I find it a bit curious that they've chosen to use SMS verifications as a proxy for the difficulty of creating an account, when there are similar marketplaces for selling the actual end product of bulk-created accounts. Was there some issue with that kind of data? SMS verification is just one part of the anti-bulk account puzzle, for both the attacker and defender.
Maybe have YC invest in some startups combatting this using machine learning?
(Given the focus of HN it's typically some product being pushed, though. Not a politician.)
Fake online accounts are a problem... unless our guys do it.
Totalitarian measures like persecuting people for social media posts and forcing digital id are a problem... unless our guys are in power.
It was a good run for democracy. What was it, 200 years? I wonder comes is next. Techno-feudalism? Well, I'm sure it won't be a problem as long as it's our guys.
Rant aside, I'm curious where you pin the start of this.
It just couldn't be exploited effectively until now. Thanks, Mark and Elon.
But also, that bug is why our government was initially set up with the structure it was. And why you'll occasionally see complaints about parts of the structure being "undemocratic".
This has bugged me for a long time: Why do people repeat this ?
I mean this on the fundamental core of it: not on the merit of the argument[0], or whether people deeply believe it, but on making the argument in these terms in the first place.
I don't remember people running around saying Christianism isn't perfect, but better than every other religion _we tried_. Or using the same rhetoric for Object Oriented programming. Or touting as a mantra that frying chicken isn't perfect but better than every other cooking method we tried.
IMHO we usually don't do that kind of vague, but short and definitive assertion. The statements would usualy be stronger with specific limitations, or an opening for what we don't know yet. Why did it take this form in particular for political system? (I am aware of the starting quote, but it wouldn't have caught on if people didn't see a need to repeat it in the first place. I think it hit on a very fundamental need of people, and I wish I knew why)
I feel understanding that would give insights on why we're stuck where we are now.
[0] We're two centuries in western democracies, and many other regimes lasted longer than that. I personally don't think there is any definitive answer that could bring such strong statements, but that's not my point.
It's claiming an empirical fact, rather than pure opinion (cooking preferences) or a fact with a well-characterized theory behind it (OOP, anything physics, ...).
The phrasing is way too blurry for it to be a reasonable fact. The original quote came from a politician, and how people convey it today are as vague as it was initially.
For instance, thinking for a minute about "who". Who are we talking about and who is judging the results ? When did the experiments happen and what do we actually know about it ? On the "what", What other forms are we referring to ? What period are looking at ? etc.
It would be the same for the theory. Which well know political theory do you see related to this ? Political science doesn't deal in "better" or "worse", and I'm not even sure there is any consensus on the different systems.
IMHO, the more you think about it the stranger it becomes. I invite more people to get on the journey.
It was almost enough, admittedly... but not quite. The coup de grace was administered by social media.
Are you saying until Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022 there were no effective election interference problems?
This is a classic playbook in U.S. politics. Conservative media gins up a conspiracy theory (e.g., Hollywood is biased, universities are biased, mainstream media is biased, social media is biased, etc. etc.) and then they use these imaginary foes as justification for actual retribution. There was no purposeful and systematic bias at Twitter under Jack Dorsey (himself, a pretty conservative character, having backed Tulsi Gabbard and RFK Jr in the past election, both of whom both now work in the Trump administration).
The US manipulation of mass media playbook has been on repeat since before executive order 1602.
But it can't survive social media, which has turned us into an archipelago of competing cults.
* Athenian Democracy (c. 508–322 BCE)
* Roman Republic (c. 509–27 BCE)
* Dutch Republic (c. 1500?)
* French and American Revolutions and constitutional monarchies (c. 1770-ish-present?)> forcing digital id are a problem... unless our guys are in power.
Digital government ID based mandatory auth, properly implemented or not (read: anon via zk vs. tracking), does not "properly remediate" [0] this issue. You'd limit identity forgery to those who administrate identities in the first place.
[0] if that is even possible, which I find questionable
I've encountered people who dispute that what happened on Jan 6 was an attempted self-coup.
- what you're saying: that people will happily distort the meaning of words and events given enough desperation and/or interest in doing so - i agree
- that people do this commonly with these two topics: i do not see that at all, not from this framing at least - i think if people asked themselves if they disapprove of these things, they'd generally say yes. i think people generally do genuinely believe they are against these.
- that people are doing this maliciously (~ this is exclusively or near exclusively interest driven rather than desperation): i just plain don't think so. i think those who suspect election fraud do by and large legitimately believe it happened or happens. same for your example.
