Makes sense. Russia and friends would seem to have an interest in Scottish independence as it undermines the UK.
It seems to me most social platforms (not just big tech, smaller UGC sections like the BBC) have many puppet accounts that are triggered by certain content.
Anecdotally looking at BBC comment sections of Scottish content, the "highest rated" comments are almost unilaterally pro-British/anti Scottish National Party which deviates a long way from historical voting preferences. The SNP have performed very well in Scottish and Westminster elections and the weakest barometer for them is/was the 45%/55% vote split in the Scottish independence referendum 12 years ago. I think if anyone took a "sentiment score" of what's there vs how people generally think or behave there'd be a large deviance.
More generally, any platform seems to have systemised abuse and this pattern goes all the way back to generic content management systems being abused in the early 2000s.
I do wonder, are these accounts being accessed via proxy? i.e. someone claiming to be from the UK and having a residential IP- if the platform doesn't care about the location of access, maybe start checking for latency?
I actually think that the process around Scottish independence actually demonstrates that the UK is actually relatively sane - a part of the country wanted to consider independence, the government at the time said "OK you can have a referendum", the referendum was held and Scotland voted to stay in the UK.
I was, and still am, a support of Scottish independence but I how the whole thing was handled reflects pretty well on the UK as a whole.
The SNP have won a lot of seats through the voting system because the other parties split the non-independence vote. The SNP have never had a majority of votes, even with an overwhelming majority of parliamentary seats.
It has been quite a long time since a Westminster party has won with a vote share of over 50%, and the SNP vote share at Holyrood is higher than those of parties that win Westminster elections. The Westminster electoral system (nb to non-Brits: all the UK constituent bodies run different voting systems for no good reason) delivers majorities at the cost of legitimacy.
A survey of online posts is usually not representative of a population at large, either within the online community or the society as a whole. There are so many biasing and selection effects at work, even before talking about anything deliberate which is probably also going on.
>Makes sense. Russia and friends would seem to have an interest in Scottish independence as it undermines the UK.
Do they? Since Independent Scotland is very likely to rejoin EU it seems to me Russia & co would be interested in keeping it on the sinking ship that is post-brexit UK(economy wise).
I think it'd make the remainder of the UK weaker and more divided if Scotland joined the EU after leaving the UK, so I'd think that serves their interests too.
I don't think that's a given, or even necessarily a strong likelihood. A majority of Scotland's trade is with the rest of the UK, unlike the Brexit situation where a shrinking minority of the UK's trade was with the rest of the EU, the only EU member for which this was the case. Scotland is accustomed to deficit spending and to large subsidies from the rUK, neither of which would be epecially palatable to EU finances.
And while I certainly think it's fair to describe the UK economy as a sinking ship, I also think that blaming that on Brexit is, to put it politely, "starting with your conclusion". UK growth has been higher than France, Germany or Italy since 2016. Brexit has obviously had impacts, but they haven't all been negative (the City in particular has zero enthusiasm to fall back into any EU alignment) and I think the COVID lockdown shambles and the Homerically inept current government have been bigger factors.
Given that a sentiment for independence of Scotland has only really became an actual topic people discuss semi-seriously after the Brexit, I think it is fair to assume that there is a quite high likelihood of it, and there are quite some EU states that get preferential treatment budget wise, no reason to assume that Scotland cannot become that.
Covid has been global, lockdowns have been everywhere, UK is not unique and did not even have the worst of it in terms of lockdown strictness. While "averaged out" UK economy post-brexit/pre-covid might not look that much worse than EU, if you look into specifics the picture gets far uglier with entire economy sectors going bankrupt, all in all it was a spectacular self inflicted damage that will be felt for decades to come, especially now that US is becoming a hostile actor.
"a 2024 study by researchers at Clemson University has estimated that 4% of content relating to independence were linked to one Iranian-backed bot network of around 80 accounts."
Speaking as a Scot, I would expect there are those who support attempts to break up the UK who care zero about Scotland. Who's ultimately behind it is speculative.
>‘Jake’ claimed that a “top BBC anchor resigned on air and was immediately detained by security services” and that “crowds have surrounded the residence of the newly appointed ‘Governor General’ imposed by London”.
