[nradov]

It's well known that foreign intelligence services are active on social media trying to foment divisiveness. They're not even necessarily pushing a specific political goal, just getting Americans to hate each other. The Russians appear to be the most active but other countries play the same game. So before you get drawn into an online argument, ask yourself am I dealing with an authentic person or a paid foreign troll?

This isn't even a new phenomenon. Back during the Cold War before there was a real Internet the Soviet intelligence services did similar things by infiltrating political action groups and paying off journalists to write stories calculated to stoke dissent.

[XorNot]

The problem is it's not an argument that manipulates you, it's passive reporting and it only has to be echoed by one other real person before it becomes "the rumor on the twittersphere" or whatever.

Even the act of people writing debunking articles like "Is shocking X actually true? No." is still doing a little bit of work to inject that idea into your psyche.

[throwaway0a5e]

>Even the act of people writing debunking articles like "Is shocking X actually true? No." is still doing a little bit of work to inject that idea into your psyche.

I get a chuckle every time I see a social media post about <subject> that's some minor mishap and OP is pretending to be repentant ("if only I had <virtue singling trope that applies to that subject> this wouldn't have happend") and all the commenters virtue signaling to each other along those same lines.

Little do they know they're making it seem more normal for people to do whatever sin they're all hating on.

[stuaxo]

This is pretty meta, since "virtue signaling" is just as real as "the culture war" and other myths like the tooth fairy.

[jfengel]

It's interesting that you put it that way. I see the term "virtue signaling" as one aspect of the culture war. It's a blanket ad hominem attack: "They don't really believe X. They just want everybody else to believe that they believe X. X is actually so bad that nobody really believes it." Thus allowing them to sidestep any discussion of the validity of X; they just assume it's false and attack the person.

In practice, I find that the term is mostly just used as "vice signalling". It's not really an argument at all, but rather a call to other subscribers to their ideology that they're all in this together, as indicated by the use of the common buzzword.

The term is used only along ideological lines, and I do believe that those ideological lines are turning increasingly hostile. Calling it a "war" is always going to have weird connotations, but the terminology used for hostility is always subject to escalation.

I do believe the divisions are growing louder and more angry, if not always violent (though there's a good case to be made that they have gotten more violent over the last 40 years or so). Is that where your disagreement is, or is it elsewhere?

[pydry]

Russia and China have to deal with this too (through different mechanisms), so it's not unexpected that they'd do it back.

They are also at much higher risk of fragmentation. Russia with the far east, etc. China with Xinjiang, etc.

I wouldn't expect them to stop unilaterally. It would require a treaty like SALT, which the US has shown zero appetite for - likely coz it sees fragmentation of rival states as a bigger prize than preventing political arguments at thanksgiving.

[blaser-waffle]

Well before even the Cold War. The USSR was pumping lots of propaganda into the US as far back as the Red Scares of the 1920s.

A Clockwork Orange uses Russian slang ("nadsat") based on the aggressive propaganda that was blasted at the West. There are some uncomfortable comparisons to be made with modern times there, e.g. Q-Anon and aggressive propaganda aimed at the survivalist types...

[WalterGR]

It's well known that foreign intelligence services are active on social media trying to foment divisiveness. They're not even necessarily pushing a specific political goal, just getting Americans to hate each other.

I see the same behavior in some users here on HN. You could replace "social media" with "Hacker News" and your comment would read the same.

I don't know if you include HN as under the umbrella of "social media" or not, but I just thought I'd point this out. I see lots of people "culture warring" about Facebook and "Big Tech"... on HN.

[FooBarBizBazz]

I wonder if the same thing happens within/between companies. Industrial espionage is a thing. When billions of dollars are at stake, why not "cultural activities" too?

[ravel-bar-foo]

Isn't this effectively what is happening when a major media outlet writes a piece about how $SocialMediaCompany has a racist/sexist "bro" culture or allows racist/sexist $SocialMediaCeleb on their platform? As much as I dislike social media, a lot of these attacks have been made with only minimal substantive claims, so it seems like the real goal is to delegitimize (sabotage) the upcoming/ competing businesses.

[hattmall]

It's a thing between teenage girls (and boys), it's not some new tactic. If you read about Ben Franklin, he was huge into the idea of secret societies of a small number of people. The primary reason was that they were immune to this type of dissent building and outside opinion influencing.

