I've said for a while that I think this sort of thing is a much better explanation for trends we see than moustache-twirling foreign dictators "spreading dissent" for the heck of it.
Yes, they exist and yes, they have troll factories, but they usually promote narratives with some immediate benefit to themselves. When they do promote irrelevant stuff, I think it's just to build social media clout for their actual messages. The payload so to say.
In particular, when Russian trolls promote both sides in some divisive foreign domestic issue, it's not to "spread chaos", but to gain a foot in the door to promote their actual messages, which are things like, "Sanctions on Russian leaders are pointless and counterproductive", "Assad didn't gas anyone", "Actual nazis have the Ukrainian leadership's balls in a vice" etc.
There's a meme that most "nationalist" Twitter/X posters in the UK are actually from South Asia, and only doing it because for people in low-income countries the Twitter payments are a viable source of income.
I'm not on Twitter anymore thankfully, but when I was there seemed to be a lot of truth to this. It even got to the point of there being successful witch hunts outing quite large/popular accounts as being Indian people pretending to be British
Which led Twitter to release a feature allowing you to see which country accounts were originally made which confirmed a lot of suspicions about Indian/Pakistan accounts positing politics stuff because it goes viral and pays. Other sites would benefit from that sort of feature to at least set the bar higher.
No they released the feature. The more controversial part was X also announced they’d start a large ban campaign to kill off foreign accounts posting stuff low quality politics memes like this just for money. This got push back as a bunch of big accounts claiming it would create false positive bans and they had legitimate interest in the topics despite not being American etc. I didn’t follow it closely after that but I believe it still led to some foreign accounts being banned, just not at the scale Nikita Bier wanted.
“Just ban them” is admittedly more complicated than it sounds once you think about it. Ie what about Canadians who post about American politics all the time. Or is it just low quality Indian accounts. How do you measure quality. Etc
On the other hand... on the internet, everybody is an American (or a Brit).
There are many people who don't live in a country where English is spoken natively, but who speak it well enough to lurk on the English internet. Those people are exposed to American and British politics and start to form opinions. It's not unusual for us to have our own takes on what happens in these countries.
I’m not an economist but it seems that a lot of things boil down to “X is cheaper in country A” or “Y is more costly in country B” creating arbitrage opportunities for players operating in grey area.
Again, I’m not an economist and am just speculating as a layman who understands math, but without wage normalization it seems the other option would be to only have per-country regulated social media. So Canadian social platforms are only accessible to users with Canadian IDs, US to US ID holders, and Indian ID holders can only access Indian social networks. And so on and so forth.. but then we become China.
X famously implemented a feature that revelaed where the posters were from. Sure you can use a VPN, but Musk changed the rules all of a sudden and exposed a lot of accounts posting about issues from other countries.
Twitter may have a lot of faults, but they're ahead of Facebook on this one.
I think the difference is Elon is actually a Twitter addict and he's genuinely on there every day engaging with this stuff, so he probably saw the memes.
I get the sense Zuckerberg is a lot more disconnected from everyday Facebook and Insta content
South Asia and africa. There's a reason he bought twitter and let any bozo buy verification. The money they make goes a long way in low income countries.
Not most of it - at least on Facebook where there is a LOT posted by people from South Asia and racist/extreme nationalist posters - far more than on Twitter the last time I compared my feeds. For one thing most of it on Facebook is dogwhistle racism not direct. A lot more does not meet the legal standards for creating records. Very little gets reported so no on investigates.
People selling get rich guides did not get rich using the method they describe. But I don't doubt a lot of people try, with or without guides to help them.
Well I think both things can be true. I imagine he made a lot of money doing it, then eventually that well dried up for whatever reason, so he started selling courses (which are worthless because his method clearly doesn't work or he would just keep doing it)
Definitely a real thing, I meant it was a meme in the sense that at one point almost everyone was getting accused of being Indian (and subsequently having to refute it) in a partly humorous but also partly serious way
> The move made him a mint — and Sam was soon raking in thousands of dollars a month.
> “I was spending maybe 30 to 50 minutes of my day, and I was making good money for a medical student,” he recalled.
> He said he also attempted to make a liberal counterpart for Hart on Instagram, but “Democrats know that it’s AI slop, so they don’t engage as much,” he said.
The effort-to-profit ratio is so insane that you almost can't blame them for turning the internet into such toxic wasteland.
There's also the fact that the media and a large cadre of activists in the targeted countries already provide the 'democrat' standpoint which makes an AI simulacrum less noticeable as well as less appealing. I'd say that is a far more likely explanation than 'democrats know it is AI slop' which sounds a lot like wishful thinking by 'democrats'.
Its been discussed for long time already how russian methods work :
The ex-KGB defector you're thinking of is Yuri Bezmenov (also known by his alias Tomas Schuman). The strategy he described is called "Ideological Subversion" (also referred to as "Active Measures" or "Psychological Warfare")
Their time scale is measured in decades.
1. Demoralization Undermining the moral and cultural foundations of a society — making people lose faith in their own country, values, and institutions ~15–30 years (one generation)
2. Destabilization Exploiting the demoralized state to create social, political, and economic instability — polarizing the population ~2–5 years
3. Crisis Pushing the destabilized society into a full-blown crisis, creating a situation where people demand radical change ~6 weeks
4. Normalization After the crisis leads to a power shift, the new order is "normalized" — a totalitarian system is established and accepted as the new normal Ongoing
>1. Demoralization Undermining the moral and cultural foundations of a society — making people lose faith in their own country, values, and institutions ~15–30 years (one generation)
took Putin less than 10 years to do that to Russia. the collapse is postponed while the regime's eunuchs and dogs are fed, of course, but God wills it, that might not be the case for much longer.
We're in a recession caused by the current government's 11 years of mismanagement but approval ratings are higher than ever because our government just blames the US.
Meanwhile the gap between our peers and us is widening and certain Canadians (mostly boomers) just refuse to see the problem.
Everyone I know has left the country and I've already got one foot out the door.
That's what you think they ought to be doing as a rational actor, but there is a body of counter-evidence suggesting that their intent is to cause chaos as a dual goal.
I would point you towards the various hybrid warfare attacks on civic society especially across Europe, such as infrastructure sabotage, bomb threats to election centers, and hiring petty criminals to attack religious sites or paint hateful graffiti.
My interpretation of this strategy is that it's an attempt to undermine social cohesion, create sectarian politics, which fragments the society, draws its attention inwards and makes it impossible to pursue any specific coherent direction.
> hiring petty criminals to attack religious sites or paint hateful graffiti.
This turns out to have been alarmingly effective. All it needs is someone willing to hand cash to bored teenagers, and their vandalism can be redirected from bus shelters to critical infrastructure.
They definitely play both sides to spread chaos. That's been extremely effective for them in reducing American power and influence. Getting their messaging out there is also a goal.
> which are things like, "Sanctions on Russian leaders are pointless and counterproductive", "Assad didn't gas anyone", "Actual nazis have the Ukrainian leadership's balls in a vice" etc.
What would be the point of that? Wars and support of wars do not generally rely on public support. For instance here in the us, only around 3% of americans vote based on foreign policy. Does it really matter which narrative the masses believe? I would think it would be people in power worth persuading, and there are much more direct ways of buying politicians and career government workers.
Propagandizing their own people I get, but what you're outlining just doesn't make sense. "Spreading chaos" does because it draws resources away from their interests to domestic discord.
Public opinion does sometimes change the direction of a country. For Russia it's probably most relevant in a few eastern European countries, but there's a normality effect - it is probably easier for someone like Órban to dissent from EU on Ukraine the more there is minority dissent in other EU countries.
Either way, it doesn't have to actually work, the propagandist only has to think it's worth it to try.
Its not about Americans. Russians already owned them and got them to do what they want. Its about Europeans that are much closer to their representatives.
> Wars and support of wars do not generally rely on public support
Up until Iran, wars in America had large general support. Americans liked wars and their support for leadership went up when those wards started. And Americans politicians who wanted those wars put a lot of work into making people support wars.
Russians supported invasion of Ukraine. And Putin made sure they will. Even Germans prior WWI and WWII supported and wanted war. Ironically, especially young wanting to prove their masculinity.
In case of Germany nope. Germans were not against the wars but there was not a huge support case.
Especially WWI it was only a nationalistic educated minority who supported the war. Most people were not so keen to die
> Especially WWI it was only a nationalistic educated minority who supported the war.
Definitely not minority. There were hawks "attack now" and doves claiming "we are not ready we get ready and attack". Moreover, large parts of Germans population did not accepted defeat of WWI, thought the peace was betrayal and wanted a redo.
In 1914, the "spirit for the war" was high.
> Most people were not so keen to die
It just so happen that young men and former soldiers were the keenest on WWII. Of course they were not keen to die, but they were massively keen on proving they are manly men who will kill their enemies. They wanted to prove they are as good as their heroes from WWI.
The actual context is that they believed they would win the war if they continued fighting. They believed that peace deal was "stab in the back" of great fighters by soft politicians (and jews). To large extend, WWII was redo because by and large Germans did not accepted defeat.