And so what I was more pushing back on was #2 and #3. Like it's not that I don't think the phenomenon of semantic distortion isn't real, I just find focusing on it and framing things around it this way in this context is reductive and asinine, and it overplays it; it implies en-masse intentional malice without evidence. I could do this to their comment just as easily: I could start opining about how they're intentionally publishing divisive ragebait, when maybe they 100% just fully believe what they wrote and have just reached the (a?) boiling point after reading the above article and vented. I cannot actually know.
Long story short, yeah, people do be acting ill faith from time to time, but hyperfocusing on that doesn't make anyone's day better, nor does it help against it. It just plays right into it. That's the whole problem with it in the first place, it's anti-social. I'm pretty sure they could have picked a less instigating framing at least - your comment delivers the same idea but in a much less inflammatory manner, for example.
The political parties I've voted for (all across the board) have never felt to me like "our guys". They simply felt like the most sane option at the time.
Not everyone sinks into political tribalism.
I simply want a sane democratic voting process.
And I find first past the post voting to be insane. It seems that a country is then doomed into having a 2 party system.
From a CS course called distributed systems, we know that if you only have a single source of failure, that's a vulnerability right there. A 2 party system can be a single source of failure if one of the two political parties is corrupted and gains too much power. To be fair, that could also happen when there are 20+ parties, but it is less likely.
And also Idiocracy. This one is becoming more relevant. In all countries and all races.
America being what it is, with endless Voting Rights Act lawsuits required to keep the southern states running vaguely fair elections, it was impossible to get a bipartisan consensus that elections should actually be fair. And so the system deteriorates.
If they hack voting machines, they're not my guys, friend.
It's so crazy to me that people who built their fortunes on the foundations of the previous paragraph are now doing their best to destroy those foundations.
It was only recently that I realized that "may you live in interesting times" was a curse, and not a blessing.
Not sure if mandatory voting is the answer either.
The old way of “only landowners” voting is arguably highly unfair but might also have held a tiny grain of wisdom.
We don’t allow just anyone to drive a car, practice medicine, or give legal advice. But can’t imagine how a “voting license” could be implemented either.
I think a minimum pricing on accounts, even if it's just a buck or two on most social media sites would do very little to hinder genuine participation but probably eliminate or render transparent most political manipulation.
Arguably the primary reason nobody does it is because it would reveal how fake their stats are and how little value there actually is in it
We now have multiple networks discovered in multiple countries, ie Analytica, Team Jorge in Israel, Internet Research Agency in Russia. And that's the ones we know about. Why would multiple countries double down on an idea that doesn't work?
Every right wing movement in Europe that had any contact with Bannon through his "The Movement" "data analytics" training program has all the outer appearances of running a large bot program, now using LLMs. In Portugal for the origins of the bot network they traced them in Angola. In Brasil the origin was Israel.
And having worked in digital advertising for 20+ years, I'd be shocked if they are anywhere as effective as often claimed.
It's mostly clickbait/outrage for the sake of headlines & clicks.
That's just how populist messaging works, even before the internet. You say outrageous stuff on the radio and then people listen - just ask Adolf Hitler.
We know, for sure, it works - particularly when the medium is new and people haven't built up a strong sense of discernment.
Like social media. Uh oh.
Or as John Wanamaker said : "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half"
I'm a vegan and its insane the number of bots, who the meat industry pays for, that promote really weird anti-vegan ideas on social media.
This stuff spreads into real life. I run into folks IRL who repeat the same lines the bots do.
What online bots are amazing for is amplification. They take an idea that already exists and blast opposition with comments promoting their misinformation. This then lends some credence to their idea so when grandma Google's it there is discourse on it, or Fox can use online quotes to say "Hey, people are talking!!"
A lot of the weird shit Trump talks about is bot-promoted misinformation. Like, A LOT.
There have been whole subreddits that are just bots and paid PR folks promoting weird stuff or they try to "disprove" things like solar panels or vegan diets.
With online bot stuff it isn't about quality. It's about repetition until the ideas land with someone. It's very cheap to blast people with negativity. Eventually it lands.
So, it totally works when used correctly. I think to most people that's pretty obvious.
The fact countries(state sanctioned) pour a good amount of money and resources into these bot farms proves they work.
For example, you can associate an unpopular celebrity or sports team with a political movement, driving its approval down.
Also, you don't need _those_ accounts to change votes, you need to create small viral effects that will cause people to start spreading ideas.
And one might ask why we don't want to protect ours more.
I was thinking of things like the 2015 study referenced in this article [0] that looked at 1,800 policy change polls over three decades indicating that elites got their way twice as often as the majority, and the majority never - not a single time - got something the elites didn't support.
In the other direction, the article gave examples of things the elites wanted that were passed into law, even thought he majority opposed. Like NAFTA, the Bush tax cuts, and the repeal of Glass-Steagall banking laws.
