I've been a moderator over at Reddit for over a decade.
Personally I found Steve Huffman's claims to be disingenuous, deceptive, and self serving. I have no idea if there will ever be any consequences for that but I feel like Reddit would be a better place if there were.
Reddit generally never acts on anything (whatever the subject) unless it appears in the news and they are in the spotlight. There's very rarely any proactive action from Reddit.
That’s because every time they make a change, no matter how small, they get a very loud reaction from pissed off users, many of whom generate the bulk of Reddit’s content.
Yes. It's clear to me that the priorities and incentives that Reddit operates with are not those they talk about. So surely "Reddit cares" but it's ridiculous on its face to pretend that what they care about is what they're saying in public.
As long as he doesn't hurt the stock price, I think he can say what he wants. CEO's aren't known for being the most honest and frank people in the planet.
But yeah, an entire organization funded by a foreign government to subvert Western civilization and democracy does not compare to a single modified comment.
It also probably left traces in the mysql(postgres?) logs.
It shouldn't surprise anyone on HN that you can freely edit your own data.
More generally it's very common for forums to have a post edited by mods/admin, usually the edit will show up but if you mess with them they may be tempted to hit back and forget to set the "changed by xxxx" flag.
First, "single instance" isn't fair since it was multiple comments that were edited.
Second, silently misattributing words to people (he went behind the site's back, into the database, so the "comment edited" star never appeared) is not a "prank", it's a serious breach of trust, unprecedented in the history of the site, and calls into question anything anyone has ever written. If I remember right, this was only ever proven because archive snapshots of the comments pre-edit existed.
If someone familiar with Reddit history now is ever called to legally account for their comments, Reddit Inc. now gets to be called and has to prove they didn't screw with the posts. Can you say liability exposure? Sheesh.
There are some lines you just don't cross. If Huffman would edit people's comments on the sly for funsies, it shows he has no professional ethics that would prevent him from doing the same thing in a more important situation. What's to say he hasn't already in the matter of some other litigation we're not aware of?
Sorry destabilize the US government? Destabilize over the 2 options they ALWAYS have? Oh sorry you have a Republican government now. What a destabilization.
So in conclusion the only dangerous thing in that election is the fact that Trump could be blackmailed. And Hillary can't be blackmailed?
This is the logical step I've never been to follow and I am open to understanding. If Trump, the GOP. and all of his supporters are idiots, how did they win? If the liberals and liberal candidates were so smart, why did they lose so badly? It seems it would be easy to control a mass of idiots. I'm not trying to flame, I've never been able to follow this logic and am interested in how others view it
While the question of how they won despite being idiots is interesting and important, I find it much more alarming that the fact they won an election somehow make the almost daily idiotic escapades of the administration unimportant evidence.
Note that I am not making a claim about the supporters, just the orange and his staff. Why people voted as they did in the numbers they did is of course a much bigger question.
But I mean, the obvious answer is that the election process itself is very flawed as it can elect an administration this bad, that's just empirical fact now.
I completely agree. I think the outcome of event proves that. I am interested on how this generalization can be so pervasive in the media and among internet communities despite the democrats getting blown away in the presidential, congressional, and state elections
One could also be defined as someone in Russia (or another boogeyman de jour) finding funny memes and posting them on the internet to troll Americans. As an America I posted Brexit memes that I found funny, does that mean I am also destabilizing a country?
It's not utterly destabilized, this isn't black and white. We know for a fact that a foreign adversary is _attempting_ this, which is a hostile.action. How successful they have been is incredibly difficult to measure, but that doesn't mean it's not a problem.
>> We know for a fact that a foreign adversary is _attempting_ this
Yes, no one denied that. Its part of the equation, the russians are doing it yes, but so is everyone else (the US especially)... Im am pretty sure there are even assets in the services of Luxembourg, that have this task. It has been done in the past and will be done in the times to come. Disinfo campaigns are only a media topic right now, not because they are targeting the US (this has been done before), but because they are somewhat successful.
>> which is a hostile.action
Oh please, don't overreact. These campaigns are mean, divisive and unfair, but in the end they are -- in essence -- just words. Escalating them to a level of bellicosity is neither nessesary nor merited.
>> How successful they have been is incredibly difficult to measure, but that doesn't mean it's not a problem.
They are somewhat successful (not utterly of course), because there are wide fracture lines in the US society, that are not getting enough attention. If less people would feel disenfranchised and unrepresented -- left and right, native and immigrant, black and white -- These campaigns wouldn't be very effective.