Btw, that is literally why WWII ended up without peace deal, with complete military takeover of Germany. The alliance wanted to avoid another "we were about to win" myth followed by third round of the whole thing. They wanted clear military victory, so that no one can possibly think they would win it if it continued.
Second, the conditions were softer then what Germany planned against their enemies in case they win. The bigger economic disaster in Germany pushing toward far right was great depression. You can discuss how much economic consequences of the loss contributed to the culture, but the fact is, Germany was pretty violent country and celebrated war itself.
We can get into the weeds about German (or more accurately, Prussian) militarism. Prussia dominated the day-to-day politics of the united German Empire (for good reason, it essentially led the unification), but didn't necessarily represent the rest of the country. Even today, German culture varies a lot by region.
I remember reading about the post-war reconstruction of Germany, where a handful of anti-nazi German politicians (in particular Ludwig Erhard) tried to rationalize how the German people, that gave the world Beethoven and Bach, fell to the evils of Nazism. The oversimplified answer could just be it depended on who was in control. There are evil people everywhere.
Rather like the Raytheon adverts in DC airport, the aim of all this nonsense is to alter the worldview of the small number of people who make the actual decisions. It does seem to have some effect - the Trump administration withdrew support from Ukraine.
I suppose. But social media would be a very indirect way of influencing decision makers. Surely it'd be more straightforward to simply bribe or threaten them.
> It does seem to have some effect - the Trump administration withdrew support from Ukraine.
No, they haven't. We just haven't increased support. They still benefit from our existing aid packages and intelligence.
A divided and weakened EU is the biggest priority of Putin’s Russia after reconstituting the USSR.
Brexit and other forms of dissension spread in Europe by Russian agents (from bombings in Berlin to poisoning dissidents in London) are definitely deliberate and war by other means, not some sort of sideshow. Separatist movements have and will be used to weaken enemies and figures like Farage and Orban are still doing Russia’s work.
I would not be at all surprised to find that dissent/separatism in countries opposed to Russia is funded by Putin. Dissent and chaos are an important part of the Russian playbook, not an afterthought.
Those people are people with high HN karma, a lot of it for posting or submitting technical discussions. Is that enough to give that much weight to their opinion on political topics?
>Those people are people with high HN karma, a lot of it for posting or submitting technical discussions.
Click on a few of those names and see what kind of topics they wade into. I wish you were right.
You're not gonna get high karma by having high quality technical discussion. First off no human can likely know enough depth on enough topics to contribute to very many of them. Second off, such commentary only gets praise from the narrow band of people who are capable of assessing it.
Like all "scored" social-ish media this stuff is a numbers game. The way you "win" as these people have is by gaming the scoring system. Post stuff that appeals to the demographics of the site and with a low common denominator so anyone can "approve" of it. And if you click on through you'll find that's what they do.
>Is that enough to give that much weight to their opinion on political topics?
I assure you that a great many of them take great offense when you suggest that they are not experts in whatever they are speaking at a given minute. My personal favorites are the one that appeals to authority by cherry picking links (thereby moving the discussion from one of attacking his opinion to one of attacking his sources, a tried and true troll/propagandist/etc tactic) when you disagree with him and the one tries to portray being involved in politics as though it confers legitimacy.
That said, some of the power users around here are in fact reasonable and seemingly free of obvious ill will.
> I assure you that a great many of them take great offense when you suggest that they are not experts in whatever they are speaking at a given minute.
That I can believe without question. I see it in action every day. But how are they any different from any social media influencer who has an opinion on everything and millions of followers and who use their existing clout to demand more?
One of the people high on that list once introduced themselves by the karma points from HN. That was the value they saw in themselves, that’s all that matters.
That HN leadership list has in the same page the typical serial posters or panderers, with an opinion on every mundanity under the sun, having 10-20 times the karma of other people in the list who bring genuinely unique and fascinating views of things that normal people never get to see or even know they exist.
Perhaps projection? It is perfectly valid to have different opinions. "Russian trolls" are not some sort of uniform centralized group, that gets directions what to "promote". Some people just have opinions, and do stuff out of conviction, not to get reward.
There is a uniform centralized group that operated for a decade under the name of Internet Research Agency, and almost certainly something like it continues to operate to this day. These had paid employees who got directions on what to promote with the goal of manipulating the public debate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Research_Agency
That was a private company operated by Prigozhin [1] who was, almost certainly, an extremely mentally unwell individual. He was the guy who formed the 'Wagner' private military company, supported Putin, then seemingly tried to overthrow Putin, and then was likely killed by Putin. When he left the stage, it was unceremoniously shut down alongside most of his other ventures. The spastic operations of the org would be pretty much in the character of Prigozhin without any grand 5D chess going on.
I'm also of the mindset that the effort to suggest there's state propaganda everywhere is, itself, mostly domestic state propaganda in an effort to try to 'otherize' dissenting views, especially as politicians and their actions become ever more unpopular.
So that page didn't exist before December 2024, and was created by a guy whose done nothing but push anti-Russian propaganda, and links to a video in Ukrainian on his user page showing Russian soldiers being killed. Interestingly the page has also had segments of its edit timeline permanently deleted as well, which is something that never used to happen on Wiki.
Anyhow apparently examples of "Russian hybrid warfare" are the West cynically claiming Russia blew up its own oil pipeline. Those tricky Russians multiplying their forces by blowing up their own pipelines. Just imagine what they could achieve if they nuked themselves! Imagine, just for a second somebody linking to an article/account that was pro-Russian, but otherwise everything was equal but opposite. Can you even begin to imagine what you might think? Well that's what I'm thinking.
Thanks for the info! I've literally never once seen that done on Wikipedia, and pretty much the first thing I do when looking at a new page is go to the history.
I imagine Israel's various hasbara operation dwarfs its relevance and funding by multiple orders of magnitude. I don't see much evidence it plays a role outside of being useful to blame for inconvenient discourse.
Sure, but that's a good example. They obviously push pro-Israel, anti-Palestinian and probably a good deal of outright anti-Muslim positions.
But do you think they push random divisive issues, unrelated to their own interests, just to destabilize countries they don't like? I think the evidence for that is much weaker.
That wouldn't really make sense for Israel. They don't want America to be destabilised. They want it stable and supporting them. Same for European countries. They want Palestine and Iran unstable, but they've already achieved that through other means.
For a country of 8 million to "dwarf by multiple orders of magnitude" a country of 140 million in almost anything requires very lively imagination indeed.
Soft power operations are hard to measure. You cannot measure the impact of Israeli activities either.
> For a country of 8 million to "dwarf by multiple orders of magnitude" a country of 140 million in almost anything requires very lively imagination indeed.
I see you've never heard of Hasbara.
Anyway, there's little reason to think that influence scales with the size of the population as opposed to the number of people involved in active influence and funding, especially with Russia locking down access to the global internet. Israel simply has much, much, much, much more to gain from interfering in american culture than russia does (despite its being scapegoated by the least capable of our politicians).
Russia has its own Great Power status to lose, which they worked on since the 16th century. If they cannot defeat Ukraine and be seen as clear winners of this long war, no amount of nuclear weapons will help them regain their clout. Even their own heavily Muslim regions like Caucasus may well secede.
I clicked on the link wondering if the twist might be that it was from state-backed troll farm, but not the country we normally associate with state-backed troll farms...
However, from the article: "This may not always be classic foreign interference in the state-backed sense. Sometimes it's much more banal. It's in some ways more depressing, ... People sitting thousands of miles away working out that Canadian outrage is a profitable niche. I think they may not actually care about Canadian politics at all."
I wonder how "free speech absolutists" defend the idea of people in low-income countries using these platforms to spread outrage simply to make themselves a little money (and the platform owners a lot of money), rather than to "exercise their right to free speech" or whatever, given these people aren't saying anything they believe in (let alone have any interest in or even knowledge of). Not that you can really call it free speech if you are being paid to do it.
Free speech doesn't mean that we don't desire filters. Go check your gmail spam folder. Twitter would look identical to this with filters at all. What we really want is:
* transparency about the filters we have on our feeds
* the ability to tweak them if they're not working
* the ability to change providers without losing your entire social graph / reach
You are on to something but going the wrong path. It is all about personal decision making and not enforcement by goverment.
To put it:
"
* Government decides and approves about the filters we have on our feeds
* the government has the right and duty to tweak them if they're not working in the way a panel of experts decides
* no ability to change providers since there is only one that takes care of your entire social graph / reach
"
Historically, all speech was considered "intentional". And by speech here I am including two distinct things: the expression of opinion, and the publication of opinion by a magazine/newspaper owner.
I separate those two things because they are very different with respect to the scale of the dissemination of speech. Nevertheless, magazines and newspapers are free to publish opinion, though it is significant in my opinion that in those cases there is an accountable individual (the editor/publisher).
It strikes me as different when we have social media platforms that amplify speech to a massive scale without any accountability. Clearly, monetization fuels the large-scale amplification of some undesirable speech so that 1. it is not an opinion expressed in good faith and 2. there is no directly accountable individual, unless the poster can be considered accountable for FBs large-scale publication of their speech, which feels perverse to me. It's effectively "robo-published".
