[actionscripted]

If you ever wonder about the extent of Russia's online efforts consider that the comments on this HN thread might be part of things.

Not saying anything in here is good/bad/other but you rarely see this level of flagged and down-voted comments in a HN thread.

[dang]

This comment breaks the site guidelines: "Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email [e-mail] and we'll look at the data."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Sinister insinuation about astroturfing is the internet's favorite pastime. The overwhelming majority of this, as far as we can tell from countless hours looking at the data, is pure imagination.

Is it possible that the manipulation is so sinister and so clever that it leaves no traces we can see in the data, and yet thousands of internet commenters see what we don't? Sure it's possible. But following that path means abandoning evidence. That way leads to the wilderness of mirrors. The only sane way to look at this is to require some evidence, some objective peg of some kind (we'll take anything!) to hang your suspicions on. The presence of opposing viewpoints, downvotes, and flags on divisive issues is no evidence at all. It just means that the community is divided.

As far as I can tell, the psychological phenomenon driving this phenomenon is that people are deeply reluctant to take in how wide the range of legitimately opposing views is. We're probably hard-wired to see the world as much smaller than it is. Bring us all, with that hard-wiring, into a community of millions of people on the internet, and the inevitable result is that people see spies, shills, astroturfers, and foreign agents everywhere. No—what you're seeing is that there are a lot of humans with very different backgrounds from yours. And on any issue with an international dimension, multiply that phenomenon by a hundred.

I've written about this a zillion times: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme.... See also https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... and https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... for how often I repeat myself.

[sam_lowry_]

@dang, I collected 5000 exit points of what seems to be sources of Kremlinbot activity here: https://gist.github.com/mikhailian/5d65694fdaaf0ccbab4c6cf39... watch out these are IPv4 and IPv6 formatted lists of subnets as exported from ipset.

There are some specifics to my use case, take this with a grain of sault. Hope this helps sorting genuine Putin-lovers from Kremlin bots.

[lazyjones]

I picked a random IPv4 address from this list and looked at it. It's a dynamic mobile IP address from Belgium, used by thousands of customers.

Come on people, apply some common sense and stop the hysteria.

[sam_lowry_]

I know, there are quite a few of those. Pick one of the subnets, they are more interesting.

[lazyjones]

But what is somebody supposed to do with this list, when it contains dynamic IP addresses used by many people? Ban everything on it, based on the assumption that some of them are actually endpoints of suspicious activity, thereby preventing many innocent people from using the Internet?

At my previous company I dealt with all the scraping bots for 15 years, in the end I even banned all of Tor and many of the commercial proxy network providers, with the justification that our site (CSE) didn't need anonymous posting because there was nothing sensitive and no private information on it. But I couldn't ban dynamic IP addresses for more than a few minutes since all the abusers originating from them happily obtained a new address within seconds and continued the scraping, rendering the IP address pool used by their provider completely banned from using our site.

[sam_lowry_]

I should have filtered IP addresses, leaving only ranges before posting. Mea culpa.

IP addresses are blocked in a different context but land on the same list.

Still, to answer your question, dynamic IP addresses can be sticky. Where I operate, some ISPs lease the same IP address for each IP lease renewal. The only way to get an IP address is to wait until the lease expires by e.g. switching off the router.

[dang]

Thanks! I'll take a look. Feel free to ping me at [e-mail] if you like—it can take time to get to something like this but we're definitely willing.

[singularity2001]

It would be very helpful if there was a follow up post to confirm whether in this specific case the insinuations were justified

[dang]

In which specific case?

Edit: I've now had a chance to examine this data. It turns out that the IP ranges in that list are so broad as to cover more than 50% of the posts on HN.

[BrianOnHN]

> countless hours looking at the data

Will you provide that data for independent review?

Edit: it's not that you shouldn't be trusted. The issue is the old “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” For example, what if a large segment of the user base, that regularly contributed extraordinarily positive engagements, existed solely for the opportunities to frame certain conversations, even in the slightest, or even in preparation for something in the distant future.

[dang]

No, for the privacy reason pvg mentioned (edit: since deleted, but he made the simple point that it would violate users' privacy), and also for a different reason: it would convince no one. The only people with enough time and energy to bother looking at it would be people who already have strong views, and they would inevitably pull their preconceptions back out of the data and claim that they'd proven something.