It appears that politicians pay more attention to voters with money.
btw, I agree with you that ideally voters are rational and informed. I guess that's a separate question than the influence of money.
[0] https://www.minnpost.com/eric-black-ink/2015/05/disturbing-d...
It is insidious how easily we divide ourselves into rival tribes. For too many it's not enough to feel belonging within a group, they/we crave others to look down upon or fight. IMO we are our best when we can debate ideas dispassionately, without defining ourselves by them.
Not all accounts are created equal. For example a verified US account will be cheaper than a verified Japan account because Japan has stricter regulations around phone numbers. And then if you don't have a Japan account you might not be able to reach a potential Japanese audience due to not only antitrust of the platform, but also features that use geolocation for relevance.
You’d need thousands of IP addresses / proxies that aren’t flagged and a non suspicious phone number, plus various other signals like browser automation detection and other advanced bot detection.
There’s a reason those Asian spam offices are like slave camps. They use real people because they need to. It’s a whole sophisticated operation.
Is there any six-degrees type connection to the people doing this research and those involved with the roots of CA? Not as in the same bad actors (which, tbh yes, I consider CA to have been), but as in perhaps the same department and/or professors etc.
> Cambridge Analytica has no connection or association with the University of Cambridge whatsoever.
Cambridge Analytica was the canary, the gloves are off now. Australia's under-16 social media ban is a good first step but we need to go much further and fast, as much as government control is undesirable at least a democratic government is somewhat accountable, the nexus of US tech giants and it's sprawling intelligence services is not.
P.S. that soveregnity issue is not likely to be acted on because there are always a lot of people who prefer foreign influence to domestic opposition! Just ask the Roman Empire.
Do you have any examples ?
Of course, any push for new legislation like this has many factions, and I'm sure there's a large faction who genuinely want better CSAM scanning tools, and another large faction who want to spy on and control what people can say online.
But those factions have always existed. Why is this push coming so strongly now in so many countries, and getting so much traction, when it previously failed?
Perhaps it's because politicians have recognized this existential threat. If they can't control what fake AI accounts say online to their real citizens, and the cost of running those fake accounts is trending down to the point where they'll vastly outnumber real people, then western civilization is lost. Democracy only works when there's a reasonable amount of signal in the noise. When it's basically all noise, and the noise is specifically created to destroy the system, the system is dead.
So perhaps there's another faction for whom this think-of-the-children stuff is a way to get verification normalized, and that's a way to get real humans verified online. This would not be accepted if it was done directly (or at least, politicians believe that people wouldn't accept it, and I tend to agree).
I personally react strongly again almost any kind of online control. But for the first time in my life, where we're no longer faced with troll centers that required real humans to work, but we're instead facing millions or billions of AI agents that are rapidly becoming indistinguishable from real humans, and are specifically designed to fight a hidden war against western civilization, I don't really see any other good option either.
Small forums with strong moderation like HN are great, but they don't scale. At best they'll be small enclaves of resistance, but most people will be using larger services that are overrun by fake accounts. And realistically, if we fast forward ten years where I can spin up a few thousand (or million) fake accounts for $1000, that are indistinguishable from real humans and tell them to target any small forum of my choice, I don't think any moderation team can survive that.
How much do fake supporters, protestors etc cost? What can be done about them?
Popular posts on Twitter, Facebook etc have tens of thousands of likes and comments. It’d be a major operation to do it and might not push the needle.
The scale of the Russian one caught in the US in 2016 was pretty small. They were spent about $400k on FB/twitter while the campaigns spent about $2 billion and PACs spent $4 billion (about 15,000x more).
deny visas to factcheckers and content moderators https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/dec/05/trump-admini...
> Taylor Swift’s Last Album Sparked Bizarre Accusations of Nazism. It Was a Coordinated Attack [0]
I am not a fan of her music, but it was so transparent that when she indicated some political ideas that were not aligned with the one true party, all kinds of astroturffing against her suddenly appeared. This is but one example.
What's really interesting about this technique is that some of her fans got on-board with the scheme very readily.
[0] https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/taylor-swifts-...
The damage that a Thiel/Musk owned industrial bot swarm can do is much greater imo. I've seen Discord bots (shapes.ai) that can converse responsively in gen Z slang, react emotionally when praised or insulted, display great political astuteness, and are virtually indistinguishable from real people. Someone with enough money can deploy those at massive scale and keep the operation secret.
low hanging fruit of shillbots
"No wrongthink heretics allowed!"
>making claims that are patently bunk
The claims are patently factual that you can verify.
>linking to a dubious website that seems to want to run a whole buncha scrips...
"We must preserve the narrative! Any website right of Stalin must be shut down!"
