>‘Jake’ claimed that a “top BBC anchor resigned on air and was immediately detained by security services” and that “crowds have surrounded the residence of the newly appointed ‘Governor General’ imposed by London”.
>Meanwhile, ‘Fiona’ said that “protesters have seized Balmoral Estate” and “International markets are dumping UK assets as images of tanks in Edinburgh go viral”.
>‘Lucy’ claimed that "farmers have used tractors to block the A1 at the English border”, while another account called ‘Kelly’ said that “army trucks are rolling down the Royal Mile. Soldiers in fatigues are guarding the Scottish Parliament”.
Surely the number of Scottish people influenced by accounts making such outlandish claims is exactly zero.
Seems totally risible stuff. On Twitter, I've mostly seen this story shared by British nationalist accounts, presumably because they think it tarnishes the cause of Scottish independence by throwing support for it into question.
Having said that, partisan people on social media are always happy to share stuff that they agree with regardless of the source. Presumably these accounts posted less loopy stuff sometimes and got retweets.
I think these accounts may not be as political as many people think. It has been observed that foreign bot accounts often support both positions on contentious issues.
Maybe they're just Russian cybercriminals chasing impulse likes and follows for the sake of building up their accounts' social currency? Once they've gotten enough real engagement that the algorithm thinks they're real people, they can pivot to something entirely unrelated to the political controversy they pushed. Change name, change style, suddenly the victim follows an account they don't remember but gives interesting advice on crypto investments.
Now, I do certainly believe Russian cybercriminals do work for the government now and then in return for tolerance. But it may be less mustache-twirling chaos farming and more plain old scams.
We are the target of this propaganda, and I don’t mean the Scottish independence stuff. The US and Israel are jamming the airwaves with anti-Iran propaganda to manufacture consent to attack Iran. Every day we’re being subjected to a ton of this stuff on every channel (including HN).
It’s certainly not working on me, but I fear far too many of us are just taking these stories at face value.
When I read wildly insane comments on a mildly contentious issue here on HN (e.g. as a very mild example, posts on electric cars always draw out someone who needs to state they drive 1000 miles a day and so electric cars will never work for anyone) I wonder how many sock puppets accounts there are here. There must be some. The radicalization of, e.g., Marc Andreessen was very useful to some group, so there is no reason they wouldn't try more of the same in this venue.
When you do the job we do, and spend hours each day looking at the discussions and the data, it becomes fairly easy to spot inauthentic actors on HN. It stands out when newly registered accounts (which appear in green) or older accounts without much posting history, suddenly start posting comments in support of a particular position.
This is another reason why HN's primary purpose – gratifying intellectual curiosity – is so important. Curious conversation is hard to fake. You can't really be inauthentically curious, at least not for long. So the more we can succeed at nudging the community's conduct towards curious conversation, the more it stands out when accounts are acting to promote a particular agenda, and the faster we can weed them out.
> The account, which describes itself as “a proud Scottish lass” and “passionate about Scotland's independence & our right to self-determination”, is based in Europe (according to X’s location data).
I get suspect everytime an online socialist overuses famous socialist terms (or supposed socialist terms) before segueing into a conjunction. “Of course I want the socialist utopia just as much as all of us, comrades, but...”
This is why my FB feed is full of misinformation, strawman arguments, sweeping conclusions and no nuance. it does not matter what they are arguing about of which side they are on, the stupidity is constant. Left and right, theists and atheists, pro and anti-immigration. Anything else you can think of. All things I am happy to have an interesting argument about, but what social media offers is engagement bait of one kind or another - from rage bait to feigned ignorance.
Important thing to note - UKDefenceJournal only tracks a set of known Iran linked related accounts that could be tracked because of previous Internet blackouts in Iran.
It would be interesting to see how this applies more widely to other sets of content and countries.
From the original UKDJ article:
> The original UK Defence Journal investigation stressed in an editor’s note that “this article does not claim that Scottish independence is a foreign plot, nor does it suggest that support for independence is illegitimate, inauthentic, or driven by anything other than sincere political conviction.”
