the politics but it feels fairly deliberate.
Edit: At this time this is my most heavily downvoted post. I'll leave it up because I think that itself is interesting.
Do I agree with your post? No, I think >50% is too high. Do I think you should be downvoted? No, I don't think your comment is in bad faith or inflammatory.
Whenever I see one of those I like to post Yong-heum Lee, who really did 500 miles a day in an Ioniq 5: https://www.hyundaimotorgroup.com/en/story/CONT0000000000176...
But as you say, facts are of limited use in debates any more.
To be clear, that's an average of about 500 miles a day, for almost 3 years.
> The radicalization of, e.g., Marc Andreessen was very useful to some group, so there is no reason they wouldn't try more of the same in this venue.
He's a billionaire. They come pre-radicalised and detached from reality by default. A body don't get to be a billionaire by just going with the flow and not having any particular interest in influencing the world around them.
It's also important to remember that (rightly or wrongly) a lot of these culture war issues are really touching a tribalism nerve rather than really touching on the issues themselves. To a lot of people, the EV debate amounts to "those _other_ people trying to force a change on _me_." Mind you, I'm not suggesting this is the right way to look at these sorts issues, but I think that's how it plays out for a lot of people. I had a real-life friend who was very anti-environmentalist, and his view was effectively that it was all made up, and was just an excuse for the left to push things on people.
We're much, much worse. "Most communities" are built around consensus. Show up at your Facebook group organized around your favorite hobby and you'll find that everyone has a bunch of similar opinions about most things, and that's the way most people like it. Walk off the reservation and try to pick fights over something controversial and you'll find the community walks away.
That sounds bad, right? What if consensus is wrong? Don't we need free thinkers?!
HN is an enclave of antisocial nerds[1] who think they're smarter than the rest of society. We live for disagreement. Discovering that we disagree with our peers isn't a mark of shame, it's evidence that we've discovered a Magical Great Truth, that our "peers" at HN are all sheep, and that we're therefore smarter than the herd.
Sure, Facebook fishing groups or knitting sites or whatever breed senseless group think. But on the whole "group think" usually works out pretty well and keeps people from wandering off into the scarier weeds of the thoughtscape.
HN? We breed radicals. And therefore we're more susceptible to deliberately radicalizing sockpuppetry, not less.
[1] To wit: we're basically 4chan but with an older demographic and industry cred.
But your comparison to HN radicalism to equating tech billionaires as HN users themselves flips my whole comment upside down.
I don't know much about the political biases here but I like to think that most people are pro open source and that they dislike the manipulative characteristics deployed by some infamous tech billionaires or those companies. Usually I think that's the case unless of course someone might have a bias themselves I suppose.
Whereas a community that tends towards groupthink might have a narrower range of views, but if those views begin to shift in a particular direction then it’s much harder for those who are disadvantaged by that shift to resist, because to do so requires violating the norms of groupthink.
I’m not sure which is better. My own preference is to tolerate a wide range of views in return for robust disagreement being the norm, but I can imagine some (most?) people preferring the opposite.
They are also very sneaky in their predatory nature at times so the average person either doesn't know the extent or doesn't look out for alternatives (Open Source) and other issues
Most people on Hackernews are able to realize predatory nature of Big tech (I think) and are usually very supportive of Open source.
Personally I may be wrong but one of the most common things we can discuss in Hackernews is the extent that big tech or such aspects genuinely harm the average person.
If we try to talk about this nuance or other related topics with friends and family, they suffer from the same issue and as such Hackernews becomes a place where people discuss this more frequently
I don't know if this counts as radicalism but a lot of my political viewpoints stand from that one of the easiest ways to bring as such good points is when country can support Open source and can fight against unethical practices in a fair and square way in general.
> [1] To wit: we're basically 4chan but with an older demographic and industry cred.
Teenager from High school here. 4chan is genuinely a cesspool where trolling is the key purpose. I feel like hackernews is much more on the knowledge side of things so much so that I feel more confident about knowing certain projects or gluing things together and just this make shift attitude of make things work and curiosity with great influence to Hackernews and I cannot be thankful of it enough
Perhaps I try to be more agreeable though and see other person's perspective because I may be wrong I usually am and I think I just get this kick in having an agreeable conversation in the end. I think I can treat hackernews as a book for open source projects which are cool and interesting tidbits. I have found some really really great software which I must not have found if it were not for Hackernews and I am grateful for it
Ooh I got a question
Let's rephrase it this way, What would you prefer more, if your child used HackerNews or used tiktok?
The reality of the situation is that in many places like Reddit or even twitter which are radicalized, firstly they become echo chambers and secondly, instead of being radical for bringing change for all people (Think focus on open source but I think its not a radical idea but still) but what ends up happening in those places is that they literally treat each other as another species and the rift grows even further and secondly that they also mostly don't have ideas but rather ideologies to implement.
In this sense, Hackernews is far more effectively radical atleast in my opinion. I must admit that I am a little surprised about the comment of HN being radical because usually, its mostly knowledge based and sure there are some political comments but nobody's forcing somebody to acknowledge those
So in essense, a lot of people are being radicalized, either some just dont know how to approach things or they try to focus absolutely on the us vs them dynamic where the major systemic issues are just not focused on (inequality,poverty etc.)
The world is radicalizing also because its leaders are usually radicalizing it too.
