It's obviously better if people always look at things with a sceptical eye but it isn't weird to me people want to support the Ukrainians.

Pair the narrative of the smaller country being invaded by the belligerent dictator next door with (in my case) a country where Russia is already unpopular due to various assassinations, sabre-rattling, and so on, its not hard to understand the current balance of

In the UK the mainstream (serious) news has been fairly reliant on reporting based on estimated troop movements illustrated by video so there hasn't been too much potential for egregious nonsense.

In my obviously biased view the thing that worries me is actually people (knowingly, twitter promotes a fairly distorted presentation of ones true feelings) swallowing Russian propaganda hook line and sinker out of a fairly boring contrarianism.

It is easy to imagine the debates in the neutral (or less than neutral) countries of past historical conflicts - you can make your own mind up about how those debates would go, but this conflict (paired with such easy access to differing opinion) seems to be a great source of material.

Contrarianism is often a very important thing to have in society, make no mistake, but many would benefit (and perhaps internally do, who knows) from being contrarian against their own beliefs, even just for a little time a day - this goes for both sides of this conflict although I won't pussyfoot by saying that both sides are in some way the same.

> In the UK the mainstream (serious) news has been fairly reliant on reporting based on estimated troop movements illustrated by video so there hasn't been too much potential for egregious nonsense.

I'd agree with this. The BBC's Ukrainecast podcast seems to be very conservative here as an example. I don't listen all the time, but when I do it reports things as new days behind OSINT sources. And they're always very clear about what they can and can't independently verify, and specifically call out when Ukrainians are stopping journalists getting places to verify their claims.

I think there is a false-dichotomy presented here.. a choice is not "believe big govt (mine) versus big govt (theirs)" to be contrarian. There is another avenue and that is to listen to your own sense of right and wrong, up to and including questioning the authority of your own govt, of "their" govt, giving voice to the voiceless like minority social elements, the elderly, the agrarian, the less-educated locals with cultural affinity, religious voices.. etc.

The media products of mass mobilized military societies have some similarity with each other, when viewed this way, despite being "at war".

Unless the entire narrative you laid out is the result of a propaganda campaign. I don't think it is in this case, but the presence of this quantity of bots pushing a certain perspective does make me question my assumptions and worry how I'm being influenced in cases that are not nearly as black and white as Ukraine vs Russia.

If you see Ukraine vs Russia as black and white, it means you are already manipulated. The conflict didn't start on 24th of February this year. Even if the press pretends it's all clear, there's a long history of events full of nuances going back hundreds of years that can paint the current events in one or other colour.

Yes, the story is long. Yes, there are many Russians in Ukraine, especially in the East. Yes, there were some alt-right people in Ukraine, too. No, none of these justifies starting a full-scale war, killing thousands of people.

> No, none of these justifies starting a full-scale war, killing thousands of people.

That's the problem with conflicts that have a long history. You can conveniently choose a point it time, like you choose 24.02.2022 and make a case for the side you already support.

For example, if you pick a date in 1944 or 1945 and ignore everything that happened before, you can come to the conclusion that Soviet Union did a full-scale aggression on Germany killing thousands of people. Those bastards, how dared they attach a country of poets and thinkers.

Yes, in his speeches Putin likes to go back to the 16th century and so on. But the truth is very simple: Ukraine was living in peace for several decades. I was there many times and I met happy people, Ukrainians and Russians. Both were very nice, hospitable, and I saw no problems between them. They had different kinds of problems: poverty, corruption and so on.

Putin attacked Ukraine in 2014 because of Euromaidan - because he saw that Ukraine ceases to be under Russian influence. And yet, we decided it is more convenient to trade with him and pretend the shelling doesn't exist and people don't die in Donbas. This emboldened him to start the war in 2022, take over KIev and install his own puppet government. This didn't work well and now Russia is in a very dark place. I hope you can get out of there somehow.

> because he saw that Ukraine ceases to be under Russian influence

This is not true. Ukraine was willing to get nuclear weapons, and use them along with biological weaponry stations all over the border. see «Carribean crysis»

Do you really believe this? NATO refused to consider Ukraine's membership. We were very careful with what we should and shouldn't do in order not to make Putin angry. Now nothing of this matters. We got to the point when Armenia is asking Putin's help and he doesn't have any meaningful force to send anymore.