> The focus, we underlined, was not on genuine activists but on documented attempts by Iranian-linked actors to exploit authentic political debates for their own strategic purposes. Robertson’s reply arguably missed this distinction. The concern raised by analysts was not that independence itself is tainted, but that foreign actors are infiltrating the conversation, seeking to magnify division and undermine trust in democratic processes.
The Herald information comes from ukdefencejournal.
They don't tell us exactly where the information comes from originally, despise talking about the company Cyabra later in another context.
But the Jewish Telegraphic Agency tell us that the information about Iran also comes from Cyabra (1)
Cyabra? The Tel-Aviv based company, with important customers as the USA State Department, informing us about Iran?
Russia is a waning superpower with a low GDP but a powerful enough internal economy to wage a conventional invasion of a large European country. The US is a much richer country, the leading superpower, and an IT powerhouse. But for some reason the first thing that pops into people’s mind when they hear propaganda bots is “Russia”.
(I would buy China, too. A huge country with a powerful economy.)
That in itself looks like a programmed response.
Of course Russia uses bots and propaganda. But the focus on Russia seems completely out of proportion.
During the Prigozhin uprising / coup attempt, internet was cut off in parts of Russia, and there was a noticeable slowdown in comments on multiple popular subreddits. I don't know if any studies have been done to evaluate this empirically though
I can confirm that when I blocked a huge swathe of mobile broadband providers in Russia and Israel, something like 95% of the spam on the forum I run stopped instantly.
It seemed like a messy and obvious approach - sign up with a clearly bot-generated gmail account, hit the activation link sent by email an average of 100ms, and immediately post in every thread something along the lines of "WHEN WE'VE FINISHED IN KHARKIV / GAZA WE'LL BRING THE GAS CHAMBERS TO ENGLAND", all in under about ten seconds.
I don't think it's Russians or Israelis behind it, necessarily, but that's where the annoying noise has been coming from.
"a 2024 study by researchers at Clemson University has estimated that 4% of content relating to independence were linked to one Iranian-backed bot network of around 80 accounts."
Speaking as a Scot, I would expect there are those who support attempts to break up the UK who care zero about Scotland. Who's ultimately behind it is speculative.
Makes sense. Russia and friends would seem to have an interest in Scottish independence as it undermines the UK.
It seems to me most social platforms (not just big tech, smaller UGC sections like the BBC) have many puppet accounts that are triggered by certain content.
Anecdotally looking at BBC comment sections of Scottish content, the "highest rated" comments are almost unilaterally pro-British/anti Scottish National Party which deviates a long way from historical voting preferences. The SNP have performed very well in Scottish and Westminster elections and the weakest barometer for them is/was the 45%/55% vote split in the Scottish independence referendum 12 years ago. I think if anyone took a "sentiment score" of what's there vs how people generally think or behave there'd be a large deviance.
More generally, any platform seems to have systemised abuse and this pattern goes all the way back to generic content management systems being abused in the early 2000s.
I do wonder, are these accounts being accessed via proxy? i.e. someone claiming to be from the UK and having a residential IP- if the platform doesn't care about the location of access, maybe start checking for latency?
Presumably BBC comments also contain comments from English people who might not follow the same 45/55 split on Scottish indeoendence as Scottish people do?
The problem with this argument is that it is very simplistic.
And a very simple way of de-legitimising any anti-establishment position, and protecting the status quo.
We can look at independence movements in Europe, Brexit, Trump, republicanism in the UK, any sort of heterodox economic or foreign policy.
Even if you disagree with these positions, it is helpful to you to steelman your position and your arguments. And just dismissing them as Putin's work drops you into a trap. It's arguably one reason why Trump got re-elected. People spent his entire first term assuming he'd be exposed in some complicated Russian plot and put in jail; rather than thinking hard about why he got elected in the first place.
Same thing happened to some degree with the Brexit vote.
There is no incentive to implement such a feature. Bots and paid social media workers drive engagement. Also social media sites are designed to avoid any triggers that make users click away (like showing origin flags that would allow a user to easily dismiss a thread as fake). This is the same reason why Youtube removed dislike counts.