>Meanwhile, ‘Fiona’ said that “protesters have seized Balmoral Estate” and “International markets are dumping UK assets as images of tanks in Edinburgh go viral”.
>‘Lucy’ claimed that "farmers have used tractors to block the A1 at the English border”, while another account called ‘Kelly’ said that “army trucks are rolling down the Royal Mile. Soldiers in fatigues are guarding the Scottish Parliament”.
Surely the number of Scottish people influenced by accounts making such outlandish claims is exactly zero.
A lot of this stuff doesn't work by changing people's mind on topic X, but rather by saturating the informational environment so that people declare epistemological bankruptcy. For example, one thing that you can quite often hear from a Russian that has been confronted with something unpleasant is "well, who knows what's true". This is usually not a figure of speech, not some kind of washing down of facts, but rather an accurate representation of their mind.
Between being fooled and being uninformed the latter is much more pleasant.
Maybe it’s not meant to be signal. It’s meant to be noise that makes the signal increasingly hard to distinguish. You get used to there being bullshit and now you can’t tell precisely which unlikely but maybe plausible messages are true. It helps weaken the ability for the target to be able to engage in meaningful discourse.
I hate to admit it but I failed the NPR real vs fake video quiz [1] and it is exactly because of this. There is so much fake noise out there that it is very hard to tell what is true.
It's for the Scottish. It's in Iran's interests for Scotland to become independent because that would enforce change on the United Nations Security Council. The UK ceases to exist and loses its veto, then what happens on the UNSC after that is anyone's guess.
The UK doesn't cease to exist though, it just shrinks. Plus the USSR fragmenting and Russia (as the main constituent part, the nuclear power and the country the independent republics were happy to acknowledge as the continuation of the USSR) becoming the successor state is pretty well-established precedent for what happens when states fragment, whose legitimacy Russia probably doesn't want to contest too strongly...
General disruption in the UK would help the Iranian government a little, but I managed to click on one of the accounts before it was suspended, and its most popular tweets received very interaction (and were pretty banal statements of independence support indistinguishable from stuff thousands of completely normal Scottish people posted) I assume their attempts to seed wilder rumours were low effort and had very little success.
Russia was allowed to inherit the USSR seat on 3 conditions:
- It took on all the sovereign debt from the newly independent nations.
- It relinquished nukes that were left behind in Ukraine.
- The United Nations collectively agreed to it.
I don't think any of those things would happen in the UK's case. But of course it doesn't matter what you or I think. It only matters what _Iran_ thinks will happen if Scotland gains independence.
Russia didn't lose its veto when the USSR collapsed and neither would the UK lose it in such a case. If the UK was in danger of losing its veto it would never allow Scottish independence.
Manx is the demonym for people from the Isle of Man. It's odd to see it written "Isle of Manx" in a list of other demonyms, but the word Manx itself is far from modern. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manx_people
Not Iranians - what would anyone gain by influencing Iranians' views of Scottish nationalism? My experience has been that people outside the west barely know Scotland exists and are not going to care about it anymore than the average Scot is likely to have strong feelings about Laos.
It may be aimed at Scots but sometimes be done too blatantly so slips into the implausible. It may be aimed at influencing just those prone to conspiracy theories - who might be few but more likely to extreme actions.
People leave Iran for UK. The idea is that if UK seems less atttactive and stable, fewer people will be strongly inclined to pursue it. It also normalizes chaos at home.
I think there are parallels to draw to how Fox News tried to paint a picture of places in Europe being on fire and overtaken by gangs and radicals years before that became close to actual reality.
tbf the US is a very different place where you'd have to at least double check rumours that the executive hadn't decided that tanks in cities were the best way to address crime in cities.
The UK rumour people probably believe is more likely to be "English police suppress tweets of valued contributors to the Scottish nationalist movement"...
Northern Ireland is a big part of why the UK doesn't think the optics of deploying tanks are a show of strength and doesn't think it comes without a cost...
Apart from anything else, where are they rolling 'down' from? The castle? I mean I know it's technically a castle, but it's not like there are a bunch of troops there just waiting to spring on Holyrood, no?
