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Comment by ilaksh | Hacker News Reader

There's a phenomenon I have noticed where things like these are okay to discuss if they involve someone else's government or if they are far enough back in the past.

But there is some cut-off point closer to present day where sinister-sounding allegations about one's own government automatically become "insane conspiracy theories".

It's just good to know that anything bad they were doing is over now. It must be. Because the US government, and all of its agencies and military actions, despite a few bad apples in the past, is trustworthy and true to the pure mission of democracy and freedom for all. And there are never any "means to an end" "ethical compromises" anymore. Other countries, sure. But ours? No, of course we rooted all of that out. Only the pure of heart survive here. The pure light of Democracy doesn't permit evil or corruption or subversion to survive.

And anyone who suggests otherwise and makes a serious allegation against the government or admits a fundamental lack of trust for it, is definitely mentally ill and should be publicly noted as such.

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Just the other day I brought up that many countries use things like memes to modify public perception. Topic was about China but I brought up that everyone else does it too (US, Russia, Israel, Germany, etc) and people thought it was insane and a conspiracy theory(specifically that anyone would want to influence Reddit because it is "a small website"). It honestly feels like we're gaslighting ourselves because this topic has been so openly discussed over the last 50 years that it is hard to say that this isn't happening. Though maybe because I suggested agencies use memes now instead of more well known sock puppets.

Even on HN news I've been downvoted for this. I guess people don't think memes are being weaponized, even when they are explicitly referred to as such by those in the military[0] and other agencies. Actually one thing I've liked about The Boys (on Prime) is how it shows the viral marketing of Stormfront and how it is manipulating people (and how people didn't even notice the not even remotely subtle naming of the character). I guess that just shows how effective of a tool all this is.

[0] https://youtu.be/qOTYgcdNrXE?t=1287

The funny thing is, a strategy to do this kind of thing was explicitly laid out by a U.S. Army major named Michael Aquino in 1980. He appears to have gained influence after his paper's publication and was promoted to lieutenant colonel. I imagine the sort of things he advocated had already been going on for some time so I don't think he represented some kind of inflection point, but it's not like this stuff has never been openly discussed.

https://www.wanttoknow.info/mk/mindwar-michael-aquino.pdf

It's just a pretty fuzzily defined theory. It's surely true that Western governments use memes and similar content to convince people of things. Quite often they do so openly, with military ads and public health messages and such.

But China dictates public perception - in addition to sending messages, the government has full editorial control over all major social media platforms, and regularly intervenes to shut off discussion on any topic they'd prefer people not to hear about. It seems very unlikely Western governments are doing anything like that.

Blatant censorship tends to call attention to things and reveal to people that their perceptions are being manipulated. It's much subtler and more effective to exercise editorial control over nominally "independent" media by firing reporters pushing stories about inconvenient truths, which Allen Dulles used to do by simply calling up the heads of major newspapers.

But inconvenient truths come out all the time, don't they? If the CIA had the power to keep stories they don't like out of the national conversation, they surely would have used on the Snowden leaks or Abu Ghraib.

I don't think they have the power to exercise total control or prevent (much of) the truth from eventually coming out, in particular now that alternative sources have become more widespread. Again it's a balancing act -- mixing some of these things into the mainstream sources which are meant to be trusted helps to lend them credibility, and there seems to have been no serious repercussions to any programs or the players involved from the Snowden or Abu Ghraib leaks.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limited_hangout

Read Greenwald book to know how many big news organizations refuse to publish Snowden leaks.

Greenwald has really hurt his credibility in recent years.

Greenwald has continued to cover both US political parties critically. In an era of hyper-partisanship, anyone not choosing a tribe and remaining loyal to it is treated as a pariah by those who do, but it's the latter group who have lost their credibility.

I think the Snowden case is actually a good point. When we look at how officials responded they shifted the conversation to metadata to downplay the amount of information and what that information could be used for. It does seem like their responses were fairly effective since people don't consider metadata particularly useful. But also a large amount of people don't even know who Snowden is and opinions on him are quite divided (and there are radicals with ridiculous opinions on both sides that often take the spotlight).

I don't think people seriously talking about this think the government has an all seeing power or a hand in everything (I personally don't think even China does). So it would not be expected that the CIA/NSA or any agency could prevent a story like that from eventually breaking. But the question is how effective are they at being able to downplay it and sway public opinion? Personally I see it as subtle and frequent nudging more than active control.

Compare the way media covered the Snowden leaks vs the Vault 7 ones. The Vault 7 leaks basically show that as soon as you're a person of sufficient interest to the state, tools like Signal and Tor (for which Snowden is probably the highest profile proponent) are at best useless, and at worst might just paint a target on your back. But hardly anyone has ever heard of them.