I sometimes wonder how much your own beliefs change consuming some content online even if you consciously disagree with it. Like a slight subconscious erosion that you don't even realise is happening until you have been radicalised. Ironically I think people who are more honest or empathetic might be more susceptible to this as they try and take in other people's view points without crudely dismissing it.
This is 100% a real factor in shaping opinions. Every piece of information we encounter affects us - that's how we're built & how we can learn. But this also makes us easy to influence by consistently repeating lies, like we've seen with the "Flood the zone" technique, as well as basically the whole rise of the right over the last decade. It's all lies and misinformation, but it works because of how we're built & because there are not enough counter operations.
It goes without saying that social media is causing irreparable harm to the fabric of our society.
To use an analogy: if the village idiot went to the town square and shouted hate speech, he'd be laughed at or dealt with. Now anyone has a platform to go to the town square, except it's the world, and shout hate speech. And unlike before there will be hateful people, some of them unrecognisable from real people, who will support the village idiot. They will help amplify his voice and validate him and legitimise him.
We have to find a way to stop this. The only thing I can think of is require you to attach your real identity to social media accounts, and regulate the living daylights out of it to hold the networks accountable if their owners don't want to do the right thing. Free speech isn't free.
> To use an analogy: if the village idiot went to the town square and shouted hate speech, he'd be laughed at or dealt with. Now anyone has a platform to go to the town square, except it's the world, and shout hate speech. And unlike before there will be hateful people, some of them unrecognisable from real people, who will support the village idiot. They will help amplify his voice and validate him and legitimise him.
As usual the problem is the commoner idiot, not the group of sociopaths that now have the means to astroturf their agendas efficiently.
Especially puzzling since this submission is about exactly the latter.
> We have to find a way to stop this. The only thing I can think of is require you to attach your real identity to social media accounts, and regulate the living daylights out of it to hold the networks accountable if their owners don't want to do the right thing. Free speech isn't free.
Think harder then.
The village idiot could move and reinvent himself as a respectable fellow. Basically, pre-digital we naturally had different personas; there was no Panopticon that could ever hope to know all our associations. Digital tools have changed that. And inventing the fiction of “one single persona” to tie back to what you said five years ago, ten years ago, thirty years ago, is a terrible idea, and I would argue (based on intuition) very unnatural.
"‘Lucy’ claimed that "farmers have used tractors to block the A1 at the English border”, while another account called ‘Kelly’ said that “army trucks are rolling down the Royal Mile. Soldiers in fatigues are guarding the Scottish Parliament”."
Very convincing stuff. We must fast-track the shutdown of X in the UK to stop this ultra-persuasive disinfo from brainwashing our citizens.
It's about half a dozen accounts, it could just be the very strange hobby of a single person in Iran. I don't know why all the other comments are acting like this is evidence of a huge misinformation campaign by Russia.
As someone who doesn’t use these products (FB, TikTok, Twitter, &c) I think it’s very clearly time to require proof of citizenship and formal ID verification to at least post content.
I’m not suggesting all of the Internet needs to go that way, but for large social media platforms I don’t see why not. You can argue that journalists need anonymity but I’m confident we can find a workaround or solution there.
I understand there’s this hacker spirit of doing things anonymous and I get it, and agree with it, but these platforms are the most mainstream things imaginable and they are way past the point of having gotten out of control.
You can’t have MAGA/Hamas/Iran/Antifa/Russia/Cuba/China/India/Pakistan all participating in shaping public opinion and sowing disinformation without contest. I’m surprised that western countries have been somewhat resilient to all of this BS by and large (nothing is collapsing, just degrading), but for how long?
47 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 64.7 ms ] thread>Meanwhile, ‘Fiona’ said that “protesters have seized Balmoral Estate” and “International markets are dumping UK assets as images of tanks in Edinburgh go viral”.
>‘Lucy’ claimed that "farmers have used tractors to block the A1 at the English border”, while another account called ‘Kelly’ said that “army trucks are rolling down the Royal Mile. Soldiers in fatigues are guarding the Scottish Parliament”.