And there's a third reason: sooner or later (maybe we're already there, maybe not yet) we have to assume a sufficiently smart manipulator (SSM) who's able to do whatever they want and be indistinguishable from a legit user. This is exactly what your phrase alludes to, I think: "regularly contributed extraordinarily positive engagements, existed solely for the opportunities to frame certain conversations". Once we're past that SSM threshold, all we can do is fall back on what the community ought to be doing anyway: answering false information with correct information, answering worse arguments with better ones, preserving community-ness without falling into war.

Since that's the only long term solution and it's what we want anyway, we might as well be practicing it now.

[BrianOnHN]

Dang, I think that's a solid response. Thank you.

The theory behind SSM seems well thought out.

I think it would be helpful to enlighten people about the SSM when noting that a response is breaking the rules for an accusation of astroturfing.

For me, I think a brief explanation that well formed arguments are the only defense against an SSM would have removed a feeling of helplessness derived from reading your initial comment. And instead, lead me down a path which could really be helpful.

[dang]

That's great feedback. I only thought of that "SSM" wording just now but will try to weave it into future explanations. You can see that this argument has been cooking for a while: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23839602. There are lots of other instances but I can't think of a search query to dig them up.

[pvg]

The theory behind SSM seems well thought out.

And it's fun to extend in the obvious ways. For instance, what if a SSM (an 'essessum', as they are often referred to in the technical literature) is orchestrating a campaign to write comments insinuating astroturfery into HN threads? After all, taken as a group such comments look very much like the kind of commentary a nefarious corporate or state actor might promote, as pointed out by the shillologists themselves! A curious and under-explored connection.

[shostack]

As someone looking to learn more, can you suggest any specific technical literature on the topic that digs further into this?

[iron0013]

It sounds like you’re saying you’re fine with users doing things like creating unlimited sock puppet accounts and engaging in vote manipulation (which is what the troll farms you’re describing as SSMs have been accused of doing)? I’m genuinely not trying to be snide here—I’m just reading “we won’t enforce the rules because someone’s probably smart enough to break them (i.e. ‘do whatever they want’) and get away with it”. Is it officially okay for HN users to engage in coordinated inauthentic behavior?

[dang]

Absolutely not. We're not fine with those things and we ban people for astroturfing and other abuses. I believe that is the one thing that's in both the site guidelines and the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html. That's how important that is.

It's just that we need to have some evidence, something objective to go on, before we ban people. Absent that (<-- note that I said absent that), what one is encountering on the internet is a gigantic Rohrschach diagram, in which people routinely see the opposite of what they like or identify with. This internet experience is like being surrounded by demons of one's own creation: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

Sock puppet accounts and vote manipulation are not what I understood BrianOnHN to be talking about upthread. Maybe one could adapt the point to those cases though. Imagine someone who was coordinating inauthentic behavior so cleverly that we couldn't detect it at all. Fortunately I don't think we're there yet—but of course we wouldn't know it if we were. Either way, just imagine for a moment that this is the case. What are our options? The way I see it, we have two:

1. Go after each other based on subjective interpretations of whatever deviousness we imagine we see;

2. Have a functioning community with a healthy immune system based on clear thinking and responding to bad arguments with better arguments.

Surely we all choose #2, at least in our better moments. The key insight here is that #2 doesn't depend on what manipulators, even the cleverest manipulators, do. It depends on us. I'm not saying that it's the only defense we have against manipulation; I'm saying that if the day ever comes when it is the only defense we have, well, it's what we ought to be doing anyway, so we should work at getting good at it now.

[Const-me]

> Sure it's possible.

I don’t think it’s possible. We have huge amount of evidences. This article alone has 150 references: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Research_Agency They include analysis of internet activity of state-sponsored trolls, insider leaks, and even documents from US courts.

[xorcist]

Astroturfing doesn't exist?

Are all companies selling such services charlatans?

Not sure I buy it. It's well established that you can buy followers, reviews, positive comments and even stories on all large public platforms, and they are quite public about it.