.. correct, a good old fashioned non-AI mis-googling error. The castle barracks is the "New Barracks", so called because it was built in 1799, and I saw the blocky stonework construction and went "close enough". Sources are a bit vague on how currently used it is. https://edinburghtourist.co.uk/questions/who-lives-edinburgh...
Yeah, fair point. I was just not sure if they have enough troops to take the parliament in any meaningful sense (not that this stuff should really be taken seriously).
Of course, if there are pipers involved, then everyone better watch out ...
Surely the number of Scottish people influenced by accounts making such outlandish claims is exactly zero.
The accounts appear to be suspended, so it is true that Scottish people are not being influenced by these accounts.
In fact, the link in the story about tanks in Edinburgh goes nowhere. Combined with the links to suspended accounts, the article almost reads like it was written by a sock puppet...
I’m certain that a key pillar of Russian propaganda in the USA is to repeat the horseshit that Europe is some degenerate shithole/caliphate arresting people left right and centre for tweeting. See also the US’s total obsession with London and its supposed “no go zone” for white people. The irony is that the US is far less white than Europe is, so they really cannot point fingers at us. It’s worked fantastically at separating the US from all of its allies. We saw that at the Munich security conference last year.
You only need look at Musk’s Twitter and right wing media outlets to hear about the U.K’s no go zones for white people — which do not exist. Accounts professing to be from Scottish people are not trying to influence Scottish people, they’re trying to influence Americans into believing that Scotland has already fallen victim to what the fearmongers say is coming for America.
It's part of their government's "Death to England" vision, which they describe as a "policy". Splitting up the UK is part of it. It's ineffective and bizarre, but this insular theocracy has a long track-record of such decision making.
I sometimes wonder how much your own beliefs change consuming some content online even if you consciously disagree with it. Like a slight subconscious erosion that you don't even realise is happening until you have been radicalised. Ironically I think people who are more honest or empathetic might be more susceptible to this as they try and take in other people's view points without crudely dismissing it.
Important thing to note - UKDefenceJournal only tracks a set of known Iran linked related accounts that could be tracked because of previous Internet blackouts in Iran.
It would be interesting to see how this applies more widely to other sets of content and countries.
From the original UKDJ article:
> The original UK Defence Journal investigation stressed in an editor’s note that “this article does not claim that Scottish independence is a foreign plot, nor does it suggest that support for independence is illegitimate, inauthentic, or driven by anything other than sincere political conviction.”
> The focus, we underlined, was not on genuine activists but on documented attempts by Iranian-linked actors to exploit authentic political debates for their own strategic purposes. Robertson’s reply arguably missed this distinction. The concern raised by analysts was not that independence itself is tainted, but that foreign actors are infiltrating the conversation, seeking to magnify division and undermine trust in democratic processes.
It goes without saying that social media is causing irreparable harm to the fabric of our society.
To use an analogy: if the village idiot went to the town square and shouted hate speech, he'd be laughed at or dealt with. Now anyone has a platform to go to the town square, except it's the world, and shout hate speech. And unlike before there will be hateful people, some of them unrecognisable from real people, who will support the village idiot. They will help amplify his voice and validate him and legitimise him.
We have to find a way to stop this. The only thing I can think of is require you to attach your real identity to social media accounts, and regulate the living daylights out of it to hold the networks accountable if their owners don't want to do the right thing. Free speech isn't free.
I agree that social media is a net negative, but want to also point out that before social media it was the mainstream press and TV have been shaping society for decades. Things like buying a used car from Nixon or fighting in Vietnam etc are all mainstream press impact.
US would simply have a large impact as well, of course because lots of internet-users are from the US, but also because the US likes to astroturf as well.
This is why my FB feed is full of misinformation, strawman arguments, sweeping conclusions and no nuance. it does not matter what they are arguing about of which side they are on, the stupidity is constant. Left and right, theists and atheists, pro and anti-immigration. Anything else you can think of. All things I am happy to have an interesting argument about, but what social media offers is engagement bait of one kind or another - from rage bait to feigned ignorance.
Networks were full of this stuff before the bot armies were a glimmer in whoever's eye.
I don't doubt bots are a factor in the sheer volume of it, but human nature on network debates was bad when it was only fairly smart, educated people, and it only got worse as the AOL-to-Facebook pipeline demographic became politicised.
