Neither of these sources support this claim as none of them include any discussion on Amber Heard('s legal team) using bots?

Depp's behavior during the US trial is textbook DARVO (Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender) and any abuse expert would be able to immediately recognize it.

The reason I "both sides"'d it is because

A) I remember reading about evidence that Heard's team also used bots (obviously much less successfully). I could not find that evidence this time. I am not personally critical of her using bots to defend herself but, if she did, it would still be a notable feature of modern highly public debates.

B) When it was all going down, I remember something like 97% of tiktoks being pro-Depp (I wasn't on TikTok, just read a study). My main goal was to get people to accept the reality that even legal teams are working with PR firms that run massive bot farms to influence public opinion. Regardless of my opinion on who is in the right and who is in the wrong. I thought if I took an explicit side, the male-leaning demographics of HN would be less likely to engage with my actual main point

the maturity of those platforms, their "we need to make big money" drive to allow obviously bad actors to work their magic, and the ability to automate is what has weaponized it

brand defence, nation-state influence operations.

There are many different flavors of the same thing, trying to mislead competitors or enemies. Or to dupe consumers ofc... Since the tech is more and more available, now also 12 year olds can run insanely large influence campaigns, to boost their streaming profiles or other somewhat benign things, but obviously modelled after what larger players have been doing forever.

The first transatlantic commercial transatlantic phoneline (TAT-1) was immediately tapped on both sides by UK/US... before that it went over radio, which was simply intercepted.

Because of that nature of the coms system being easily listened in on, just like they do/did with the lil mirror-beam-splitters at GCHQ etc.., its been natural effect to then provide disinformation over those channels. perhaps even use those channels exclusively for disinformation, and have a secure channel to do _actual_ coms.

So as you can imagine there has been many decades now of practice in why and how to share disinformation effectively to undermine other peoples work or processes.

the war against in person gathering and the family unit has been pretty successful, as they were pretty sloppy ways to exchange information to begin with. but at the very least you knew you were getting an actual opinion from someone, and you had context of their personhood and background for which to base that opinion.

They were instrumental in the whole "Uyghur genocide" thing where the only proof was Adrien Zenz suggesting there would be a possible future decline in population growth and called it a "cultural genocide".

The US State department has been running things like "Radio Free Asia" as state propaganda mills for decades. This has broken out into an industry of insiders getting board seats on various think tanks and churning out essentially policy desires as "studies". These studies are then used as citations for actual news articles to launder the policy desires into something that seems like a reliable source. Then people say "Look! this is really happening!" while 100s of articles are written citing the same untrustworthy sources, laundered through dozens of thinktanks funded by the DoD and state dept.

Anyways, I got really interested in this topic around mid 2010s because of some really interesting reporting by Codastory[0] covering Russian "troll factories" especially used to influence opinion in eastern Ukraine, but also in many other circumstances. In Houston in 2016, Russian troll accounts planned both an ANTI Muslim rally AND a counterprotest to that rally all on Facebook.[1] Hundreds of real human beings showed up!

Russia got a ton of attention for their use of troll farms but the truth is that the US and certain allies have actually been using stuff like this for far longer and, imo, with much more success. In fact, Coda Story itself is funded by the NED which is a massive pillar of global US, uh, "soft power".

[0] https://www.codastory.com/

[1] https://www.npr.org/2017/11/01/561427876/how-russia-used-fac...

See also, the Great Game and the Eastern Question.

They’re enemies because they want each others stuff. Russia has a LOT of stuff that the British would be quite happy to ‘manage’.

And vice-versa, which results in the polite games being played, where everyone knows everyone else is doing shitty stuff to everyone, but nobody will ever admit it because that might cause the shitty stuff to descend into a shooting war, which is something we try to avoid as much as we can.

Please elaborate when the west has done the same in Russia.

