[Zak]

There are an unusual number of comments from new accounts making disingenuous arguments on this post. I wonder who is behind the astroturfing.

The answer to "what else should we do about bad people doing bad things?" is, of course how we usually catch people doing bad things: old-fashioned detective work. It involves taking reports of suspicious or illegal acts, interviewing witnesses and associates, requesting court orders to search or surveil specific people and places when there's evidence to do so, etc.... It doesn't scale. It's not supposed to.

[daveoc64]

Please remember the HN Guidelines:

> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, bots, 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

[causi]

I mean yeah, but when there's a bunch of green accounts whose only comments are horrible corpo-speak takes on one single submission they're basically holding a sign that says "I am not a real HN commenter".

[z3c0]

This might be the one guideline that makes me uneasy. I get why it's in place - some people will call anybody that disagrees with them a shill or whatever - but to pretend it isn't happening while it so obviously is feels a bit immoral. At the very least, it's certainly complacent.

[sva_]

Scrolling down... You weren't lying. I've recently been pondering more and more in how far governments use social media to manipulate our perception. The astroturfing has been pretty shamelessly obvious recently (in particular on sites like Reddit.)

On the other hand, since there seems to be so much going on, why aren't there any whistleblowers?

[hulitu]

> I wonder who is behind the astroturfing.

First rule of propaganda: look who will profit from this: The companies who sell personal data, politicians in power, maybe some 3 letter agencies, although they already have this data.

Anyway, this is a good sign that humanity is too stupid to learn from history.

[Zetice]

It’s likely just one person fwiw, HN is alarmingly bereft of anti-one-person-who-is-upset measures.

[codetrotter]

Hmm, idk, I had two accounts in the past and I wasn’t even using them for anything nefarious, but I got a reply from dang asking me to not use multiple accounts, so I went back to using just one account.

Seems from my experience that at least to some degree dang is on top of making sure each person has only one account.

But again, the situation may be different when people intentionally try to do sketchy things. If someone uses separate browser sessions and separate VPN connections then there would not be much HN could do to discover that multiple accounts belong to the same person, except if the person with the accounts made the mistake of displaying voting ring behaviour, i.e. a number of accounts upvoting each other, and that sort of thing

[Zetice]

I promise you dang is in absolutely no way on top of any of this.

[codetrotter]

Then again, the most obvious way to combat this problem is to require a bunch of verifications, like providing your phone number and a scan of your passport/drivers license and a selfie and so on.

And I am happy and thankful that HN does not require all ‘at.

[Zak]

HN's best defense against that is probably that it doesn't take many flags from older accounts to kill a comment from a new account.

Whether these accounts were one person with an axe to grind, trolling by someone who doesn't really believe the arguments they were making, or coordinated activity by an organization, none of the comments stayed up longer than 15 minutes.

[f_devd]

> I wonder who is behind the astroturfing

I noticed the same thing, but this really is a strange one since there isn't an obvious single party which would desire this legislation (from my limited view).

External state-actors (e.g. China for proxy-policing), or non-democratic internal politicians/leaders (EU/EEA neo-facists?), is the only thing I can imagine.

[rocqua]

The parties that want this are government agencies that want more power. Perhaps the companies that plan to support the government agencies in this work.

There is a lot of money and political power that wants these laws. But they don't seem likely to be running any campaigns as obvious as astroturfing. Isn't it more likely that the new commenters are people who want to remain anonymous?

[unity1001]

> there isn't an obvious single party which would desire this legislation

Holy cow. Its amazing how the general public is so unaware of how the mechanism for lobbying for laws work:

This 'pedophilia! think of the children!' thing along with its accompanying laws came to the public agenda at the same time in both sides of the Atlantic. In the US, in the Eu at the same time. And separately, in the UK. With various celebrities pushing it and certain segments in the respective parliaments introducting it all at the same time. In the same fashion that laws like ACTA, PIPA etc were pushed.

Who wants it is pretty simple - the establishments want to spy on the citizens but they dont want the public stampede and ensuing fallout that laws like the Patriot act involves.

If you would have any doubts about it, just look at what the UK establishment and its politicians say - having gotten used to get whatever they want regardless of what they say, they are directly saying "Just give us backdoors" to encryption software producers without bothering with the hassle of pedophilia.

Which brings us to the below problem:

> China for proxy-policing

These people are able to commit all these evils, from patriot act to jailing whistleblowers, because the public rationalizes and justifies what they do and throws the blame and all the evils to outside just like you did.

It wasnt China who pushed the patriot act. It wasnt China who spied on everyone on the planet as revealed by Snowden. It was our own establishments. And as long as people like you keep diverting the blame to outside like you have done, those who perpetrated such acts will keep getting bolder.

...

Aside from all of these, there IS an actual party with a very specific interest that is pushing these laws, and the reason why it is doing this is so much sh*ttier than the above establishment reasons that you will want to gouge your eyes out:

https://www.theregister.com/2022/10/13/clientside_scanning_c...

https://www.thorn.org/about-our-fight-against-sexual-exploit...

Ashton Kutcher is a founder of something called Thorn that sells spying software to chat services. He and his partner Demi Moore are pushing this pedophilia law on the Eu in order to be able to sell spying software to chat services. At the same time they are lobbying for client side spying, ie, spying on people from their browser.

