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Comment by s_m_t | Hacker News Reader

Well.... did they say anything untrue?

Our media stations are propaganda outlets as well. I get my 'news' from many different propaganda sources because I've found that it is very easy to tell when they are outright lying so I can just ignore that, but typically they say something that is close to the truth. The thing is that there is so much truth out there so each propaganda outlet will tell some portion of the truth that fits their narrative the best. If you grab all these different portions of the truth you can begin to piece it all together and have the biggest piece of the truth possible.

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If you listen to interviews with any politicians or intelligence officials it's pretty obvious that they are dancing around the truth and never answering any questions. This is a partisan hit job.

And I can't tell if the DNC is supposed to be a private or government entity. If you complain that they cheated and screwed over Bernie, people respond with "well it's a private organization, they can do what they want". But now it's a matter of "election rigging" and "national security" that they've supposedly been hacked.

And if the information released was true, who cares if it was a hack? If the information is true, which it appears to be, then it was a service to our country that it was released.

Where I sit with the entire thing is that this is a stark lesson in why security is important, and how effective phishing scams are.

However, once that information is out there, and verifiable through means like DKIM, we should absolutely scrutinize its content, and every voter should follow reports closely.

This report was commissioned with bipartisan support from congress. So, is it a "bipartisan hit job"?

"Partisan" is a more generic term. It's one set of groups going after another.

This report had no Congressional involvement. Obama ordered the intelligence estimate.

If Americans can agree on anything, let it be that foreign parties must stay out of our elections. Of course Russia said untrue things. They ran active disinformation campaigns in addition to the email leaks (read the "Key Judgements" section...). Didn't help that voters were ready to eat it up during a domestic battle between warring media corporations. The chaos and confusion stirred by this election will take years if not decades to settle.

If by staying out of our elections you mean stop participating in political speech then I don't see how that is going to happen or why it should happen.

> If Americans can agree on anything, let it be that foreign parties must stay out of our elections.

I'm not agreeing to that in any way, and the US doesn't feel the same way about any other election in the world.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/10/13...

Your comment isn't a contradiction to what the parent comment said. They said stay out of United States elections, not the elections of other nations.

You can be against both.

This seems not just wrong, but dangerously wrong. There is a huge difference between a propaganda outlet and an imperfectly comprehensive or objective news source.

How am I dangerously wrong? C'mon don't throw that out there and then not back it up.

Because you refuse to distinguish between an attack on your mind and a good-faith but imperfect attempt to share genuine information. These are two very different things, and treating one as the other damages your ability to reason about the information you get from that source. More insidiously, it is likely to lead you to treat everything as somewhere more towards the middle of the two than it actually is (e.g. "everything is propaganda, but it contains some truth I can glean and some parts I need to reject"), thus offering an "in" for the dedicated attacker while refusing some good information that could help you course-correct.

More broadly, it serves to normalize propaganda by treating a deliberate attempt to trick us as if it were the same thing as an honest but maybe imperfect attempt at sharing information.

In that an "objective news source" is a complete fiction, yes. Propaganda outlets exist.

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