Just waiting for a random US future president to create an "Internet" branch of the military. Maybe that's already happened.
Internet is a communications medium. It was destined to be flooded with propaganda, whatever you try to call your particular flavour.
Or as I have been saying since the 1990's, the only difference between marketing and propaganda is that with marketing at least you are trying to peddle a product instead of an ideology.
The difference now is the speed, cost and scale. It is super cheap to spread crap today than ever. Also it is quick and the reach is massive.
By the way, Manufacturing Consent is a depressing book. You’d lose what little faith you have in media, if you read it…
God knows what % of the population has mental issues because we watch too much Twitter and Facebook and other crap
Here's AI Trump and AI Biden debating live now on Twitch (video isnt great as of today but the voices are) https://m.twitch.tv/videos/2157689323
Difference today is you can stoke the flames of public outrage with just a few people, without even setting foot in the country, while maintaining a lot of plausible deniability, since the modern playbook relies heavily on uncertainty and confusion, meaning you can safely target allies without significant risk of being caught (even if you're caught, you can deny it and say it's hostile propaganda).
If anything, this makes me question the accuracy of historical events that happened before humanity had access to such tools.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Cyber_Command is the closest thing that we have today. It's not a formal branch, though, but rather a joint effort across the existing branches.
A cursory look and it seems Germany and China were first to having a specific branch, but China dissolved theirs
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyber_and_Information_Domain_S...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People%27s_Liberation_Army_Str...
Why internet is the battlefield? Because everything in our world is based on an opinion. You can sell a lot of bs to your “client” if he has “correct” opinion.
Bad news, our opinion system was designed for groups and villages, not for the internet.
Cyber Force!
They have cyber marines, cyber carriers, cyber destroyers, cyber bombers, cyber jets, and cyber drones. They even have their own sister agency called Veterans Affairs where veterans can go to get virtual healthcare treatment.
The US hasn't been especially loud about it, but it's been a dominant force in 'internet warfare.'
This is not a war.
how competent they actually are at this, who knows...
US military spent over half a billion on war propaganda - outsourced to experts.
Israelis are just doing what their version of Judaism is telling them to do, it's the neocon Zionists in the US that finance it that are the real danger. It isn't just that they don't care about Palestinian lives, they don't care about Israeli lives, either. They care about Israeli contracts.
Allies influencing other allies is part of the process. Don't just think that it is Israel doing it in America. America is also doing similar actions in other countries where they want to win favour.
Yes? This happens periodically when someone is caught doing something outside of normal diplomatic duties.
Americans’ views of the Israeli people are broadly positive [1].
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/05/30/how-ameri... 64%
"The survey puts numbers on trends that have become increasingly apparent: Cable news viewers are more supportive of Israel’s war effort, less likely to think Israel is committing war crimes, and less interested in the war in general. People who get their news primarily from social media, YouTube, or podcasts, by contrast, generally side with the Palestinians, believe Israel is committing war crimes and genocide, and consider the issue of significant importance.
WE OFTEN HEAR people say that “Twitter isn’t real life” or that “Nobody watches cable news,” but the survey asked where people get most of their news, asking them to pick just one, and cable and social media won out. Most Americans do in fact get their news either primarily from cable (42 percent) or social media like TikTok, Instagram, or another platform (18 percent). A third of people said they get their news from YouTube or podcasts, with 13 percent saying they got most of their news that way.
Asked generally where folks got their news on a day-to-day basis, with a “check all that apply” option, it’s even more clear how dominant cable (55 percent), social media (38 percent), and podcasts/YouTube (34) are compared to print, at 21 percent. (I read the survey as using “print” as a stand-in for any text-based media, whether digital like The Intercept or on actual printed paper.) "
Even the polls you referenced show how stark the contrast between young and old americans are on this topic. Some of the older americans barely have any education on this topic but just stick with the zionist propaganda they were fed when they were younger, they couldn't even locate Israel/Palestine on a map.
Most of the older christian zealots don't have the critical thinking skills or capacity to change their mind on the topic because their indoctrination is so thorough that they'd rather deny reality than face the facts. Not surprising considering they grew up on a mantra that the so called "chosen" people can do no wrong.