There are some conclusions which could be drawn here, and I'm not sure which should be drawn if any. But I think it's important to point out that the details do matter (libel laws and "malice" for example) and that the details change in significant ways as society and technology change.
IME most people calling themselves a “free speech absolutist” absolutely believe those who agree with them should be free to speak, and anyone that might affect them negatively or just disagree should be stopped from oppressing or endangering them. The term usually means as little as the “democratic” in DPRK.
A true free speech absolutist would not be concerned with paid speech being blocked, in fact they should really be against paid speech, at least in the sense being discussed here. The point of free speech is to be able to say what you want and saying something else because you are paid to, because you can't afford to turn down the payment to say what someone else wants instead, is anti-free-speech.
This has nothing to do with free speech but giving an incentive (money) for posting which ruined every social media platform in existence (YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, etc.)
That would make most (if not all) of today's mainstream media speech (and not only) as "not free".
To add, in essence I agree with you, that's why I regard Jean-Jacques Rousseau as one of the really few free thinkers out there, i.e. because he was aware that as soon as he was accepting to be paid for what he was writing then his speech would become "imprisoned".
I'm not entirely sure that I believe this, although I do believe a strong argument can be made here.
I think the idea that various mechanisms in modern society are subtly corroding free speech en masse with various nasty knock-on effects is an interesting one though.
I've talked to enough free speech absolutists to know they would defend this behavior because they believe all speech should be allowed. It's written in the name of their ideology!
> I wonder how "free speech absolutists" defend the idea of people in low-income countries using these platforms to spread outrage simply to make themselves a little money
By recognizing that undesirable uses of free speech are the price society pays for having free speech, and by strongly believing that it is a price worth paying.
Just like 1.3 million global road traffic deaths per year are the price society pays for having cars, and believing that people should still be able to freely own and drive cars doesn’t make someone a “car absolutist”.
The idea that free speech should probably be restricted if it turns out that free speech can lead to unpleasant consequences misses the whole point of free speech – in many cases deliberately, I think.
Free speech absolutists just don't defend their position because it devolves into absurdity immediately. It's just a dogwhistle of the far right or people that haven't put any thought into their beliefs.
It’s interesting how the idea that free speech is too important to sacrifice to any other cause, which was the position of Rousseau and other enlightenment luminaries, has supposedly turned from the foundation of humanism into a “dog whistle”.
The implication that if someone is unwilling to compromise on free speech, they must belong to the far right, is certainly revealing.
> Just like 1.3 million global road traffic deaths per year are the price society pays for having cars, and believing that people should still be able to freely own and drive cars doesn’t make someone a “car absolutist”.
Car traffic is heavily regulated to reduce the harm being done by cars/drivers.
Don't forget that undesirable uses of free speech can be made less effective by more speech - as long as what you desire is actually in the interest of the people you want to influence. Like for example this article.
And of course in this case the root problem is not that people have free speech but that they are financially rewarded for using it in bad ways. Financial models that reward impressions are fundamentally bad for society.
Those who are making the undesirable speech can counter their opponent's speech with more speech of their own - and they can afford to outspeak their opponents at any opportunity because they are paid to speak and their opponents are not.
The EU would be better off promoting separatism for the redneck states rather than specifically supporting California. Direct trade with California is tough, but if the southern states were to fall off, the east coast of the USA would still provide a decent area to trade with.
I always find it so interesting how little the topic of Californian independence comes up online. You would think there would at least be a decent amount of organic content around that, never mind external interference.
Separatism is born of a sense of ethnoracial exceptionalism:
1) we're a genealogically different ethnic group from the rest of the country
2) we're better than the major ethnic group of the rest of the country
Both bits are absolutely essential. I can't recall a single instance of a separatist movement based on purely political differences gaining serious ground, Alberta included.
It would be kind of a stretch to argue this as the reasons for separation of the US from the UK - I can see some of it, but I think the argument is a stretch.
Why just ethnic? It can also be religious, ideological, or based on some economic interest. The US revolution was a mix of tax revolt and ideology. The British were the same ethnic group as most of the leaders of the revolution.
-One screenshot of Nieta Aqila's Meta monetization dashboard, which she posted, showed she made roughly $14 US in a month when she was active in Alberta Facebook groups.
So brave CBC making this woman doing this to eke out a few bucks the star of this exposé while the fb executives enabling this get to remain nameless
Canada may not have laws against this, but some countries might classify this as "subversive activity harmful to the nation". That is normally punished by imprisonment, losing the right to conduct business and hold public office.
Usually they couldn't care less about what you say about another country. Unless, of course, if you say bad things about a certain country when you are in another certain country, you get deported. Hmm.
Well done to the journalist that uncovered this. Makes a change from copying and pasting press releases that many 'journalists' seem to do these days (partly because journalist organizations have been so hollowed out by Facebook et al).
If Facebook propaganda is so effective (and cheap) Western democracies should promote democratic values in Belarus/Kazakhstan.
Canada should use this channel to promote tariff cancellation in the USA.
I doubt that Facebook is efficient on important matter.
If I'm wrong then Canadian government is doing very bad job in promoting democratic values in and outside Canada.
There is an assymetry cause by the fact that way more foreigners speak English fluently, than Americans/Canadians/British who speak foreign languages fluently.
So, they're naturally able to influence the West way more than the West can influence them.
Facebook is not a universal tool that is used the same way in every country in the world. As a start, there are more Facebook users in Canada both in absolute numbers and percentage of population than in Belarus. Internet censorship also doesn't help.
The countries that would need this the most are usually also the countries where it is the hardest to reach their population from the outside.
I doubt it’s an effective channel for promoting liberalism (or even rationality). In North America at least the folks most engaged on Facebook tend to be media illiterate and reactionary leaning. The smart people left long ago.
Same for Datacenters, MAGA and a ton of other things. Algorithms are being abused to manipulate reality for people and people know it. But they still get swept up because it feels so real when you're reading hundreds of comments, seeing countless articles and posts and videos.
Reddit is 49% indian and 27% african and i doubt either groups have an incentive to spread misinformation against trump. But maybe you now something I don't?
> He said he also attempted to make a liberal counterpart for Hart on Instagram, but “Democrats know that it’s AI slop, so they don’t engage as much,” he said.
We're now solidly in a point of tine that a random 3rd world noodle merchant can make livable money by significantly warping and distorting governments across the world. I dont know the solution for this, but Id have a real hard look at DMCA Section 230, and social media's responsibility in enabling and amplifying.
I live here, rural and in areas you'd expect this to have more traction. Nobody is even talking about it. It just doesn't come up in conversation. It might get fifteen percent of the vote and only then because only people that care will bother to show up.
Fellow AB resident here.... then what do you make of their claim that 99.2% (or whatever the number was) of residents in Sylvan Lake, Drumheller etc signed the petition? Has to be completely fabricated right?
I agree that the most obvious answer is probably correct, and I think that it was a poorly worded statement, however, I haven't seen them correct it yet (doesn't mean they haven't.... just that I haven't seen it).
These incentives are IMO a significant part of the political problems we are having around the world and even the general decline in mental health.
Just on a personal level I’ve found it hard for example to get YouTube and Facebook to stop showing me short videos, which I don’t want to see. You can click the “not interested” or “show less” button, and it doesn’t do much.
What works though if you apply it consistently is, when you see something on a feed that you don’t want anymore, is to immediately close the app and don’t come back for a while at least. That’s the strongest signal you can send to their recommender.
The headline is rather misleading, it indicates a specific intent. But all the article reports is that there are overseas accounts that post about Alberta separatism because it creates clicks and hence money.
Nothing to do specifically with albertan separatism, it has (and will) happened with plenty of other topics as well.
The original phrase, "the purpose of a system is what it does", was coined as a contrast to people saying "the purpose of this system is X" even though it consistently fails to achieve X. It does not make sense to look at an arbitrary problem and declare that the system is that problem or exists to produce the problem.
I don't understand your point. Identity and effect are not the same as purpose, but identity also isn't the same as effect. If a news headline read "Bars are encouraging foreigners to drive drunk", and the contents were just that the reporter compiled a list of 14 foreigners who were served alcohol when the bartender knew they drove there, I would say that's similarly misleading.
There's a problem here that people don't necessarily consider. Ignore motives for a bit. Lets say that large groups of people really, really wanted to spread positive, constructive messages on social media. Perhaps about how important it is to read and exercise and not to consume passive content. Or how kind it is to put group differences aside and focus on the things we have in common. Etc.
I'd argue that it just wouldn't work. Outrage is what's "engaging" and it is engagement which actually forces these things to go viral and spread. You are therefor limited in what sort of information you can spread on social media, at least in the virality sense. You could not, for instance, use social media to "trick" millions of people into practicing calculus every day. And you could not use social media to coerce people into spending hours meditating.
It's of course not that you could never house this content on social media, but instead that this content could never be viral, never make a strong, immediate emotional impression in the eyes of the viewer. Practicing calculus or meditation is much, much more than a strong, quick, (and I'd argue) innate emotional reaction to bare stimulus. It requires focus and participation.
