whybroke

I left after being hounded by trolls and sock puppets and, a year later, far from being deleted (as requested twice by email) my account was instead shadow banned.

Of course, likely as not this post itself is invisible. Likely as not the GDPR is as uninteresting as user's needs. Likely as not, Hanlon's razor applies. Although I would not brag about the last possibility.

And I think a hostile nation affecting one's internal politics is an act of war, successful or not.

This didn't just damage Hillary, although the media you so deprecate made it into just that. The hack also serves to de-legitimatize Trump. It is also causing Trump to fight with and denounce all the intelligence agencies critical to US functioning. Beside refusing their intelligence, the demoralization affect alone is huge (who will risk their life for a president who calls them a liar?). It has also thrown the whole electoral process into doubt. etc.

And they hacked the RNC too. You can bet that will be used to to maximum damage at some point.

It is no doubt that most damaging and successful attack on the US in decades.

But even more shocking is that it is condoned because it furthers certain parties political ends. What happens if both political parties start using acts by hostile nations to help them win elections?

The logical extension of your statement means the Russians should be invited to hack the DNC or any enemies of Trump forever because in your opinion leaks about debate questions and Pizzerias are so very, very critical to democracy. Perhaps denying the hacks every time they happens because, after all, they serve such a 'noble' purpose.

And I imagine I am not remotely the first one to realize this.

(Edit) My goodness but this is earning a lot of down votes. How very odd.

Authoritarians will do everything in their power to replace fact based journalism with messages that support their ideology with no concern to accuracy. The very definition of authoritarianism means the public doesn't need to know what's going on and all paths to victory are acceptable.

It is a problem we have not faced in free societies but do now. It is the suppression of information and its replacement by propaganda with no connection to reality. It is the world of Putin's Russia, a world we in the west have not experienced.

And it is not necessarily driven from the top down although casting doubt on what constitutes a fact is core to the maintenance of power in a dictatorship.

There is pretense that changing Facebook's algorithm from favoring profitable self confirming nonsense to being balanced with factual posts is some an obscene from of censorship rather than a fix for a broken algorithm. This as absurd as claiming Google is censoring when it changes it's search to give results the user wants because no user wants to be fed inaccuracies by either Google or Facebook.

Incredibly we're now saying it's censorship just to adjust a ranking such that propagandist nonsense (that the user didn't want) is no longer quite the top result.

Indeed the argument has now deteriorated into the surreal position that no-one (e.g. Snopes) should dare even post corrections to politically motivated lies because that is somehow censorship. And certainly no-one should promulgate those correction let alone use them. This is exactly the Kafkaesque logic that reveals the underling motivation is actually the exact opposite of free speech.

In the 1800s after even after Napoleon there were sporadic uprisings scattered through Europe and around the world, especially in the 1830s and 40s. The Franco-Prussina war was a prelude to WWI. Brits fought Russians, Turks fought Russians, Spain had multiple civil wars, Germans fought each other constantly. Even the US had a civil war. And the seeds for 1914's WWI did not suddenly appear in the 14 years of the 20th century before it.

>...is not even remotely in the league of anything in the past. Not even close...

I wish this were the case. And while Brexit is only one referendum, possibly recoverable, the Front National, AfD, PVV and Trump use rhetoric that is completely indistinguishable for Eastern and Southern European fascism of the 1920s. Some of it is verbatim quotes translated. And the economic policies of these parties will only worsen the economic well being of the electorate angering them further.

We can keep making optimistic guesses about the next score years but there is also more realistic outcome:

We do not in fact live in a magic time at the end of history. The post WWII (relative) peace is not remotely an inevitable state of affairs. It is an incredibly delicate thing maintained by moderate democratic global nurturing. Inept leaders set on dissolving alliances and treaties combined with aggressive rhetoric and random hostilities executed solely to excite a demagogue's support base could break that peace in any of a dozen powder kegs world wide faster than the bullet that killed prince Ferdinand. Indeed, if NATO weakens enough, as many on the far-right wish, and Putin starts loosing popularity, god help the Baltic states.

The period you describe was marked by revolutions, civil wars and world wars not stabilized until after WWII.

Things did indeed come out well eventually but that better world most definitely did not emerge serenely and rationally. It took the utter annihilation of the pre-WWI world order through decades of enormous violence. Indeed, the egalitarian socialist plan and the response of populist fascist to crush it emerged exactly because of industrialization.

There can be no doubt that displaced workers are not going to smoothly transfer to become professional athletes: a 50 year old unemployed coal miner with no social safety net is not going to peaceable become a wedding planer in a big city even if he could.

Until then, there will be increasing political disruption and radicalization as the advantaged group holds the disadvantaged down believing it's their own fault for not changing careers. And just like last time, the fighting will continue until adequate social safety nets are in place.

It would be better to honestly face the events of the past and not try to convince ourselves that an idealized smooth economic shift is how it's going to work out. But unfortunately we are just at the beginning of this and likely most people in the advantaged group will ideological despise the level of social security that will solve the problem. Indeed, in many quarters, there is a fetishization of and desire to return to that pre-WWI unconstrained economy that caused the nightmares in the 20th century. So, polarization, demagoguery, extremism and eventually violence loom for now I fear.

Given that the topic is about a German government action, it's safe to say it very much is a concern for free societies and not a product of US media. And therefore I fear you conjectures about google trends, the Times financials and a conspiracy of failing media to gain market share is as flawed as it is distracting.

>...outside of our hackernews bubble there is real sense the times is now just propaganda...

And that is exactly backwards, unless you're living in a especially un-innovative and low achievement area of the country. If so suggest you'll have more success moving to a city with bright people than pinning your financial hopes on a demagogue.

If accurate information is in fact one sided, it will look like the purveyor is pushing an agenda.

And in fact every competent news source including the Atlantic, WaPo, CNN, the Guardian, Forbes, the BBC, NHK and the Economist reported the same things.

Free societies decry false propaganda and always have. Authoritarians decry accurate information as equivalent and any information contrary to their goals.

But unfortunately there is no force on earth to dissuade the indoctrinated that there is no world wide conspiracy out to get them. That their facebook feed and extremest websites have no connection to reality. Particularly if they have found a charismatic leader to focus on who has no interest in accuracy.

>...what ruined its reputation and made it on par with various propaganda sites...

The is false. Generally, a thing does not become true simply because someone tweets it.

Casting doubt on what constitutes a fact is core to the maintenance of power in a dictatorship.

Those who now believe there is an equivalence between far-right propaganda (some of it originating form a hostile power) and the NYT, are a lost cause. It is identical to equating the bulk of the scientific community to a few climate change deniers. You obfuscate your own view of reality.

You will find that individuals emerging from behind the iron curtain were more stunned by the accuracy of information and the absence of a surreal reality in the west than by anything else.

As an aside, it's interesting the stunning amount of interest in guaranteeing the wide circulation of utterly false propaganda on a site that instantly mob censors any discussion of Russian hacking. A site called Hacker News (apparently ironically).

Unfortunately being right is of small consultation if the situation is plunged into economic, diplomatic and military disaster by an ill-informed tweeting leader.