Glinner isn't a bot, just to pick one example of somebody who - irrespective of the merit or not of his argument - simply behaves like an asshole, constantly.
I'm sure regulation would be more complex than "Feeds must be chronological and only what you're explicitly following" - hammer out the details - but yeah, basically, that
10+ years ago I had a job which involved developing/testing geo-restricted software in another country. Eventually each VPN exit point would get marked up as such, and I would have to switch to another.
So if posts were marked with the country of origin or VPN, that might be enough for most people to evaluate the intent of the post.
Of course things have changed. There might not be so many IPv4 addresses around to trade, but IPv6 has probably changed that. And it's probably hard to know how long an address was used by a VPN before being traded back to a telco.
The Herald information comes from ukdefencejournal.
They don't tell us exactly where the information comes from originally, despise talking about the company Cyabra later in another context.
But the Jewish Telegraphic Agency tell us that the information about Iran also comes from Cyabra (1)
Cyabra? The Tel-Aviv based company, with important customers as the USA State Department, informing us about Iran?
> The account, which describes itself as “a proud Scottish lass” and “passionate about Scotland's independence & our right to self-determination”, is based in Europe (according to X’s location data).
I get suspect everytime an online socialist overuses famous socialist terms (or supposed socialist terms) before segueing into a conjunction. “Of course I want the socialist utopia just as much as all of us, comrades, but...”
When I read wildly insane comments on a mildly contentious issue here on HN (e.g. as a very mild example, posts on electric cars always draw out someone who needs to state they drive 1000 miles a day and so electric cars will never work for anyone) I wonder how many sock puppets accounts there are here. There must be some. The radicalization of, e.g., Marc Andreessen was very useful to some group, so there is no reason they wouldn't try more of the same in this venue.
I'd like to think HN is generally better at this than most communities, but it's hard to imagine we're immune.
It's also important to remember that (rightly or wrongly) a lot of these culture war issues are really touching a tribalism nerve rather than really touching on the issues themselves. To a lot of people, the EV debate amounts to "those _other_ people trying to force a change on _me_." Mind you, I'm not suggesting this is the right way to look at these sorts issues, but I think that's how it plays out for a lot of people. I had a real-life friend who was very anti-environmentalist, and his view was effectively that it was all made up, and was just an excuse for the left to push things on people
Partisan tribalism is such an odd phenomenon, and it has a very obvious deranging effect on people. They no longer pay attention to principle or policy. Instead, everything becomes a matter of some vacuous “groupism”. Parties become little jingoist nations unto themselves. Our of weakness, people are unable to maintain a position rooted in honesty and truth, and instead search for some Borg cube to join in order to receive “protection”, as long as they chant the party’s mantras. Very often, it crosses over into cult of personality territory. People make idols of the party and the party leader.
The tragedy of it all is that it completely misses the point. Politics is in service of the common good of the polity. True loyalty is to that common good as an objective good. Loyalty to a party is a false loyalty, as parties are not proper objects of loyalty. They are merely convenient political instruments, not the objects of the good pursued. Things become doubly absurd when this party loyalty remains intact despite a party’s errors.
> it was all made up, and was just an excuse for the left to push things on people
The fact is that environmental issues - like almost any political issue - can be used by any party to push an agenda in parallel to the actual issue. So, here, environmental concerns can be used by any party as a cudgel and an instrument, whether negatively (e.g., painting all environmental concern as subterfuge in order to push through policies aimed at private profit at the expense of quality of life) or positively (e.g., stopping critical projects proposed by a political opponent by commissioning bogus ecological studies to create impediments).
Of course, that’s different than the extreme position that all environmental concern is part of some conspiracy (the Left has its own share of analogous conspiratorial crackpottery).
> I'd like to think HN is generally better at this than most communities, but it's hard to imagine we're immune.
We're much, much worse. "Most communities" are built around consensus. Show up at your Facebook group organized around your favorite hobby and you'll find that everyone has a bunch of similar opinions about most things, and that's the way most people like it. Walk off the reservation and try to pick fights over something controversial and you'll find the community walks away.
That sounds bad, right? What if consensus is wrong? Don't we need free thinkers?!
