Barcelona unrest: how to fabricate a protest in the age of TikTok | Hacker News Reader

Barcelona unrest: how to fabricate a protest in the age of TikTok

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I live in Barcelona, it was no actual protest as the article accurately explain but weaponised youth. It's incredible how completely artificial and easy it was to make happen, literally none of my friends living in the city saw it coming, me included, these riots came out of nowhere.

What would "seeing riots coming" look like?

Just like in France: a planned and legitimate protest turning violent near the end, clashes with the police escalating into riots after hours of tensions.

Here, there was no context to the riots other than "go to plaça Catalunya and break/steal things", no political demand whatsoever, it was a totally opportunistic chaos and nothing like I've seen in France or Spain ever.

And no coordination with the camped protestors who’ve been occupying Placa Catalunya for weeks now.

A great many riots result from building pressures and real issues that formed over months or years.

  In the preceding months there had been growing unease between the police and the inhabitants of ...

~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1981_Brixton_riot

Which is pretty different to this apparent clear blue sky bolt from blue spontaneous remotely weaponised flash mob.

Lots of social unrest on every online platform, for example what happened in the days prior to 15M (which thankfully didn't end up in riots, but riots would have been another logical outcome).

To me, it was shocking to watch the street interviews with the rioters, where they were just repeating the same exact slogans from the French protests, but badly translated to Spanish (like a literal word-by-word translation that was weird and made no sense).

Solid sign of foreign interference.

It's baffling how western countries have left themselves completely open to information warfare. It's completely negligent. It's not some new thing and yet the door is open to TikTok, Facebook, X, whatever social media that is at the beck and call of foreign governments.

Sure, but what do you propose governments do to stop it?

Pivot to domestic alternatives and encourage them to root out bot accounts and foreign influence campaigns.

That sounds a lot like "censor foreign media and domestic anti-regime media". I'm of the opinion that if foreigners can convince me and my countrymen of something just by posting, we probably didn't really need the convincing anyway. Even if it turns out my position on something was changed 180 degrees by foreign posters (even Chinese intelligence employing cutting edge propaganda AI, or whatever bogeyman you want to employ), then: Fine. Whatever. Persuasion of citizens in a democracy is just how a free society works.

How do you feel about the FCC. Should it be abolished? Otherwise, why should social media broadcasting be exceptional vs over the airwaves?

Spectrum is finite and must be shared. In the absence of a functioning world government, it makes sense to treat it as a national resource. And no, I don't think the FCC should be in the business of policing the content of what is broadcast on the public's spectrum, only that it is done in an orderly way.

regulate the shit out of social media.

they know. Facebook, Tiktok, Twitter -- it's not hard to figure out who and how this is happening.

it's like how Twitter goofed and made accounts show the country they were posting from. Turns out most of the Real American Patriot influencers were posting from India. Twitter immediately freaked out and ended that visibility.

They know. They're the problem.

Western countries with freedom of speech have ALWAYS been open for information warfare.

Governments and special interests have always spread propaganda, and they've frequently made criticizing it illegal.

Most people still end up believing some version of the truth. The ones that don't would likely never have believed the truth.

Nations should not coddle their citizens. People should be trusted to hear information and choose to believe it or not - that's a key aspect of our shared humanity and a fundamental human right.

They did notably abstain from saying Israel was not involved, even when they did so for Russia.

do you think Israel and Russia are now propaganda sharing? With the loss of russian data centers, they might need to colocate and do cost sharing.

in catalan or spanish?

one would expect locals to be speaking catalan ...

Both Spanish and Catalan are the official languages in Catalonia, and actually there are more people who speak only Spanish than people who speak only Catalan.

These specific rioters I watched spoke Spanish, although by the accent you could see that they were foreigners or second-gen foreigners.

Pro Israel media: "Analysis: Riots Show the Price France Has Paid for Turning Against Israel" [0]

[0] https://combatantisemitism.org/special-features/analysis-rio...

yde_java pointed it out on a comment below

Something similar has been going on in Washington, DC, but ours is organic. Someone fires up a “teen takeover” to a popular area, it floods with kids 99% of which are just there to harmless goof off and see their friends, and of course a small group of jerks starts a fight with no regard for the people around them.

