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Comment by Zealotux | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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).

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

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.

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