[dang]

Sure it exists. We've banned people for it. I've scolded them publicly for it, too, in the hope of discouraging others from doing similar things. So no, what I'm saying is that it's wrong to claim astroturfing without evidence, and the mere fact of someone posting a comment that you feel is wrong—even outrageously, perversely wrong—is not evidence of astroturfing. It's evidence merely that they have a different view than you.

I can't speak about other forums but as far as I'm aware there's one outfit that sells HN votes and comments and stories. What their customers don't seem to realize is that using that service will get them banned here. At this point I figure the spammers know this too, but since people still buy from them, they probably don't care. I doubt they get much repeat business though.

[ogogmad]

I think many Russian people, especially those who watch or read mainly Russian news, hold such views with complete sincerity. The internal propaganda is quite effective.

[sam_lowry_]

The events in Belarus recently demonstrated that you are wrong.

I ran a small (1 mln pageviews/month) online Russian-speaking community since 2003 and since 2014, my main preoccupation are Kremlin bots.

The population in Russia is mostly anti-Putin, they just do not speak up, because the state made sure they feel isolated.

[dilyevsky]

Not a secret russian government spends considerable resources on online astroturfing but there are large constituency of closet (or not so closet) putin supporters even among tech folks of 30yo and older (basically people who were alive and old enough to remember 90s and 80s)

[siliconvalley1]

Why would you think that there is a large number of Pro-Putin Pro-Political Assassination tech workers? This seems like a ridiculous statement.

[dilyevsky]

It’s quite anecdotal but my sampling is rather large as I’ve worked with those people over multiple years and still have contacts there. Nobody would admit they approve of this assassination obviously same as mh17 but as long as putin maintains plausible deniability they’d be ok with supporting him

[actuator]

Not that I don't believe you, but how would you back such statement when you say "majority".

[sam_lowry_]

By matching what happens in Belarus now to Russia.

It was long believed, even in US, that Lukashenka had the majority. In reality, he faked all elections since 1994.

Once his deeds became hard to ignore even for pathetically peaceful Belarusians, all the population turned against him. Gosh, the exit poll in my voting station recorded only one vote for Lukashenka among 358. I was there watching the exit poll for a couple of hours. I fully trust the organizers, but one in 358... I could not even imagine it.

Same for Russia.

P.S. Yes, I have a Belarusian passeport. Yes, I run a Russian-speaking community site. Pass on.

[actuator]

The election results had him at ~80% votes, if he is really rigging elections, would he really go for such unrealistic numbers. If I have just 40% support, I might go for showing it to be about 55%, so that it at least looks close.

I think he did rig elections but he might have had majority already, which makes his numbers look so unrealistic or he is just plain stupid to not even rig elections to make them look believable.

I do really sympathize with the Belarussian people though, every community should get a say on who represents them.

[throwaway8941]

>would he really go for such unrealistic numbers

I am from Kazakhstan. If you've ever heard of it, would you consider it to be an autocratic state? Because according to the official results our beloved leader received 98% of votes in an election a few years back. Now that's an unrealistic number for sure.

[noctune]

>if he is really rigging elections, would he really go for such unrealistic number

You are assuming someone has an overview of the rigging being done. It's probably more chaotic than that. If 1000 different people are chucking opponents' votes into furnaces, how do you coordinate hitting that number?

[sam_lowry_]

He just told his long-time ally the head od Central Electoral Comission to give him 80%. It is THAT simple.

[rxhernandez]

> if he is really rigging elections, would he really go for such unrealistic numbers

He would if he wanted his quiet dissidents to feel isolated and his loud ones to be that much easier to find.

It's not that much different than other leaders declaring there are no gay people in their country.

[notahacker]

That depends on whether the purpose of the election result is to be universally accepted as an accurate reflection of public sentiment or just to say, the opposition couldn't have won

[xorcist]

> would he really go for such unrealistic numbers

That part is pretty well established by now.

Coincidentally, he established again a level of support a couple percentage points above Putin, who received "just" 78% last election.

[nephrite]

And how does what happens in Belarus match what happens in Russia? Lukashenka and Putin are different kinds of people, they do different politics, Russian and Belarussian governments are not that alike. Just because both of them are "dictators" doesn't mean their people think the same about them.

[nomadnomad]

That is not true.

