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Comment by LAC-Tech | Hacker News Reader

I've never understood this conspiracy theory. If Russia does have bot farms, and they're effective, surely the US has much, much larger bot farms - their budgment for this sort of thing completely dwarfs Russia.

Or is the US just too much of a moral actor to do this?

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This underlying idea that the US state is “just the same” as Russia, China, etc. (and that as such they will function in the same way) is imho one the biggest factors on the decline of the quality of western democracy today. I’m not American, have only been there once a couple of days, and have no special sympathy for the country, but the fact that so many people do not understand that the US democracy is fundamentally different than the Russian or Chinese regimes is such a sad, depressing thing.

They're "just the same" in the sense that they would surely both use similar tools in the information war. Just like they're "just the same" in having submarines, fighter jets, etc etc.

The content of the information war or different, but it's still a war, and the idea that the US would just cede all advantages to Russia because they're above using bots strikes me as faintly ridiculous.

In regards to things our secret government agencies do, we are the same though (and secret police/courts/governmental organizations are very much anti-democratic in principle, so it says a lot that we have them in our "fundamentally different" US democracy)? Covertly manipulating opinions in foreign countries is very much spy agency territory IMO. Seems like they should be running bot farms as well if they are effective.

So the claim is USA has bot farms but they are much, much better then the Ruzzian ones since we never seen them, and no USA hired criminal publicly got medals and rewards for running them.

But is a very typical Ruzzian stuff happening in response to my original comments

1 denial, "are the Ruzzians bots in the room with us" , trying to imply I am mad and there is no such thing as Ruzzian bot farms funded by Kremlin

2 Ruzzia has bot farm but what about USA

If bot farms are effective, we probably have them. I doubt that bot farms are good enough to prefer over the "feed a story to friendly media" approach which has been working very well so far.

>If bot farms are effective, we probably have them.

If UFOs are effective then USA has them too

> Or is the US just too much of a moral actor to do this?

US government has massively more oversight because of still somewhat functioning legislative and judicial systems. Also free press is still a thing (compared to Russia anyway..).

Ao any large scale program like this would inevitably be leaked and scrutinized (of course if they keep it somewhat low scale it will probably pass under the radar).

So effectively.. yes? It is?

That does not make any sense.

"If germany had concentration camps and they were effective then surely US has much larger concentration camps"

Why do you assume that US must be worse than the worst in everything? US is not perfect but russia, iran, north korea etc are on another level.

Russia was just flowing USA's lead, Centcom was contracting out influence operations through sock puppet accounts since 2011, no different than Radio Free Asia really, influence hearts and minds, now with just a little automation.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-op...

And what’s the point you’re trying to make? If Russia was trying to drop bombs on DC and the US was trying to drop bombs on Moscow, would you think it strange for the US to try to prevent the bombs from being dropped on DC?

Say it is true, then both are wrong and evil. But from my POV Ruzzia has more interests in destabilizing my country and region then do a invasion they would call liberation and grab some strategic lands.

No, US is the one that gives them platform.

It's not a conspiracy theory. We know where the farms were located and several former bot farm workers spoke about them.

The US government can barely make a comment telling people that they're not horses.

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