So it's not just that there are these little evil troll farms sowing discord around the world. Rather, outrage, and particularly outage about social or tribal topics will always float to the top in any sort of system (algorithmic or not) that preferences engagement. There will always be at least outrage in the general population of posters (whether "natural" or else astroturfed) who are putting out outrage content, and this content will always be treated preferentially in any system that filters for outrage content. It's quite hard to avoid. You actually see this on the "boring" 4Chan boards. There is no algorithm in the modern sense of the word (although of course there is something like an algorithm in the literal sense of the word) and on these boring boards you just cannot get much much traction when starting a thread that is not a "troll" thread. A normal, informative thread gets fewer replies, and so it falls off the front page, and then no one sees, and so it gets even fewer replies.
In other words, these systems will always privilege outrage bait, even if they had real incentives to attempt to avoid it. There are only certain topics that get people fired up in a quick, immediate, emotional sort of way -- and the communication systems we've built and have become addicted to will only preference that sort of communication. Identifying these troll farms matters, but why would a crappy little troll farm from far away be able to to write content that captivates you. If they wrote a book, you wouldn't read it. If you directed a TV series, you wouldn't watch it. But one dumb little caption on an image about how a person from the wrong group has trespassed against you and it sticks in your mind forever. People need to think about why that is.
The title is a bit misleading. The title suggests that Facebook is intentionally paying for a political interference campaign targeting Alberta. It sounds more like it is the monetary incentive structure that indirectly encourages this type of behavior.
It has been years since I signed into Facebook. The content on Facebook is just vile and disgusting, IMO. I remember signing in 3 years ago, and signing out less than a minute later because I couldn't look at it. It wasn't content from people I knew. It was all the thirst traps, rage bait, weird ads, and other garbage. I don't think normal humans still use Facebook, do they? I can't imagine regularly frequenting a sewer like that.
Any political issue that is popular or viral will have stuff like this. It’s definitely not unique to this one Alberta issue since it happens all the time. It’s just a topic that has reached beyond a local issue so it gets good traction on social media.
YouTube and Tiktok have been paying creators for years. You can guarantee people will post stuff that gets traction, not just nefariously but even regular creators getting pushed in certain directions because it’s a reliable source of views. Many will do it for free just for attention or a sense of power.
Ironically comment section is essentially a more meta version of why peddling this content is so lucrative. For every Canadian who might click there's 10x that number of people in the US and Europe who'd either be rage baited or confirmation bias'd into clicking because of how what's going on in Alberta squares with their own ideology politics.
Facebook is also paying far right israelis, whose content incites violence against Palestinians.
> a new report titled “Monetizing Occupation: Meta’s Financial Enablement of Settlement Activity and Violent Rhetoric Against Palestinians.” The report reveals how Meta allows Israeli far-right pages, settler-affiliated accounts, and extremist media outlets to generate revenue through its platforms, despite publishing violent, racist, and inciting content against Palestinians, and despite many being directly linked to promoting illegal settlement expansion, as well as widespread violence and attacks against Palestinians in the West Bank.
Meta is absolutely just bunch of griefers. The only thing they add to society is division, enragement and rage bait content. Fuck meta and their garbage products.
But we most keep them that they are indeed visionaries of enshitification.
The root issue is the monetization. If engagements weren’t monetized, no one will be incentivized to post in rage bait or hot topics for the most part, and of course, if you live in a country where $100 a month is a quality of life, you will have thousands of these posters. Look at twitter, if you browse it now you will think ww4 is imminent (as if ww3 started already), everyone is hating and attacking everything and everyone else, ragebait, clickbait, and all sort of baits just so the account owner get paid at the end of the month, a grift.
Check this grifter, indian in canada, running a bot to support MAGA to grift and milk engagements, will this bot exist if monetization wasn’t a thing?
> [The person they're investigating] even posted about income she generates from Meta's monetization program, which rewards creators for engagement and solicits subscribers on her personal page.
Facebook pays people to post content that people "engage" with, outrage is engagement, and tiny amounts of money incentive money are significant to poor people in the 3rd world.
Western governments are so concerned when this happens to them (at arguably a tiny scale) compared to the “interventions” they’ve supported around the world for almost one hundred years.
Rules for thee and not for me. Sure, Canada isn’t the CIA, but they’ve been right there with the US from Iran to Ukraine.
NATO (of which Canada is a founding member or) actively supports Kosovar separatism, it has even started an unprovoked and illegal war on account of it, at the end of of it all what would be wrong with one of Canada's federal states deciding to split off? If anything, the international community could send some Blue Helmets force there in order to support the local Albertans in the face of Ottawa-led occupation.
The Canadian Supreme Court has ruled that provinces essentially have the right to separate. There are a bunch of conditions, but they have the right to separate, the Federal government is required to negotiate separation in good faith.
”Facebook is paying out to creators of monetized content because that content is popular”
Would also work as a headline. But wouldn’t attract as many clicks I guess. The implication that Facebook is actively promoting a certain view point is disgusting, and old media loves to do that (even though they were historically the ones doing so). I’m all for local filtering (on some level) and preventing foreign interference on local political matters, and social media companies ought to do better. But I twist my nose at old media shamelessly trying to manipulate the views of people on tech. And this is Facebook we’re talking about here…
Paying money for a particular viewpoint is promoting it. This is not complicated.
(yes, this is a serious problem with content monetization intermediaries; somehow as soon as the topic is sexual everyone immediately understands what the problem is and rushes to condemn the intermediary)
NATO is not a company that does business in Russia. Facebook is a company that does business in Canada and as a result is subject to whatever conditions Canada imposes.
The point is that Facebook's mechanisms drive poor people in the third world to promoting division in the developed world.
Doesn't need to be some sort of evil scheme in order to be dangerous. Often dangerous things come from people not thinking through the consequences of their actions instead of mustachio-twirling supervillains executing elaborate plans.
I've said for a while that I think this sort of thing is a much better explanation for trends we see than moustache-twirling foreign dictators "spreading dissent" for the heck of it.
Yes, they exist and yes, they have troll factories, but they usually promote narratives with some immediate benefit to themselves. When they do promote irrelevant stuff, I think it's just to build social media clout for their actual messages. The payload so to say.
In particular, when Russian trolls promote both sides in some divisive foreign domestic issue, it's not to "spread chaos", but to gain a foot in the door to promote their actual messages, which are things like, "Sanctions on Russian leaders are pointless and counterproductive", "Assad didn't gas anyone", "Actual nazis have the Ukrainian leadership's balls in a vice" etc.
There's a meme that most "nationalist" Twitter/X posters in the UK are actually from South Asia, and only doing it because for people in low-income countries the Twitter payments are a viable source of income.
I'm not on Twitter anymore thankfully, but when I was there seemed to be a lot of truth to this. It even got to the point of there being successful witch hunts outing quite large/popular accounts as being Indian people pretending to be British
Which led Twitter to release a feature allowing you to see which country accounts were originally made which confirmed a lot of suspicions about Indian/Pakistan accounts positing politics stuff because it goes viral and pays. Other sites would benefit from that sort of feature to at least set the bar higher.
Didn't they almost immediately retract that after it became clear so many of the GOP adjacent accounts were based offshore?
No they released the feature. The more controversial part was X also announced they’d start a large ban campaign to kill off foreign accounts posting stuff low quality politics memes like this just for money. This got push back as a bunch of big accounts claiming it would create false positive bans and they had legitimate interest in the topics despite not being American etc. I didn’t follow it closely after that but I believe it still led to some foreign accounts being banned, just not at the scale Nikita Bier wanted.
“Just ban them” is admittedly more complicated than it sounds once you think about it. Ie what about Canadians who post about American politics all the time. Or is it just low quality Indian accounts. How do you measure quality. Etc
They did.
On the other hand... on the internet, everybody is an American (or a Brit).
There are many people who don't live in a country where English is spoken natively, but who speak it well enough to lurk on the English internet. Those people are exposed to American and British politics and start to form opinions. It's not unusual for us to have our own takes on what happens in these countries.
But we don't pretend to be something we're not.
Is the solution that global wages are normalized?
I’m not an economist but it seems that a lot of things boil down to “X is cheaper in country A” or “Y is more costly in country B” creating arbitrage opportunities for players operating in grey area.
Again, I’m not an economist and am just speculating as a layman who understands math, but without wage normalization it seems the other option would be to only have per-country regulated social media. So Canadian social platforms are only accessible to users with Canadian IDs, US to US ID holders, and Indian ID holders can only access Indian social networks. And so on and so forth.. but then we become China.
X famously implemented a feature that revelaed where the posters were from. Sure you can use a VPN, but Musk changed the rules all of a sudden and exposed a lot of accounts posting about issues from other countries.
Twitter may have a lot of faults, but they're ahead of Facebook on this one.
I think the difference is Elon is actually a Twitter addict and he's genuinely on there every day engaging with this stuff, so he probably saw the memes.
I get the sense Zuckerberg is a lot more disconnected from everyday Facebook and Insta content
Which is actually healthier, like a drug dealer that doesn't consume his own product
Healthier for him, unhealthier for society that is forced to suffer the effects of mass consumption of his product.
Nothing we have seen since musk‘s acquisition of Twitter indicates that his close proximity/high usage has led to better results for society.
Healthier - perhaps, although I do prefer when my dealers use the same product they sell to me.