I think if those christians who voted favorably had seen how israelis spit[3] on christians and assault[4][5] christians, their opinions would change swiftly, but the news channels they consume won't feed them this reality because consent needs to be manufactured.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent
[1] https://theintercept.com/2024/04/30/gaza-israel-palestine-ca...
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJNfKTO7XK8
Israel seems to only extend that sort of courtesy to a part of its citizenry, but when you remember that the "stable" countries in the region are all more-or-less absolute monarchies, it becomes obvious why the US is willing to at least work with Israel.
There have been over 100 Arabs in the Israeli parliament: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Arab_members_of_the_Kn...
More directly: apartheid "democracy" > monarchy?
What do you mean at least work with Israel? The US is propping up Israel and without that ally Israel would probably implode. What’s messed up is how disrespectful Israel and some of their politicians are to US and their citizens. One thing I like about Israel is that they have a variety of oppinions and schools of thought. What we’re currently seeing is coming from the radical right wing and those atrocities will unfortunately stain Israelis of all types. Hope they do at the next elections.
All most people know is the spin they've gotten from the media and politicians. Both tend to be very pro Israel in the US. That's changed a little recently, but not much.
It's bipartisan enough that I don't believe the parties will be able to come to an agreement to enact any meaningful change. This goes beyond the Republican vs. Democrat issues so it's much more difficult to make this a partisan issue to rally mass support from either party.
I know propaganda is a thing, but it feels like we are getting more about a foreign government than our own.
I feel like before what is going on now I was aware of some of the groups responsible for this being a thing, but was not fully aware just how much money there was in it those organizations until recently.
Some of the practices are concerning, like I found out recently apparently the Boston police regularly go over to Israel for training?
Regardless of what is going on right now, I don't understand how this much power over the US was ever deemed acceptable?
The Israel / Palestine conflict is one of those low-valence issues with the general public where a politician rarely gets punished for voting one way or another with the notable exception of cash lobbying and super PACs for/against a given candidate.
You also get stuff like the POTUS repeating lies like "40 beheaded babies" and "a mother and child had kerosene poured on them" with none of the usual media freakout you usually see over "misinformation."
Next to articles about the protests or other things, there are the articles about the hostages or something else that just feels like a propaganda piece aimed at one thing.
And that is just the headlines.
Yeah. The politicians who repeated this also never apologized for inflaming tensions without any evidence or investigation whatsoever. But anything Israel is accused of, requires thorough investigation by Israel (or sometimes independently - without ever mentioning Israel will not allow independent investigators into Gaza), before we can even think about trusting the people they're killing currently, regardless of affiliation.
Then you read https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20231215-israel-social...
And you see that 20 children 15 and younger were killed in total, and out of them 10 by rockets, which starts to paint very different picture. So militants killed 20-36 children depending on how you wish to define a child, out of 1200 people in total. So that's 1.7-3% of killed victims.
On the other hand, you get at least 16 000 killed children by Israel in just the last 8 months. 60 a day at least.
https://time.com/6909636/gaza-death-toll/
And you can see 10-5 a day individually just scrolling through video posts on telegram https://t.me/eyeonpal/
And we're supposed to think that Hamas are child killing monsters and Israel is not and somehow uniquely righteous. Yeah, right. Just the math alone on this doesn't compute for me, at all.
That is currently the NYT headline - How can you call it Israeli propaganda is beyond me.
US politicians can direct funds to Israel and Israel can support them or attack their rivals.
That's really common for most countries on earth though[0]. Gaining exposure and experience from other countries is very valuable for police forces.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Law_Enforcement_...
I can't prove that these are somehow connected to funding from Israel, but it seemed like these billboards were ready to go at a moment's notice.
As far as why we deem foreign propaganda as acceptable, I like to think that we play dumb about it in part so we can strategically point it out when it is in the favor of politicians and/or elites. Remember how Russian propaganda supposedly got Trump elected even though it was going on during prior years when the establishment insisted on the integrity of the elections? On the other hand, maybe we are just dumb.
How do you know how much we get from Israel relative to others?
Free speech sometimes applies to things you don’t like. There’s pro and anti propaganda for just about any foreign interest. Some of it’s just more subtle such as recommendations on TikTok.
