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Comment by nitwit005 | Hacker News Reader

Trying to inflame it. I haven't seen any evidence it was effective. It's not as if there was a shortage of outrage on Facebook or Tumblr.

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Although you're going to get down-voted, that's an actual problem. We don't know the full state of discourse before interference, during interference, or currently so it's a bit hard for anyone to say 'this is specifically what they changed'.

It's a bit analogous to having a server that lots of people access. Then you notice that a bunch of people have been accessing it with write permissions that weren't supposed to write to it, but the data's totally disorganized, you don't have a backup to compare it to, and reconstructing the changes they made is a pain.

That being said, there's been quite a bit of individual changes identified at this time by going back and looking which are evidence that changes were made, but as far as how any of the changes add up to significant functional differences, we don't know.

Are you shitting me? It was a critical hit.

Surely you can point me to some sort of evidence of its effectiveness then?

The exact outrage you mentioned noticing. The outrage didn't stop it, the outrage IS it. Russia doesn't care if we know they're meddling, it works just fine at generating instability anyways. It might even work better that way. Look at us, here we are still talking Russia. It's going to continue to work for as long as people let it so easily outrage them.

It was already a gasoline-soaked pile of wood scraps and leaves, piled up higher and higher for decades (if not centuries). The social network meddling is the lit cigarette flicked into it.

It was always burning Since the world's been turning

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