Washed up Hollywood actors trying to make money by destroying democracy...

[f_devd]

I do understand how lobbying works as you described, however the question remains with who specifically are "the establishments" and why are they so gung ho on it when the public backlash is visible from miles away.

> throws the blame and all the evils to outside just like you did.

I realise that China is unlikely the originator for the lobbying but the discussion is on who would likely support the movement, still I considered the internal actors as well as a potential driver.

> It was our own establishments.

So would you expect it to be like an aggregate of different government agencies that would post fallacious comments?

EDIT: posted before the '...' edit, that part actually does make sense and is very shitty indeed

[unity1001]

> who specifically are "the establishments"

What you could call 'the establishment' in the modern Angloamerican-centric West is a collection of old money aristocrats, long-time ultra rich billionaires and their holdings in defense, heavy industry, and media sectors. This is a rather broad definition and it does not elaborate some of the factions among it, however it more or less accurate. As an example, Eisenhower called a part of it as the 'military-industry' complex. And that is what most of the people know 'the establishment' as. But of course, anything that is involved in this complex web of monetary and power interest is a part of it.

They are gung ho about it because especially in the Angloamerican West, at least half of the public justifies and rationalizes whatever they do. In some way or the other. So they get away with it. From mass spying to Iraq War lies, from the scam that led to the 2008 crash to anything you could pick from the latter half of the 20th century and early 21st. And because there are no repercussions for anything and they can get away with anything, they really dont care what anyone thinks. All that is required for them to push their stuff is a small percentage of public buying into their agenda and making enough noise. The most clear example of this can be seen in the UK - the establishment got used to getting whatever they want regardless of anything that they recently started just being honest with what they want.

> who would likely support the movement

That's just more of the 'blaming others for what the domestic psychos are doing'. Its a really nasty habit that is not easy to throw off.

Look. In terms of spying, you can bet that every single major actor has all the information that matters regarding the other major actors. From latest weapons' details to critical complexes and installations. For, if the satellite technology was not enough, there is the long-standing institution of double spies that leak info to both sides for many reasons, one being the need to tell about what you are doing to your rival so that the rival wont act on suspicion, ending up creating major conflict and even nuclear war.

So this kind of thing - mass spying on people - has absolutely NO value for things that actually matter. What every superpower needs to know about each other, they already know. And if they dont know something and they need to really know it or confirm it, its not the random public that they would spy on - it would be the rival intelligence agencies and the target would be their actual IT infrastructure. Actually even that is not needed - just pay enough to someone and you will get the info you want.

So, nobody has any interest in whatever the random Joe in another country is doing. Except that country's own establishment. China has no interest about some random schmuck going home somewhere in New York is doing. And the US has absolutely no interest in what the street seller somewhere in Beijing does.

But ALL of them have an immense interest to know what their OWN people are doing.

So, dont seek the blame outside.

> So would you expect it to be like an aggregate of different government agencies that would post fallacious comments?

No. It will just institute and normalize mass spying like how the patriot act was intended to, but failed to do.

[halfjoking]

Foreign Malign Influence Center? They seem so hostile to free speech, I’d be surprised if they weren’t astroturfing stuff like this.

https://mobile.twitter.com/NameRedacted247/status/1628847554...

[flangola7]

That's a US entity, not EU. I have my skeptic goggles on too because the accounts and comments on that whole thread are a rat's nest of typical Twitter right wing garbage. There's even people tagging Elon Musk who seem to think he protects anything more than speech he agrees with.

[tpmx]

More likely, TBH, in this case: Just one random person with a strong conviction and sub-par execution.

There is a meta-effect going on here: Your complaining about the now vastly downvoted comments is now filling the top of this topic.

[f_devd]

You're probably right, seems like there hasn't been any new ones since the original influx.

EDIT: never mind since posting this there have been a few more.

[pilsetnieks]

It's a tired tale by now but stirring shit (whatever shit wherever it happens) is literally part of the Russian playbook [1]

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

[vuln]

Really? Just the Russian playbook? No other country stirs shit up? No other country meddles in another country's affairs? No other country starts color revolutions to get someone they like to lead the country? No other country bombs another countries pipeline that serves "Allies"?

[KptMarchewa]

Yes, russia. And they don't even hide the threats: https://twitter.com/PMSimferopol/status/1634111915596173312

[vuln]

Neither does the US.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-02-07/biden-sai...

[KptMarchewa]

Turns out he did not even have to do anything. Russians did it themselves.

[chmod775]

> There are an unusual number of comments from new accounts making disingenuous arguments on this post. I wonder who is behind the astroturfing.

The comments are so obviously going to elicit a negative response that a reasonable explanation would be that they're intentionally terrible. It might just be someone having a laugh - someone who is actually against this proposal.

Either that or they're not sending their best and brightest...

[kneebonian]

His name is Sir Humphrey Appleby, aka the Deep State, aka the bureaucrats. Seriously watch the show Yes Minister, there has never been a show that does a better job at showing the ridiculousness that leads to these apparently horrible ideas that no one seems to like but seem to continue marching forward.

[mhitza]

I only see two fresh accounts in this thread which were deleted/flagged. Come back when a pro-Tor topic is posted and see then how many new accounts pop up :)