I must admit that the world feels like on the brink of war and no this time its not hyperbole. There are systemic issues in world and instead of addressing them, we are trying to force the focus outside these by all the recent political issues happening and I am not even sure if somethings can be done or the domino has fallen already and I am sure I must not be alone in this when we see massive wars erupt all around the world.
To be deliberately flippant but making a much more serious point than it should be: migrant laborers in the USA.
For the most part they're just honest folk trying to make a buck while a bunch of cosplaying superheroes wander the streets trying to hunt them down.
Middle aged curmudgeon here. And the older I get the more I realize that the hyperliterate technomagical credential flinging you see in the comments here is... basically just trolling. We do it to make ourselves feel smart.
Sure sure, we all want to imagine ourselves geniuses changing the world with the power of our intellect. But that's hard, and most of us settle for getting in a good barb or three in the comments.
I think I can agree with you that perhaps sometimes comments might be getting barbs (first time I heard this phrase, I guess a still lot to learn xD) but also that this behaviour isn't rewarded in the context of an article or anything usually.
Most articles are about coding related software and the pretext around it thus makes comments mostly helpful, or atleast have genuine reasons that one can weigh against
And that behaviour is what's rewarded even in somewhat political posts on HN as compared to something like reddit which might not be helpful in a general stance and especially so in its political posts (or anything related to it)
The tragedy of it all is that it completely misses the point. Politics is in service of the common good of the polity. True loyalty is to that common good as an objective good. Loyalty to a party is a false loyalty, as parties are not proper objects of loyalty. They are merely convenient political instruments, not the objects of the good pursued. Things become doubly absurd when this party loyalty remains intact despite a party’s errors.
> it was all made up, and was just an excuse for the left to push things on people
The fact is that environmental issues - like almost any political issue - can be used by any party to push an agenda in parallel to the actual issue. So, here, environmental concerns can be used by any party as a cudgel and an instrument, whether negatively (e.g., painting all environmental concern as subterfuge in order to push through policies aimed at private profit at the expense of quality of life) or positively (e.g., stopping critical projects proposed by a political opponent by commissioning bogus ecological studies to create impediments).
Of course, that’s different than the extreme position that all environmental concern is part of some conspiracy (the Left has its own share of analogous conspiratorial crackpottery).
This is a zero-barrier-to-entry forum (not even an email required!) that has the eyes of a people prone to being involved with startups. Why would you think in any way this would be better than an average equivalent? Because you don't personally notice it?
I see a lot of people who conflate "my opinion, which is the correct opinion just won't fly here, so how can you say the community does a good job of self-policing?" I really don't agree with this. Any community is going to hold some opinions you disagree with, and will hold some bad or even wrong opinions. What I generally (but not always) see is HN upvoting comments that are thoughtful and intelligent, not necessarily ones that I think might be correct.
For some, reality can't fit in their belief systems, and they have to suppress any challenging information. "Everything is fine/Don't make me think". For others, it is highly inconvenient, because they have a stake in it. I think for something like the YCombinator audience in general it is a hard subject, as the business model seeks to pick out the winners to take it all. The monopolist playbook is so deeply ingrained and normalized, that it cannot face the higher order effects of this modus operandi.
So bots and sockpuppets yes, but I think some of the stupid flagging, the obvious poor argumentation and general context blindness also can be explained as people being unable to adjust their belief systems.
My account isn't that much old but I was lurking around for years and I can say that quality of content and comments has significantly dropped in last 5 years. I'd guess it's because people running away from reddit settled here, because HN serves more generic stuff - with help of notorious spammers who surely get paid for uploading content from big media outlets every few hours.
This is another reason why HN's primary purpose – gratifying intellectual curiosity – is so important. Curious conversation is hard to fake. You can't really be inauthentically curious, at least not for long. So the more we can succeed at nudging the community's conduct towards curious conversation, the more it stands out when accounts are acting to promote a particular agenda, and the faster we can weed them out.
The Herald information comes from ukdefencejournal. They don't tell us exactly where the information comes from originally, despise talking about the company Cyabra later in another context.
But the Jewish Telegraphic Agency tell us that the information about Iran also comes from Cyabra (1)
Cyabra? The Tel-Aviv based company, with important customers as the USA State Department, informing us about Iran?
What could possible go wrong?
(1) - https://www.jta.org/2025/07/14/global/when-irans-internet-we...).
I’m not suggesting all of the Internet needs to go that way, but for large social media platforms I don’t see why not. You can argue that journalists need anonymity but I’m confident we can find a workaround or solution there.
I understand there’s this hacker spirit of doing things anonymous and I get it, and agree with it, but these platforms are the most mainstream things imaginable and they are way past the point of having gotten out of control.
You can’t have MAGA/Hamas/Iran/Antifa/Russia/Cuba/China/India/Pakistan all participating in shaping public opinion and sowing disinformation without contest. I’m surprised that western countries have been somewhat resilient to all of this BS by and large (nothing is collapsing, just degrading), but for how long?
Alternatively, if you don't want to do that just don't use the platforms. As someone who doesn't, it sucks that I have to sit here and watch people get radicalized or become confused about reality and then go and affect my daily life with their lunacy. It's annoying.
* I'm open-minded on the details, just using these as examples or discussion items.
https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/technology/safety-secu...