It's certainly interesting that the number of Russians discovering r/funny increased by an order of magnitude in the run up to the election. And that Putin found r/gifs so entertaining that he hired thousands of Russians to post on it and similar places. Don't you think?
This is called "whataboutism", and is an (often deliberate) attempt to create an inflammatory side conversation that, while compelling and likely rooted in truth, distracts from the actual (and more important) topic at hand.
I'm personally reluctant to downvote because this is semi-relevant and intelligently written, but HN is fairly defenseless against such techniques.
During the elections r/politics and reddit generally was intensely pro Hillary. The margins who supported Trump did so regardless of some Russian originated postings of comments (like this one). Actually did you know I am an agent of the government of Malaysia. You've all been trolled and influenced in ways you don't even realize yet.
/r/politics flipped right after the DNC convention. Filled quickly with rabid pro-Hillary accounts, and any voice critical of her candidacy was quickly silenced with a flood of down votes and horribly formulated arguments and claims
It is well known that "Correct The Record" has been influencing the discussions and votes. In the beginning it was easy to identify them, because they just copy-pasted political statements.
They were very active during the primary elections. In some subreddits we had discussions whether there were any people at all on reddit that were in support of H. That was how popular Bernie was, and partially still is on reddit.
There also military level manipulations going on directly from military bases, and also manipulations by some Israeli agencies. Also the UK has active agencies, but they seem more subtle.
And then we have manipulations by companies that want to support their product (or favourite politician). There are even click-farms that you can pay to work for you, and companies specialized in manipulating social media (as Correct the Record).
And we have groups that work together to get upvotes and downvote unwanted posts. We usually call this "brigading", and while it is forbidden, this is also very common on reddit.
In 24 hours you can see the upvotes switch between soccer and football. Each nation has its own favourites and opinions. And I think that this is a good thing. We as different nations learn to communicate with each other.
Compared to all the manipulating going on, the manipulations of "Russian bots" is not much. And as far I have seen the influence, it is really overhyped. Frankly, if you really want to destabilize the US, you can do that by letting the internal political corruption bring it to the ground.
By communicating on the other hand, besides all bots and trolls, we can learn to see problems and solutions of our and other nations. See many different sides of problems and politics. This can be beneficial to all nations.
(Even Malaysia ;-)
Why does nobody talk about the fact that Clinton and Democrats spent 10s of millions astroturfing various online communities? You could see r/politics go from fairly balanced to rabid pro-clinton when CTR got fresh funding infusions. You can check Alexa rankings and see the massive traffic surges at the same time. You could see sentiment shift on weekends when the shills were off.
Hell, the CIA had an entire "Meme warfare division" according the vault7 leaks.
It's hardly mentioned in many popular political forums, and when it is mentioned the user posting gets overran with claims of being a Russian agent, or that it's a conspiracy
I am literally copy-pasting my comment from above:
> This is called "whataboutism", and is an (often deliberate) attempt to create an inflammatory side conversation that, while compelling and likely rooted in truth, distracts from the actual (and more important) topic at hand.
Whataboutism, the new keyword to shutdown any discussion about how shitty the entire US political system is.
"US lobbying rules allow any company to manipulate people online that would be illegal in a rational democracy" --It's the American way!
"Russia does the same thing as US companies" --End of democracy as we know it
Now, what Russia did is wrong and illegal, but the discussion of saying that the solution to the problem is going after Russia and everything will be ok after that seems like manipulated talking points. All political ads and manipulation needs to be labeled or made illegal. Russia is just a little piece in a huge problem.
My thoughts on this are complicated. I agree with the overall goal (namely, "HN threads are for conversation"), but disagree with the implication that this was anti-conversation--I find it disturbing that places that _should_ have conversation are so easily derailed.
I want there to be a good solution for this, but don't think we as a society have figured out a way to address deliberate manipulation that isn't worse than the problem.
> Why does nobody talk about the fact that Clinton and Democrats spent 10s of millions astroturfing various online communities?
Because that's a conspiracy theory, based on one pet interpretation of one press release and ignoring all the times Correct the Record denied it (such as the instance in this article you posted: "Barrier Breakers accounts are always identified as Correct the Record").
The article you posted describes what they actually did ("Much of the effort appears to be fairly anodyne so far. An official-looking Twitter account, Facebook page, and Instagram and Pinterest accounts have been set up. The social media accounts seem to consist mainly of graphics and videos that deliver inspirational pro-Clinton messages, content that appears to have been designed in the hopes that it might go viral.")