South Asia and africa. There's a reason he bought twitter and let any bozo buy verification. The money they make goes a long way in low income countries.
The same on Facebook, and its a very profitable:
https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2025-11-16/kin...
Makes sense for the UK since if you post the same content as a citizen you could end up with the police at your door.
Not most of it - at least on Facebook where there is a LOT posted by people from South Asia and racist/extreme nationalist posters - far more than on Twitter the last time I compared my feeds. For one thing most of it on Facebook is dogwhistle racism not direct. A lot more does not meet the legal standards for creating records. Very little gets reported so no on investigates.
You "could" end up with police at your door, but even if reported most of these things do not meet the requirements for being recorded: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/non-crime-hate-in...
It's pretty amazing corporate america was able to find a revenue scheme based on Russian disinformation campaigns, init.
It's more like astroturfing since forever, any mention of Americans doing disinformation instantly gets Russian bots brought up, like bro come on now.
ok, but making it a revenue strwam is the point, not whose message is doing what.
I mean I'm not sure it's a meme - this guy literally got rich doing it, to a point where he's selling "self guide" courses on how to do this:
https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2025-11-16/kin...
People selling get rich guides did not get rich using the method they describe. But I don't doubt a lot of people try, with or without guides to help them.
Well I think both things can be true. I imagine he made a lot of money doing it, then eventually that well dried up for whatever reason, so he started selling courses (which are worthless because his method clearly doesn't work or he would just keep doing it)
Definitely a real thing, I meant it was a meme in the sense that at one point almost everyone was getting accused of being Indian (and subsequently having to refute it) in a partly humorous but also partly serious way
You know what? I ain't even mad. 300k is life-changing money in Sri Lanka.
Similarly: https://nypost.com/2026/04/21/us-news/top-maga-influencer-em...
Some highlights:
> The move made him a mint — and Sam was soon raking in thousands of dollars a month.
> “I was spending maybe 30 to 50 minutes of my day, and I was making good money for a medical student,” he recalled.
> He said he also attempted to make a liberal counterpart for Hart on Instagram, but “Democrats know that it’s AI slop, so they don’t engage as much,” he said.
The effort-to-profit ratio is so insane that you almost can't blame them for turning the internet into such toxic wasteland.
I was wondering how people monetised these things. Selling t-shirts and AI porn is not what I expected.
There's also the fact that the media and a large cadre of activists in the targeted countries already provide the 'democrat' standpoint which makes an AI simulacrum less noticeable as well as less appealing. I'd say that is a far more likely explanation than 'democrats know it is AI slop' which sounds a lot like wishful thinking by 'democrats'.
Its been discussed for long time already how russian methods work :
The ex-KGB defector you're thinking of is Yuri Bezmenov (also known by his alias Tomas Schuman). The strategy he described is called "Ideological Subversion" (also referred to as "Active Measures" or "Psychological Warfare")
Their time scale is measured in decades.
1. Demoralization Undermining the moral and cultural foundations of a society — making people lose faith in their own country, values, and institutions ~15–30 years (one generation)
2. Destabilization Exploiting the demoralized state to create social, political, and economic instability — polarizing the population ~2–5 years
3. Crisis Pushing the destabilized society into a full-blown crisis, creating a situation where people demand radical change ~6 weeks
4. Normalization After the crisis leads to a power shift, the new order is "normalized" — a totalitarian system is established and accepted as the new normal Ongoing
>1. Demoralization Undermining the moral and cultural foundations of a society — making people lose faith in their own country, values, and institutions ~15–30 years (one generation)
took Putin less than 10 years to do that to Russia. the collapse is postponed while the regime's eunuchs and dogs are fed, of course, but God wills it, that might not be the case for much longer.
These measures are directed outside of russia.
Putin had the backdrop of 1990s Russia to speed things up, though.
Lol sounds like my country (Canada).
We're in a recession caused by the current government's 11 years of mismanagement but approval ratings are higher than ever because our government just blames the US.
Meanwhile the gap between our peers and us is widening and certain Canadians (mostly boomers) just refuse to see the problem.
Everyone I know has left the country and I've already got one foot out the door.
https://economics.td.com/ca-silent-brain-drain
That's what you think they ought to be doing as a rational actor, but there is a body of counter-evidence suggesting that their intent is to cause chaos as a dual goal.
I would point you towards the various hybrid warfare attacks on civic society especially across Europe, such as infrastructure sabotage, bomb threats to election centers, and hiring petty criminals to attack religious sites or paint hateful graffiti.
My interpretation of this strategy is that it's an attempt to undermine social cohesion, create sectarian politics, which fragments the society, draws its attention inwards and makes it impossible to pursue any specific coherent direction.
> hiring petty criminals to attack religious sites or paint hateful graffiti.
This turns out to have been alarmingly effective. All it needs is someone willing to hand cash to bored teenagers, and their vandalism can be redirected from bus shelters to critical infrastructure.
In the 1930s there were people arguing Hitler didn't really want war.
Maybe it is time for us to stop sane-plaining Americans and just take them at their word?
They definitely play both sides to spread chaos. That's been extremely effective for them in reducing American power and influence. Getting their messaging out there is also a goal.
> which are things like, "Sanctions on Russian leaders are pointless and counterproductive", "Assad didn't gas anyone", "Actual nazis have the Ukrainian leadership's balls in a vice" etc.
What would be the point of that? Wars and support of wars do not generally rely on public support. For instance here in the us, only around 3% of americans vote based on foreign policy. Does it really matter which narrative the masses believe? I would think it would be people in power worth persuading, and there are much more direct ways of buying politicians and career government workers.
Propagandizing their own people I get, but what you're outlining just doesn't make sense. "Spreading chaos" does because it draws resources away from their interests to domestic discord.
Public opinion does sometimes change the direction of a country. For Russia it's probably most relevant in a few eastern European countries, but there's a normality effect - it is probably easier for someone like Órban to dissent from EU on Ukraine the more there is minority dissent in other EU countries.
Either way, it doesn't have to actually work, the propagandist only has to think it's worth it to try.
Its not about Americans. Russians already owned them and got them to do what they want. Its about Europeans that are much closer to their representatives.
Do europeans vote based on foreign policy?
> Wars and support of wars do not generally rely on public support
Up until Iran, wars in America had large general support. Americans liked wars and their support for leadership went up when those wards started. And Americans politicians who wanted those wars put a lot of work into making people support wars.
Russians supported invasion of Ukraine. And Putin made sure they will. Even Germans prior WWI and WWII supported and wanted war. Ironically, especially young wanting to prove their masculinity.
In case of Germany nope. Germans were not against the wars but there was not a huge support case. Especially WWI it was only a nationalistic educated minority who supported the war. Most people were not so keen to die
> Especially WWI it was only a nationalistic educated minority who supported the war.
Definitely not minority. There were hawks "attack now" and doves claiming "we are not ready we get ready and attack". Moreover, large parts of Germans population did not accepted defeat of WWI, thought the peace was betrayal and wanted a redo.
In 1914, the "spirit for the war" was high.
> Most people were not so keen to die
It just so happen that young men and former soldiers were the keenest on WWII. Of course they were not keen to die, but they were massively keen on proving they are manly men who will kill their enemies. They wanted to prove they are as good as their heroes from WWI.
> It just so happen that young men and former soldiers were the keenest on WWII.
Weren't they subject to crushing economic conditions as a result of the diplomatic terms on which WWI ended? The context is important (as usual).
The actual context is that they believed they would win the war if they continued fighting. They believed that peace deal was "stab in the back" of great fighters by soft politicians (and jews). To large extend, WWII was redo because by and large Germans did not accepted defeat.
Btw, that is literally why WWII ended up without peace deal, with complete military takeover of Germany. The alliance wanted to avoid another "we were about to win" myth followed by third round of the whole thing. They wanted clear military victory, so that no one can possibly think they would win it if it continued.
Second, the conditions were softer then what Germany planned against their enemies in case they win. The bigger economic disaster in Germany pushing toward far right was great depression. You can discuss how much economic consequences of the loss contributed to the culture, but the fact is, Germany was pretty violent country and celebrated war itself.
We can get into the weeds about German (or more accurately, Prussian) militarism. Prussia dominated the day-to-day politics of the united German Empire (for good reason, it essentially led the unification), but didn't necessarily represent the rest of the country. Even today, German culture varies a lot by region.
I remember reading about the post-war reconstruction of Germany, where a handful of anti-nazi German politicians (in particular Ludwig Erhard) tried to rationalize how the German people, that gave the world Beethoven and Bach, fell to the evils of Nazism. The oversimplified answer could just be it depended on who was in control. There are evil people everywhere.
It still is one - but more quietly.
Rather like the Raytheon adverts in DC airport, the aim of all this nonsense is to alter the worldview of the small number of people who make the actual decisions. It does seem to have some effect - the Trump administration withdrew support from Ukraine.
I suppose. But social media would be a very indirect way of influencing decision makers. Surely it'd be more straightforward to simply bribe or threaten them.
> It does seem to have some effect - the Trump administration withdrew support from Ukraine.
No, they haven't. We just haven't increased support. They still benefit from our existing aid packages and intelligence.
