Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by anticodon 1890 days ago
> 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).

2 comments

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?

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.

For the Russian perspective, спасибо.