Ukraine had really obvious pro Ukraine requests for military aid and images of destruction, but quite a bit of pro Russia propaganda was more subtle aiming for people to stay out of it.
With Israel you see some really blatant pro Israel propaganda, but both sides also have a lot of more subtle stuff.
I think the more worrying is going after the low information voter. I didn't think Russia's election interference had much effect in 2016, but now when you look at US Media (largely conservative outlets) their footprint is very visible.
So they may recognize trolling, but if you tell them "Hey, the President of Israel tweeted at you," they just assume it was the President of Israel.
* my grandmother can't recognize fake information
* my grandmother is old
* politicians are old
* therefore politicians can't recognize fake information
Politics has always been full of deception, people doing politics professionally for decades should know a bit or two about it.
Take a look a r/worldnews vs any other subreddit discussing this topic. r/worldnews is controlled. Negative comments towards Israel get comments deleted and users banned. Any other subreddit, there are people arguing from multiple directions. On r/worldnews, you only see dissenting opinions for the first hour or so until the mods "clean up the thread".
Obviously, this is anecdotal information and probably slightly biased.
It's just a different echo chamber...
If you're wondering why politics sometimes seem out of touch, it's because politicians, their media and the commentariat are locked into an echo chamber already.
If I were an actor interested in influencing the policy of another country, why would I spend $$$ on manipulating the voting populace if I can poison the feed of the people who matter for far less?
Do you know of any? Can you cite them?
Jordan seems to be a much stronger friend to us in the region.
Spying and keeping tabs on your friends is one thing. Influence campaigns among close allies are generally not the way it works.
Someone from their group is clearly thinking ahead and automating all of them out of a job :)
Note the biggest word in the cloud: UNRWA. All my confirmation bias was in one direction in October. The oddly dissonant and desperate messaging you'd see made things extremely difficult to maintain that, like, you have to be of a very specific mindset to see message after message about the evil UN and not say, "uh, did we go off the rails somewhere?"
(n.b. this was in a lefty Jewish space, broadly denigrating governmental institutions isn't a usual virtue signal)
Going back to the beginning, there's an uncomfortable willingness/ignorance of Overton window widening, in a way that reduces sympathy rather than engenders it, and all of a sudden, otherwise kind people are engaging in rank racism*, glorification of destruction, and extreme conspiracies**.
* lots of "no such thing as innocent Palestineans", "Palestineans love redacted", when questioned, turns into "it's not racist if they're not a race, and they aren't because bla bla bla"
** Day after day after day of the bailey, "World Central Kitchen was trying to smuggle terrorists", coupled to the motte "Jose Andres held a barbecue buffet! Lol!"
I think saying "evil" anything is wrong. But the UN is still a body made up of people, and like everything has its flaws. Its done some things that have turned out great and truly made the world a better place. Its done other things that haven't worked out so well. I certainly don't think it is above criticism.
So good luck to you, but I'm not surprised you'd stay private But my anecdata (or some may call life experience) tell me you'd be fine and fare well where a similarly extreme position on the opposite end of the spectrum would cost you a lot personally and professionally. I wish we all reflected in the West or in tje region or conflict area, well, why is that?
For the record since I inevitably get routinely called an anti-Semite anyway: I think Hamas and groups like them are vile, but many in the region opposing them don't take the high road by comparison either. Im nkt sure if its recent or monitoring that become easier and more economical, but that means their opponents with this crap and other tactics have really screwed up. This HN post further supports my cynicism and disappointment.
That's a solvable tech problem to shut it down. Unfortunately, it's not a priority on a state level because everyone is doing it.
Evidence aside, I personally think it is extremely likely that Russia, China and most other countries active on the world stage have tried to "interfere" in US politics to some degree, but nowhere near the amount that we interfere in the politics of other countries or that Israel interferes in ours.
These campaigns were multifaceted and included calling proven basic facts into question, going so far as to suggest Russia wasn't interfering at all.
Convincing people to disbelieve this basic fact precluded them from any possible consideration of whether Russia was supporting specific candidates, how Russia might benefit from such a candidate taking power, and why Russia might consider interference to be worth the effort, money, and risk.