Russian government has the same power in regards to VKontakte, Yandex, etc. However it does not really stop stories spreading.

What they have realised recently, is that injecting misinformation, even if it's outrageous bullshit, is far more effective.

Coming back to the West: Snowden and Assange are still pariahs, Assange is remembered by the public as a rapist escaping justice rather than for wikileaks. Id say the strategy is working.

I think that Assange is best known for WikiLeaks, but WikiLeaks is now a pariah after the 2016 US election.

In America, we tend to amplify outrage at irrelevant things instead of silencing the important ones. Works just as well and is harder to prove.

> we tend to amplify outrage

I think this is the key word here which makes it impossible to differentiate sock-puppetry from genuine outrage (or at least genuine levels of outrage). I think this is why some turn to monsters under every bed (as dang suggested) vs gaslighting. The fact that this is both extremely transparent and very opaque makes it very difficult to even have a discussion. That is amplified by the difficulties we have in communicating and being able to determine where someone is on the spectrum of "doesn't exist" to "microphones in my vaccine"

And everybody here believe that US Gov has no influence in the recommendation algorithms of the main social networks. That they don't an army of fake profiles to direct public opinion to their economical benefit.

The problem isn't that it doesn't happen, it's that there's no reliable way to tell when it's happening vs. isn't, and internet users are, let's call it, rather undisciplined about jumping to conclusions. On any divisive topic, people eagerly proclaim without a shred of evidence that some comment they don't like has been planted. Soon there are astroturfers and spies and foreign agents under every bed. However much real manipulation may be happening, it's plain that many people are simply indulging their assumptions and fantasies about it, which quickly inflates to grandiose levels. This has an extremely degrading effect on discussion, surely at least as degrading as any sophisticated campaigns.

That's why the HN guidelines ask people not to post such insinuations [1]—it's not because such things don't exist. It's because once a topic gets polarized enough, it always feels like the other side isn't arguing in good faith. In the absence of some specific evidence or data or something at least a teeny bit objective to go on, the default presumption has to be that the other user is commenting in good faith and just has a totally different view than you do (I don't mean you personally, of course).

I find it helpful to imagine that we're already at the endgame of this, which is that everything is potentially manipulated and artificial. I call this the SSM: imagine a Sufficiently Smart Manipulator [2], smart enough to plant whatever they want, make it sound authentic, and leave no detectable traces in the data. What can we do in such a situation? Only what we should be doing anyway, which is thinking and writing clearly and respectfully replying to bad arguments with better arguments. Since that's the only answer in the long run, we might as well practice it now. It has the desirable side effect of strengthening the community, and a healthy community is the best immune system against manipulation.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

I think this is the root of it but also why it is so effective. You can never tell when it is happening and when it works correctly it causes people to independently mimic and generate new content for you. Even better when you push the very topics to the extreme. Either this is being done at such a large scale with such precision that the lizard people effectively are mind controlling the population vs it doesn't happen at all (for what it is worth I'm on the very mundane end of the spectrum). The former I would call gaslighting but I don't have a great term for the latter, maybe someone else does?

Side note: interesting to see you outside your moderator role and thanks for the service to the community and your thoughtful addition to the discussion.

Edit: (You got a ninja edit on me!) I think the point you make about the sufficiently smart enough effect. And I do like that the community here is (imo) much better at self enforcement with good faith arguments. But would not a simple tactic be to encourage the use of bad faith arguments? That seems fairly simple to execute and an easy way to generate a Divide and Rule[0] tactic. But I think when it comes down to it the impossibility to even know is what makes all this both very interesting and frustratingly difficult (as well as effective).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divide_and_rule

Would like to echo your compliments to dang. The only bit of pushback I would make to his point is that if the SSM really does exist, perhaps the correct course of action is to reduce our participation as much as possible and move our engagement to less easily manipulated forms of communication, particularly face-to-face meetings. Perhaps, even if we do our best to post in good faith and make well reasoned, careful arguments, in the end we only lend a superficial credibility to a system which still has a negative effect in the aggregate (because it has been engineered to do so). And yes, I'm aware of the inherent hypocrisy in posting this on a (well!) moderated forum with a system of largely opaque voting and flagging. :-)

(Sorry about editing the rug from under you - I write these comments by adding to them bit by bit, but it somehow only 'works' if I do it live.)

