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.
enaaem 1 days ago [-]
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].
Wow... I guess that plausibly explains why I see an n = 2 without looking for it.
jasonwatkinspdx 13 hours ago [-]
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.
spiderfarmer 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
an0malous 1 days ago [-]
Network effects are powerful, it’s still the “town square” of the world
flipgimble 1 days ago [-]
It’s more accurately the “truck stop bathroom wall” of the world under new management.
nomel 1 days ago [-]
To be fair, the world is a truck stop bathroom, on average.
Gud 1 days ago [-]
Not really. It’s a beautiful place.
3 hours ago [-]
nomel 3 hours ago [-]
you should travel more. you'll find the actual average truck stop bathroom (i mean a truck stop, the kind that truckers stop at), with warm running water, and electricity, is a first world luxury.
remember, the average income of the world is $9k/year. truckstop bathrooms aren't so bad. something like Love's are NICE.
reactordev 1 days ago [-]
Dubious claim now
Forgeties79 1 days ago [-]
Town squares have an implied equal access to the floor. Twitter favors certain political and social ideologies.
nradov 1 days ago [-]
I logged into X right now and saw zero racist fear mongering or Nazi propaganda. You're probably following the wrong type of accounts.
nathanaldensr 1 days ago [-]
No, it's not 100% anything. The content you're looking at is what you see.
rasz 1 days ago [-]
Yes, and what you see is decided by algorithm designed to radicalize you.
array_key_first 17 hours ago [-]
It's algorithmically based - if the algorithm is built to promote certain patterns, those will be promoted.
Populist messaging, such as extremist right-wing stuff, does well on a lot of platforms because it optimizes engagment. It's purposefully stupid, simple, and outrageous. That's a recipe for success on Twitter, Facebook, and some others.
mmooss 11 hours ago [-]
The owner of Twitter has openly prioritized and promoted certain social and political perspectives.
amitav1 1 days ago [-]
I don't know why you're getting downvoted for this, but it's the same thing for me. The For You tab is a cesspool, but if you stick to the Following tab and unfollow anybody who says pretty much anything political, it's actually a pretty nice platform.
earthnail 1 days ago [-]
Reads a bit like “nah if you ignore the main streets and just walk on the paths that you like you’re safe from crime in your neighbourhood.”
I find it crazy that we accept this madness on social media.
amitav1 1 days ago [-]
I feel like it's more "if you don't sprint through the middle of the freeway and instead cross at the crosswalk, you're safe from cars". Also, there's not some genie sprinkling fairy dust on all of the political posts that's making them go up to the top, it's because that's what most people interact the most with. If you have atypical tastes (as most people on this website do), then you shouldn't be surprised when content tailored for typical tastes do not fit your tastes. After enough time on Twitter, even the For You becomes a bit better, with only occasional political posts.
irishcoffee 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
vkou 1 days ago [-]
We don't accept it on the street either, and if you think that's what Main Street looks like, you either live in Memphis, an active warzone, or you need to turn off the telly.
irishcoffee 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
Cornbilly 1 days ago [-]
Nah. I live in Baltimore. It’s really not.
Try not living in your algorithms.
irishcoffee 1 days ago [-]
I’ve been mugged 3 times in the past 7 years.
I have the scars to prove it.
Cornbilly 1 days ago [-]
Me too, bud. Me too.
nephihaha 1 days ago [-]
I agree with your comment about the "for you" tab. It is really the death of Twitter. Like Faecebook and YouTube, much of their suggested content is suss.
harvey9 12 hours ago [-]
YouTube is very good at showing me what I am interested in and nothing else.
nephihaha 12 hours ago [-]
I continually catch it trying to take me down rabbitholes. It's always trying to get me to watch a Monty Python video for example. Also testing my political views to take me down one road or another. I clicked "not interested" on both MSNBC and Fox videos... They're just bipartisan trash.
andrepd 12 hours ago [-]
Youtube, without fail, every SINGLE time I look up anything in my native language, suggests me videos of the local far-right party. Doesn't matter if I'm watching a funny video or educational content, in comes (autoplayed, no less) some variation of "the gypsies and communists are coming to steal your money". I should note neither centre nor left parties have the honour of such promotions. I am not logged in.