HN is an enclave of antisocial nerds[1] who think they're smarter than the rest of society. We live for disagreement. Discovering that we disagree with our peers isn't a mark of shame, it's evidence that we've discovered a Magical Great Truth, that our "peers" at HN are all sheep, and that we're therefore smarter than the herd.
Sure, Facebook fishing groups or knitting sites or whatever breed senseless group think. But on the whole "group think" usually works out pretty well and keeps people from wandering off into the scarier weeds of the thoughtscape.
HN? We breed radicals. And therefore we're more susceptible to deliberately radicalizing sockpuppetry, not less.
[1] To wit: we're basically 4chan but with an older demographic and industry cred.
Doesn’t that also create a kind of immunity, though? If what I see is a cacophony of differing views, then I am unlikely to be influenced by any particular sock puppet account.
Whereas a community that tends towards groupthink might have a narrower range of views, but if those views begin to shift in a particular direction then it’s much harder for those who are disadvantaged by that shift to resist, because to do so requires violating the norms of groupthink.
I’m not sure which is better. My own preference is to tolerate a wide range of views in return for robust disagreement being the norm, but I can imagine some (most?) people preferring the opposite.
That is something we are susceptible to indeed. Our job is to grok complex systems, and that easily leads us to hubris like we can push historians and sociologists away.
I think the same can be observed in econometric circles, where I see inevitable complexity arising from human social dynamics, be it historic, cultural, sociological, or religious in nature, often gets ignored.
About your last point, you hit the nail for me. HN is 4chan without the pure chaos, with people talking smartly. Here you can find all the political spectrum (including nazis), but people will try to not be as inflammatory as 4chan users (most of the time, at least). There's no limit to what people will defend here. I don't think that it's something necessarily bad for HN, but it opened my eyes about how tech billionaires are a bunch of HN users that got a lot of power.
Any site that becomes sufficiently popular will attract sock puppets, shills, paid agitators, paid astroturfers, spammers, scammers, people paid to warm up accounts and to vouch for their alternate accounts, accounts pretending to ask questions with alternate accounts that suggest a solution that they own and operate and many many other shenanigans. There are also no shortages of people that try to influence the thinking of others or trick them into buying something or voting a particular way. Some of them get nullified in /newest by some of us. Some make it through. Some even get massive responses and that is is a chance they are rolling the dice on.
Looking at various discussions, I'd say there's enough to attempt to steer narrations. In some cases users bury comments from such accounts rightfully with downvotes. But it's not just discussions - there are accounts submitting nothing but single-themed content to spread particular themes.
My account isn't that much old but I was lurking around for years and I can say that quality of content and comments has significantly dropped in last 5 years. I'd guess it's because people running away from reddit settled here, because HN serves more generic stuff - with help of notorious spammers who surely get paid for uploading content from big media outlets every few hours.
Mr. Andreessen has been involved with high level politics for a long time. This is not "random radicalization". I will not comment on the quality of the politics but it feels fairly deliberate.
I remember a time when entire discussion threads were swiftly culled from HN based on the magnitude of their political content.
These days, it’s pretty clear that the direction matters a lot more than the magnitude, and “flamebait” is only a problem when the flames blow a certain way.
Just search and you'll find a million articles about his "dark enlightenment" (or whatever stupid name is used) views. I think "Chatham House" was the name of a private group chat he was in that helped this process along, and there are several articles about this.
Chatham house are famous for the rule that if you're invited, you agree that if you talk about what they talked about in their meetings, you must not say who said it.
Most political manipulation of influential people isn't sophisticated at all, it's 3rd grade bullying level. For instance, getting invited to an exclusive meaning as proof of your importance/"seriousness". Brazen flattery, but it works.
And the secrecy grooms them into betraying outsiders in favor of insiders. It's not such a big betrayal to give cover to powerful people's ugly opinions, but it's a start. And once you've done one bad thing with the gang, you're easier to persuade to do worse things with the gang. Again, really banal stuff.
Remember in Snowden's biography, he mentioned being involved in a plot to get some diplomatic person to drunk drive, so they could swoop in and "help" him. That wasn't just targeted at the diplomat. It was also targeted at rookie CIA agent Ed: first do iffy things with us, so that you have firmly rationalized and justified it to yourself once we ask you to do uglier stuff.