There was definitely a withdrawal, partially resumed, and a reduction of funding: https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-...
A divided and weakened EU is the biggest priority of Putin’s Russia after reconstituting the USSR.
Brexit and other forms of dissension spread in Europe by Russian agents (from bombings in Berlin to poisoning dissidents in London) are definitely deliberate and war by other means, not some sort of sideshow. Separatist movements have and will be used to weaken enemies and figures like Farage and Orban are still doing Russia’s work.
I would not be at all surprised to find that dissent/separatism in countries opposed to Russia is funded by Putin. Dissent and chaos are an important part of the Russian playbook, not an afterthought.
Who of credit has claimed otherwise, that dictators spread dissent as an end rather than as a means?
Of credit, that's arguable. But a famous example is Nancy Pelosi suggesting that pro-Palestine protests in 2024 were funded by Putin.
>Who of credit has claimed otherwise
By my rough estimation a third to a half of these people: https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders
>Rayiner
Those people are people with high HN karma, a lot of it for posting or submitting technical discussions. Is that enough to give that much weight to their opinion on political topics?
>Those people are people with high HN karma, a lot of it for posting or submitting technical discussions.
Click on a few of those names and see what kind of topics they wade into. I wish you were right.
You're not gonna get high karma by having high quality technical discussion. First off no human can likely know enough depth on enough topics to contribute to very many of them. Second off, such commentary only gets praise from the narrow band of people who are capable of assessing it.
Like all "scored" social-ish media this stuff is a numbers game. The way you "win" as these people have is by gaming the scoring system. Post stuff that appeals to the demographics of the site and with a low common denominator so anyone can "approve" of it. And if you click on through you'll find that's what they do.
>Is that enough to give that much weight to their opinion on political topics?
I assure you that a great many of them take great offense when you suggest that they are not experts in whatever they are speaking at a given minute. My personal favorites are the one that appeals to authority by cherry picking links (thereby moving the discussion from one of attacking his opinion to one of attacking his sources, a tried and true troll/propagandist/etc tactic) when you disagree with him and the one tries to portray being involved in politics as though it confers legitimacy.
That said, some of the power users around here are in fact reasonable and seemingly free of obvious ill will.
> I assure you that a great many of them take great offense when you suggest that they are not experts in whatever they are speaking at a given minute.
That I can believe without question. I see it in action every day. But how are they any different from any social media influencer who has an opinion on everything and millions of followers and who use their existing clout to demand more?
One of the people high on that list once introduced themselves by the karma points from HN. That was the value they saw in themselves, that’s all that matters.
That HN leadership list has in the same page the typical serial posters or panderers, with an opinion on every mundanity under the sun, having 10-20 times the karma of other people in the list who bring genuinely unique and fascinating views of things that normal people never get to see or even know they exist.
Why not both?
> when Russian trolls promote both sides
Perhaps projection? It is perfectly valid to have different opinions. "Russian trolls" are not some sort of uniform centralized group, that gets directions what to "promote". Some people just have opinions, and do stuff out of conviction, not to get reward.
There is a uniform centralized group that operated for a decade under the name of Internet Research Agency, and almost certainly something like it continues to operate to this day. These had paid employees who got directions on what to promote with the goal of manipulating the public debate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Research_Agency
That was a private company operated by Prigozhin [1] who was, almost certainly, an extremely mentally unwell individual. He was the guy who formed the 'Wagner' private military company, supported Putin, then seemingly tried to overthrow Putin, and then was likely killed by Putin. When he left the stage, it was unceremoniously shut down alongside most of his other ventures. The spastic operations of the org would be pretty much in the character of Prigozhin without any grand 5D chess going on.
I'm also of the mindset that the effort to suggest there's state propaganda everywhere is, itself, mostly domestic state propaganda in an effort to try to 'otherize' dissenting views, especially as politicians and their actions become ever more unpopular.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yevgeny_Prigozhin
It's called Hybrid Warfare and is an explicit element in Russian military doctrine because it's such a cheap and effective force multiplier.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_hybrid_warfare
So that page didn't exist before December 2024, and was created by a guy whose done nothing but push anti-Russian propaganda, and links to a video in Ukrainian on his user page showing Russian soldiers being killed. Interestingly the page has also had segments of its edit timeline permanently deleted as well, which is something that never used to happen on Wiki.
Anyhow apparently examples of "Russian hybrid warfare" are the West cynically claiming Russia blew up its own oil pipeline. Those tricky Russians multiplying their forces by blowing up their own pipelines. Just imagine what they could achieve if they nuked themselves! Imagine, just for a second somebody linking to an article/account that was pro-Russian, but otherwise everything was equal but opposite. Can you even begin to imagine what you might think? Well that's what I'm thinking.
>something that never used to happen on Wiki
Revision deletion has existed for at least 17 years:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Revision_deletion (page created in 2009)
Thanks for the info! I've literally never once seen that done on Wikipedia, and pretty much the first thing I do when looking at a new page is go to the history.
I imagine Israel's various hasbara operation dwarfs its relevance and funding by multiple orders of magnitude. I don't see much evidence it plays a role outside of being useful to blame for inconvenient discourse.
Sure, but that's a good example. They obviously push pro-Israel, anti-Palestinian and probably a good deal of outright anti-Muslim positions.
But do you think they push random divisive issues, unrelated to their own interests, just to destabilize countries they don't like? I think the evidence for that is much weaker.
That wouldn't really make sense for Israel. They don't want America to be destabilised. They want it stable and supporting them. Same for European countries. They want Palestine and Iran unstable, but they've already achieved that through other means.
They certainly benefit from the division in the states. A large majority of AIPAC funding comes from American Evangelical groups. Why wouldn't they?
There's no doubt in my mind that there's a constant effort to keep it that way.
There's entire apps designed to organize brigading efforts online: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/01/24/gaza-is...
Israel? No. Russia? Absolutely; a country preoccupied with domestic conflict is less likely to interfere with others.
For a country of 8 million to "dwarf by multiple orders of magnitude" a country of 140 million in almost anything requires very lively imagination indeed.
Soft power operations are hard to measure. You cannot measure the impact of Israeli activities either.
> For a country of 8 million to "dwarf by multiple orders of magnitude" a country of 140 million in almost anything requires very lively imagination indeed.
I see you've never heard of Hasbara.
Anyway, there's little reason to think that influence scales with the size of the population as opposed to the number of people involved in active influence and funding, especially with Russia locking down access to the global internet. Israel simply has much, much, much, much more to gain from interfering in american culture than russia does (despite its being scapegoated by the least capable of our politicians).
Russia has its own Great Power status to lose, which they worked on since the 16th century. If they cannot defeat Ukraine and be seen as clear winners of this long war, no amount of nuclear weapons will help them regain their clout. Even their own heavily Muslim regions like Caucasus may well secede.
Why would you even need to measure? There are precedents.
VKomtakte social network was blocked because owners were russian, and there could interfere in internal affairs.
Why not block facebook? Its ownership has clear ties to Israel and it DOES interfere in elections and democratic process!
I clicked on the link wondering if the twist might be that it was from state-backed troll farm, but not the country we normally associate with state-backed troll farms...
However, from the article: "This may not always be classic foreign interference in the state-backed sense. Sometimes it's much more banal. It's in some ways more depressing, ... People sitting thousands of miles away working out that Canadian outrage is a profitable niche. I think they may not actually care about Canadian politics at all."
I wonder how "free speech absolutists" defend the idea of people in low-income countries using these platforms to spread outrage simply to make themselves a little money (and the platform owners a lot of money), rather than to "exercise their right to free speech" or whatever, given these people aren't saying anything they believe in (let alone have any interest in or even knowledge of). Not that you can really call it free speech if you are being paid to do it.
Free speech doesn't mean that we don't desire filters. Go check your gmail spam folder. Twitter would look identical to this with filters at all. What we really want is:
* transparency about the filters we have on our feeds
* the ability to tweak them if they're not working
* the ability to change providers without losing your entire social graph / reach
You are on to something but going the wrong path. It is all about personal decision making and not enforcement by goverment.
To put it:
" * Government decides and approves about the filters we have on our feeds * the government has the right and duty to tweak them if they're not working in the way a panel of experts decides * no ability to change providers since there is only one that takes care of your entire social graph / reach "
Choose the premise wisely.
You're not a free speech absolutist then.
Historically, all speech was considered "intentional". And by speech here I am including two distinct things: the expression of opinion, and the publication of opinion by a magazine/newspaper owner.
I separate those two things because they are very different with respect to the scale of the dissemination of speech. Nevertheless, magazines and newspapers are free to publish opinion, though it is significant in my opinion that in those cases there is an accountable individual (the editor/publisher).
It strikes me as different when we have social media platforms that amplify speech to a massive scale without any accountability. Clearly, monetization fuels the large-scale amplification of some undesirable speech so that 1. it is not an opinion expressed in good faith and 2. there is no directly accountable individual, unless the poster can be considered accountable for FBs large-scale publication of their speech, which feels perverse to me. It's effectively "robo-published".
There are some conclusions which could be drawn here, and I'm not sure which should be drawn if any. But I think it's important to point out that the details do matter (libel laws and "malice" for example) and that the details change in significant ways as society and technology change.
