>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.
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.
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.
Is Isle of Manx the modern, gender-neutral term for Isle of Man, or something else?
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.
- 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.
Perhaps they mean to influence Iranians who activity circumvent internet restrictions :-)
But perhaps they influence American foreign policy.
There are always some idiots who believe implausible claims. There are plenty of conspiracy theorists around who believe implausible things.
These are also the most extreme posts so there may be more plausible ones.
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?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edinburgh_Castle#Military_role
Of course, if there are pipers involved, then everyone better watch out ...
Aka, the one o'clock gun, which locals ignore entirely as it's every single day but always surprises a tourist: https://www.edinburghcastle.scot/see-and-do/highlights/one-o... . There is actually a small barracks on the site as well, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redford_Barracks ; the city as a whole contains a few more barracks for various units, including a signals unit conveniently located near the main telephone exchange.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2025/11/30/nx-s1-5610951/fake-ai-videos-...
I dunno, have you seen US news recently?
The UK rumour people probably believe is more likely to be "English police suppress tweets of valued contributors to the Scottish nationalist movement"...
Given the amount of tanks the UK has I think it would have to be "tank in city" - mind you tanks have been used in Glasgow! ;-)
https://euppublishingblog.com/2018/10/03/georgesquarebattle/
(more seriously, let's not forget the deployment of the Parachute Regiment to Northern Ireland, although that was a while ago)
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...
Between being fooled and being uninformed the latter is much more pleasant.
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...
Unsurprising given there is no true Scotsman.
Can you share more? I read his book years ago, but haven't heard/read anything since.
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Andreessen#Political_view...
For example, I have always preferred most of Democrats' positions on the national level, but on the local/state level, especially in California/Oregon/Washington, I disagree with a lot of the Democrat leaders, more and more since 2010. Of course, I'm nowhere near as influential as Andreessen nor do I have interests that would warrant a say in national politics, but I can see why if one is against local leadership they would cozy up to someone who you think can help you fight against them, without being "radicalized", per the above definition.
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.
The main argument was that democrats policies were detrimental to their business.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_sNclEgQZQ&t=11s
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.
Edit: At this time this is my most heavily downvoted post. I'll leave it up because I think that itself is interesting.
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.
Whenever I see one of those I like to post Yong-heum Lee, who really did 500 miles a day in an Ioniq 5: https://www.hyundaimotorgroup.com/en/story/CONT0000000000176...
But as you say, facts are of limited use in debates any more.
To be clear, that's an average of about 500 miles a day, for almost 3 years.
> 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.
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
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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...”
This guy claims to have made $300k posting racist content posing as British: https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2025-11-16/kin...
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.
It doesn't help matters when the initial founding was less than innocent https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1692122
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.
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.
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?
What could possible go wrong?
(1) - https://www.jta.org/2025/07/14/global/when-irans-internet-we...).
https://web.archive.org/web/20160406094911/http://www.reddit..., Most addicted city (over 100k visits total) Eglin Air Force Base, FL
"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.
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?
IIRC it's been a long time since anyone has commanded a >50% of the vote share.
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).
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.
I found this a decent recent overview on the common analytical takes, if you're interested: https://julianhjessop.substack.com/p/what-the-nber-gets-wron...
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.
Though its notional deficit would be far higher and break EU rules IIRC (which have been broken numerous times by existing EU states).
If anything it would force UK back into the EU, further strengthening it.
In 2024 the SNP got 30% of the vote, the big unionist parties having more than 2 votes for every 1 nationalist.
Famously, Alex Salmond (at the time, the leader of the Scottish National Party) was given a regular programme on Russia Today. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Alex_Salmond_Show
Say what you want about Scottish independence (its for the Scots to decide), but a break up of the UK would serve Kremlin interests no end.
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.
Man if Russia went dark like half of all politics X and Reddit would probably go dark. I bet it would be both ends of the horseshoe.
My experience of reddit is that it is wildly anti-Russian since the invasion, sometimes to an almost cartoonish degree (e.g. r/worldnews).
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.
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.
LadyCailin•1h ago