Makes sense. Russia and friends would seem to have an interest in Scottish independence as it undermines the UK.
It seems to me most social platforms (not just big tech, smaller UGC sections like the BBC) have many puppet accounts that are triggered by certain content.
Anecdotally looking at BBC comment sections of Scottish content, the "highest rated" comments are almost unilaterally pro-British/anti Scottish National Party which deviates a long way from historical voting preferences. The SNP have performed very well in Scottish and Westminster elections and the weakest barometer for them is/was the 45%/55% vote split in the Scottish independence referendum 12 years ago. I think if anyone took a "sentiment score" of what's there vs how people generally think or behave there'd be a large deviance.
More generally, any platform seems to have systemised abuse and this pattern goes all the way back to generic content management systems being abused in the early 2000s.
I do wonder, are these accounts being accessed via proxy? i.e. someone claiming to be from the UK and having a residential IP- if the platform doesn't care about the location of access, maybe start checking for latency?
>‘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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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?
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.
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.
Important thing to note - UKDefenceJournal only tracks a set of known Iran linked related accounts that could be tracked because of previous Internet blackouts in Iran.
It would be interesting to see how this applies more widely to other sets of content and countries.
From the original UKDJ article:
> The original UK Defence Journal investigation stressed in an editor’s note that “this article does not claim that Scottish independence is a foreign plot, nor does it suggest that support for independence is illegitimate, inauthentic, or driven by anything other than sincere political conviction.”
> The focus, we underlined, was not on genuine activists but on documented attempts by Iranian-linked actors to exploit authentic political debates for their own strategic purposes. Robertson’s reply arguably missed this distinction. The concern raised by analysts was not that independence itself is tainted, but that foreign actors are infiltrating the conversation, seeking to magnify division and undermine trust in democratic processes.
"a 2024 study by researchers at Clemson University has estimated that 4% of content relating to independence were linked to one Iranian-backed bot network of around 80 accounts."
Speaking as a Scot, I would expect there are those who support attempts to break up the UK who care zero about Scotland. Who's ultimately behind it is speculative.
It goes without saying that social media is causing irreparable harm to the fabric of our society.
To use an analogy: if the village idiot went to the town square and shouted hate speech, he'd be laughed at or dealt with. Now anyone has a platform to go to the town square, except it's the world, and shout hate speech. And unlike before there will be hateful people, some of them unrecognisable from real people, who will support the village idiot. They will help amplify his voice and validate him and legitimise him.
We have to find a way to stop this. The only thing I can think of is require you to attach your real identity to social media accounts, and regulate the living daylights out of it to hold the networks accountable if their owners don't want to do the right thing. Free speech isn't free.
I sometimes wonder how much your own beliefs change consuming some content online even if you consciously disagree with it. Like a slight subconscious erosion that you don't even realise is happening until you have been radicalised. Ironically I think people who are more honest or empathetic might be more susceptible to this as they try and take in other people's view points without crudely dismissing it.
This is 100% a real factor in shaping opinions. Every piece of information we encounter affects us - that's how we're built & how we can learn. But this also makes us easy to influence by consistently repeating lies, like we've seen with the "Flood the zone" technique, as well as basically the whole rise of the right over the last decade. It's all lies and misinformation, but it works because of how we're built & because there are not enough counter operations.
US would probably have a large impact as well, of course because lots of internet-users are from the US, but also because the US likes to astroturf as well.
I can confirm that when I blocked a huge swathe of mobile broadband providers in Russia and Israel, something like 95% of the spam on the forum I run stopped instantly.
It seemed like a messy and obvious approach - sign up with a clearly bot-generated gmail account, hit the activation link sent by email an average of 100ms, and immediately post in every thread something along the lines of "WHEN WE'VE FINISHED IN KHARKIV / GAZA WE'LL BRING THE GAS CHAMBERS TO ENGLAND", all in under about ten seconds.
I don't think it's Russians or Israelis behind it, necessarily, but that's where the annoying noise has been coming from.
During the Prigozhin uprising / coup attempt, internet was cut off in parts of Russia, and there was a noticeable slowdown in comments on multiple popular subreddits. I don't know if any studies have been done to evaluate this empirically though
Russia is a waning superpower with a low GDP but a powerful enough internal economy to wage a conventional invasion of a large European country. The US is a much richer country, the leading superpower, and an IT powerhouse. But for some reason the first thing that pops into people’s mind when they hear propaganda bots is “Russia”.
(I would buy China, too. A huge country with a powerful economy.)
That in itself looks like a programmed response.
Of course Russia uses bots and propaganda. But the focus on Russia seems completely out of proportion.
This is why my FB feed is full of misinformation, strawman arguments, sweeping conclusions and no nuance. it does not matter what they are arguing about of which side they are on, the stupidity is constant. Left and right, theists and atheists, pro and anti-immigration. Anything else you can think of. All things I am happy to have an interesting argument about, but what social media offers is engagement bait of one kind or another - from rage bait to feigned ignorance.
