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Comment by croon | Hacker News Reader

Going off things like this [1], I'm going to say yes. (See location tag)

[1] http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:/...

if that's the evidence that Russia instigated black activism in the U.S. , where's the evidence that the U.S. government didn't plant a falsely geo-tagged photo and then bring attention to it in every news outlet that it can influence in order to instigate U.S. hatred towards Russia?

I don't care either way, but I don't really think that either possibility is far from probable -- and the barrier to entry for this kind of trickery is just obscenely low as far as nation-state bickering goes.

I personally feel that you raise a good question. I believe that the US is much closer to civil war than most realize, and the government is trying to prevent it by lowering fuel and grain prices, spurring economic growth without hurting the lower class anymore, and creating a common enemy(Russia). I know the only ones claiming Russian involvement is the US government and media.

However, I don't think it's a bad thing. Despite our issues, civil war would be a terrible, horrid occurrence.

> I know the only ones claiming Russian involvement is the US government and media.

That isn't really true, though. You could argue that our allies were just doing our bidding, but other countries definitely saw this meddling both in the 2016 POTUS election and other elections.[1] I also think statements like "US is much closer to civil war than most realize" needs some quantification or support.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jan/07/russia-us-el...

> I also think statements like "US is much closer to civil war than most realize" needs some quantification or support

That's why I said "I believe," I don't have any evidence. I just find it incredibly interesting how at the same time we have a growing number of protests and most are experiencing a declining quality of life, food and gas prices are incredibly low. To me it seems like the government is trying to stabilize the population.

I too believe we are closer to civil war than ever before. A powder keg is building.

My question is a little different: whose to say they weren't just on a VPN on Twitter instead? It's not entirely impossible.

This is something I thought about too. Especially considering communities like /r/The_Donald and 4Chan's /pol/ have been observed creating parody Twitter profiles and the like with Russia based geo-tags. I am nearly positive the image linked by OP is an example of just that. This is not to say that Russia did not purchase Facebook ads, just that a geo-tag is very weak evidence of anything and using images like the above to make accusations makes for a pretty weak argument.

You can manually set your twitter location to whatever you want for any tweet, and the account mentioned above was a parody/troll account.

The idea that this is proof of Russian meddling in the election is laughable.

Interesting I had not considered that either. Thanks for the information. After years of being a programmer I'm convinced that digital evidence is really hard to take seriously considering the inability of most of it being tamper proof.

Just wait until technology like this [0] becomes more common place, which I guess will be either the next US election, or the one after that. It's going to be a crazy world.

0: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/11/adobe...

Fair enough, also 3D rendering of realistic looking 3D art could be worrisome as well. If it can be abused someone somewhere will try to find a way to abuse of it. I wish this were not the world we lived in.

> where's the evidence that the U.S. government didn't plant a falsely geo-tagged photo

It doesn't matter what entity instigated it. This is a problem irrespective of source.

The questions are: how pervasive is this and how do we deal with it?

Are you sure that's not a parody account?

I'm fairly certain the facebook presence of the same account is parody, so presumably this one is too.

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