I have little doubt that the CTR conspiracy theory was largely spread by the very real Russian astroturfers. It was super effective at effortlessly shutting down Clinton supporters online.
> I have little doubt that the CTR conspiracy theory was largely spread by the very real Russian astroturfers.
Could you source/clarify this?
I agree that the narrative around CTR as an astroturf source is either massively overstated and outright wrong, but that's a basically negative claim - there's no real evidence for it. The Russian astroturf part is a very specific positive claim, and across the identified Russian accounts (e.g. Reddit, Tumblr) I haven't seen any indication that they meaningfully drove the CTR rumors.
It's not like Americans have any trouble starting political conspiracy theories without outside help; why are we laughing at claims of "this idea came from an astroturf campaign" and then making comparable claims without strong evidence?
There are some political posts in its history but I agree with your sentiment. I posed a similar question in the announcement thread (not asking for specifics because they'd never share that) but received no answer.
Elsewhere in the thread however I did see that they worked with some other companies like Twitter to share data of suspected Russian trolls and issued bans based off of that.
Perhaps it's one of many accounts identified sharing the same IP address, but this particular one was still in the process of farming karma. (In order to make a later post look more legitimate)
Then again, quite a few on the list have little to no karma points anyway.
The account is created on October 14th, 2015. Posts dogs and cats to relevant channels, then posts political articles from a dead domain (butthis.com). But two months later the account goes dark. Looking at what other posts (and their subreddits) posted this domain [1] I can't help but think this is suspicious.
Then I see the four TESTING posts at the bottom of the list, all on July 1st 2015. They even use TESTING URLs of butthis.com, and no other posts are made from an earlier date. Every account that posted one of these TESTING posts is also banned in the same way as the OP's account.
One of those TESTING post accounts [2] left a little russian in his links too [3].
I would be very interested in seeing these accounts' upvote/downvote history.
This is an interesting take. The CIA/FBI/GCHQ have provided precisely zero evidence to the public on their various, and extensive, list of claims that Russia did bad thing X.
Why is the burden of proof on the conspiracy theorist to prove a negative assertion, and not on the intelligence services - many of whom have a storied history of making things up - to prove a positive assertion?
I did not say the intelligence services do not have any burden of proof. Their claims absolutely require evidence that can stand up to scrutiny. I'd say they even require harder evidence because of the history you mention.
You can say their claims are unsubstantiated, or if they have provided evidence then you can provide counterarguments against it. But accusations like 'intelligence propaganda' need proof as well.
There is no hard evidence. This is the nature of the game. First of all how do you even suppose evidence could be procured? What form would this "evidence" have? Claims by partisan authority figures, like the media or politicians? Is that evidence? No. There is no evidence.
You have to make judgments based on your own perception and what you think is plausible, all the while being aware that your own perception is biased, by your preconceived understanding of the world, and also your perception is also actively manipulated by those who you are trying to assess.
With regards to the topic at hand I think what the GP claimed is plausible, Russian propaganda does exist, but also our politicians are now going to use this excuse every time there is legitimate discontent.
For example: a story broke out some weeks ago about Russian shills, shilling against the controversial Keystone Pipeline. This is usually not a right-wing political position. Those who stand to make a lot of money from the pipeline immediately tried to discredit all the opposition to the pipeline as Russian trolling.
> In comments, Huffman also noted that these troubling accounts were most active in /r/funny, /r/uncen, /r/Bad_Cop_No_Donut, /r/gifs, /r/PoliticalHumor, and /r/The_Donald, a notorious pro-Donald Trump subreddit.
Russian trolls are active in many other subreddits such as /r/politics. But Huffman only lists the rightwing subreddits he personally disagrees with. He's using Russian propaganda to create his own propaganda.
Reddit needs a CEO who doesn't engage in amateur stuff like this.
All: could you please keep political talking points and the shallow-angry comment style out of threads like this? I know it's hard, but it's possible if you try.
Low-information internet attack mode is the biggest threat to Hacker News these days, and when you add that acid to one thread it seeps into others.
74 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 31.8 ms ] threadPersonally I found Steve Huffman's claims to be disingenuous, deceptive, and self serving. I have no idea if there will ever be any consequences for that but I feel like Reddit would be a better place if there were.
But yeah, an entire organization funded by a foreign government to subvert Western civilization and democracy does not compare to a single modified comment.
More generally it's very common for forums to have a post edited by mods/admin, usually the edit will show up but if you mess with them they may be tempted to hit back and forget to set the "changed by xxxx" flag.
