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Comment by marksc | Hacker News Reader

I did not know that about the BBG. That is quite interesting.

I would have to agree that the level of media manipulation done by Russia and China is far beyond that done by the US. I think that's pretty clear. Frankly, I don't think any of it is "OK."

But third-world propaganda doesn't excuse first-world media manipulation either. Or maybe it does. I think it's fair to say that we're squarely in the realm of opinion here.

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I don't think the level of manipulation is any different between Russia and the US. The only difference is the type of manipulation - US spooks need to found a company and use their connections to make influence - e.g. CNN - meaning they're more covert. Russian examples are more overt, because Russian culture simply allows for the embarrassment. Americans would rather not be confronted with the degree to which their government is oppressing them - so they hide it behind corporate entities designed to hide the true influence in the shadows.

What would be a convincing argument for people who don't believe that CNN is literally a front for the US Government?

Edited for clarity.

That RfA does this work quietly makes it all the more impressive to me. We did work for the program in my last couple years at Matasano (I imagine Tom Ritter's NCC Cryptography Practice is continuing it). They paid real money --- specialist cryptography practice money --- and their only terms were "find good bugs". The projects were coordinated with the open source project managers, who got full reports. Some of those open source projects even publicized the results!

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