Surely the number of Scottish people influenced by accounts making such outlandish claims is exactly zero.
Having said that, partisan people on social media are always happy to share stuff that they agree with regardless of the source. Presumably these accounts posted less loopy stuff sometimes and got retweets.
Maybe they're just Russian cybercriminals chasing impulse likes and follows for the sake of building up their accounts' social currency? Once they've gotten enough real engagement that the algorithm thinks they're real people, they can pivot to something entirely unrelated to the political controversy they pushed. Change name, change style, suddenly the victim follows an account they don't remember but gives interesting advice on crypto investments.
Now, I do certainly believe Russian cybercriminals do work for the government now and then in return for tolerance. But it may be less mustache-twirling chaos farming and more plain old scams.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firehose_of_falsehood
The goal is to get that one lunatic to do something, that sets off the response which drains resources and makes the powers at be less nimble.
We live in a world of subtle war.
It’s certainly not working on me, but I fear far too many of us are just taking these stories at face value.
Unsurprising given there is no true Scotsman.
This is another reason why HN's primary purpose – gratifying intellectual curiosity – is so important. Curious conversation is hard to fake. You can't really be inauthentically curious, at least not for long. So the more we can succeed at nudging the community's conduct towards curious conversation, the more it stands out when accounts are acting to promote a particular agenda, and the faster we can weed them out.
I get suspect everytime an online socialist overuses famous socialist terms (or supposed socialist terms) before segueing into a conjunction. “Of course I want the socialist utopia just as much as all of us, comrades, but...”
This guy claims to have made $300k posting racist content posing as British: https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2025-11-16/kin...
This is why my FB feed is full of misinformation, strawman arguments, sweeping conclusions and no nuance. it does not matter what they are arguing about of which side they are on, the stupidity is constant. Left and right, theists and atheists, pro and anti-immigration. Anything else you can think of. All things I am happy to have an interesting argument about, but what social media offers is engagement bait of one kind or another - from rage bait to feigned ignorance.
It would be interesting to see how this applies more widely to other sets of content and countries.
From the original UKDJ article:
> The original UK Defence Journal investigation stressed in an editor’s note that “this article does not claim that Scottish independence is a foreign plot, nor does it suggest that support for independence is illegitimate, inauthentic, or driven by anything other than sincere political conviction.”
> The focus, we underlined, was not on genuine activists but on documented attempts by Iranian-linked actors to exploit authentic political debates for their own strategic purposes. Robertson’s reply arguably missed this distinction. The concern raised by analysts was not that independence itself is tainted, but that foreign actors are infiltrating the conversation, seeking to magnify division and undermine trust in democratic processes.
The Herald information comes from ukdefencejournal. They don't tell us exactly where the information comes from originally, despise talking about the company Cyabra later in another context.
But the Jewish Telegraphic Agency tell us that the information about Iran also comes from Cyabra (1)
Cyabra? The Tel-Aviv based company, with important customers as the USA State Department, informing us about Iran?
What could possible go wrong?
(1) - https://www.jta.org/2025/07/14/global/when-irans-internet-we...).
(I would buy China, too. A huge country with a powerful economy.)
That in itself looks like a programmed response.
Of course Russia uses bots and propaganda. But the focus on Russia seems completely out of proportion.
It seemed like a messy and obvious approach - sign up with a clearly bot-generated gmail account, hit the activation link sent by email an average of 100ms, and immediately post in every thread something along the lines of "WHEN WE'VE FINISHED IN KHARKIV / GAZA WE'LL BRING THE GAS CHAMBERS TO ENGLAND", all in under about ten seconds.
I don't think it's Russians or Israelis behind it, necessarily, but that's where the annoying noise has been coming from.
"a 2024 study by researchers at Clemson University has estimated that 4% of content relating to independence were linked to one Iranian-backed bot network of around 80 accounts."
Speaking as a Scot, I would expect there are those who support attempts to break up the UK who care zero about Scotland. Who's ultimately behind it is speculative.