The city council is treating this like a curfew issue. The problem isn’t the kids, it’s the algorithm. But nobody seems to have any power to bang on TikTok’s door and tell them to cut it out.

at least at 16:30 a lego store on passeig de gracia announced that there was a demonstration starting and they were closing and police was everywhere around so looks like it was a planned protest rather than just some unexpected tiktok looting flashmob

> at least at 16:30 a lego store on passeig de gracia announced that there was a demonstration starting

> looks like it was a planned protest

Huh? The first doesn't mean the second automatically becomes true, spontaneous protests without permission happens city-center from time to time, wouldn't be the first time.

The figure out if it was planned, could you please outline which political groups organized this and where they posted about this planned protest? As that's what a "planned protest" actually means. Going to a location of a Tiktok post to cause mayhem isn't a "planned protest" regardless of how many LEGO stores close.

To nay-sayers: There is real discontent and there are real grassroots protests, however that movement has been hijacked and turned into a widespread astroturfing campaign that's calling for protests and unrest all across Europe.

Spain: https://files.maldita.es/uploads/2026/10/6adf4cb02eb11captur...

Belgium and Austria: https://files.maldita.es/uploads/2026/10/6adf4cdc68db4captur...

Germany: https://files.maldita.es/uploads/2026/10/6adf4ccfdee54captur...

France and Germany (inciting violence): https://files.maldita.es/uploads/2026/10/6adf6524f4131pasted...

^Source: https://maldita.es/investigaciones/20261026/tiktok-manifesta...

There are more of these posters circulating and calling for protests in every European country that locals know nothing about and never actually happened (i.e. Oct 17): https://www.tiktok.com/@genz.rights/photo/769540155445459688...

As someone from Spain: those posters weren't made by a (native) Spaniard. They contain several weird sentences absolutely nobody uses.

My bet: foreign meddling.

It even has the LLM-ism "it's not just X, it's Y" (no es solo _, es _).

I don't know.

This itself seems like propaganda to blame the unrest on TikTok or foreign countries, rather than fundamental issues within Spain or Europe generally.

It can both be true that TikTok was a factor in the increased property damage and that Spanish citizens are unhappy and ready to protest. Or that 130 people were ready to do property damage and there also, TikTok videos.

It's hardly surprising that ≈0.01% of the population of Barcelona are ready to do property damage. The only surprising thing is that they managed to all be at the same place at the same time. Identifying Tiktok as one link in their organizing process doesn't mean Tiktok is to blame, but it suggests that one way to prevent future occurrences could be e.g. to have a dedicated police unit monitoring social media content so they're not caught unawares.

Or foreign influence campaigns target legitimate greviances but attempt to expand the grievance beyond all proportion, reframe the concerns from solveable to evil vs good and attempt to purposefully inflame emotions rather than solve problems in order to weaken unity and ability of rival states to act against the agitating nation.

Relevant:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zCvPPaIN5Ew

It's a video on AI-manufactured rage-bait. Quite a few plot-twists that I won't spoil here.

I recently stumbled on the political polarization score [1]. America hereby joined the club with Poland, Turkey, and Belarus. It's an awful club to be in. If you wonder how it looks in real life. Every discussion on history, politics, social issues immediately escalates to "us against them", "you are from among them". On every scandal and corruption the only concern is "are they from us or from them?".

[1] - https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/political-polarization-sc...

That was interesting.

Minor spoiler: looks like the platforms found a way to mass produce the formula Robby Lefkowitz made money out of, to everyone else's detriment.

Besides Ireland and parts of the UK Halloween traditionally hasn't been a thing in Europe and some people are adamantly against it being celebrated. But here in Switzerland in the recent years it's become the night where teenagers/students go out late and vandalize and be nuisances, start fires, etc.

This year it's on a Saturday and there's also general unrest with frequent protests (Israel/Palestine, Kurds, students, etc etc etc) so it's probably going to be worse than usual.

I find it so cute when Swiss embrace rioting or vandalism. Go emigrate somewhere and let's see how tough you are.

A subtle form of propaganda is choosing what to call legitimate or not, since there’s really no first principles reason for any legitimacy

I agree with your first statement, but I’m not sure I understand what you’re saying here:

> there’s really no first principles reason for any legitimacy

Do you mean in this case, or are you making a blanket statement about the nature of morality and power?