You're raising an important point which I think about a lot. It's very clear to me that most users who get into intense arguments about divisive topics are sincere. The anger and hurt feelings that energize these arguments and get re-energized by them are too unmistakeable to just be cynically planted. But it may be that these are second-order effects of propaganda systems. If you convince enough people and get them feeling angry and hurt enough, they'll do your job for you, and much better, by being intensely sincere. You can't say that these commenters are manipulators, because they're not. "You're a shill!!" will meet with justified indignation, and "you've been brainwashed!!" is no good either. The whole distinction between "manipulated" vs. "authentic" doesn't address what really goes on in these discussions. You can't use it to make anything better. That's not to say that we should do nothing when we find some real indication of actual manipulation—the opposite is the case. But it doesn't make that much difference when the 'organic' dynamics point in the same direction. Certainly it doesn't solve the problem.

Another extremely powerful factor that does the propagandist's work for them in an entirely innocent way is tribalism. Is it manipulation if I feed your beliefs about your identity and (especially) the opposing identity in a way that inflames you with indignation against the enemy? That "food" is so eagerly gobbled by the consumer that at some point you have to ask who's influencing who. The tribal psyche, which we not only all have but are almost totally dominated by, is enough to generate the situation all on its own. Media stories will feed it because that's what people want. No one can get enough of hearing how good their group is and how bad the opposing one is. This force is so powerful that it's not even possible to discuss it, except in the abstract.

In my experience, if you take that seriously then you come to feel that such external manipulators as are lurking out there are only effective because they activate the real manipulators, which are inside ourselves. "We have met the enemy and it is us," etc. This perspective is much better because it is empowering: we can do something about it, we can work on it, we can change. The other perspective (external agents are manipulating!) just leads to a wilderness of mirrors, even if external agents doubtless are manipulating. There's nothing we can do about that, except in the important (but relatively rare) case where evidence appears; in the absence of evidence, all we're doing is projecting our shadows onto each other.

The reason I think the sufficiently-smart-manipulator argument is a good one is that besides being the only response that can actually work, it points us directly at what we need to be doing anyway, which is addressing these more powerful factors in ourselves.

Ok, I'm done editing for the moment :)

> But it may be that these are second-order effects of propaganda systems. If you convince enough people and get them feeling angry and hurt enough, they'll end up doing your job for you, and much better, simply by being intensely sincere. You can't say that these commenters are manipulators, because they're not. "You're a shill!!" is simply going to meet with justified indignation, and "you've been brainwashed!!" is no good either.

This is a really important point and something I try to very consciously and actively resist, not always successfully. The thought "these are all bots" may be a more comforting one to most people than "lots and lots of my fellow human beings have been manipulated into behaving like bots." I would bet an SSM might even have sockpuppets demo and engage in this tactic to encourage divisions.

These are some really good points. It is reminding me a lot of one of my favorite John Cleese videos[0].

One of the things that I think makes this so difficult is that language has a lot of limits that people don't realize. Since we often don't run into issues with communication (or rather don't notice since the errors are small) it is difficult to realize when we're in boundary cases. For example there's priming[1]. Many may learn that this is a useful way to influence people and many are aware of the psychological experiments, but it is also a fundamental part of how we communicate. We try to communicate the most information with the least amount of words. But this same factor is why good faith arguments are so important but also difficult to maintain. We could not easily converse if we didn't make certain assumptions about another person's views. This is normally fine but we run into problems in heated topics where we often act like someone can only hold an extreme opinion (and of course, mine is not extreme and just common sense). It's the "oh, I've heard this argument before" and while one person may have subtext another may not (why it is difficult to identify dog whistling). Removing nuance from a topic makes it easy, and we like easy things. But that's not beneficial to resolving issues and like you say "leads to a wilderness of mirrors".

But it is impossible to tell if priming like this is actively being pushed or naturally happening, since we do have a natural predisposition to form tribes and groups. We're nuanced and thoughtful with our arguments while they are overly simplifying and idiotic. They just want a win while we want to actually fix things. And since this kind of talk is natural it is also almost impossible to figure out if I'm doing the thing I'm actively complaining about or not.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HLNhPMQnWu4

[1] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/priming

I like Monty Python so I watched your Cleese video. It's funny, but of course he lets "moderates" off the hook as if they aren't just as subject to this dynamic as everyone else, when the truth is that they not only are, they have the ace of trump cards—social proof—to mask it with.

To me the interesting thing about that video is that it shows how much self-reflection (or personal work, whatever you want to call it) Cleese had been doing by then. His classic character was the rigid, angry type who was comically un-self-aware, which had roots both in his own character and also in his effort to be conscious of it—it takes consciousness to make oneself hilarious in that way. In this video, the way he describes how to feel good about yourself by projecting badness onto others shows how much deeper he had gone with that.

At the same time, with the blatant loophole for "moderates" in that bit, one can sort of see his limit.

