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Comment by aucisson_masque | Hacker News Reader

France had the same kind of sabotages during the JO. It was later confirmed to have been sponsored by Russia.

what? they were local anarchist. what the hell are you saying?

With social media encouraging and promoting divisive bullshit it’s really not hard for a hostile power to influence local groups to do their bidding.

Social media should be the main target of all these defense groups, but sadly politicians themselves derive their power from it so it’s unlikely anything tangible will be done.

But how do you do actually deal with it? The bad actors are not in reach of law enforcement.

The bad actors here are the social media platforms who host and promote divisive content since it generates more engagement thus ad revenue. Those are very much in reach of law enforcement and regulations can be passed to forbid such engagement-maximizing behavior. Simply moving back to chronological feeds of accounts the user explicitly chose to follow would be a big first step in curbing the spread of propaganda.

But this imposes an effectively impossible burden on them. You can't build a platform with anything resembling free expression without inherently creating a platform that can be used for evil.

Such groups are manipulated. Easy enough to do, especially if you provide money in exchange for doing things. Russia has been caught doing it in Ukraine, why in the world would you think it couldn't happen elsewhere? There are enough desperate suckers out there.

yeah, but no credible connection has been revealed or proven. there might well be a teapot orbiting the Moon, but without evidence it’s just random speculation

Any given case, no, you can't prove. The pattern, sure--they're sometimes caught.

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