Yes, there are. A popular protest (and even riots!) should come entirely or at least in the vast majority from a sentiment spread across the people. If it's 500 youngsters that come out of the blue following a campaign orchestrated most probably by a foreign state actor, then it's not legitimate.

Yes, we could start doing verbal and mental gymnastics about how an external actor could be legitimately interested to try and drive the political landscape of a country one month before elections, sure. But it's not the point here.

Recent studies have shown that performing mental gymnastics could delay the onset of dementia.

I'd rather talk about whether the protests were "genuine" rather than "legitimate". Riots usually escalate from prior peaceful protests, in which protestors claim specific concerns and political factions get involved. None of that seems to have happened here, it was zero to teens rioting.

This doesn't seem like a full article without bothering to interview ANY of the arrested 130 people.

What I will say is that getting tiktoks in front of hundreds of thousands of people in a coordinated way isn't easy, and they won't come out if they weren't already passionate about something. If there are written records proving this was made to cause chaos specifically then they should subpoena tiktok for exact records.

> What I will say is that getting tiktoks in front of hundreds of thousands of people in a coordinated way isn't easy

Literally trivial: https://getstarted.tiktok.com/gofulltiktok?lang=en

> and they won't come out if they weren't already passionate about something

First time protesting and/or rioting in Barcelona? There is definitively always people taking advantage of our peaceful protests to cause chaos and mayhem, this happens every time there are protests, and especially once the police wants to shut down the events but people want to keep on partying.

> they should subpoena tiktok for exact records

Absolutely, straight up attempts to subvert democracy, should be met with investigations immediately.

would be nice if organizers were actually arrested and investigated

The eternal way is: follow the money. Not politician declarations or poster designs. The money. I have some preconceptions about it - based on who could profit from a broken EU - but still, follow the money.

Wherever there's change, there's money to be made. We just don't really care about people making the dosh from changes we like.

poster designs came from an ai subscription which, even if free, is still a better trail than "the money"

I'm not really clear what you're trying to say with your choice of fresh account name, but it seems pretty offensive for no good reason.

Image-generation platforms can be subpoenaed for identifiers associated with the account that produced those images.

In the US, I heard lots of conspiracies about who was really behind the BLM riots, Charlottesville, Jan 6th, the Trump assassination attempts, etc.

The same thing is happening here in the comments. Everyone is looking for the puppeteer. I’m not sure one way or the other.

On the one hand, it’s true that when you look through history, you often find that there was a “someone” (e.g. the Germans funding the Bolshevik Revolution, or the CIA shenanigans in the Middle East and South America).

On the other hand, can’t these things also legitimately arise from disenfranchised groups without needing to point to a boogie man?

> On the other hand, can’t these things also legitimately arise from disenfranchised groups without needing to point to a boogie man?

I think that's the crux, they do, constantly! We have "real riots" in Spain all the time, and protests, both peaceful and violent ones. We have experience of the actual process of seeing people getting more and more frustrated, and things slowly bubbling until it reaches a threshold, then bubbles over.

This doesn't seem to be that. There is zero political parties/groups involved, which is very uncommon, we have strong groups that are always up for causing some property damages and similar things, when these "real riots" happen, but none of these were involved.

When you have basically groups of individuals all acting in uniform way, based on the same misinformation, with zero association or relation to our existing political factions, then it's quite easy to see that things didn't happen as they "normally" do, that's why people are asking questions right now about it.

This is because they are baffling. I still don't understand BLM. Those women came out of nowhere; everybody organic who initiated the initial Ferguson protests was executed, and the media went all in. I am a black American and I know very few black Americans who participated, but tons of white liberal types. All of the black American people I know of who tried to get involved and started their own local chapters of BLM got no support or money from the national organization, other than disapproval of protests that they wanted to do on their own about local issues that they cared about. The national organization was drowning in institutional money.

Everything about it was just bizarre. I still can't deny that it was a color revolution to unseat Trump, and I wish I could.

