What are some links to HN comments that you (or anyone else) feel is "coordinated astroturfing"?

The site guidelines ask users to send those to us at [email protected] rather than post about it in the threads, but we always look into such cases when people send them.

It almost invariably turns out to simply be that the community is divided on a topic, and this is usually demonstrable even from the public data (such as comment histories). However, we're not welded to that position—if the data change, we can too.

> Governments (and a few companies) really want this.

The cynic in me fears they don't want a privacy-preserving solution, which blinds them to 'who'. Because that would satisfy parents worried about their kids and many privacy conscious folks.

Rather, they want a blank check to blackmail or imprison only their opponents.

> It’s apparent if you watch the discussions across platforms, there are obvious shared talking points that come in waves

This is true of basically any issue discussed on the internet. Saying it must be astroturfing is reductive

> It’s apparent if you watch the discussions across platforms, there are obvious shared talking points that come in waves.

How do you know what is "shared talking points" vs "humans learning arguments from others" and simply echoing those? Unless you work at one of the social media platforms, isn't it short of impossible to know what exactly you're looking at?

> there is a lot of coordinated astroturfing.

Interesting. Are you saying all the concerns raised by the proponents of ID verification are invalid and meritless? For example,

1. Foreign influence campaigns

2. Domestic influence campaigns

3. Filtering age-appropriate content

I’m sure there are many other points with various degree of validity.

> there is a lot of coordinated astroturfing. It’s apparent if you watch the discussions across platforms, there are obvious shared talking points that come in waves.

Is that really evidence of astroturfing? If we're in the middle of an ongoing political debate, it doesn't seem that far fetched for me that people reach similar conclusions. What you're hearing then isn't "astro-turfing" but one coalition, of potentially many.

I often hear people terrified that the government will have a say on what they view online, while being just fine with google doing the same. You can agree or disagree with my assesment, but the point is that hearing that point a bunch doesn't mean it's google astroturfing. It just means there's an ideology out there that thinks it's different (and more opressive seemingly) when governments do it. It means all those people have a similar opinion, probably from reading the same blogs.

More than a few companies. Nothing would allow advertisers to justify raising ad rates quite like being able to point out that their users are real rather than bots.

"A few"?

"Real" user verification is a wet dream to googlr, meta, etc. Its both a ad inflation and a competive roadblock.

The benefits are real: teens are being preyed upon and socially maligned. State actors and businesses alike are responsible.

The technology is not there nor are governments coordinating appropiate digital concerns. Unsurprising because no one trusts gov, but then implicitly trust business?

Yeah, so obviously, its implementation that will just move around harms.

> there are obvious shared talking points that come in waves.

Groups of people who wake up at the same time of the day often have a tendency to be from a similar place, hold similar values and consume similar media.

Just because a bunch of people came to the same conclusion and have had their opinions coalesce around some common ideas, doesn't mean it's astroturfing. There's a noticeable difference between the opinions of HN USA and HN EU as the timezones shift.

I think we should be careful of writing off this sea change as simple professional influence campaigns. That kind of thinking is just what got Trump to the Whitehouse, and is currently getting the immigrants rounded up.

Things that didn't seem likely to have broad support previously, now are seen as acceptable. In the 90's no one could envision rounding up immigrants. No one could envision uploading an ID card to use ICQ. No one could envision the concept of DE-naturalization or getting rid of birthright citizenship.

Today, in the US for instance, there are entire new generations of people alive. And many, many people who were alive in the 90's are gone. Well these new people very much can envision these things. And they seem to have stocked the Supreme Court to make all these kinds of things a reality.

All because the rest of us keep dismissing all of this as just harmless extreme positions that no one in society really supports. We have to start fighting things like this with more than, "It's not real."