Networks were full of this stuff before the bot armies were a glimmer in whoever's eye.
I don't doubt bots are a factor in the sheer volume of it, but human nature on network debates was bad when it was only fairly smart, educated people, and it only got worse as the AOL-to-Facebook pipeline demographic became politicised.
Glinner isn't a bot, just to pick one example of somebody who - irrespective of the merit or not of his argument - simply behaves like an asshole, constantly.
I'm sure regulation would be more complex than "Feeds must be chronological and only what you're explicitly following" - hammer out the details - but yeah, basically, that
10+ years ago I had a job which involved developing/testing geo-restricted software in another country. Eventually each VPN exit point would get marked up as such, and I would have to switch to another.
So if posts were marked with the country of origin or VPN, that might be enough for most people to evaluate the intent of the post.
Of course things have changed. There might not be so many IPv4 addresses around to trade, but IPv6 has probably changed that. And it's probably hard to know how long an address was used by a VPN before being traded back to a telco.
There is no incentive to implement such a feature. Bots and paid social media workers drive engagement. Also social media sites are designed to avoid any triggers that make users click away (like showing origin flags that would allow a user to easily dismiss a thread as fake). This is the same reason why Youtube removed dislike counts.
"‘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”."
Very convincing stuff. We must fast-track the shutdown of X in the UK to stop this ultra-persuasive disinfo from brainwashing our citizens.
> The account, which describes itself as “a proud Scottish lass” and “passionate about Scotland's independence & our right to self-determination”, is based in Europe (according to X’s location data).
I get suspect everytime an online socialist overuses famous socialist terms (or supposed socialist terms) before segueing into a conjunction. “Of course I want the socialist utopia just as much as all of us, comrades, but...”
I think folks attempting to build a unicorn could just do what nextdoor did -- require a modicum of proof of life -- but for clones of twitter, reddit, etc.
The idea that I might get in a fight with a robot or some state agent on -- gasp -- Hacker News... it makes me want to pull my hair out. I would happily receive a postcard with code once every few years to quasi-prove my location.
Not surprising at all. Wasn't most of pro-Trump content during 2016 election campaign actually generated by some kids in Macedonia who figured out how lucrative fake and sensationalized news can be ?
Social media is increasingly the poison of the society.
[+] [-] LadyCailin|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] ricardo81|1 month ago|reply
It seems to me most social platforms (not just big tech, smaller UGC sections like the BBC) have many puppet accounts that are triggered by certain content.
Anecdotally looking at BBC comment sections of Scottish content, the "highest rated" comments are almost unilaterally pro-British/anti Scottish National Party which deviates a long way from historical voting preferences. The SNP have performed very well in Scottish and Westminster elections and the weakest barometer for them is/was the 45%/55% vote split in the Scottish independence referendum 12 years ago. I think if anyone took a "sentiment score" of what's there vs how people generally think or behave there'd be a large deviance.
More generally, any platform seems to have systemised abuse and this pattern goes all the way back to generic content management systems being abused in the early 2000s.
I do wonder, are these accounts being accessed via proxy? i.e. someone claiming to be from the UK and having a residential IP- if the platform doesn't care about the location of access, maybe start checking for latency?
[+] [-] OtherShrezzing|1 month ago|reply
>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.
[+] [-] H8crilA|1 month ago|reply
Between being fooled and being uninformed the latter is much more pleasant.
[+] [-] Waterluvian|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] rozab|1 month ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firehose_of_falsehood
[+] [-] jaapz|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] philipwhiuk|1 month ago|reply
But perhaps they influence American foreign policy.
[+] [-] cramsession|1 month ago|reply
It’s certainly not working on me, but I fear far too many of us are just taking these stories at face value.
[+] [-] pjc50|1 month ago|reply
I dunno, have you seen US news recently?
[+] [-] dfxm12|1 month ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] vintermann|1 month ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] John23832|1 month ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] gilleain|1 month ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] blitzar|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] arethuza|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] nmeofthestate|1 month ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] 3rodents|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] graemep|1 month ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] c0n5pir4cy|1 month ago|reply
It would be interesting to see how this applies more widely to other sets of content and countries.
From the original UKDJ article:
> The original UK Defence Journal investigation stressed in an editor’s note that “this article does not claim that Scottish independence is a foreign plot, nor does it suggest that support for independence is illegitimate, inauthentic, or driven by anything other than sincere political conviction.”
> The focus, we underlined, was not on genuine activists but on documented attempts by Iranian-linked actors to exploit authentic political debates for their own strategic purposes. Robertson’s reply arguably missed this distinction. The concern raised by analysts was not that independence itself is tainted, but that foreign actors are infiltrating the conversation, seeking to magnify division and undermine trust in democratic processes.
[+] [-] jbms|1 month ago|reply
"a 2024 study by researchers at Clemson University has estimated that 4% of content relating to independence were linked to one Iranian-backed bot network of around 80 accounts."