Also, I still have a weird video of some strange masked and "tactically dressed" man who walked into the middle of the protests in some town and just started breaking the windows of businesses (an Auto Center iirc) without speaking to anyone who was actually protesting (peacefully), while they were yelling at him to stop. He then just leaves, and while one guy is walking after him and questioning him, he threatens the guy until he stops following.

There's also the weird French stuff where "black bloc" people are doing damage or in one case throwing a flash bang grenade, police rush in, a few words are exchanged, and then this "black bloc" leave with the police.

The blaming of the Russian Chinese anti-Semitic mullahs is the real conspiracy. What it looks like to me is that people may be engineering protests to justify crackdowns, or turning existing protests violent in order to shut them down. The masking that has been done since the "black bloc" started ruining protests and escalated greatly after covid just makes it too easy. Also the fact that these protests are generally slacktivist and not organized, so people don't expect to know each other. They get messages on social media that say that there's going to be a protest about some subject, and they feel obligated to show up - but they have no connection to each other.

It's weird that that's how it's expected to be now. This "protest" ritual has gone to the limits of artificiality. The "No Kings" "protests" in the US are directly run by Democratic contractors, and they text spam relentlessly from voter lists (I've gotten dozens, if not a hundred or two.) It isn't like grassroots people get together, discuss their grievances, and decide to coordinate a protest. It's completely top-down, coordinated with elections, and has no articulable grievances, just slogans.

Alienating, isolating, dislocating people, and shattering communities and families has resulted in people who are completely subject to centralized control. The state thinks the most dangerous issue in the world is that people might be able to speak to each other in an unmediated fashion. Can a state like that ever be happy about family, friendship, or community?

I saw an interview with BLM organisers by Daryl Davis where they say they where voting for Trump. For some reason the clip of them voting Trump was cut from the netflix version but its still on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xN-rxUDryO4

While everyone are busy hoarding real estate, here it comes the Chinese-Russian and American-Israeli hypnotic brainwashing with sweatshops in South Asia. Hopefully the growth of real estate market was worth it.

Isn't it suspicious that EU nation most vocal about Israel's atrocities gets targeted by campaigns like these, when Israel has the most advanced propaganda machines globally ?

> when Israel has the most advanced propaganda machines globally ?

What an interesting claim. Unless you're saying that despite Israel having the "most advanced propaganda machines" (whatever that means), it's failing miserably. The amount of hate towards Israelis and the Israeli government is at all time high.

Not failing at all: still no leaders arrested, no UN security council decision, not even sanctions by the EU. Any other developed nation would have had already seen more serious consequences.

There's only been one nation that has been attacked like this and then responded with military action: USA. And they didn't see any sanctions, in fact, many western countries sent troops to help them. I think the evidence is exactly the opposite of your claim.

And do you attribute that to "advanced propaganda"?

Can you expand on that?

That’s because the internet briefly left a window open for the masses to attain information outside of controlled channels, but they’ve clamped down on it severely in the last year by giving TikTok US, Paramount, and Warner Brothers to the largest donor of the IDF.

Pro-Israel organizations like this one suggest what you say is true: "Analysis: Riots Show the Price France Has Paid for Turning Against Israel" [0]

[0] https://combatantisemitism.org/special-features/analysis-rio...

Reads like a threat

Israel are easier to blame than the reality, which is some people are entirely feral and will turn legitimate protests into an excuse to riot and loot. It doesn’t need a state actor to amplify this stuff. Just a bunch of idiots in social media bubbles.

The CIA and NED have been creating color revolutions for decades. This isn't new.

https://nonsite.org/change-agent-gene-sharps-neoliberal-nonv...

I found it interesting that two of the AI posters in the article have the three-pointed “no kings” crown, and one has a two-pointed version. The AI hallucinated icons from American partisan propaganda into an EU context in a country with a monarchy.

"fake protest"

The people protesting there weren't fake. This is just propaganda.

Maybe try reading the article, it isn't claiming "all protests in Spain are fake".

I did. It's propaganda intending to de-legitimize the opposition.

What opposition organized these riots? You're confusing them from proper demonstrations and protests that are organized by actual opposition. The riots seems to have come from something else, unless you can quote which organization is behind this.

Digital markets act in EU Tiktok is a gatekeeper. Special rules apply

https://digital-markets-act.ec.europa.eu/gatekeepers-portal_...

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