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Comment by H8crilA | Hacker News Reader

A lot of this stuff doesn't work by changing people's mind on topic X, but rather by saturating the informational environment so that people declare epistemological bankruptcy. For example, one thing that you can quite often hear from a Russian that has been confronted with something unpleasant is "well, who knows what's true". This is usually not a figure of speech, not some kind of washing down of facts, but rather an accurate representation of their mind.

Between being fooled and being uninformed the latter is much more pleasant.

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> but rather by saturating the informational environment so that people declare epistemological bankruptcy.

"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"

This doesn't come close to replacing the meaning of the sentence you're complaining about.

Yes, exactly by grinding people down. Making it exhausting to discern the truth, until it's not worth the energy exertion to do so.

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

Exactly this. Or just obfuscating the question so much that people give up asking the question.

It's quite possible a lot of this stuff just doesn't work, or only has an extremely slight effect. The internet is so full of nonsense, I'm not sure how much effect you can add by tossing some more on the top of the pile.

But, these sorts of bots are fairly cheap to run, and they have time on their side to try a bunch of different ideas.

I've always heard this as "Firehose of misinformation" but Wikipedia tells me it's "falsehood".

Nonetheless... look who innovated on it:

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

I hear that sentiment from a lot of right wing friends in US fwiw. IME here it's more a coded speech and / or an escape from difficult conversations. The coded speech part steers it towards general conspiracy topics, which are often a simple way to blanket discard everything "liberal".

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.

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