alt Hacker NewsDang, I would appreciate a reply, since you kind of skirted around my main point, which is that pro-Israel accounts have been posting copy-pasted verbatim-identical talking points going back all the way to at least 2014. Multiple accounts are literally posting the same word-for-word replies, but we're supposed to pretend that it's impossible for state actors to run influence operations on HN. How?
You haven't supplied any links of that kind. Where are these accounts that are "literally posting the same word-for-word replies"?
We need something objective to go on (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...) or all this just reduces to the mist of imagination.
You've given me one link so far, and I gave you an in-depth, thorough reply. That's not "skirting around" and it's not telling you to "pretend" (as if such a thing would work). If you want me to engage with you seriously, you should omit such swipes. Writing in-depth responses to these questions is extremely time-consuming, and that means taking time away from the other 50,000 things we're overwhelmed with. I'm not going to keep doing this if you signal that you're unwilling to accept an answer you don't already agree with.
It is common on open internet forums (like HN) for people to become convinced that they're surrounded by enemies, and eventually that the mods are in cahoots with their enemies - because the alternative is to believe the simpler-but-more-painful theory that other legit users sincerely and strongly disagree with them. I've written about this many times (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098).