I think the point he was making is it's tough to pinpoint who start the war, considering ukraine has been a pretty intense proxy battlefield for almost a decade and beyond

Still fairly easy tbh. Ukraine didn't invade Russia in 2014 either...

One country moved their soldiers across the border, the other didn't...

Tell me, when did Ukraine EVER attack Russia?

No it isn't. Russia started the war.

You must be kidding, right? Ukraine didn't invade Russia, neither in 2014 nor in 2022.

Clearly he thinks that when the Ukrainian people threw out the russian puppet head of state that was an aggressive attack against Russia so everything done since then is in self defence.

This fits the bias hypotheses. Facts gets twisted in the way that confirms your bias that already exists.

If the population elects a head of state you don't like, it's a pro-Russian puppet. If the person is pro-USA, it's an expressed democratic will.

If government gets changed on the streets, it's not a coup, it's a pinnacle of democracy, as long as you don't like the former head of state.

If people you don't like start a rebellion, they are terrorists who need to be crushed. Or a democratic liberation army, if you like them.

If the regular army of a state is sent to crush a rebellion, it's either a genocide and the country needs to be bombed to oblivion, or a legal action where any atrocity is allowed because you are fighting an evil terrorist organization.

Seen thousands of times on any of the mainstream TV in any "western" country. (in "eastern" countries too).

You just have to put a "correct" frame based on your pre-existing knowledge who's your friend and who's your enemy, and the whole narrative fits perfectly.

Can you go into any detail on historical events which a reasonable person might feel justify the Russian invasion of Ukraine?

Understanding Russian Strategic Behavior - Imperial Strategic Culture and Putin’s Operational Code (2022) by Professor Graeme P. Herd.

https://www.routledge.com/Understanding-Russian-Strategic-Be...

This book is useful for understanding (not justifying).

Trust me, I see your point. I was trying to be diplomatic considering the dominant perspective.

> hundreds of years

Yes hundreds of years of Ukraine being oppressed by Russia (also western powers at times)... Meanwhile when did Ukraine EVER attack Russia?

Americans have been so indoctrinated to the idea that every issue must have two sides who should be equally considered, that when we have issues where one side is the obvious aggressor completely in the wrong, they don't know how to comprehend it. Our media has made everything a debate game because it gets viewers, and it's rotting people's ability to actually figure out what the right side of an issue is.

There is no equally valid argument against man-made climate change, evolution, gay rights, the right for people of color to exist without harassment, or Ukraine defending itself.

This is wrong. You are saying, this is so established that entertaining any alternative is wrongheaded. No. That's not how it works. We need dissent even in the middle of battle. We need to re-asses and continuously examine what we hold true to ensure it is still true. People are not gods. We can be in the wrong. This echoes GWBushe's you're either with us, or you're against us. It's a made up dichotomy.

> We need dissent even in the middle of battle. We need to re-asses and continuously examine what we hold true to ensure it is still true.

Tacticians act on Intelligence. Dissent is not Intelligence.

Dissent is so toxic it is literally weaponized to cripple an adversary with indecision and domestic unrest. It is the militarization of gaslighting.

It's not something you want arising mid-campaign, especially when (as in this case) its proponents are entirely fictional.

I upvoted both of you because you both have valid points in spite of apparent contradiction.

Dissent, if it's based on intelligence, can be extremely useful. It's literally something that can save a society. But intelligence involves a careful analysis of facts, and it's something very hard if you deal with an army of trolls.

Speaking of made-up dichotomies, surely there's some option in between "news shows should constantly debate X vs Y" and "X is so established that entertaining any alternative is wrongheaded".

Yeah, I think there is. Usually you could find them by looking at third parties that did not have much stake in either alternative.

For example, the southern border. You have OpenBorders vs Close the border camps. But there has always been the guest worker visa program on the hoper but no one wants it. It would drive business costs up, it would drain the Ds and Rs of energy around that topic. If you look at many LatAM countries, they themselves implement controls so that locals have preferences for jobs even with respect to immigrants legally able to work. But CNN never mentions those aspects. CNN doesn't mention Bernie used to vote against having foreigners compete against the local workforce for jobs.