Fuck all of these platforms with a retractable baton (to quote a great letter).
kstrauser 1 days ago [-]
I signed up for a new account a month ago for a specific purpose, and the default timeline was full of literal Nazi crap, like dumb 1488 references, and blaming weather on Jews, and other bullshit like that. I did absolutely nothing to get that. I signed up and that’s what it showed me until I went on a spree of blocking stuff.
chasing0entropy 18 hours ago [-]
With that description you could have been using tiktok with a new account or instagram with a non-us account. Twitter is no more or less a cesspool of misinformation that every other algorythmic content addiction generator (aka 'social media' site).
chneu 17 hours ago [-]
Lol not true at all. Twitter actively promotes hate speech. The other platforms don't do that.
spiderfarmer 11 hours ago [-]
I recently signed up for TikTok. The default feed is entirely pop culture driven. Twitter really is bottom the garbage bin rage bait slop by default. It’s no comparison and no coincidence. It’s exactly what’s driving Elon Musk to do and say the things he does.
chneu 17 hours ago [-]
The algorithm will eventually start putting sensationalist shit in your feed. That's the point.
It promotes what trends. What trends on twitter is racist far-right misinformation and porn.
roenxi 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
ordinaryradical 1 days ago [-]
Of course it is in their interest. The problem is that Russia only knows how to bully, oppress, or violently interfere with their neighbors.
You cannot get along with a tiger who only regards you as a meal.
crazybonkersai 20 hours ago [-]
That's blatantly false. Look at the map, Russia has good relations with majority of its neighbours. It is only NATO and its vassals Russia has got sour relations and for that NATO has nobody else to blame than themselves. Had Russia been integrated into European security/economic structures from day one, we wouldn't be in the current mess.
roenxi 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
samastur 1 days ago [-]
EU has been a neighbour of Russia since a very long time as Finland joined EU in 1995. Not being a neighbour hasn’t been an option in a very long time as there are now several countries bordering it. Beside EU is not a military alliance so why should it matter?
Russia has only ever expanded, but since you seem to be wrong just about everything no surprise there.
hkpack 1 days ago [-]
> Russia is one of the few powers who's borders have retreated in my lifetime
What part of russian border retreated in your lifetime?
jazzyjackson 1 days ago [-]
Suppose they're conflating Soviet Union with Russia
machomaster 1 days ago [-]
Well, Putin did border agreements with China and gave them territory no so long ago.
I am sure "Putin is a foreign agent working against the interests of Russia and Russians (killing them by literal millions)" is not the response he waited to counter his narrative of "Putin defending poor Russia".
:-)
nephihaha 1 days ago [-]
Chechnya did briefly.
mopsi 1 days ago [-]
Spreading this expansion narrative is intellectually dishonest. For decades, the power balance has been such that Eastern Europe has sought to join Western cooperation platforms like the EU, against lukewarm reception from existing members.
France was cautious about East Germany joining the EU, fearing economic strain. Germany had reservations about Poland. Poland generally supports Ukraine's membership, but remains concerned about security and migration. And so it goes.
Attempts to depict this as the EU somehow forcing itself eastward are 100% pure bullshit. New members have generally had to fight an uphill battle to gain entry into the union. They are usually poorer, work for lower wages, and undermine the economies of existing members of the common market until economic development levels catch up in a few decades.
ponector 1 days ago [-]
Also it's in the EU interest to sanction russia to the bankruptcy, wait for implosion and buy for pennies all available resources.
gherkinnn 1 days ago [-]
Doubt it. Appeasing hasn't worked. I don't know what would, but polishing Putin's shoes doesn't help. As for the US, least they have the chance to oust their emperor in three years.
david422 1 days ago [-]
No.
