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Comment by ninjagoo | Hacker News Reader

> I wonder what caused that prediction to fail.

A lot of media outlets have been fingering the outage of some data centers due to kinetic action for a worldwide decline in divisive rhetoric, potentially impacting democratic processes.

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Facebook/Meta openly supporting Bolsanaro and sabotaging Lula probably mattered a lot more. Here's them acknowledging funny business:

https://mronline.org/2026/10/16/meta-acknowledges-the-reduce...

This has been widely discredited.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c9y7l0pm8jkko

Cloudflare misunderstanding was discredited but there are other sources than just cloudflare: https://www.thelondoneconomic.com/politics/reform-figures-se...

Ha! I knew it. That was way too unlikely. But it was a great narrative. Kudos to Selenskyj.

Don't mistake debunking Cloudflare graph for debunking that russian troll bots were affected, because they were: https://www.thelondoneconomic.com/politics/reform-figures-se...

This far less popular than United 24 which is a propaganda outlet disguised as a news site. People believe what they want to hear.

> This far less popular than United 24 which is a propaganda outlet disguised as a news site.

What are smoking? If you bother to check, United24 clearly describes itself as "The official fundraising platform for collecting donations to support Ukraine."

The world is more worried about US/CIA bots(US social sites) than any so-called Russian bots

European here, that's absolutely false in Europe.

Ah, speaker for the world!

Speaker for the region where elections and politics is manipulated by external forces

Is there a country where elections and politics are not manipulated by external forces?

Middle East, because they conduct no elections :-)

Fair point. I guess we can add Russia and tentatively pencil in USofA from 2028 onwards.

Russia does have elections, but they are internally meddled with so outsiders don't see much point. Even places known for brutal authoritarian regimes like Israel and Iran have elections. Elections are a great tool for promoting social cohesion even in decidedly undemocratic countries. It's totally illogical, but people like to vote for the winner - and when everyone knows who the winner is going to be that's quite easy. Elections in illiberal countries are like a societal placebo that can ease the mental burden of the voters and give them a sense of participation and belonging without making any actual changes. Letting the controlled opposition vent regularly and then crushing them in a "fair" election keeps their popularity at a manageable level and helps governments gauge public opinion. Democracy is a system rather than a process, and confusing the trappings of democracy (elections) with the system of democracy (self-governance) is something that's been done by with purpose by antidemocratic forces.

Israel is just brutal authoritarian to others. Their elections are free.

Every state in the world is “authoritarian” to non-citizens.

Well they're not always very nice to their Arab citizens either.

Not everything you'd want to be true, is. Checking makes the difference, you just need to do it.

If that were true it would have diminished Lula "support" as Lula is strongly preferred by Russia due to his anti-US and anti-NATO stance.

Lula is neither anti-US, nor is he anti-NATO. He is against a single country having hegemony over the globe, against US meddling in Latin American elections (including with trade policy as of late), and against huge defense budgets.

Why do Americans accept that their democratic country is actively intervening in other countries elections? It's grotesque. The US security establishment has been allowed to run amoc for decades and they have destroyed the values that made the US country that people admired across the world.

The people in charge didn't run on this. Most of the real orchestrators are appointees, anyway. They're about to get a reality check fairly soon. I wouldn't be surprised if Hegseth were sacrificed. Rubio, the real brains behind the operations, will probably hold on somehow.

If Americans elect Rubio after all this, or resoundingly reelect a Republican congress, I think you have a better claim.

Tl;dr they don't accept it, but they keep getting tricked

That feels like an analysis stuck in 2015.

To me it often if feels like South American countries themselves are stuck in an eternal pendulum of electing corrupt left-wing populists after corrupt right-wing populists and swinging back again.

That's representative democracy. There's not really any practical ways to delegate power without enabling corruption, so corruption is more or less inevitable without radical levels of transparency and public oversight.

Im not sure the strategic calculation is as simplistic as that

Would a Trump puppet not also be anti-NATO and pro-Putin?

That's a bingo gif.

hey i see what you did there. so funny

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