Or abortion vs Abortion bans. Let's look at the rest of the world, and if not the whole world, then Europe, and we see there a mixture with some consensus around some figures. But we don't get that coverage, it's all outrage one way or the other.

> one side is the obvious aggressor completely in the wrong

If your model of any political situation resembles a moralizing children's cartoon, 99% chance you are a mark, incapable of identifying propaganda.

> it's rotting people's ability to actually figure out what the right side of an issue is

99.9% of issues in the population of issues we ever think about do not have a clear right answer, because if they did we would just discharge the issue immediately, and it would not stick around. Everything that remains exists in a tradeoff space, and if you think there's a clear right answer, it's probably because your understanding of the tradeoff space is naïve and low-dimensional.

Okay, so what is your take on the issues GP identified? Or is the only conclusion you can arrive at "it's complicated"?

GP made the very salient point that some things are clearly bad. Blind clinging to the idea that everything has two sides is just as simplistic as thinking everything can be viewed from a perspective which is just as moral as every other. Except maybe even more so, because at least the moral simplicity of black and white forces us to show flag instead of hiding in "neutrality".

Nihilism, strong moral relativism and contrarianism without a constructive goal are lazy pseudo intellectual positions that do not serve any constructive purpose (be it insight or improvement of the material world) and serve only as deflections and comfort arguments.

And for those that disagree with me: I'd love to hear where and why I'm wrong about thinking "Putin and other authoritarian strong men are worse than democratically elected politician" and "there are degrees of corruption, and the west is less corrupt than Russia". Because I've got evidence for these beliefs (the industrial output of Russia and Putin's palace being only two data points). What's yours?

"The west probably could have avoided (or maybe just delayed) this war if they had taken steps X" is some the nuance you could add to your statements.

Simple example of X would be stating Ukraine was never going to be part of NATO.

More complicated example would be if Europe prioritized energy independence from Russia putting in a weaker position. An example that loops in nuclear power debate, one which likely could have been manipulated (see other threads around Reddit bots in addition to twitter bots) by the Russians themselves to achieve that end.

--

Russian being the bad guy doesn't make conflict inevitable. And if it does, then we're probably just buying time until full scale nuclear war within the next century and none of this actually matters.

> Simple example of X would be stating Ukraine was never going to be part of NATO

What makes you certain that this was going to prevent the invasion? Russia gave a number of pretexts for the invasion, some unrelated to NATO: De-nazification of Ukraine, protecting Russian-speakers within Ukraine, among many others.

> Russian being the bad guy doesn't make conflict inevitable.

Oh, so you prefer the Chamberlain-style "Peace in our time" appeasement. What next, cede Finland or Poland to Russia when Putin demands it?

I mean the real question here is why all the central European states wanted to join NATO. Given how peace loving the Russians have been, it seems to be a mystery.

And let's be clear, the Russian Ukraine war started in 2014, not in 2022. I personally would be looking for allies if another country had already invaded part of my territory.

> What makes you certain that this was going to prevent the invasion?

It's not certain but assuming the worst is just an extension of the same moral pure-good and pure-evil that this thread is about. My point is that if your view of the world is that Russia is an pure-evil actor that will keep invading more and more countries no matter what the west does then it'll eventually lead to nuclear war. In which case none of this discussion matters. The reason Finland (or any country) is joining NATO is because it makes that point explicit.

> It's not certain but assuming the worst is just an extension of the same moral pure-good and pure-evil that this thread is about.

One doesn't need to delve morality to figure this out: empirical evidence alone is sufficient to come to the same conclusion. Russia's initial invasion of Ukraine was in 2014, and it still wants more than the Donbas.

Assuming the best goes against existing evidence. Russia has not explicitly said what the limits to its aggression are. Without invoking morality, why would you assume Ukraine is the limit?

If we don't want to believe anything they say then why bother having any diplomatic ties at all? Do you think we'd be in the same or better place if we just cut all communication with Russia?