Putin's approval rating is actually pretty high even when measured by NGOs sponsored by the "West". You'll be surprised, but it is quoted to be 60% in July 2020. [1]

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_image_of_Vladimir_Putin

[baybal2]

I'll tell you how they are cooked:

1. The legacy of 8 decades under a government practicing public polling under a gunpoint.

2. Only the most well fed, and carefree Potemkin villages can be surveyed.

3. The lack of any other genuine option other than saying "I back a complete joke "alternative" candidates," which are set up by the regime itself to play Pope Gapon

4. Plainly faked polls

[nomadnomad]

I am not referring to fake government-run polls.

I am referring to polling agencies that are very west-leaning, and even they can't blatantly lie about it. His approval rating as of a month ago is 59-60% [1][2][3].

In fact his approval rating after the annexation of Crimea was at all time high of 85%. Check the sources. Again, these are not government-run polls.

Lots of good data on it (thanks to google):

https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/putin-facing-growi...

https://www.statista.com/statistics/896181/putin-approval-ra...

https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2020/05/06/putins-approval-ra...

And I am not saying Putin did or didn't order the poisoning of Navalny. I am just saying he is not the only one with motive/opportunity contrary to popular belief pushed in the mainstream media propaganda.

[pvg]

Polling in developed democracies has errors of a few percentage points, even with extensive work done to improve the accuracy of the results, correct for various sampling biases, etc. What do you think the error bars of a poll in an authoritarian country are, especially one that asks 'Do you like the authoritarian leader'.

As to Crimea, plenty of Russians believe Crimea is Russian, including Navalny - the Russian opposition is neither monolithic nor does it always represent views that in lock-step with Western ones.

[cwkoss]

The reason why identifying bots on social media is so hard is that many propagandized humans act indistinguishably from bots on social media.

[koonsolo]

I definitely believe you. A Russian colleague, who is living in EU for several years, found it justified that Russia invaded Poland back in 1940. We were all baffled.

[throwaway8941]

Ah, the greatest Russian patriots always prefer living in North America or the EU, starting from the relatives of the ruling elite.

[boomboomsubban]

*39. The alternative was likely German occupation of the whole region, and from that perspective their statement makes sense.

[koonsolo]

Sure, just like they "freed" eastern europe from the Germans...

[agapon]

Which Nazi Germany did anyway, just a short time later.

It seems that holding joint parades, signing secret pacts, sacrificing Comintern, etc, still did not help much.

[boomboomsubban]

>seems that holding joint parades, signing secret pacts, sacrificing Comintern, etc, still did not help much.

Neither did appeasement. The correct response to Ribbentrop's suggestions was war on Germany, just like the correct choice at the Munich agreement was war on Germany. Beyond that, you're just choosing between bad options.

[sireat]

Anecdotally, my inlaws who are NOT Russian also hold pro-Putin and pro-Lukashenko views. I avoid politics with them.

Why? Because they mostly watch Russian TV (those Russian WW2 serials are addicting). The propaganda in the Russian TV talk shows and news is very well done.

It is just like any other echo chamber. Just like watching Fox News,listening to Limbaugh in US, etc.

There are echo chambers for all political spectrums and all countries.

[Const-me]

It's OK to disagree with other people. It's OK to have civilized discussions about these topic, despite the disagreement.

Avoiding some topics in fear of insulting/upsetting other party, or in context of social media in fear of downvotes/flags, is the main cause of these modern echo-chambers.

[notahacker]

Yep. There have always been echo chambers where hostile international relations, repressing rival political movements and even open corruption are seen as good things by millions of people in established liberal democracies.

Why would it be surprising this might also be the case for many Russians, with an existing tradition of hostile international relations with the West, and more repressive and corrupt governments, especially when many Russians also felt a lot poorer before Putin arrived?

[lazyjones]

> There are echo chambers for all political spectrums and all countries.

And your conclusion is to avoid politics with your in-laws, so you can stay in your own echo chamber. Well done...

[WhompingWindows]

Just wondering, do you think it more likely that:

A) Russian-sympathetic people post their own sincere views

B) Russians for hire in Russia are brought in on all forums/social media

C) Russians use bots or non-Russian farms for the B)'s purpose?

