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A comment on U.S. Capitol Locked Down Amid Escalating Protests. Parent comment

Re:U.S. Capitol Locked Down Amid Escalating Protests by sugarpile on Wednesday January 06, 2021 @04:06PM (#25662491)
The internet allows for mass influence of the population by third party actors. This is largely China vs Russia. I have trouble not playing this out at scale and drawing the conclusion the internet inherently invalidates a lot of the assumptions democracy (as in the American Experiment™ version of it) requires to function. I hope I'm wrong and overly pessimistic.
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Re:U.S. Capitol Locked Down Amid Escalating Protests by tsimionescu on Wednesday January 06, 2021 @06:19PM (#25664119)
You're forgetting the largest player, which dwarfs all the others 10 times over - the US itself. The US propaganda machine is so far ahead of Russia and China that even discussing Russian and Chinese influence over the Internet of all places is laughable.
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Re:U.S. Capitol Locked Down Amid Escalating Protests by raxxorrax on Thursday January 07, 2021 @07:21AM (#25670188)
Very true. There are huge language barriers that makes this unlikely. You don't get a 5 cent army of people highly proficient in another language and presenting manipulative talking points. There are those people, but they would still have difficulties reaching large audiences.
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Re:U.S. Capitol Locked Down Amid Escalating Protests by g42gregory on Wednesday January 06, 2021 @04:18PM (#25662637)
> This is largely China vs Russia.

I would like to question this a bit. If this were true, wouldn't this mean that China won this time since Biden is the President (vs Russia won in 2016 since Trump was the President)?

I think there are a lot more internal actors, such as special interest groups, PACs, activist groups, etc..., that may dwarf the external influence. There is so much money involved in politics and elections. I wonder how can we curtail the flow of money to make things more civil in politics?

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Re:U.S. Capitol Locked Down Amid Escalating Protests by mhh__ on Wednesday January 06, 2021 @04:35PM (#25662865)
> wouldn't this mean that China won this time since Biden is the President

Only if there was interaction between the Biden campaign and the Chinese state, which there was in the case of the Trump campaign

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Links_between_Trump_associates...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_interference_in_the_20...

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