comment: >
  
  Lol you do know about ockams razor right?
context: Holy shit the comments in this thread are all so weird. I feel like I'm reading multiple AI chatbots arguing with each other >
  
  Its actually remarkable how much the quality of comments change when the same story is posted to r/news vs r/worldnews depending on the topic being posted. You'll really notice the trolls in action. >
  
  Which is suppose to be higher quality? >
  
  World News is much larger, and therefore is targeted by bot farms more for misinformation campaigns.
  News is smaller, but there was a large push by the alt right during the Trump era to try and take it over. There are still remnants of that in the comment section with people with ultra right-wing views cropping up more often then usually expected.
  So the World News bots often seem more credible. >
  
  Yeah, /r/news is still significantly astroturfed by the far-right, just watch what happens when crime stories with a black suspect is posted. Often the top 2-3 posts (with thousands of upvotes) are blatantly racist. Though I guess it was worse under Trump.
  On /r/worldnews we mostly have pro-Russian / pro-Erdogan / pro-CCP astroturfers. A few years back Iran had surprising influence as well. They don't have the numbers to significantly influence votes of the top posts, but scroll a bit down and you'll often see them having great impact. This is especially true for issues fewer people care about, where they don't get much pushback from real users and can easily form the narrative, just look at pretty much any post that deals with China as an example. >
  
  How do you discern an astroturfer from someone who just has the opposite opinion? Just curious. >
  
  You can't conclusively determine that on an individual account level, after all there are probably a few actual Nazis/alt-righters there who don't co-ordinate outside the site. We can see which Reddit posts get linked to on far-right social media though. It's also highly suspicious when certain types of posts will have large numbers of fresh accounts posting far-right propaganda. >
  
  Pro-Russia or Pro-CCP content is never upvoted on this sub, honestly idk what you're talking about. Unless you're talking about comments calling for a bit more nuance then literal "CHINA = BAD" level spam which is just intellectually lazy and lowers the level of discourse on the sub.
  And I've never seen a pro-Erdogan post on this sub, like ever. >
  
  Yeah and I'm sure there is no astroturfing in the other direction cause we're the good guys, right guys? >
  
  Kind of hard to misuse a HIMAR and have no one notice >
  
  USA provides the Intel, UA picks the targets. The End ⚰ >
  
  you mean UA ends the targets >
  
  Also yes >
  
  The point of propaganda is to keep everyone chasing their tail and fighting against brandolinis law. If they keep the pressure on they win by default because any data that validates one conspiracy theory instantly validates 99 others that have no verifiable data. >
  
  Brandolini's Law is the reason dislike and downvote buttons are so valuable on social media. YouTube made a huge mistake removing theirs. >
  
  It was not a mistake... they knew damn well what they are doing.. >
  
  Which is…? >
  
  Mostly running cover for corporation's videos that weren't popular but were highly monetizable. >
  
  But with the bonus of further boosting propaganda, pseudo science, fake/dangerous lifehacks, and other videos that were already useful for drawing people further into the YouTube sphere of influence. >
  
  I would imagine during wartime, you would have an incentive to use funds properly, since the alternative is starving to death and dying to your enemies. >
  
  But the US is directly supplying weapons, not just dropping off billions in cash >
  
  I’m not saying they do this but weapons can be and have been misappropriated and sold off before to black markets. It’s quite common. Though it would be with small arms and stuff they can actually smuggle out without getting caught. I doubt it would be significant if there were.
  Also this is why audits are important. To prove critical weapons and equipment aren’t misappropriated. >
  
  The USA has a fairly decent method to help with corruption avoidance in the military. It would not surprise me if they shared it with Ukraine to help them.