Razengan 1 days ago [-]
> 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:
(I don't know where else to mention this, this conversation seemed close enough to be relevant)
osiris970 1 days ago [-]
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).
anonym29 10 hours ago [-]
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.
blackcatsec 10 hours ago [-]
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.
pixl97 1 days ago [-]
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.
raincole 1 days ago [-]
Yeah because in the US the billionaires actually run the country.
ChadNauseam 1 days ago [-]
I wish that were true but it's not. If billionaires ran the country we wouldn't be starting trade wars and restricting immigration.
raincole 1 days ago [-]
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.
(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.
bigbadfeline 9 hours ago [-]
> 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.
bigbadfeline 9 hours ago [-]
> 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.
anonym29 10 hours ago [-]
The billionaire running the country is the one starting the trade wars and restricting immigration.
boston_clone 1 days ago [-]
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.
chneu 17 hours ago [-]
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.
1 days ago [-]
pandaman 19 hours ago [-]
What Russian billionaires you have seen to fall out of a window or disappear?
Razengan 1 days ago [-]
> 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?
vkou 1 days ago [-]
> 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.
andrepd 12 hours ago [-]
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.
msy 1 days ago [-]
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.
whatshisface 1 days ago [-]
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.
jaybrendansmith 16 hours ago [-]
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.
romaaeterna 1 days ago [-]
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.
paulryanrogers 8 hours ago [-]
> 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.
charcircuit 1 days ago [-]
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.
energy123 1 days ago [-]
Cheap accounts from other regions are equally useful for mass upvoting preferred viewpoints.
dmix 1 days ago [-]
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.
charcircuit 1 days ago [-]
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.
sejje 1 days ago [-]
Do we have solid evidence that these accounts actually change votes?
whynotmaybe 1 days ago [-]
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"
wdr1 1 days ago [-]
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.
mmooss 11 hours ago [-]
Lots of people repeat the things from the manipulation campaigns, vote for them, and act on them.
array_key_first 17 hours ago [-]
> 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.
intended 12 hours ago [-]
Thats forcing a claim that wasn’t made in the article.
chneu 17 hours ago [-]
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.
gaigalas 13 hours ago [-]
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.
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.
fsflover 47 seconds ago [-]
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.
kranke155 1 days ago [-]
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.
throwawaypath 8 hours ago [-]
Paid DNC (US Democratic Party) staffers were caught swaying/manipulating some of the largest political and regional subreddits: https://archive.is/XfL8h
faidit 6 hours ago [-]
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.
betaby 1 days ago [-]
If that is as easy as the comments suggest, EU should just pay couple euros to sway elections in Hungary, Russia, Belarus, etc.
dmix 1 days ago [-]
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).
enaaem 10 hours ago [-]
There is a reason why Russia bans Facebook..
esperent 1 days ago [-]
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.
pixl97 1 days ago [-]
The future of the internet is a dark forest
dehrmann 1 days ago [-]
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.
mikem170 1 days ago [-]
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.
dehrmann 1 days ago [-]
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.
pixl97 1 days ago [-]
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.
1 days ago [-]
mikem170 1 days ago [-]
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.
This is “why are we going to space when we haven’t cured cancer” reasoning.
1 days ago [-]
skeptrune 1 days ago [-]
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.
void-star 1 days ago [-]
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.
> Cambridge Analytica has no connection or association with the University of Cambridge whatsoever.
void-star 17 hours ago [-]
Thanks for the clarification. I wasn’t sure if I was right about that hence the question mark.
jsnell 1 days ago [-]
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.
consumer451 1 days ago [-]
Related story:
> 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.
$100 for 4400 twitter verifications. That explains a lot.
lysace 1 days ago [-]
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.)
Nasrudith 1 days ago [-]
It is machine learning, not machine telepathy or machine precognition. Without causality you just automate superstition.
lysace 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
Noumenon72 1 days ago [-]
You should delete the bonus content from this post too because you started with a good point that doesn't deserve to get deleted for irrelevant and confessed-intentional spam.
lysace 1 days ago [-]
Insightful. Thank you.
burnt-resistor 1 days ago [-]
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.)
RickJWagner 1 days ago [-]
Interesting. How to counteract these online imposters?