You only know what they tell you and what your intelligence agencies can uncover. Russia said Ukraine joining NATO was a red line in diplomatic discourse and then they acted on it. Same way the USA told China that aiding Russia in this war would be a red line and China has refrained from providing direct aid even after what happened in Taiwan recently. I don't have any access to classified information so no idea what information is in there but hopefully it's a lot more accurate then what we can read on twitter and Reddit.

> Russia said Ukraine joining NATO was a red line in diplomatic discourse and then they acted on it.

They acted on what exactly, considering that - as far as I know - Ukraine is not a NATO member?

I don't understand why you're still pursuing this argument when Kremlin has dropped the NATO pretext quite a long time ago. According to Putin[1], now it's a special operation to liberate Donbas from their Ukro-Nazi overlords. The Russian PR machine has recently been struggling to find better justifications to this pointless carbon copy of a 19th century colonial war.

As a result of this war, Finland and Sweden joined NATO, turning the Baltic Sea into NATO's internal waters, which isolates Kaliningrad and St Petersburg. Ukraine will sooner or later join it too. The whole western border from Sochi to Murmansk (except puppet state Belarus) will soon be in a mutual defence pact against further Russian aggression. So in this dimension, it's been a spectacular failure for Russia.

The argument of protecting Russians in Ukraine has become morbid at best, after Russia razed to the ground several major cities with large Russian populations, many of whom now lie in nameless mass graves. Daily missile attacks on civilians in eastern Ukraine, where disproportional number of Russians live, doesn't help the case either. After the spectacular counteroffensive, which expelled Russians from Kharkiv region, they have nothing left but threats of widening the war against civilians in pursuit of scorched-earth policy.

So what justifications of this war remain? What halftones are there to discuss? That maybe there still remain some undiscovered arguments in support of blowing up hospitals and power stations?

[1] https://twitter.com/DAlperovitch/status/1570808500053475331

Why do you believe the diplomatic situation is the same pre war as post war?

> Russia gave a number of pretexts for the invasion

Why would you pay attention to these, except as an exercise in PR strategy analysis?

Because the only reason people would even consider that the invasion would have been avoidable if only Ukraine had ruled out joining NATO is because Russia launched a PR campaign in advance of the invasion insisting that all it wanted was for Ukraine not to join NATO (its most effective PR strategy of the whole war)

In which case it's also worth taking into account that Russia was very loudly coming up with a bunch of other rationales for why it needed to go to war for domestic consumption, none of which would have gone away if Ukraine had ruled out joining NATO, making it even less likely that all Putin cared about was the remote possibility that it might join NATO at some unspecified time in future

I still see zero reason for Russia to start a war against a sovereign country with a democratically elected leader. It’s like saying that the other classmates didn’t let the bully copy their homework so he is right in beating the everliving shit out of a completely different kid.

> It’s like saying that the other classmates didn’t let the bully copy their homework so he is right in beating the everliving shit out of a completely different kid.

Is this the only way that situation gets resolve or are there any alternatives? Why is the kid a bully? Why does he feel the need to copy homework? Maybe the classmates should group together and seriously injury the bully first, would they be in the right if they did so? How do you know the bully will actually harm the kid and doesn't just want to scare him?

You can make any situation a simple good-evil answer by drawing arbitrary boundaries around the situation. The propaganda this thread is mentioning enforces those boundaries and potentially prevents people from discussing the real underlying problems. Doesn't mean the outcome or conclusion is any different.

The point is it does not matter that the kid has a horrible life. It's still bullying and attacking people and needs to stop. The first rule of helping a family member with depression or a friend lashing out in pain is protect yourself, otherwise you can't help anyone.

The situation would be different if e.g. Ukraine had invaded Russian territory after the invasion of Crimea, or had done broken armistices beforehand, or there had been a mass killing of ethinic Russians in Ukraine. There has not been. This means long before we can talk about Russia maybe feeling threatened by NATO expansion they need to stop the war they started.

There is no nuance here. Russia felt that for whatever reason an attack-war was warranted and couldn't even be bothered to come up with a believable justification. The fact that other countries have done the same thing (e.g. over allegations of WMD) changes nothing here.