IME most people calling themselves a “free speech absolutist” absolutely believe those who agree with them should be free to speak, and anyone that might affect them negatively or just disagree should be stopped from oppressing or endangering them. The term usually means as little as the “democratic” in DPRK.
A true free speech absolutist would not be concerned with paid speech being blocked, in fact they should really be against paid speech, at least in the sense being discussed here. The point of free speech is to be able to say what you want and saying something else because you are paid to, because you can't afford to turn down the payment to say what someone else wants instead, is anti-free-speech.
This has nothing to do with free speech but giving an incentive (money) for posting which ruined every social media platform in existence (YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, etc.)
Why are you making it sound like speech needs to be qualified? The point of freedom of speech is that it doesn’t need to be approved by any authority.
Sounds more like a mealy mouthed argument against it.
Cash incentivised speech is arguably not free.
That would make most (if not all) of today's mainstream media speech (and not only) as "not free".
To add, in essence I agree with you, that's why I regard Jean-Jacques Rousseau as one of the really few free thinkers out there, i.e. because he was aware that as soon as he was accepting to be paid for what he was writing then his speech would become "imprisoned".
> That would make most (if not all) of today's mainstream media speech (and not only) as "not free".
Yep. I was going to say I wouldn't go as far as all, but I can't think of a mainstream counter example…
I'm not entirely sure that I believe this, although I do believe a strong argument can be made here.
I think the idea that various mechanisms in modern society are subtly corroding free speech en masse with various nasty knock-on effects is an interesting one though.
I've talked to enough free speech absolutists to know they would defend this behavior because they believe all speech should be allowed. It's written in the name of their ideology!
> I wonder how "free speech absolutists" defend the idea of people in low-income countries using these platforms to spread outrage simply to make themselves a little money
By recognizing that undesirable uses of free speech are the price society pays for having free speech, and by strongly believing that it is a price worth paying.
Just like 1.3 million global road traffic deaths per year are the price society pays for having cars, and believing that people should still be able to freely own and drive cars doesn’t make someone a “car absolutist”.
The idea that free speech should probably be restricted if it turns out that free speech can lead to unpleasant consequences misses the whole point of free speech – in many cases deliberately, I think.
Free speech absolutists just don't defend their position because it devolves into absurdity immediately. It's just a dogwhistle of the far right or people that haven't put any thought into their beliefs.
It’s interesting how the idea that free speech is too important to sacrifice to any other cause, which was the position of Rousseau and other enlightenment luminaries, has supposedly turned from the foundation of humanism into a “dog whistle”.
The implication that if someone is unwilling to compromise on free speech, they must belong to the far right, is certainly revealing.
> The implication that if someone is unwilling to compromise on free speech, they must belong to the far right, is certainly revealing.
No. The implication was almost no one who claimed to be unwilling to compromise on free speech was.
> Just like 1.3 million global road traffic deaths per year are the price society pays for having cars, and believing that people should still be able to freely own and drive cars doesn’t make someone a “car absolutist”.
Car traffic is heavily regulated to reduce the harm being done by cars/drivers.
Don't forget that undesirable uses of free speech can be made less effective by more speech - as long as what you desire is actually in the interest of the people you want to influence. Like for example this article.
And of course in this case the root problem is not that people have free speech but that they are financially rewarded for using it in bad ways. Financial models that reward impressions are fundamentally bad for society.
Those who are making the undesirable speech can counter their opponent's speech with more speech of their own - and they can afford to outspeak their opponents at any opportunity because they are paid to speak and their opponents are not.
Or maybe they can counter your speech because they have an argument and you do not.
To some extent, people also just need to be less credulous.
Being saturated with ragebait slop is a good way to get people to associate ragebait with wasting their time.
I'd wish the EU would pay for California separatism as much as the US is supporting breaking up the EU (Orban, AfD in Germany, Farage, ..)
The EU would be better off promoting separatism for the redneck states rather than specifically supporting California. Direct trade with California is tough, but if the southern states were to fall off, the east coast of the USA would still provide a decent area to trade with.
I always find it so interesting how little the topic of Californian independence comes up online. You would think there would at least be a decent amount of organic content around that, never mind external interference.
Separatism is born of a sense of ethnoracial exceptionalism:
1) we're a genealogically different ethnic group from the rest of the country
2) we're better than the major ethnic group of the rest of the country
Both bits are absolutely essential. I can't recall a single instance of a separatist movement based on purely political differences gaining serious ground, Alberta included.
It would be kind of a stretch to argue this as the reasons for separation of the US from the UK - I can see some of it, but I think the argument is a stretch.
I wouldn't define independence from colonial rule as separatism.
Why just ethnic? It can also be religious, ideological, or based on some economic interest. The US revolution was a mix of tax revolt and ideology. The British were the same ethnic group as most of the leaders of the revolution.
-One screenshot of Nieta Aqila's Meta monetization dashboard, which she posted, showed she made roughly $14 US in a month when she was active in Alberta Facebook groups.
So brave CBC making this woman doing this to eke out a few bucks the star of this exposé while the fb executives enabling this get to remain nameless
Canada may not have laws against this, but some countries might classify this as "subversive activity harmful to the nation". That is normally punished by imprisonment, losing the right to conduct business and hold public office.
Usually they couldn't care less about what you say about another country. Unless, of course, if you say bad things about a certain country when you are in another certain country, you get deported. Hmm.
She lives in a different country, Canadian laws can't do anything about it. I'm not sure what the answer is to this, but it's a real problem.
Oh, I was thinking of going after Facebook given that they finance the operation.
And it should be Facebook who’s held accountable.
Well done to the journalist that uncovered this. Makes a change from copying and pasting press releases that many 'journalists' seem to do these days (partly because journalist organizations have been so hollowed out by Facebook et al).
If Facebook propaganda is so effective (and cheap) Western democracies should promote democratic values in Belarus/Kazakhstan.
Canada should use this channel to promote tariff cancellation in the USA.
I doubt that Facebook is efficient on important matter. If I'm wrong then Canadian government is doing very bad job in promoting democratic values in and outside Canada.
There is an assymetry cause by the fact that way more foreigners speak English fluently, than Americans/Canadians/British who speak foreign languages fluently.
So, they're naturally able to influence the West way more than the West can influence them.
Facebook is not a universal tool that is used the same way in every country in the world. As a start, there are more Facebook users in Canada both in absolute numbers and percentage of population than in Belarus. Internet censorship also doesn't help.
The countries that would need this the most are usually also the countries where it is the hardest to reach their population from the outside.
I doubt it’s an effective channel for promoting liberalism (or even rationality). In North America at least the folks most engaged on Facebook tend to be media illiterate and reactionary leaning. The smart people left long ago.
The US used to have that program (Voice of America). Trump shut it down because promoting democracy is woke.
Democracy is just a political slogan, if so called democracy is there, why political leadership favor billionaires over public.
Same for Datacenters, MAGA and a ton of other things. Algorithms are being abused to manipulate reality for people and people know it. But they still get swept up because it feels so real when you're reading hundreds of comments, seeing countless articles and posts and videos.
Reddit is 49% indian and 27% african and i doubt either groups have an incentive to spread misinformation against trump. But maybe you now something I don't?
MAGA people are easy to ragebait and sell to
Correct.
MAGA are mostly inherently dumb, gullible, and afraid. And 'strongman' (fascism) is the answer for dumb, gullible, and afraid.
And from an accompanying article https://nypost.com/2026/04/21/us-news/top-maga-influencer-em...
> He said he also attempted to make a liberal counterpart for Hart on Instagram, but “Democrats know that it’s AI slop, so they don’t engage as much,” he said.
We're now solidly in a point of tine that a random 3rd world noodle merchant can make livable money by significantly warping and distorting governments across the world. I dont know the solution for this, but Id have a real hard look at DMCA Section 230, and social media's responsibility in enabling and amplifying.
I live here, rural and in areas you'd expect this to have more traction. Nobody is even talking about it. It just doesn't come up in conversation. It might get fifteen percent of the vote and only then because only people that care will bother to show up.
Fellow AB resident here.... then what do you make of their claim that 99.2% (or whatever the number was) of residents in Sylvan Lake, Drumheller etc signed the petition? Has to be completely fabricated right?
Suspect or poorly worded
I agree that the most obvious answer is probably correct, and I think that it was a poorly worded statement, however, I haven't seen them correct it yet (doesn't mean they haven't.... just that I haven't seen it).
These incentives are IMO a significant part of the political problems we are having around the world and even the general decline in mental health.
Just on a personal level I’ve found it hard for example to get YouTube and Facebook to stop showing me short videos, which I don’t want to see. You can click the “not interested” or “show less” button, and it doesn’t do much.
What works though if you apply it consistently is, when you see something on a feed that you don’t want anymore, is to immediately close the app and don’t come back for a while at least. That’s the strongest signal you can send to their recommender.
Imperial boomerang strikes again
The headline is rather misleading, it indicates a specific intent. But all the article reports is that there are overseas accounts that post about Alberta separatism because it creates clicks and hence money.