Speaking as a Scot, I would expect there are those who support attempts to break up the UK who care zero about Scotland. Who's ultimately behind it is speculative.
[+] [-] deanc|1 month ago|reply
To use an analogy: if the village idiot went to the town square and shouted hate speech, he'd be laughed at or dealt with. Now anyone has a platform to go to the town square, except it's the world, and shout hate speech. And unlike before there will be hateful people, some of them unrecognisable from real people, who will support the village idiot. They will help amplify his voice and validate him and legitimise him.
We have to find a way to stop this. The only thing I can think of is require you to attach your real identity to social media accounts, and regulate the living daylights out of it to hold the networks accountable if their owners don't want to do the right thing. Free speech isn't free.
[+] [-] password54321|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] lowdownbutter|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] Timon3|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] wiseowise|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] 4ggr0|1 month ago|reply
tiny example: https://web.archive.org/web/20160406094911/http://www.reddit..., Most addicted city (over 100k visits total) Eglin Air Force Base, FL
let's not lose ourselves in cold-war propaganda too much and act like russians and chinese are the only ones astroturfing online.
[+] [-] ErroneousBosh|1 month ago|reply
It seemed like a messy and obvious approach - sign up with a clearly bot-generated gmail account, hit the activation link sent by email an average of 100ms, and immediately post in every thread something along the lines of "WHEN WE'VE FINISHED IN KHARKIV / GAZA WE'LL BRING THE GAS CHAMBERS TO ENGLAND", all in under about ten seconds.
I don't think it's Russians or Israelis behind it, necessarily, but that's where the annoying noise has been coming from.
[+] [-] sofixa|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] keybored|1 month ago|reply
(I would buy China, too. A huge country with a powerful economy.)
That in itself looks like a programmed response.
Of course Russia uses bots and propaganda. But the focus on Russia seems completely out of proportion.
[+] [-] unknown|1 month ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] graemep|1 month ago|reply
This guy claims to have made $300k posting racist content posing as British: https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2025-11-16/kin...
This is why my FB feed is full of misinformation, strawman arguments, sweeping conclusions and no nuance. it does not matter what they are arguing about of which side they are on, the stupidity is constant. Left and right, theists and atheists, pro and anti-immigration. Anything else you can think of. All things I am happy to have an interesting argument about, but what social media offers is engagement bait of one kind or another - from rage bait to feigned ignorance.
[+] [-] Earw0rm|1 month ago|reply
I don't doubt bots are a factor in the sheer volume of it, but human nature on network debates was bad when it was only fairly smart, educated people, and it only got worse as the AOL-to-Facebook pipeline demographic became politicised.
Glinner isn't a bot, just to pick one example of somebody who - irrespective of the merit or not of his argument - simply behaves like an asshole, constantly.
[+] [-] alex1138|1 month ago|reply
It doesn't help matters when the initial founding was less than innocent https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1692122
[+] [-] kace91|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] api|1 month ago|reply
Man if Russia went dark like half of all politics X and Reddit would probably go dark. I bet it would be both ends of the horseshoe.
[+] [-] RegW|1 month ago|reply
So if posts were marked with the country of origin or VPN, that might be enough for most people to evaluate the intent of the post.
Of course things have changed. There might not be so many IPv4 addresses around to trade, but IPv6 has probably changed that. And it's probably hard to know how long an address was used by a VPN before being traded back to a telco.
[+] [-] myrmidon|1 month ago|reply
My experience of reddit is that it is wildly anti-Russian since the invasion, sometimes to an almost cartoonish degree (e.g. r/worldnews).
[+] [-] phba|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] draw_down|1 month ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] 6LLvveMx2koXfwn|1 month ago|reply
Unsurprising given there is no true Scotsman.
[+] [-] simianwords|1 month ago|reply
- I can’t find any of the accounts
- geolocation feature is hard to crack so they must have been identified as Iranian when this feature was released
- these don’t seem to be high profile accounts
[+] [-] nmeofthestate|1 month ago|reply
Very convincing stuff. We must fast-track the shutdown of X in the UK to stop this ultra-persuasive disinfo from brainwashing our citizens.
[+] [-] aussieguy1234|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] CrzyLngPwd|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] keybored|1 month ago|reply
I get suspect everytime an online socialist overuses famous socialist terms (or supposed socialist terms) before segueing into a conjunction. “Of course I want the socialist utopia just as much as all of us, comrades, but...”
[+] [-] philipallstar|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] scoofy|1 month ago|reply
The idea that I might get in a fight with a robot or some state agent on -- gasp -- Hacker News... it makes me want to pull my hair out. I would happily receive a postcard with code once every few years to quasi-prove my location.
[+] [-] TheAlchemist|1 month ago|reply
Social media is increasingly the poison of the society.
[+] [-] LightBug1|1 month ago|reply
I heard on the grapevine that X is consistently number 1 on the app stores for News content ...
X ... the home of Truth ... and where the team would get rid of bots and bot networks once and for all !!!
Elon ... you're a fucking genius ...