Second, silently misattributing words to people (he went behind the site's back, into the database, so the "comment edited" star never appeared) is not a "prank", it's a serious breach of trust, unprecedented in the history of the site, and calls into question anything anyone has ever written. If I remember right, this was only ever proven because archive snapshots of the comments pre-edit existed.
If someone familiar with Reddit history now is ever called to legally account for their comments, Reddit Inc. now gets to be called and has to prove they didn't screw with the posts. Can you say liability exposure? Sheesh.
There are some lines you just don't cross. If Huffman would edit people's comments on the sly for funsies, it shows he has no professional ethics that would prevent him from doing the same thing in a more important situation. What's to say he hasn't already in the matter of some other litigation we're not aware of?
So in conclusion the only dangerous thing in that election is the fact that Trump could be blackmailed. And Hillary can't be blackmailed?
Hilarious.
-- thanks for the downvotes.
Out of all those 17, the biggest idiot won, and now you want to take away the best excuse for this fracas that the elites have come up with?
I think the fact that the orange one is an idiot is pretty dangerous in and of itself, completely independent of however easy he is to be manipulated.
Note that I am not making a claim about the supporters, just the orange and his staff. Why people voted as they did in the numbers they did is of course a much bigger question. But I mean, the obvious answer is that the election process itself is very flawed as it can elect an administration this bad, that's just empirical fact now.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Sure, in another universe where we didn't already know this stuff is a coordinated effort to destabilize our political system...
Yes, no one denied that. Its part of the equation, the russians are doing it yes, but so is everyone else (the US especially)... Im am pretty sure there are even assets in the services of Luxembourg, that have this task. It has been done in the past and will be done in the times to come. Disinfo campaigns are only a media topic right now, not because they are targeting the US (this has been done before), but because they are somewhat successful.
>> which is a hostile.action
Oh please, don't overreact. These campaigns are mean, divisive and unfair, but in the end they are -- in essence -- just words. Escalating them to a level of bellicosity is neither nessesary nor merited.
>> How successful they have been is incredibly difficult to measure, but that doesn't mean it's not a problem.
They are somewhat successful (not utterly of course), because there are wide fracture lines in the US society, that are not getting enough attention. If less people would feel disenfranchised and unrepresented -- left and right, native and immigrant, black and white -- These campaigns wouldn't be very effective.
It's certainly interesting that the number of Russians discovering r/funny increased by an order of magnitude in the run up to the election. And that Putin found r/gifs so entertaining that he hired thousands of Russians to post on it and similar places. Don't you think?
I'm personally reluctant to downvote because this is semi-relevant and intelligently written, but HN is fairly defenseless against such techniques.
Is it difficult to find threads from a specific date?
It is well known that "Correct The Record" has been influencing the discussions and votes. In the beginning it was easy to identify them, because they just copy-pasted political statements. They were very active during the primary elections. In some subreddits we had discussions whether there were any people at all on reddit that were in support of H. That was how popular Bernie was, and partially still is on reddit.
There also military level manipulations going on directly from military bases, and also manipulations by some Israeli agencies. Also the UK has active agencies, but they seem more subtle.
And then we have manipulations by companies that want to support their product (or favourite politician). There are even click-farms that you can pay to work for you, and companies specialized in manipulating social media (as Correct the Record).
And we have groups that work together to get upvotes and downvote unwanted posts. We usually call this "brigading", and while it is forbidden, this is also very common on reddit.
In 24 hours you can see the upvotes switch between soccer and football. Each nation has its own favourites and opinions. And I think that this is a good thing. We as different nations learn to communicate with each other.
Compared to all the manipulating going on, the manipulations of "Russian bots" is not much. And as far I have seen the influence, it is really overhyped. Frankly, if you really want to destabilize the US, you can do that by letting the internal political corruption bring it to the ground.
By communicating on the other hand, besides all bots and trolls, we can learn to see problems and solutions of our and other nations. See many different sides of problems and politics. This can be beneficial to all nations. (Even Malaysia ;-)
Hell, the CIA had an entire "Meme warfare division" according the vault7 leaks.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/05/correct...
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/xyvwdk/meme-warfa...
Maybe no one's discussing it in this thread because this article is about something specific.
> This is called "whataboutism", and is an (often deliberate) attempt to create an inflammatory side conversation that, while compelling and likely rooted in truth, distracts from the actual (and more important) topic at hand.