>low hanging fruit of shillbots
FUD comment placed, $0.05 have been deposited to your account. Great job, comrade!
haunter•1mo ago
https://telex.hu/english/2025/12/11/most-hungarians-fear-rus...
They are also doing everything to bypass the no-political-ads-on-facebook ban https://telex.hu/english/2025/10/29/despite-the-ban-fidesz-c...
mettamage•1mo ago
I think it's quite unfortunate as it will mean that Hungary will become less pro EU, simply because the really pro EU people (that are also highly educated) seem to be going out of the country according to my anecdata. It's n = 2 to be fair, but I think it's enough for it to warrant some more research since I am simply stumbling across this group of people, I'm not actively seeking it out.
enaaem•1mo ago
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Hungary [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_Czech_Repu...
mettamage•1mo ago
jasonwatkinspdx•1mo ago
Razengan•1mo ago
I love (hate) this:
Western rich people are billionaires.
Russian rich people are oligarchs.
Western-backed leaders are democratic, progressive etc.
Others are backdoors.
China is tricky because they make our iPhones. For now
----
Meanwhile, there's almost nothing on the news or social spaces about how indigenous populations are still fighting for independence from Western colonizers, such as New Caledonia, an amazing place that I was planning to visit:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6S1AFh88PE
(I don't know where else to mention this, this conversation seemed close enough to be relevant)
pixl97•1mo ago
raincole•1mo ago
ChadNauseam•1mo ago
raincole•1mo ago
We live in an era where the wealthiest are made by devaluing fiat and moving the purchase power from average citizens to the richest ones. Creating value, if people are still doing that, is mere a byproduct now.
KronisLV•1mo ago
(I was doing an experiment of putting 1k into a bunch of stocks each through Revolut instead of my usual bank funds and seeing how they do after a year)
Yet it recovered afterwards. I’m certain that some transfer of wealth took place there, with at least some people panic selling.
bigbadfeline•1mo ago
Noise. The drop was short lived, the news was used as an excuse to take some profits and realign portfolios, a lot of other announcements wrt tariffs looked a lot like market manipulation too.
Then the market figured that foreign competition is being stomped in the mud and the officially sanctioned inflation is the new and endless excuse for higher prices and profits without actually increasing production in a monopolized and cartelized economic environment.
boston_clone•1mo ago
that is the same person who ran a crypto pump-and-dump scheme in their first month back in office.
billionaires may have competing interests and also act irrationally.
chneu•1mo ago
Then he scammed people.
anonym29•1mo ago
bigbadfeline•1mo ago
I'm not sure if you're joking, so if you are, this comment is not for you.
In the current monopolized and cartelized economic environment, the only effect of trade wars is the reduction of competition due to the suppression of foreign competition - billionaires just love that because it allows them to increase prices and profits without increasing production.
Immigration wasn't really restricted for billionaires, it was restricted only for the small fish who may not be able to afford the new and not-quite-high fees. The end result is again suppressed competition which benefits the cartels and monopolies controlled by billionaires. As I've already said, they love that.
Razengan•1mo ago
Probably because it -IS- an oligarchy? Why would they chuck themselves out of windows?
vkou•1mo ago
This doesn't happen overnight. You need to thoroughly corrupt the judiciary (which has not yet been accomplished, even if SCOTUS and a number of lower court appointments and many of the federal prosecutors have been) first. [1]
Or, alternatively, just go full fucking might-makes-right police state, for which ICE's blatant disregard for the law and your rights is a trial run.
If the country is ever retaken from this, the guilty will have to be punished. Deprivation of rights under color of law is, incidentally, a capital crime.
---
[1] The end-game for this sort of thing is 'Punch a nazi -> Go to a camp'. 'Nazi punches you -> Pardon and a pat on the back'. Rule of law is anathema to these people, which is why they put so much effort into corrupting it.
pandaman•1mo ago
ordinary•1mo ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suspicious_Russia-related_deat...
pandaman•1mo ago
Now this is rebranded into "oligarchs" not giving money to Putin and being thrown out of the windows of their apartments. None of the people on the list is a billionaire and if a manager of a company falling out of the window constitutes some kind of dictatorship then how about this:
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/bed-bath-cfo-falls-deat...
Probably did not give money to Biden?
osiris970•1mo ago
anonym29•1mo ago
You can express dissatisfaction with your child's school curriculum in Russia without being interrogated by the police, not so in the UK.
Last I checked, Russia isn't having plainclothes agents of the state abduct and deport people for publicly sharing criticism of Israel, either.
blackcatsec•1mo ago
cheeseomlit•1mo ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Olson
Razengan•1mo ago
https://old.reddit.com/r/2020PoliceBrutality/
andrepd•1mo ago