This post really reads like a C.S. Lewis novel - the whole fear of being an outsider and laughed at, and the gradual but slippery slope towards more substantial clearly bad stuff.
Chatham House is openly the sort of "inner ring" Lewis warned about.
To get the topic back more on topic for HN, I think that the fear of AI manipulation of the public is misplaced. Not because it can't be a thing, but because private AI-fueled manipulation will be far more destructive. If you fake a video of some horrific crime and post it on the internet, a thousand people will be examining it for mistakes - and a thousand people will claim mistakes which aren't there, and it'll create a lot of noise and certainly that's not a small problem. But if you fake a video and show it to your super-exclusive private circle and explain to them that of course you must not talk about this for the sake of the victims etc. then it's far less likely the mistakes will be spotted. Our leaders can be radicalized by propaganda we're not even allowed to see - that scares me.
He initially supported the Democratic Party but because of crypto and AI he donated millions to super PACs for Trump, supported DOGE and said that children are now being readicalized to hate capitalism as well as directly messaging the Trump administration to put pressure on Universities like NSF, SU and MIT because of DEI or something like that.
One can support a party and then change to not supporting a party for a variety of reasons. Such as disagreeing with the direction the party is going, especially locally, or even as simple as eschewing the previously supported party because you are betting the other one will win and need to curry favor.
I haven't studied Andreessen's views and actions, so I was just positing a strategic reason for a change in political support for a high profile person. (as opposed to an actual drastic change in their thoughts which is what I take to mean as "radicalized")
He’s a “sewer socialist”, his most radical pitch is… making buses free. It’s easy to get outraged by labels but when you strip them away and look at the actual politics it’s all pretty middling. Which is a large part of why he won.
They're different economic philosophies, but most Western countries have a mixed system incorporating elements from both. Voting for Momdani doesn't necessarily mean you want total public ownership of the means of production. His manifesto is only moderately more socialist than the status quo.
extremely anecdotal but whenever I see a racist on Twitter, there's a non-insignificant likelihood that I click on their profile and see Marc Andreesen following them.
If there are sock puppets around here they are probably native internet crazies or maybe lazy covert software salesman. Most of the posters just represent the wide variety of opinions on a planet with 8 billion people competing with each other. There isn't much evidence of it and political propagandizing of HN through bots is pointless anyway - most readers have practically no money or power, there aren't that many of them and they aren't trying to coordinate to achieve anything politically interesting.
> The radicalization of, e.g., Marc Andreessen was very useful to some group, so there is no reason they wouldn't try more of the same in this venue.
He's a billionaire. They come pre-radicalised and detached from reality by default. A body don't get to be a billionaire by just going with the flow and not having any particular interest in influencing the world around them.
This place allows throwaway accounts, although it also greentexts them so they're easy to spot, and if they get controversial they tend to get downvoted/flagged. HN basically restricts politics to a narrow drip feed of one or two stories a day, a situation which has advantages and disadvantages.
Whether or not this is true, it's also true that a very popular way to dismiss someone and their beliefs is to insist they're one of these accounts. Happens to me all the time.
Indeed, this thread is very contentious. Although my top-level post has a lot of upvotes, one of my comments is bouncing up and down. Very strange to me.
Do I agree with your post? No, I think >50% is too high. Do I think you should be downvoted? No, I don't think your comment is in bad faith or inflammatory.
Unfortunately, yes there are. This is a interesting demography. But I think there are also cases of genuine stubborn blindness. For example, discussion topics that are critical of political state of things like ICE and the marriage of tech and fascism often get actively flagged.
For some, reality can't fit in their belief systems, and they have to suppress any challenging information. "Everything is fine/Don't make me think".
For others, it is highly inconvenient, because they have a stake in it. I think for something like the YCombinator audience in general it is a hard subject, as the business model seeks to pick out the winners to take it all. The monopolist playbook is so deeply ingrained and normalized, that it cannot face the higher order effects of this modus operandi.
So bots and sockpuppets yes, but I think some of the stupid flagging, the obvious poor argumentation and general context blindness also can be explained as people being unable to adjust their belief systems.
I don't much like MA. I want more from our VCs than the glib one-liner-and-no-thought-beyond-that EdwardSnowdenIsATraitor. Especially if they're going to fund multiple companies