And I’m pretty sure you know full well that any examples given to answer your question in earnest will simply be dismissed as “Russian propaganda” - just as the Russians dismiss Western claims as propaganda, or even ‘justifiable, given Western hostilities’ - but there is a long list of actions against Russia by western powers with the intention of destabilizing Russian society, which, if you make the effort to inform yourself by reaching outside your bubble, you can see for yourself.

Russians can make just as many claims as Westerners can, and the only difference is which side one is invested in: thats what you’ll believe.

No matter what.

But, just to give you some hints as to what ‘the other side’ consider a valid response to your query, I asked some actual Russians what they would respond, and here’s the list:

- Assassinations: Daria Dugina, Igor Kirilov, Mikail Shatsky, (and BTW, Russians can quite confidently claim that the Salisbury Novichok incident was a false flag intended to harm Russian standing in the world - “Russians aren’t the only ones who synthesized Novichok…”)

- Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty: 100% anti-Russian propaganda,

- The blatant censorship of RT in Western markets (although the Russians still have access to BBC and CNN, which they also view as state-sponsored anti-Russian propaganda organs),

- Emphasis on high military casualties (sometimes highlighting disproportionate impact on ethnic minorities from poorer regions),

- Coverage of economic costs, elite corruption, and contrasts between official narratives and frontline realities,

- Support for (or amplification of) Russian opposition voices in exile and independent media,

- The "UMBRAGE" Component of Vault 7, described by Wikileaks as an offensive Western intelligence/propaganda operation against Russia,

These operations are reciprocal. Both sides do it to each other, and you are foolish to deny it.

Otherwise .. I hope you learn to speak Russian and will start paying better attention to ‘the other side’, because that’s the only way you’ll get an answer to your question, legitimately. And even then, I doubt you’ll “believe it”, since we in the West live in a very, very tightly controlled propaganda bubble, to the tune of billions of dollars a year, which absolutely prevents any such sympathies for Russia from being expressed.

Our bubble is just like the Russian bubble, only its not in Russian.

As for the assassinations, those are wartime actions by Ukraine. Not sure how they are supposed to fit into our discussion.

As for Salisbury, so you found the story of these fitness supplement salesmen convincing?: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=okrdqM6hNrI It has been my impression that not even Russia tries to push that narrative any more.

These are the examples they were able to identify. And many of them could be so obviously identified because of ideological component.

The alleged censorship of RT is more a counter-propaganda move: RT is a Russian vehicle that engages in a number of psychological warfare ops.

And, BTW, the only thing Western countries have not done in Russia is assassinations with chemical or radiological weapons, possibly due to superior counter intelligence ops on Russia’s side. And because being identified was not in their best interest - unlike Russia, which is more easily identifiable up to recent times. At this point I am not sure how much destabilisation of the EU and NATO is coming from the US instead of Russia and China, which tended to be the usual suspects.

These days anyone can run a competent disinformation warfare campaign.

“American propaganda is not ideological, it tries to maximize the damage to Russia and uses whatever political and ideological message that will achieve that.”

Huh, what do you know, that can be “true” as well. And the US and its allies have been hostile towards Russia - actually, for centuries now.

I don’t find anything about Salisbury convincing - not the British investigations, nor the Russian ones.

And the reason for that is, the evidence presented never holds up in an open, public, liberal democratic court of law - instead, the ideological propaganda that “Russians are assholes because they kill people” is propagated in the court of public opinion, which is as vicious and banal as you can possibly imagine (or else we wouldn’t need courts in the first place), no matter whether you attempt to argue from the Russian or Western perspective.

Besides which, the moral altitude claimed “against” Russia by the West is simply a fallacy - you think we don’t murder people extrajudicially?

I’ve got an ideological point for you: dropping one bomb every 15 minutes for 26 years, mostly on innocent children, women, and men is wrong and should be stopped. Any state which attempts to stop that, gets my vote - but it is not going to be stopped by any state. It is going to be stopped by the criminal states’ citizen body, which is - as we see bright and clear today - completely and utterly distracted by the hatespew against the citizens of other states, intentionally, by the people dropping the bombs - because they also own and control the means by which ideological propaganda such as “hate Russia” or “hate the West” is propagated, and they use it to expand the market for their weapons production...

