[diggan]

How is that different from humans? Humans have themes/areas they care more about, and are more likely to discuss with others. It's not hard to imagine there are Russians/Chinese people caring deeply about their country, just like there are Americans who care deeply about US.

[dcminter]

A human aggressively taking a particular line and a bot doing so may be equivalent; do we need to differentiate there?

[diggan]

If the comment is off-topic/breaking the guidelines/rules, it should be removed, full stop.

The difference is that the bots comment should be removed regardless if the particular comment is breaking the rules or not, as HN specifically is a forum for humans. The humans comment, granted it doesn't break the rules, shouldn't, no matter how shitty their opinion/view is.

[dcminter]

If posts make HN a less interesting place to converse I don't see why humans should get a pass & I don't see anything in the guidelines to support that view either.

[JohnMakin]

C’mon. When you have an account that is less than a year old and has 542 posts, 541 of which are repeating very specific kremlin narratives verbatim, it isn’t difficult to make a guess. Is your contention that they are actually difficult to spot, or that they don’t exist at all? because both of those views are hilariously false.

[diggan]

I feel like you're speaking about specific accounts here, since it's so obvious and exact. Care to share the HN accounts you're thinking about here?

My contention is that people jump to "It's just a bot" when they parrot obvious government propaganda they disagree with, when the average person is as likely to parrot obvious propaganda without involving computers at all.

People are just generally stupid by themselves, and reducing it to "Robots be robotting" doesn't feel very helpful when there is an actual problem to address.

[JohnMakin]

No, I'm not. And I don't/won't post any specific accounts. I'm speaking more generally - and no one is jumping to anything here, you're projecting an argument that absolutely no one is making. The original claim was that russian/chinese bots were on this platform and left. I've only been here about 1.5 years, so I don't know the validity of that claim, but I have a fair amount of experience and research in the last ten years or so on the topic of foreign misinformation campaigns on the web, so it sounds like a very valid claim, given how proliferate these campaigns were across the entire web.

It isn't an entirely new concept or unknown, and that isn't what is happening here. You're making a lot of weird assumptions, especially given the fact that the US government wrote several hundred pages about this exact topic years ago.

[diggan]

> and no one is jumping to anything here, you're projecting an argument that absolutely no one is making

You literally claimed "when you have accounts with these stats, and they say these specific things, it isn't difficult to guess..." which ends with "that they're bots" I'm guessing. Read around in this very submission for more examples of people doing "the jump".

I'm not saying there isn't any "foreign misinformation campaigns on the web", so not sure who is projecting here.

[JohnMakin]

I “literally” did not say that. You seem to be doing the very thing I said, projecting arguments no one is making. Certainly I’m not.