alt Hacker News>‘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.
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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.
We are the target of this propaganda, and I don’t mean the Scottish independence stuff. The US and Israel are jamming the airwaves with anti-Iran propaganda to manufacture consent to attack Iran. Every day we’re being subjected to a ton of this stuff on every channel (including HN).
It’s certainly not working on me, but I fear far too many of us are just taking these stories at face value.
It's the firehouse technique. The films of Adam Curtis touch on this, I'd recommend HyperNormalisation.
The question is, is their purpose to influence scottish people, or iranian people?
It's all stochastic.
The goal is to get that one lunatic to do something, that sets off the response which drains resources and makes the powers at be less nimble.
We live in a world of subtle war.
I think these accounts may not be as political as many people think. It has been observed that foreign bot accounts often support both positions on contentious issues.
Maybe they're just Russian cybercriminals chasing impulse likes and follows for the sake of building up their accounts' social currency? Once they've gotten enough real engagement that the algorithm thinks they're real people, they can pivot to something entirely unrelated to the political controversy they pushed. Change name, change style, suddenly the victim follows an account they don't remember but gives interesting advice on crypto investments.
Now, I do certainly believe Russian cybercriminals do work for the government now and then in return for tolerance. But it may be less mustache-twirling chaos farming and more plain old scams.
> outlandish claims
I dunno, have you seen US news recently?
> Surely the number of Scottish people influenced by accounts making such outlandish claims is exactly zero.
But perhaps they influence American foreign policy.
> "army trucks are rolling down the Royal Mile"
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?
I see Elon and Trump quoting and citing this level of "reporting" as "facts" all the time.
Seems totally risible stuff. On Twitter, I've mostly seen this story shared by British nationalist accounts, presumably because they think it tarnishes the cause of Scottish independence by throwing support for it into question.
Having said that, partisan people on social media are always happy to share stuff that they agree with regardless of the source. Presumably these accounts posted less loopy stuff sometimes and got retweets.
Sadly, the figure isn't zero - I know a few.
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.
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...
> Surely the number of Scottish people influenced by accounts making such outlandish claims is exactly zero.
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.
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.