Nasrudith 1 days ago [-]
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.
Barrin92 1 days ago [-]
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
Razengan 1 days ago [-]
How were elections swayed before the internet?
How much do fake supporters, protestors etc cost? What can be done about them?
nephihaha 1 days ago [-]
By establishing two party systems and normalising them.
malshe 1 days ago [-]
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
rasz 1 days ago [-]
Fund? Forget the funding, they will not let people working in the field to enter US
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.
jiggawatts 1 days ago [-]
And Anthropic, which is why I don’t use Claude.
gyrate 1 days ago [-]
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throwawaypath 1 days ago [-]
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whynotmaybe 1 days ago [-]
Noobs, way easier to just integrate the platforms owners into your campaign that would do it for "free"
throwawaypath 1 days ago [-]
Democrats did that as well.
11 hours ago [-]
stefantalpalaru 1 days ago [-]
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reeeli 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
ivape 1 days ago [-]
I am utterly terrified of elections finally. I didn't expect that to be in my timeline. The masses are really crazy.
BobbyTables2 1 days ago [-]
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.
consumer451 1 days ago [-]
The key is to keep turnout low. That is shockingly easy with just a phrase or two.
alecco 1 days ago [-]
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.
mettamage 1 days ago [-]
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.
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
ben_w 21 hours ago [-]
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.
perching_aix 11 hours ago [-]
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.
thfuran 1 days ago [-]
>Hacked voting machines are a problem... unless our guys do it.
If they hack voting machines, they're not my guys, friend.
consumer451 1 days ago [-]
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.
pjc50 1 days ago [-]
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.
makeitdouble 1 days ago [-]
> What was it, 200 years?
Rant aside, I'm curious where you pin the start of this.
alecco 1 days ago [-]
* 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?)
faidit 5 hours ago [-]
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.
1 days ago [-]
CamperBob2 1 days ago [-]
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.
alecco 1 days ago [-]
> 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?
the_gastropod 1 days ago [-]
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).
tbrownaw 1 days ago [-]
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".
techdmn 1 days ago [-]
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.
makeitdouble 1 days ago [-]
> 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.
tbrownaw 14 hours ago [-]
> 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, ...).
makeitdouble 6 hours ago [-]
> 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.
CamperBob2 1 days ago [-]
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.
lostmsu 1 days ago [-]
It wasn't? That's the reason why religion was and in many places still is the major part of the state.
chasing0entropy 18 hours ago [-]
Your youth is showing.
The US manipulation of mass media playbook has been on repeat since before executive order 1602.
CamperBob2 16 hours ago [-]
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.
nephihaha 1 days ago [-]
Technofeudalism? In feudalism, the lords need the peasants. In an automated society they don't. Technocracy, yes, technofeudalism, no.
the_gastropod 1 days ago [-]
How is this little "both sides bad" rant related to the article at all?
36890752189743 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
the_gastropod 1 days ago [-]
Went through the trouble of signing up a Smurf account to hit me with that zinger, eh? Nice.
alecco 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
technothrasher 1 days ago [-]
> irrefutable evidence like I've seen [...] I hope you can come out of the mind-spell
I kindly suggest that your use of the word "irrefutable" here suggests you may possibly be in a mind-spell of your own.
the_gastropod 1 days ago [-]
> if the post were about ballot stuffing by the Democrats with irrefutable evidence like I've seen
That's incredible. You're not even American, and have seen irrefutable evidence of "the Democrats" participating in blatant electoral fraud? Why haven't you shared this? There's no shortage of literal billionaires who'd reward you handsomely for such proof!
Beyond this, why I constantly make fun of "both-sides!" guys is because they tend to ignore degree. To a vegetarian, eating hamburgers is wrong (some might even call it evil). But you'd be hard-pressed to find one who'd consider hambuger-eaters and murderers basically the same. You'd rightfully consider someone with such beliefs insane. Between murderers and hamburger eaters, one is considerably worse than the other.
samdoesnothing 1 days ago [-]
You gotta hand it to the Democrats, they're a lot more subtle about their corruption and malevolence. The Replublicans are comedically bad in contrast and it gives plenty of fuel to Democrats to claim that they're Different.