In short, you’re no better than any “Russian”, and neither am I. Our nations are murderous, criminal enterprises which produce mass murder at far, far greater scales than anything a trash can in Salisbury can produce.

The history is far more banal and less nefarious than you give it credit. Nobody gave a fuck about Russia. Russia was a self limited kleptocracy and everybody just ignored it because nobody needed the headache. That is why the reaction to the land grab in Georgia and later Crimea was pretty muted and everybody just hoped that Putin would be sated and ride into the sunset as great leader who took Crimea home into the motherland.

But he wants an empire, and an empire can not be an empire if nobody cares. So he overplayed his hand to sate his vanity. One of his first public announcements after the invasion was: "I hope I am now being heard.."

Well, the World heard and now it is raining oil in Moscow and the Russian provinces are getting depopulated.

But these incidents do not automatically give cause to hate the entire Russian nation any more than, say, the actions of the IDF and the Israeli government should be used to justify hatred of all Jews, everywhere.

Obviously, they shouldn’t.

> Nobody gave a fuck about Russia.

This is so untrue. Western empires have been trying to balkanize Russia and colonize its resources, aggressively - since the 1800’s up until the modern era. Russia has been demonized for centuries so that Western powers can have a justification for their war industries.

See, this is the problem with the lack of proper history education in the West. You can’t get your bearings from the History Channel alone.

And then, there is international law. Do you really think the US and its allies are law-abiding members of the international community, given the grand litany of human rights abuses, war crimes, and crimes against humanity that have been committed this century alone?

One bomb dropped every 15 minutes on an innocent life, for 26 years, does not give those next in line in the Western targeting sights much hope for peace. While Americans and other Western citizens (including Germans and Brits) are utterly myopic about this, the rest of the world are really not. The crimes against humanity committed by the 5-eyes states alone, far exceed anything that Russia has done thus far. By a huge, huge margin.

> “depopulated”

See also, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Somalia, Pakistan, Palestine ..

Wake me up when you start demanding justice for the war crimes of Mosul with the same ferocious tenacity as you call for Putins’ ears on the table.

This is the same nonsense many people screaming “antisemitism“ pull. Their comments are clearly about the Russian government with Putin at its head, the decisions the regime makes. They are clearly not talking about “the average Russian.” At no point has anyone mistaken your critiques of the US government for hatred of every American despite your use of “the US,” so why would you respond like that?

Don’t resort to such cheap tactics just to make a point online.

There have been so many bot armies exposed over the years that one would think every narrative being pushed should be considered to be backed by bots. Some state-level actors even operate their narrative-pushing campaigns openly, yet people still happily deny their entire existence.

HN is very much not an exception to this rule. It's very hard to accept that maybe some thoughts you have were actually installed.

Maybe a few are just “people” (i.e. the same people who normally post in the community.)

But in most cases I’d suspect any such botting campaign brings along with it a few human agitprop agents embedded onto each target platform, well-positioned to deny and discredit anyone pushing back on the narrative the bot farm is spreading.

(Sometimes this is pretty obvious — a lot of accounts coming out of the woodwork to deny Chinese bot farms have a conspicuous “English as learned as a second language in Beijing, to a competent but not fluent level” writing style that does not often otherwise crop up in other discussions in those same communities. But other times it can be far more subtle, making use of operatives hired from within the community’s own majority-culture rather than relying on foreign nationals playing the part of same.)

There are many Ivorians and Senegalese promoting the CCP’s ‘Community of common destiny’ on Reddit, for example.

Edit: Community of common destiny for mankind/‘Community of Nations’

Agreeing with something doesn’t make it 100% unambiguously true/correct. There are also many reasons people downvote, you don’t know the nature of the objections. It’s not worth getting upset over.