[relaxing]

All of the above? All are well documented.

[levleontiev]

B. Also it's named "Lahta" by the region where their office is .

[TheAdamAndChe]

Perhaps, but implications of astroturfing don't really contribute anything to the conversation.

If you are worried about astroturfing, you might email [e-mail]. They're pretty good overall at taking care of this kind of stuff.

[osipov]

I'm training a machine learning model that honeypots commenters like you with provocative news articles. Next, the comments section is cleaned up to eliminate commenter spam. It works amazingly well!

[dang]

Good grief. You posted this 7 times. That's obviously abusive and obviously a bannable offense. I'm not going to ban you because I understand how crazy-making it is to represent a minority/contrarian view and feel surrounded. But please don't do it again. Also, you were posting unsubstantive and flamebait comments more than once before that. Can you please not? We're trying for something better than that here. The idea here is: if you have a substantive point to make, make it thoughtfully; if you don't, please don't comment until you do.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[Buwuystai]

So let's drink to this comrades. I know I do; with all the trucking Russians everywhere. Novojstai! Let's drink buddies. Let's run the planets to the grounds. Davoi!. Let's drink vodka(s). Trucking russians.....

EDIT: I literally drink heavily due to the fucking russians. Russia and china should be nuked to the ground. Fucking basic tactics. Fuck these pieces of shits.

oh lol Dang is a russian operative. What could be better. My fucking post is flagged already. What could be worse. Fuck this network; ruled by russia and china, it seems. ADIOS. Good win fuckstar communist cockholes.

[Zenst]

Until we have evidence that would carry in a court of law and assign blame at a person/country - divides in opinion will prevail and assigning those divides into categories serves no constructive purpose beyond distract from debate upon the facts.

[chokolad]

Every comment different from mainstream narrative is downvoted into oblivion. Russia's online effort is seriously strong here /s.

[Razengan]

> you rarely see this level of flagged and down-voted comments in a HN thread.

Did you somehow miss all the Apple vs Epic posts over the last few weeks?

[sandworm101]

Russian fanboys, sure. Actual Russian security forces, doubtful. They aren't idiots. They aren't going to pick a fight on HN were things are so easily moderated/downvoted/flagged. The real agents work deep inside their facebook/twitter/whatsapp nests. What we have here are pro-russia but nevertheless amature activists.

[notdang]

I also thought that the security forces aren't idiots. But after seeing this, I have some doubts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Retlia2xT8A

[JumpCrisscross]

> Actual Russian security forces, doubtful. They aren't idiots

They're not the most competent, either [1]. It's been two decades since Putin first came to power. That sort of cronyism corrodes any bureaucracy.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrey_Lugovoy

[levleontiev]

>They aren't idiots Petrov and Boshirov with very similar travel documents and a lot of different evidences aren't idiots?

[knolax]

Again with the blanket accusations of astroturfing without any proof. Crying shill whenever you encounter an opposing opinion is not something a rational and free-thinking person does. What you're basically doing is refusing to engage intellectually on certain viewpoints which just so happen to go against the interests of your home country's government. From the perspective of an outsider, it looks a lot like the result of brainwashing.

[yorwba]

I agree with you in principle, but the way you expressed it reads too much like a personal attack for my taste. I don't think it's a good way to make the discussion more rational after the initial accusation of astroturfing.

[knolax]

And accusing fellow commenters of being foreign shills isn't a personal attack?

[yorwba]

Of course it is, but responding to a personal attack with another personal attack doesn't negate the original one, it just adds another on top. If you want to be able to have a calmly rational discussion, you need to be able to resist responding to disruptive comments in kind, otherwise it only takes a single person to derail an entire conversation and ruin it for everyone.

[knolax]

Being unable to engage with certain viewpoints to the point of bringing up foreign infiltrators every time you see it is a sign of brainwashing. I stated that as calmly as possible. I have received far worse replies on this forum.

What really derails the conversation is needlessly tone-policing people. People have a tendency of only doing that to opinions they disagree with; so in practice it's just another way to start a flamewar.

[yorwba]

I commented on your tone exactly because I frequently find myself agreeing with you when other people don't. If I disagree with someone in both content and tone, I won't bother engaging, I'll just downvote, flag and move on.