A good example is how Trumps taxes are viewed versus the blatant insider trading that the Democrats engage in.
the_gastropod 1 days ago [-]
You’re doing the thing. The Democrats are both: different in magnitude of corruption than Republicans, and absolutely imperfect and worthy of criticism.
For your example, 7 of the 10 congress members with the highest cap gains in 2024 (including the #1 spot) were Republicans. The previous democratic president and a significant number of Democratic members of congress support banning members of congress from trading stocks. The parties are not the same.
samdoesnothing 1 days ago [-]
My source shows an even 5/5 split for best performance in 2024. And 7/10 of the worst performers are Republicans (lol they can't even insider trade without messing up).
> The previous democratic president and a significant number of Democratic members of congress support banning members of congress from trading stocks
So why didn't they do it when they were in power last term. See this is what I mean, they do a decent job of sounding less corrupt whereas it's like the Republicans aren't even trying. But the outcome is the same, and it just fools people into thinking there is some significant difference.
In my country there are way bigger differences between the parties compared to the states, and even so I and a lot of other people still consider them mostly the same. So when people talk about massive differences between D & R I think they're just zoomed way in.
the_gastropod 21 hours ago [-]
Ohhh I see. Another non-American with crystal clear understanding of US politics.
With all due respect, you’re very clearly out of your element here.
samdoesnothing 20 hours ago [-]
Yeah you guys clearly have it all figured out there eh.
the_gastropod 20 hours ago [-]
No. We’ve got masked goons kidnapping people and sending them to international labor camps. We’re indiscriminately bombing small fishing boats in distant international waters based on accusations of being drug smugglers, we’re stripping people of the already internationally recognized pathetic health insurance we have, we’re trying to hide as much information we can about our president’s close friendship with the most famous underage sex trafficker to have ever lived, we are illegally, unilaterally, tariffing our allies, we’re withholding release of basic economic reports, we’re openly accepting bribes from foreign actors …
But your insight is that American Football is precisely the same as basketball because: they both involve balls, there’s passing, there’s 2 teams, and hell, they both have field goals, and stadiums filled with spectators! Any fool who sees a difference is just looking too close. Thanks for sharing such wisdom. V helpful.
samdoesnothing 12 hours ago [-]
And when people point out they're both team sports you freak out, you can't compare them at all, totally different yadda yadda yadda.
You're just so zoomed in that the differences are maximized.
BobbyTables2 1 days ago [-]
The only evidence of Democrats doing ballot stuffing is they also royally failed to get the majority last time around. Therefore they must have done it since they’re good at failing (/s).
slaw 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
p2detar 1 days ago [-]
Really? Are those the elections to which even TikTok admitted there was an organized meddling? [0]
> We proactively prevented more than 5.3 million fake likes and more than 2.6 million fake follow requests, and we blocked more than 116,000 spam accounts from being created in Romania. We also removed:59 accounts impersonating Romanian Government, Politician, or Political Party Accounts +59,000 fake accounts+1.5 million fake likes+1.3 million fake followers
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 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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Hungary [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_Czech_Repu...
remember, the average income of the world is $9k/year. truckstop bathrooms aren't so bad. something like Love's are NICE.
Populist messaging, such as extremist right-wing stuff, does well on a lot of platforms because it optimizes engagment. It's purposefully stupid, simple, and outrageous. That's a recipe for success on Twitter, Facebook, and some others.
I find it crazy that we accept this madness on social media.
Try not living in your algorithms.
I have the scars to prove it.
Fuck all of these platforms with a retractable baton (to quote a great letter).
It promotes what trends. What trends on twitter is racist far-right misinformation and porn.
You cannot get along with a tiger who only regards you as a meal.
Russia has only ever expanded, but since you seem to be wrong just about everything no surprise there.
What part of russian border retreated in your lifetime?
