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Comment by Swizec | Hacker News Reader

> it seems we are close to a tipping point where we may lose what semblance we had of a democracy.

Oh please. I grew up in a post-communist European country. You guys are doing great! Keep it up.

That’s exactly the problem though. Post-Soviet states money-bombing our politics out from underneath us. We know where that leads and don’t want it at all. Unfortunately they’re good at it so it’s taking time to vote our way out of the mess.

The ability to vote your way out of this mess is pretty much the exact opposite of losing democracy.

Yep. Learning to sift truth from noise is the key to making that work and I think we're all getting better at that now than we were in 2016.

The Russian propaganda canard is worrying, because it is this thought-terminator that prevents considering that there are actual people with real reasons for voting the way that they do.

Are the Russian spy agencies conducting propaganda? Of course they are. Are they the reason Trump was elected, or people voted for Brexit, or the Yellow Vests are marching in Paris? Hell no.

With how close the election was, it's a very short jump to conclude that hacking the emails of both the party and campaign of one side successfully directed the narrative enough to flip the election. You can easily see here that Russian cyberattacks were effective in washing out any message by the target candidate: https://news.gallup.com/poll/195596/email-dominates-american...

To me, the point of any close election is to warn society that a massive proportion of the population is very unhappy with the status quo. In some ways, it's irrelevant if there is meddling to influence single digit percentages -- the real problem is that those unhappy people need to be understood and policies built to support them.

The key to the Clinton email server is that the purpose of it was to avoid FOIA requests. Any hacking in regards to it is closer to the law than the alternative.

The hacking thing wasn't related to Clinton's emails, it was the DNC's emails, which are not subject to FOIA. That these things are conflated in many peoples' minds is ... kinda the point.

How was it unrelated to the Russian hacking narrative? From Wikipedia:

"According to security researchers at Secureworks the email leak was caused by Threat Group-4127, later attributed to Fancy Bear, a unit that targets governments, military, and international non-governmental organizations. The researchers report moderate confidence that the unit gathers intelligence on behalf of the Russian government."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillary_Clinton_email_contro...

The truth is that we don't really know what the "purpose" of the Clinton email server was. Being human we cannot help but seek explanations.

I know of no explanation for what Clinton did that would not taint her permanently.

koube says>"You can easily see here that Russian cyberattacks were effective in washing out any message by the target candidate..."

There is nothing about "Russian cyberattacks" in the link you provide. And while there is evidence that the Russian tried to influence the election there is no evidence that they succeeded.

Clinton's egregious conduct in handling her e-mail servers speaks for itself. People tend to classify such activity as either stupid or an attempt to hide information from the government or public. She was her own worst enemy in that regard - no Russians required.

I personally think propaganda works on people so I disagree with your statement that propaganda wasn't the reason Trump was elected. One example...Ads.. are non-political propaganda for companies and are billion dollar industry....for example Nike shoes are made in China and sold at insane markups...simply because of advertising/propaganda/branding. People are easily influenced in my opinion.

Clinton raised and spent roughly 1.5X as much money as Trump. She also had near universal support from actors, sports figures, the media (aka the people Nike pays that money to). It didn’t win her the election. Some crappy banner ads on Facebook don’t even register against that.

Personally, I always feel unsure that the evidence that foreign propaganda affected the election is very strong. But I also feel that people making the case that the evidence isn't strong universally dismissively downplay the problem, which makes me distrust their argument. Your "some crappy banner ads" thing is exactly this. Your dismissal of the problem as only "some crappy banner ads" makes it seem like you haven't grappled with worse things like social sharing of propaganda. Maybe that problem is also overplayed, but it isn't clear to me whether that's the case, and your dismissiveness doesn't convince me.

Not the OP, but to me, if Russian propaganda is somehow stronger than US propaganda, maybe it means that the American public is sick of the status quo and have lost faith in the image that the US sells to them?

The US attempts to influence Russian elections all the time, but Slavs aren't easily influenced, due to their innate cynicism about, well, everything.

People dismiss the problem because there is no evidence that Russia had a meaningful impact on the election. You say that the evidence is "very strong" but I've not seen that at all.

>> for example Nike shoes are made in China and sold at insane markups...simply because of advertising/propaganda/branding

This is part of it. It couldn't also be because that Nike shoes (Blue Ribbon before them) made a superior product that matched the needs of the market for years on end, could it? Are all sales and mega corporations only due to advertising and propaganda? Or could quality maybe have some part of it?

I agree with your statement. France has the same problems. People do not necessarily vote for somebody so that this person can actually implement their program.

For years, in France it was always the centre-right, then the centre-left, then the centre-right and then the centre-left. Yet the problems remain.

So what do people do? They decide to kick the hornet's nest. They vote for the far right or the far left. It is a desperate attempt to challenge the status quo.

The Yellow vests, Trump, Brexit, they are all symptoms of deeper issues that mainstream politicians have failed to address within the last 30 years.

I would even argue that if the politicians had done their jobs correctly there would be no Trump, no Brexit and no yellow vests.

Yet instead of treating the underlying causes, we blame the people. The Trump voter is as smart as a bag of rocks, the yellow vest protester is a fascist and the Brexiters are idiots.

This thing, whatever it is is not going away. People are pissed.

As opposed to American corporate interests lining up to money bomb politics out from underneath you?

Nobody seems to have contested that the emails released were real emails written by the Democrats. It is a pretty disgraceful violation of privacy, but ultimately if honestly talking about what your political opponents are doing is an election winning strategy the future is bright.

Most of the evidence is telling the truth about politicians doesn't move the needle all that much. I doubt it is a trend that will catch on, the Republicans are probably going to stick to calling people names.

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