He structured secret societies like an MLM, where you only know you're direct downline, and your recruiters direct downline. Each secret society had 6 members, and each of the 6 members would create another one with 6 members, but never sharing the identities across the groups and instruct each of the six to replicate the structure and so on. Each group of 6 would meet, discuss topics, come to a group consensu, and pass this up and down. This is how the revolution and much more was fomented.

[blaser-waffle]

> This is how the revolution and much more was fomented.

The la-le-lu-li-lo still run the show

[blaser-waffle]

The Wendy's twitter straight up drunks on other brands.

If you're Pepsi, you've got every reason to retweet all of the Coke stuff about "don't be white".

[ffggvv]

it’s not just foreign actors. it’s americans themselves especially journalists. the nyt, cnn, fox news etc.

specifically all rile up division both because of ideological reasons and money

[anticodon]

> The Russians appear to be the most active but other countries play the same game.

Russia is bombarded incessantly by US propaganda from US troll factories.

Ever since I'm on Internet, I'm reading that Russians are drunkards, barbarians, that our past (even going 1000 years back) is all history of mutual killings, yadda yadda.

It's so disgusting that I guess it even somewhat stopped to work because people are tired of this shit.

But nevertheless: any time on any social network there's a post like: "Look, there's a new undeground station opened in city N", there would be thousands of comments like:

- Built on money stolen from us! We don't need no stinking underground, better give this money to starving retired people

- 100500 millions of rubles were stolen during construction by Putins' cronies

- I'm a construction engineer and I assure you it was built in the wrong place by worthless dumb Russian engineers and this will cause the city N to collapse in 10 years

- City N doesn't need new underground stations, it needs more cars, nobody uses underground, what a useless project!

- 10 opposition activists supporting Navalny were buried during construction of this station. Wake up sheeple! You can become the next victim of the regime!

- Putin destroyed education in Russia! Russian engineers can't design anything. The blueprints for the station were stolen from glorious US engineers. Elon Musk designed the station and Petrov and Boshirov stolen them from him! They also attempted to poison him with Novichok but failed again, the dose was too small!

....

Literally hundreds of such comments under every video on YouTube in Russian, every post in Facebook, Vk, Pikabu, just anywhere it is possible to write comments.

And I guess it's even open information that at least 10-15 well funded organizations in US exist to publish this sort of comments. At least I remember reading how some US president assign funds for several such organizations.

It started to happen when the first Internet link came to Russia and it intensifies with every year. We don't have resources to publish as much bullshit as US organizations and organizations sponsored by the US (e.g. in former USSR republics that has cheap labor, high levels of unemployment and almost 100% of the population are good Russian speakers).

[WalterGR]

Ever since I'm on Internet, I'm reading that Russians are drunkards, barbarians, that our past (even going 1000 years back) is all history of mutual killings, yadda yadda.

As an American on the Internet since 1990, I didn't realize that Russians are like that.

Is this propaganda written in English or Russian?

[anticodon]

As an American on the Internet since 1990, I didn't realize that Russians are like that.

You mean you don't believe me? When you watch Hollywood movies if there's Russian in the movie, would it be a good person? Or most Russians in the movies are blood thirsty villains that love to kill people as a hobby?..

Or have you watched the famous HBO series Chernobyl? Do you think that we really drink warm vodka from the bottle any time of the day? Or that all engineers, managers and government officials in Russia/USSR are clueless psycopaths like they're in Chernobyl and other movies and series about Russia/USSR?

Is this propaganda written in English or Russian?

In Russian. This propaganda is for creating dissent in Russian population, no sense to publish it in English. Besides, you can hire lots of people in poor former USSR republics to publish comments in Russian literally for the price of a bowl of rice. Such expenses are negligible for the US budget, why waste the opportunity.

Conversely, where Russia will take that much money and that many English-speaking people to create the same amount of propaganda? It's impossible. We're losing the war of comments and fake news and we never could win it. I'm really doubtful that we even tried to fight back.

You won't find many people capable of writing texts in English in Russia. And usually those people already have a good job and they're usually on the side of the West, it's very unlikely they would agree to work against the West.

[sunshineforever]

For the Russian perspective, спасибо.