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Comment by a2128 | Hacker News Reader

There is a uniform centralized group that operated for a decade under the name of Internet Research Agency, and almost certainly something like it continues to operate to this day. These had paid employees who got directions on what to promote with the goal of manipulating the public debate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Research_Agency

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That was a private company operated by Prigozhin [1] who was, almost certainly, an extremely mentally unwell individual. He was the guy who formed the 'Wagner' private military company, supported Putin, then seemingly tried to overthrow Putin, and then was likely killed by Putin. When he left the stage, it was unceremoniously shut down alongside most of his other ventures. The spastic operations of the org would be pretty much in the character of Prigozhin without any grand 5D chess going on.

I'm also of the mindset that the effort to suggest there's state propaganda everywhere is, itself, mostly domestic state propaganda in an effort to try to 'otherize' dissenting views, especially as politicians and their actions become ever more unpopular.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yevgeny_Prigozhin

It's called Hybrid Warfare and is an explicit element in Russian military doctrine because it's such a cheap and effective force multiplier.

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

So that page didn't exist before December 2024, and was created by a guy whose done nothing but push anti-Russian propaganda, and links to a video in Ukrainian on his user page showing Russian soldiers being killed. Interestingly the page has also had segments of its edit timeline permanently deleted as well, which is something that never used to happen on Wiki.

Anyhow apparently examples of "Russian hybrid warfare" are the West cynically claiming Russia blew up its own oil pipeline. Those tricky Russians multiplying their forces by blowing up their own pipelines. Just imagine what they could achieve if they nuked themselves! Imagine, just for a second somebody linking to an article/account that was pro-Russian, but otherwise everything was equal but opposite. Can you even begin to imagine what you might think? Well that's what I'm thinking.

>something that never used to happen on Wiki

Revision deletion has existed for at least 17 years:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Revision_deletion (page created in 2009)

Thanks for the info! I've literally never once seen that done on Wikipedia, and pretty much the first thing I do when looking at a new page is go to the history.

I imagine Israel's various hasbara operation dwarfs its relevance and funding by multiple orders of magnitude. I don't see much evidence it plays a role outside of being useful to blame for inconvenient discourse.

Sure, but that's a good example. They obviously push pro-Israel, anti-Palestinian and probably a good deal of outright anti-Muslim positions.

But do you think they push random divisive issues, unrelated to their own interests, just to destabilize countries they don't like? I think the evidence for that is much weaker.

That wouldn't really make sense for Israel. They don't want America to be destabilised. They want it stable and supporting them. Same for European countries. They want Palestine and Iran unstable, but they've already achieved that through other means.

They certainly benefit from the division in the states. A large majority of AIPAC funding comes from American Evangelical groups. Why wouldn't they?

There's no doubt in my mind that there's a constant effort to keep it that way.

There's entire apps designed to organize brigading efforts online: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/01/24/gaza-is...

Israel? No. Russia? Absolutely; a country preoccupied with domestic conflict is less likely to interfere with others.

For a country of 8 million to "dwarf by multiple orders of magnitude" a country of 140 million in almost anything requires very lively imagination indeed.

Soft power operations are hard to measure. You cannot measure the impact of Israeli activities either.

Why would you even need to measure? There are precedents.

VKomtakte social network was blocked because owners were russian, and there could interfere in internal affairs.

Why not block facebook? Its ownership has clear ties to Israel and it DOES interfere in elections and democratic process!

> For a country of 8 million to "dwarf by multiple orders of magnitude" a country of 140 million in almost anything requires very lively imagination indeed.

I see you've never heard of Hasbara.

Anyway, there's little reason to think that influence scales with the size of the population as opposed to the number of people involved in active influence and funding, especially with Russia locking down access to the global internet. Israel simply has much, much, much, much more to gain from interfering in american culture than russia does (despite its being scapegoated by the least capable of our politicians).

Russia has its own Great Power status to lose, which they worked on since the 16th century. If they cannot defeat Ukraine and be seen as clear winners of this long war, no amount of nuclear weapons will help them regain their clout. Even their own heavily Muslim regions like Caucasus may well secede.

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