I think the conversation about moderates has changed a lot in this election. I think this also is relevant to our "no nuance" conversation. Defining a moderate now is relatively difficult and I think more people think they are moderates than actually are. Are we talking about moderates from a fairly objective viewpoint? American standpoint? That of the state? Are we talking about the moderates that the DNC describes and are the Joe voters? Are we talking about the moderates that the RNC describes? The moderates of today or the moderates when that skit was written? While I agree with you of the loophole of moderates since many self-label as moderate (even if they aren't by any reasonable metric) as a means of "feeling good" and having moral superiority. That kind is the same pitfall as the extremists, but I think just lumping all moderates into that bin (and subsequently having a total of 3 extremist bins) isn't helpful and makes it difficult to heal the divide that we have.

That said I'll admit I have a bias that I'm against parties since I feel they make things too simple for a well functioning democracy but you've also probably seem my passionate comments about voting.

Re: Doing it live = talking to someone = a bit different thought path.

The closest I have come to describing this is the difference between writing to a specific someone vs. writing generally. It feels real time, in the moment, theatre of the mind style. Like the other person is "there" going to respond or review. Using a different app breaks flow and it is more or less devolved into writing a letter.

The comment field is a place shared by other participants. And the closest way I can articulate it is being similar to how we may express ourselves differently when at home, vs work, or a bar.

Because of how this works, I always give benefit of the doubt on edits and intent. Sometimes reading it a couple times and or that ninja edit makes all the difference in the world.

And it is also why I love basic, threaded discussion. Healthy participants are capable of powerful insights no single member may realize individually.

That aside:

The real reason I am responding is I find this exchange thought provoking.

What can someone interested in thinking with this perspective read, listen or watch to gain a greater grasp of it?

Eh, memes (or the theory about memes) are so early-aughts.

> But there is some cut-off point closer to present day where sinister-sounding allegations about one's own government automatically become "insane conspiracy theories".

This is indeed a really interesting, perhaps even engineered, phenomenon. It's quite striking for example that people will clamor to have Confederate generals' or even George Washington's name removed from schools and public buildings, but don't bat an eye at having a major airport named after the Dulles brothers.

I think engineered outrage has been openly discussed for quite some time. America does it to its own people. Other nations do it to and about American citizens. And this isn't even remotely unique to America. Every major country plays the same game, just to different degrees (if anyone is aware of a major country that doesn't play this I'm honestly interested). Why would "trying to manipulate perception" be surprising for a country to do? Is that not what propaganda is at the root of it? Why wouldn't this idea also advance and get better? We've got native advertising, why not native propagandizing? (foreign and/or domestic) And why would America or China (insert enemy) be unique in using this tactic?

Agreed on all points. What's interesting to consider is the implications of the existence of a technology like social media which can provide the perfect means for short feedback cycles, experimentation, and mass dissemination. And then you dig into the military roots of the internet itself and start really rubbing your chin. There's a good account on Twitter that delves into some of this: https://twitter.com/cuttlefish_btc

Had exactly this kind of cognitive disonant moment with a friend of mine the other day. They were going off about Chinese persecution of Uighurs (which is terrible and should stop). When I pointed out that the Chinese government claims this as an antiterror campaign and compared it to America's disasterous antiterror campaign they were not having it.

P.S. Before I get dogpiled, I am not saying that one justifies the other or that they are identical.

I visited Aruba a decade ago. The Hotel TV picked up a channel fro Venezuela. It was amazing. It was like the Hugo Chavez action channel. Hugo playing baseball. Hugo interacting with a farmer, Hugo riding in the back of a truck... and so on. That day I learned all I need to know about TV. And those who control it.

There's also this great song by John Mayer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBIxScJ5rlY

> There's also this great song by John Mayer

Are you saying that “Waiting on the World to Change” is sung from the perspective of a demoralized communist citizen, living in a state in which the government controls all information? That would be amazing if it were true, but I’m not convinced.

Don't know what John Mayer's political views are.

The cutoff point is simply the point where modern politics tempts people to fire off streams of sarcastic quips instead of discussing the evidence and why they believe it. I've never seen for example the ATF gunwalking scandal described as a "conspiracy theory", because the people calling out the ATF focused on concrete evidence for specific accusations of wrongdoing.

ilaksh says >"It's just good to know that anything bad they were doing is over now."<

One could make that assumption but since, if something bad once happened then it might also have happened before, after, or now in the same or other context[and almost certainly did, will, or is happening]. If we see a system fail we must become more alert in watching for failure. If we put fail-safes in place we must constantly monitor and verify they are working properly, probably forever. Always verify.

As for mental illness: by now in human history it should be clear that a man may try most anything to improve his lot, even at the expense of others. Neither mental illness nor malevolence is required. It is best to keep an open mind when examining motive.

Or labeled a foreign Agent like with Edward Snowden.

/sigh

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