This disbelief would also preclude any consideration about why the politician might:
- support such Russian meddling by pretending it did not exist
- make unsupported claims implicating their political opponents which completely ignored known facts
- play dumb whenever the subject came up
It was a playbook, followed to incredible success in conjunction with other propaganda efforts.
This all served to enable the politician to completely avoid addressing core questions about why Russia would support the candidate to the point of interfering with US elections to begin with.
> last decade
well over a century..
The thing is that it’s a Constant. It’s not a new or surprising thing like fake news presents it as.
You mean through completely accepted and legal campaign donations to pretty much every major politician? Oh no wait that’s AIPAC and Israel and “just fine”. You mean through bots that post shit on FB right?
I don’t care for conspiracies, but I do wonder why American politicians don’t try to stop donations from foreign government institutions to politicians in general. JFK was on track to do just that before he was murdered.
It's pretty important that most stories about this conflict and similar current affairs get flagged, because otherwise HN's front page would consist of little else, and that's not the purpose of the site. But it's also important that the topics not be ignored completely, even though they're painful. There's no happy medium here, unfortunately.
Here are some links to previous explanations. If you (or anyone, of course) have a look at these and still have a question that isn't answered there, I'd be happy to take a crack at it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40418881 (May 2024)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39920732 (April 2024)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39618973 (March 2024)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39435324 (Feb 2024)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39435024 (Feb 2024)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39237176 (Feb 2024)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39161344 (Jan 2024)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38947003 (Jan 2024)
Brigaded reports? 4chan solved it by adding a mandatory enum to reports to specify what the report is reporting for. Identifying bad reports and banning users as a result becomes trivial.
Flooding with stories about a particular topic? That's what stickies are for and they work particularly well so that mods can auto-delete any non-sticky stories pertaining to the MOT.
Flamewar on a MOT? Add a sticky to the top of the thread like reddit does saying moderation will be minimal and to enter the thread at your own risk.
Just like I've predicted many times on HN.
Text generation is low on the list of things needed to successfully engage in automated spam. Social media is built on reputation, not who can write generic believable text the quickest. And funny enough the ex-OpenAI people (mostly Helen) calling for gov regulation said GPT should not have been released to the public because of this risk.
This is not the whole picture at all. I’d even say mostly incorrect. You can definitely influence public opinion with a social media consisting entirely of bots, provided the public aren’t aware of it.
but like most articles about Israeli hacking, US Big Tech involvement in the war, etc it was immediately flagged once it reached the front page.
I don’t know how much of this is moderators removing posts, or if there is a pro-Israel brigade that is censoring HN’s front page.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_Internet_Defense_Force
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWD5xiiafBc
it's prudent to assume such operations are still ongoing
This article is from Hareetz, which is a major newspaper in Israel.
There's a huge, organized Israel lobby aimed at the US. It's no secret. There's AIPAC, the American-Israel Political Action Committee. "Lobbying for Pro-Israel Policies", it says on their web site. There are official organizations in the government of Israel which do "public diplomacy".[1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_diplomacy_of_Israel
It's not like we haven't done this either. I worked for a company in 2005 which was doing this paid for by politicians. Moment I worked this out, I quit.
You can sit there and do nothing and wait for your enemy to paint you in a bad light and the next thing you know your usual political allies are throwing money and aid at your enemy. Or you protect your citizens as best as possible by entering the game. The moral high ground may have a higher body count.
This point applies to both sides for ref. And because it's a war, the rules of fair play go out of the window until people are on trial afterwards.
i dont know of a single country that wouldnt do the same in their position.
I mean it'd be nice not to have them but as a species we're stupid animals with stupid ideas so there's no end of it in sight.
I don't agree with any of it for ref.
I mean, if Israel started bombing me, I'd try to garner support from US citizens too? There is a world of difference between that and faking social media accounts
We need to better define what propaganda is. To me it's misleading or false information with the purpose of facilitating a political outcome. Or deceptive information not meant for selling a product.
This definition is good enough, I don't see why it would need a redefinition.
I think those who overuse the term ought to explain it in their own words.
The entire history of our species runs counter to this. The most peaceful periods are uni or bipolar dynamic. Pax Americana is statistically meaningful [1].