I am sure "Putin is a foreign agent working against the interests of Russia and Russians (killing them by literal millions)" is not the response he waited to counter his narrative of "Putin defending poor Russia". :-)
France was cautious about East Germany joining the EU, fearing economic strain. Germany had reservations about Poland. Poland generally supports Ukraine's membership, but remains concerned about security and migration. And so it goes.
Attempts to depict this as the EU somehow forcing itself eastward are 100% pure bullshit. New members have generally had to fight an uphill battle to gain entry into the union. They are usually poorer, work for lower wages, and undermine the economies of existing members of the common market until economic development levels catch up in a few decades.
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)
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.
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.
(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.
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.
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.
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.
Then he scammed people.
Probably because it -IS- an oligarchy? Why would they chuck themselves out of windows?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Or as John Wanamaker said : "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
And one might ask why we don't want to protect ours more.
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...
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.
> Cambridge Analytica has no connection or association with the University of Cambridge whatsoever.
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.
> 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-...
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.)
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
How much do fake supporters, protestors etc cost? What can be done about them?
deny visas to factcheckers and content moderators https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/dec/05/trump-admini...
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.
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.
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.
And also Idiocracy. This one is becoming more relevant. In all countries and all races.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s_law
> 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
I've encountered people who dispute that what happened on Jan 6 was an attempted self-coup.
- 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.
If they hack voting machines, they're not my guys, friend.
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.
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.
Rant aside, I'm curious where you pin the start of this.
It just couldn't be exploited effectively until now. Thanks, Mark and Elon.
Are you saying until Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022 there were no effective election interference problems?
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).
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".
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.
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, ...).
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.
It was almost enough, admittedly... but not quite. The coup de grace was administered by social media.
The US manipulation of mass media playbook has been on repeat since before executive order 1602.
But it can't survive social media, which has turned us into an archipelago of competing cults.
I kindly suggest that your use of the word "irrefutable" here suggests you may possibly be in a mind-spell of your own.
That's incredible. You're not even American, and have seen irrefutable evidence of "the Democrats" participating in blatant electoral fraud? Why haven't you shared this? There's no shortage of literal billionaires who'd reward you handsomely for such proof!
Beyond this, why I constantly make fun of "both-sides!" guys is because they tend to ignore degree. To a vegetarian, eating hamburgers is wrong (some might even call it evil). But you'd be hard-pressed to find one who'd consider hambuger-eaters and murderers basically the same. You'd rightfully consider someone with such beliefs insane. Between murderers and hamburger eaters, one is considerably worse than the other.
A good example is how Trumps taxes are viewed versus the blatant insider trading that the Democrats engage in.
For your example, 7 of the 10 congress members with the highest cap gains in 2024 (including the #1 spot) were Republicans. The previous democratic president and a significant number of Democratic members of congress support banning members of congress from trading stocks. The parties are not the same.
> The previous democratic president and a significant number of Democratic members of congress support banning members of congress from trading stocks
So why didn't they do it when they were in power last term. See this is what I mean, they do a decent job of sounding less corrupt whereas it's like the Republicans aren't even trying. But the outcome is the same, and it just fools people into thinking there is some significant difference.
In my country there are way bigger differences between the parties compared to the states, and even so I and a lot of other people still consider them mostly the same. So when people talk about massive differences between D & R I think they're just zoomed way in.
With all due respect, you’re very clearly out of your element here.
But your insight is that American Football is precisely the same as basketball because: they both involve balls, there’s passing, there’s 2 teams, and hell, they both have field goals, and stadiums filled with spectators! Any fool who sees a difference is just looking too close. Thanks for sharing such wisdom. V helpful.
You're just so zoomed in that the differences are maximized.
> We proactively prevented more than 5.3 million fake likes and more than 2.6 million fake follow requests, and we blocked more than 116,000 spam accounts from being created in Romania. We also removed:59 accounts impersonating Romanian Government, Politician, or Political Party Accounts +59,000 fake accounts+1.5 million fake likes+1.3 million fake followers
0 - https://newsroom.tiktok.com/continuing-to-protect-the-integr...