It seems to me most social platforms (not just big tech, smaller UGC sections like the BBC) have many puppet accounts that are triggered by certain content.
Anecdotally looking at BBC comment sections of Scottish content, the "highest rated" comments are almost unilaterally pro-British/anti Scottish National Party which deviates a long way from historical voting preferences. The SNP have performed very well in Scottish and Westminster elections and the weakest barometer for them is/was the 45%/55% vote split in the Scottish independence referendum 12 years ago. I think if anyone took a "sentiment score" of what's there vs how people generally think or behave there'd be a large deviance.
More generally, any platform seems to have systemised abuse and this pattern goes all the way back to generic content management systems being abused in the early 2000s.
I do wonder, are these accounts being accessed via proxy? i.e. someone claiming to be from the UK and having a residential IP- if the platform doesn't care about the location of access, maybe start checking for latency?
But so do Scottish people.
And a very simple way of de-legitimising any anti-establishment position, and protecting the status quo.
We can look at independence movements in Europe, Brexit, Trump, republicanism in the UK, any sort of heterodox economic or foreign policy.
Even if you disagree with these positions, it is helpful to you to steelman your position and your arguments. And just dismissing them as Putin's work drops you into a trap. It's arguably one reason why Trump got re-elected. People spent his entire first term assuming he'd be exposed in some complicated Russian plot and put in jail; rather than thinking hard about why he got elected in the first place. Same thing happened to some degree with the Brexit vote.
They also strongly support Unionism, because it also undermines the UK.
Man if Russia went dark like half of all politics X and Reddit would probably go dark. I bet it would be both ends of the horseshoe.
To use an analogy: if the village idiot went to the town square and shouted hate speech, he'd be laughed at or dealt with. Now anyone has a platform to go to the town square, except it's the world, and shout hate speech. And unlike before there will be hateful people, some of them unrecognisable from real people, who will support the village idiot. They will help amplify his voice and validate him and legitimise him.
We have to find a way to stop this. The only thing I can think of is require you to attach your real identity to social media accounts, and regulate the living daylights out of it to hold the networks accountable if their owners don't want to do the right thing. Free speech isn't free.
As usual the problem is the commoner idiot, not the group of sociopaths that now have the means to astroturf their agendas efficiently.
Especially puzzling since this submission is about exactly the latter.
> We have to find a way to stop this. The only thing I can think of is require you to attach your real identity to social media accounts, and regulate the living daylights out of it to hold the networks accountable if their owners don't want to do the right thing. Free speech isn't free.
Think harder then.
The village idiot could move and reinvent himself as a respectable fellow. Basically, pre-digital we naturally had different personas; there was no Panopticon that could ever hope to know all our associations. Digital tools have changed that. And inventing the fiction of “one single persona” to tie back to what you said five years ago, ten years ago, thirty years ago, is a terrible idea, and I would argue (based on intuition) very unnatural.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet%2C_nobody_know...
Very convincing stuff. We must fast-track the shutdown of X in the UK to stop this ultra-persuasive disinfo from brainwashing our citizens.
I’m not suggesting all of the Internet needs to go that way, but for large social media platforms I don’t see why not. You can argue that journalists need anonymity but I’m confident we can find a workaround or solution there.
I understand there’s this hacker spirit of doing things anonymous and I get it, and agree with it, but these platforms are the most mainstream things imaginable and they are way past the point of having gotten out of control.
You can’t have MAGA/Hamas/Iran/Antifa/Russia/Cuba/China/India/Pakistan all participating in shaping public opinion and sowing disinformation without contest. I’m surprised that western countries have been somewhat resilient to all of this BS by and large (nothing is collapsing, just degrading), but for how long?
- I can’t find any of the accounts
- geolocation feature is hard to crack so they must have been identified as Iranian when this feature was released
- these don’t seem to be high profile accounts
I heard on the grapevine that X is consistently number 1 on the app stores for News content ...
X ... the home of Truth ... and where the team would get rid of bots and bot networks once and for all !!!
Elon ... you're a fucking genius ...