> Once parties lack the resources for war
Generally speaking, impoverishment increases violence.
For a country which is meant to be one of the smartest out there, their propaganda campaigns are an utter disaster giveaway to anyone with a pulse and a few dozen brain cells.
You want to see some of the crap the agencies were pushing out pre-Brexit and it worked, so I wouldn't classify the average UK citizen as much to be contended with (I am UK as well for ref).
Seems their propaganda works just fine if that's a commonly held belief :)
The funding is what secures these politicians' votes. The propaganda is what the politicians can use to justify their actions to everyone else. That it's laughably bad is a function less of the capabilities of Israel than the utter fealty that these politicans have to the Israeli cause.
In: blame FB comments for congress funding Israel
Is it really that hard to imagine congress supporting the democratic country with one of the biggest pride parades in the world vs the country that hasn’t had elections in 18 years and is split between 2 leaders who disagree on pretty much everything?
Do you mean NYC Pride or Sao Paolo Gay Pride Parade?
I assume most countries with designs in foreign politics do much the same.
It has been a long while since I worked with them- the basic idea was that you could identify how people related to each other via their public posts, identify communities by topic, then identify how people influenced each other.
Some topics were harder to automate- if we took as an example b the keyword "abortion" you'll find multiple opposed groups. Searching for terrorists was somewhat similar- their public mouthpieces would use certain words, and their detractors would use the same words in opposition.
I won't go into too much further detail because while the company closed in 2022 I really respected the owners and I suspect they're going to find a way to bring the idea of the company back in a new form.
Still I fail to understand why the mods let this happen. Maybe quantity over quality.
(Alternately, the client state that controls its patron.)
The upside is the relationship is symbiotic, US expands Israel's borders, wreaking havock in the region, but tests US's war apparatus under "defence" and prevents a unified Arab/Asia/Indo state.
Israel gets free reign to ignore international law, billions, while touting some story about a 'promised land'.
https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/lawmaker-n...
So I want to say that it's not entirely clear to me that social media peer pressure campaigns are not on occassion counter productive. Automating it seems like it would be potentially disasterous. At the end of the day, there's much we still dont know about psychology, particularly when it comes to efforts at online persuasion.
The point of this campaign was to highlight "fake social accounts tricking" "Black lawmakers and young progressives" (>Black lawmakers in the U.S., particularly Democrats., >young Americans, >Black Americans) because at least someone wants them to think that they, their teams and their followers are weak & easy targets, thus reducing their perceived competence and credibility without the necessity of success of the campaign itself, except that similar campaigns existed for pro-Russia and fuck-Russia content all while celebrating Ukraine's destruction, sorry, fight for independence, officially.
These campaigns are part of a cluster. They are not meant to merely polarize but to make some people resign and follow public/ the states' opinions much quicker than they normally would. At the same time, buffs, journalists, educated people and the rational kind spend more time sieving through information sources that are bloated.
I'm not saying this is a conspiracy, hell no, it's entanglement, it's marketing, it's the business of politics and national establishments and companies challenging each other to test ludicrous strategies to sway public opinion. It's all from the modern "The Drump" playbook. Just imagine how at least enough people who fall for campaigns like this, feel when they are told the truth. How many will get angry, really? How many are going to start gearing and studying up? Who are they to trust if their own government supports governments who have the need to run campaigns like this?
This whole "making people support conflicting causes" has been working pretty damn well for the (alt)Right, who is desperately trying to diminish young peoples' independence and turn them all into obedient followers to sell their 'stones are really hard' books and narratives and time on screen.
It's just dozens of millions but that's the few you need make the elected look your way when they are ready to pay2win "at all cost".
So how can we fight this with engineering? We need analysis run by red and blue teams from universities worldwide. I mean it's 2024. The scientific community does it, but their time is dictated by the scientific method. Or are there live projects already?
On a more serious note, I figured the majority of US lawmakers already supported the genocide. I'm surprised Israel feels the need to use propaganda for this
Just like how we knew everyone was always spying on everyone else long before Snowden, we should all know that everyone is doing this to everyone else long before all the revaluations come down to us. There is no benefit to assuming good faith here.