I'm much less reluctant to downvote in this case.
"US lobbying rules allow any company to manipulate people online that would be illegal in a rational democracy" --It's the American way!
"Russia does the same thing as US companies" --End of democracy as we know it
Now, what Russia did is wrong and illegal, but the discussion of saying that the solution to the problem is going after Russia and everything will be ok after that seems like manipulated talking points. All political ads and manipulation needs to be labeled or made illegal. Russia is just a little piece in a huge problem.
I want there to be a good solution for this, but don't think we as a society have figured out a way to address deliberate manipulation that isn't worse than the problem.
Because that's a conspiracy theory, based on one pet interpretation of one press release and ignoring all the times Correct the Record denied it (such as the instance in this article you posted: "Barrier Breakers accounts are always identified as Correct the Record").
The article you posted describes what they actually did ("Much of the effort appears to be fairly anodyne so far. An official-looking Twitter account, Facebook page, and Instagram and Pinterest accounts have been set up. The social media accounts seem to consist mainly of graphics and videos that deliver inspirational pro-Clinton messages, content that appears to have been designed in the hopes that it might go viral.")
I have little doubt that the CTR conspiracy theory was largely spread by the very real Russian astroturfers. It was super effective at effortlessly shutting down Clinton supporters online.
Could you source/clarify this?
I agree that the narrative around CTR as an astroturf source is either massively overstated and outright wrong, but that's a basically negative claim - there's no real evidence for it. The Russian astroturf part is a very specific positive claim, and across the identified Russian accounts (e.g. Reddit, Tumblr) I haven't seen any indication that they meaningfully drove the CTR rumors.
It's not like Americans have any trouble starting political conspiracy theories without outside help; why are we laughing at claims of "this idea came from an astroturf campaign" and then making comparable claims without strong evidence?
Because, for example, this account[1] never seemed to post anything political at all, but is included in the list.
1: https://www.reddit.com/user/reggaebull
Elsewhere in the thread however I did see that they worked with some other companies like Twitter to share data of suspected Russian trolls and issued bans based off of that.
Then again, quite a few on the list have little to no karma points anyway.
Then I see the four TESTING posts at the bottom of the list, all on July 1st 2015. They even use TESTING URLs of butthis.com, and no other posts are made from an earlier date. Every account that posted one of these TESTING posts is also banned in the same way as the OP's account.
One of those TESTING post accounts [2] left a little russian in his links too [3].
I would be very interested in seeing these accounts' upvote/downvote history.
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/domain/butthis.com/
[2]: https://www.reddit.com/user/ser005
[3]: https://www.reddit.com/r/test/comments/3ayiwh/test_post/
Russians may have tried to stoke the flames of the divide in America, but its real, and its here.
What is? This article? The source? Or the arguments in general?
Claims like this require hard evidence provided in the same context, or they will be dismissed outright.
This is an interesting take. The CIA/FBI/GCHQ have provided precisely zero evidence to the public on their various, and extensive, list of claims that Russia did bad thing X.
Why is the burden of proof on the conspiracy theorist to prove a negative assertion, and not on the intelligence services - many of whom have a storied history of making things up - to prove a positive assertion?
You can say their claims are unsubstantiated, or if they have provided evidence then you can provide counterarguments against it. But accusations like 'intelligence propaganda' need proof as well.
You have to make judgments based on your own perception and what you think is plausible, all the while being aware that your own perception is biased, by your preconceived understanding of the world, and also your perception is also actively manipulated by those who you are trying to assess.
With regards to the topic at hand I think what the GP claimed is plausible, Russian propaganda does exist, but also our politicians are now going to use this excuse every time there is legitimate discontent.
For example: a story broke out some weeks ago about Russian shills, shilling against the controversial Keystone Pipeline. This is usually not a right-wing political position. Those who stand to make a lot of money from the pipeline immediately tried to discredit all the opposition to the pipeline as Russian trolling.
Russian trolls are active in many other subreddits such as /r/politics. But Huffman only lists the rightwing subreddits he personally disagrees with. He's using Russian propaganda to create his own propaganda.
Reddit needs a CEO who doesn't engage in amateur stuff like this.
8/10 of the top 10 subreddits he mentioned were left-wing or neutral:
* funny
* uncen
* Bad_Cop_No_Donut
* gifs
* PoliticalHumor
* The_Donald
* news
* aww
* POLITIC
* racism
Low-information internet attack mode is the biggest threat to Hacker News these days, and when you add that acid to one thread it seeps into others.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html