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Comment by denom | Hacker News Reader

Doesn't every well financed institution do similar things? I thought that was the substance of public relations: getting your side of the story out there. It even happens on a small scale e.g. Yelp reviews.

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No, every well financed institution does not hire people to role play hundreds of sockpuppets to create a false impression of support for its message.

Actually the US has an entire (metaphorical) army of think tanks and other propaganda outlets which do exactly that.

The sockpuppets tend to be more influential than drive-by commenters though. Some of them actually pretend to be respectable journalists and opinion-formers. The Church Committee in the 1970s blew the lid on this.

Operation Mockingbird is a famous historical example:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mockingbird

The National Endowment for Democracy is more recent:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Endowment_for_Democrac...

Given history, it would take someone with more faith in open government than I have to believe there are no equivalent online operations today.

It's one thing getting your side of the story, and another one blatantly overflooding the forums with your side of the story. In electoral campaigns there are rules against such practices, but bought reviews or fake followers are issues way more difficult to address. And as somebody else put it, financial institutions seldom try to justify with it an invasion of other countries.

Really even yelp reviews? How much vigilance does one need to not be coopted by propaganda . . .

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