Nothing to do specifically with albertan separatism, it has (and will) happened with plenty of other topics as well.
It doesn't indicate intent. It indicates incentives and outcomes.
A system is what a system does, not what a system is claimed to stand for.
The original phrase, "the purpose of a system is what it does", was coined as a contrast to people saying "the purpose of this system is X" even though it consistently fails to achieve X. It does not make sense to look at an arbitrary problem and declare that the system is that problem or exists to produce the problem.
Facebook does this consistently though.
Bars consistently serve people who will later drive home drunk, and yet it would be wrong to say the purpose of a bar is to cause drunk driving.
If you reread my comment, you will see that I never said the purpose was what it does.
That word choice was not by accident, it wasn't meant to be a simple paraphrase.
I said a system is what it does. In this case bars are the cause of drunk driving, just like in my parallel. Not on purpose. But by effect.
You mismatched my statement to the famous quote, then pointed out it didn't fit. I know that one doesn't. That's why I said something different.
My entire point is that identity and effect are not the same as purpose.
I don't understand your point. Identity and effect are not the same as purpose, but identity also isn't the same as effect. If a news headline read "Bars are encouraging foreigners to drive drunk", and the contents were just that the reporter compiled a list of 14 foreigners who were served alcohol when the bartender knew they drove there, I would say that's similarly misleading.
What if it was a list of 14 foreigners that were given money for drinking even though the bartender knew they drove there?
Still seems impossible to interpret without knowing how many Canadians were given money under similar circumstances.
There's a problem here that people don't necessarily consider. Ignore motives for a bit. Lets say that large groups of people really, really wanted to spread positive, constructive messages on social media. Perhaps about how important it is to read and exercise and not to consume passive content. Or how kind it is to put group differences aside and focus on the things we have in common. Etc.
I'd argue that it just wouldn't work. Outrage is what's "engaging" and it is engagement which actually forces these things to go viral and spread. You are therefor limited in what sort of information you can spread on social media, at least in the virality sense. You could not, for instance, use social media to "trick" millions of people into practicing calculus every day. And you could not use social media to coerce people into spending hours meditating.
It's of course not that you could never house this content on social media, but instead that this content could never be viral, never make a strong, immediate emotional impression in the eyes of the viewer. Practicing calculus or meditation is much, much more than a strong, quick, (and I'd argue) innate emotional reaction to bare stimulus. It requires focus and participation.
So it's not just that there are these little evil troll farms sowing discord around the world. Rather, outrage, and particularly outage about social or tribal topics will always float to the top in any sort of system (algorithmic or not) that preferences engagement. There will always be at least outrage in the general population of posters (whether "natural" or else astroturfed) who are putting out outrage content, and this content will always be treated preferentially in any system that filters for outrage content. It's quite hard to avoid. You actually see this on the "boring" 4Chan boards. There is no algorithm in the modern sense of the word (although of course there is something like an algorithm in the literal sense of the word) and on these boring boards you just cannot get much much traction when starting a thread that is not a "troll" thread. A normal, informative thread gets fewer replies, and so it falls off the front page, and then no one sees, and so it gets even fewer replies.
In other words, these systems will always privilege outrage bait, even if they had real incentives to attempt to avoid it. There are only certain topics that get people fired up in a quick, immediate, emotional sort of way -- and the communication systems we've built and have become addicted to will only preference that sort of communication. Identifying these troll farms matters, but why would a crappy little troll farm from far away be able to to write content that captivates you. If they wrote a book, you wouldn't read it. If you directed a TV series, you wouldn't watch it. But one dumb little caption on an image about how a person from the wrong group has trespassed against you and it sticks in your mind forever. People need to think about why that is.
The title is a bit misleading. The title suggests that Facebook is intentionally paying for a political interference campaign targeting Alberta. It sounds more like it is the monetary incentive structure that indirectly encourages this type of behavior.
It has been years since I signed into Facebook. The content on Facebook is just vile and disgusting, IMO. I remember signing in 3 years ago, and signing out less than a minute later because I couldn't look at it. It wasn't content from people I knew. It was all the thirst traps, rage bait, weird ads, and other garbage. I don't think normal humans still use Facebook, do they? I can't imagine regularly frequenting a sewer like that.
The same thing happened with the BLM groups during Covid. It was mostly people from overseas that created the groups and were promoting them.
Any political issue that is popular or viral will have stuff like this. It’s definitely not unique to this one Alberta issue since it happens all the time. It’s just a topic that has reached beyond a local issue so it gets good traction on social media.
YouTube and Tiktok have been paying creators for years. You can guarantee people will post stuff that gets traction, not just nefariously but even regular creators getting pushed in certain directions because it’s a reliable source of views. Many will do it for free just for attention or a sense of power.
Ironically comment section is essentially a more meta version of why peddling this content is so lucrative. For every Canadian who might click there's 10x that number of people in the US and Europe who'd either be rage baited or confirmation bias'd into clicking because of how what's going on in Alberta squares with their own ideology politics.
Albrexit?
Alberxit?
Albexit?
Albertadieu
Albertata!
Alberticide
Dumb and Dumbererer.
Hahalberta
Almost like a digital Cobra Effect[1]
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive
This feels illegal.
Facebook is also paying far right israelis, whose content incites violence against Palestinians.
> a new report titled “Monetizing Occupation: Meta’s Financial Enablement of Settlement Activity and Violent Rhetoric Against Palestinians.” The report reveals how Meta allows Israeli far-right pages, settler-affiliated accounts, and extremist media outlets to generate revenue through its platforms, despite publishing violent, racist, and inciting content against Palestinians, and despite many being directly linked to promoting illegal settlement expansion, as well as widespread violence and attacks against Palestinians in the West Bank.
https://7amleh.org/post/meta-monetizes-settlements-and-viole...
Meta is absolutely just bunch of griefers. The only thing they add to society is division, enragement and rage bait content. Fuck meta and their garbage products.
But we most keep them that they are indeed visionaries of enshitification.
The root issue is the monetization. If engagements weren’t monetized, no one will be incentivized to post in rage bait or hot topics for the most part, and of course, if you live in a country where $100 a month is a quality of life, you will have thousands of these posters. Look at twitter, if you browse it now you will think ww4 is imminent (as if ww3 started already), everyone is hating and attacking everything and everyone else, ragebait, clickbait, and all sort of baits just so the account owner get paid at the end of the month, a grift.
Check this grifter, indian in canada, running a bot to support MAGA to grift and milk engagements, will this bot exist if monetization wasn’t a thing?
https://ottawacitizen.com/news/ottawa-man-ai-bot-maga
>74% of Indian applicants for Canadian study permits in August were rejected, up from 32% in August 2023
https://www.reuters.com/world/india/fearing-fraud-canada-rej...
Seems Canada hasn't rejected enough of them yet?
tl;dr:
> [The person they're investigating] even posted about income she generates from Meta's monetization program, which rewards creators for engagement and solicits subscribers on her personal page.
Facebook pays people to post content that people "engage" with, outrage is engagement, and tiny amounts of money incentive money are significant to poor people in the 3rd world.
It's the same cluster of facts that lead to "Shrimp Jesus" slop: https://www.forbes.com/sites/danidiplacido/2024/04/28/facebo....
Western governments are so concerned when this happens to them (at arguably a tiny scale) compared to the “interventions” they’ve supported around the world for almost one hundred years.
Rules for thee and not for me. Sure, Canada isn’t the CIA, but they’ve been right there with the US from Iran to Ukraine.
NATO (of which Canada is a founding member or) actively supports Kosovar separatism, it has even started an unprovoked and illegal war on account of it, at the end of of it all what would be wrong with one of Canada's federal states deciding to split off? If anything, the international community could send some Blue Helmets force there in order to support the local Albertans in the face of Ottawa-led occupation.
The Canadian Supreme Court has ruled that provinces essentially have the right to separate. There are a bunch of conditions, but they have the right to separate, the Federal government is required to negotiate separation in good faith.
Canada is not being hypocritical.
Then why the fuss?
The fuss is because this means it might actually happen, despite the majority not wanting it to.
”Facebook is paying out to creators of monetized content because that content is popular”
Would also work as a headline. But wouldn’t attract as many clicks I guess. The implication that Facebook is actively promoting a certain view point is disgusting, and old media loves to do that (even though they were historically the ones doing so). I’m all for local filtering (on some level) and preventing foreign interference on local political matters, and social media companies ought to do better. But I twist my nose at old media shamelessly trying to manipulate the views of people on tech. And this is Facebook we’re talking about here…
Paying money for a particular viewpoint is promoting it. This is not complicated.
(yes, this is a serious problem with content monetization intermediaries; somehow as soon as the topic is sexual everyone immediately understands what the problem is and rushes to condemn the intermediary)
NATO is not a company that does business in Russia. Facebook is a company that does business in Canada and as a result is subject to whatever conditions Canada imposes.
Nah, that would absolutely miss the point.
The point is that Facebook's mechanisms drive poor people in the third world to promoting division in the developed world.
Doesn't need to be some sort of evil scheme in order to be dangerous. Often dangerous things come from people not thinking through the consequences of their actions instead of mustachio-twirling supervillains executing elaborate plans.