Hacker News Reader

Comment by duxup | Hacker News Reader

I can’t imagine what drives someone to go to Russia and fight on behalf of a Kleptocracy.

Russia seems one of the least likely places to go given what's reported to have been his political and ideological leanings.

Weird situation overall.

A lot of supporters of X are more just opposed to America and reflexively support anything anti American.

Damn the difficulty humans have of grasping second order thinking.

In this case it caused a young man's death.

He was only 21. Besides being brainwashed by anti-Americanism, it was probably also something of a delayed adolescent rebellion against his CIA family.

> “He was usually watching videos about Palestine and was so angry at America,” one acquaintance told iStories. “He started thinking about going to Russia. He wanted to war with the USA. But I think he was very influenced by the conspiracy theory videos.”

He was brainwashed by online propaganda.

This. No different than religions, cults, masculinity podcast influencers, etc. Some people are more impressionable than others, and those that know how take advantage of these people.

The crazy thing to me is that if he was terminally online enough to become brainwashed by this propaganda, how did he miss the thousands of videos of Russian soldiers getting turned into mincemeat. It is not the kind of war you can fight and believe that superior skill will keep you alive, it's just a waiting game till an artillery shell or drone blows you to bits. A complete meat grinder, really.

Social media sites feed you news that reinforces your algorithmically derived interests in order to maximize screen time.

Seldom is seen anything challenging, the echo chamber phenomenon. It's as if the other view doesn't even exist. More likely, it's sold as fake news.

They are roach motels.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com