I'm confused from how we got to "USA potentially had the ability to prevent the war if they had..." to "This means long before we can talk about Russia maybe feeling threatened by NATO expansion they need to stop the war they started."

USA/west could have made concessions that weren't really concessions (taking Ukraine NATO off the table) before the 2022 invasion. Those concessions may or may not have worked. We're now just supposed to ignore that fact and pretend that it never happened until some point in the future that may never take place?

> Russian being the bad guy doesn't make conflict inevitable. And if it does, then we're probably just buying time until full scale nuclear war within the next century and none of this actually matters.

One of the things that are crystal clear thanks to this war is that Russian army is in a deplorable state and while a few of their nuclear warheads still probably work, Russia can not be considered a threat in a conventional war except against a state like Azerbaijan.

What is the point of talking about previous actions or non-actions today? What will change if we spend our time and energy talking about past?

I agree with all of this. The US and EU kept discussing inviting Ukraine to NATO or even the EU, and the US was pushing towards a military alliance with Ukraine. This would've caused tension even if Russia was a democratic country not run by Putin. With Putin it led to near certainty of a conflict with Ukraine.

But while it's worth looking backward at that to try to get our leaders to not pull political moves like that in the future, it in no way changes the Ukrainians being on the right side of this war, and Russia being on the wrong side. Yes, the US's actions were likely to cause a war, no, Russia is not justified in starting that war. In the same way that European appeasement of Hitler and USSR's neutrality deal clearly led to the Nazis invading Europe, but do not in any way justify the Nazis invading Europe, or the Nazis being the right side.

> USSR's neutrality deal clearly led to the Nazis invading Europe

Hitler (Nazis) and Stalin (USSR) were allies and jointly invaded Poland.

> so what is your take on the issues GP identified

I refuse to discuss it here, because much of the site's userbase seems incapable of having an even slightly nuanced political discussion, and I will possibly get a nasty comment from moderation accusing me of flame-baiting or something.

The best I can do it argue for epistemic humility, because at least people generally find that abstractly palatable.

> "Putin and other authoritarian strong men are worse than democratically elected politician ... the industrial output of Russia"

If your benchmark of how good a political system is is just its industrial output, China's anti-democratic system is better than Western systems. I can't even disagree with your argument, because it's not internally consistent.

So basically all you are doing is claiming to have a nuanced take, but you aren't capable of expressing it in a way that won't get caught by HN moderation who despite me being an eccentric hothead that can't always resist some snark manages to no accuse me of bad faith, and rarely if ever seems to censor interesting debates. Forgive me if I take this as evidence that your arguments and thought might be less nuanced and well developed than you claim.

And regarding the point of China, aside from being a very naive read of Chinese economic history (see PolyMatters series on China for evidence) this is a non-sequitur, the output of a completely different culture and system has nothing to do with the output of Russia, nor did I claim this was the completeness of my argument.

I observe again that all you seem to do is exclaim you cannot believe how stupid peoples arguments are for not being nuanced or developed enough, without stating your own take. For anyone reading this thread, pay note to this pattern, it's basically debate smell for someone not engaging in good faith.

> won't get caught by HN moderation who despite me being an eccentric hothead that can't always resist some snark manages to no accuse me of bad faith, and rarely if ever seems to censor interesting debates.

Have you considered that this may be because your comments are insufficiently original to ever fall outside of the overton window of the site?

> the output of a completely different culture and system has nothing to do with the output of Russia

My friend, you are the one who claimed that industrial output was the criteria by which we could judge the russian system is worse than the western one.

I agree this argument is nonsense.

> without stating your own take

I already explained why I can't do this on this site.

> model of any political situation resembles a moralizing children's cartoon

I'd actually be interested in those cartoons, if you have links. Propaganda pointed at kids is fascinating!

Quite a few one dimensional villains come to mind from my childhood:

Dora the Explorer's swiper the fox, G.I. Joe's cobra commander, He Man's skeletor, robbie rotten from lazy town

Still, I'd say it's a stretch to call, say, the oversimplification of the idea that stealing is wrong, propaganda.

Alice in Wonderland.

>we have issues where one side is the obvious aggressor completely in the wrong, they don't know how to comprehend it.

The fact that so many believe this to be 100% the case, actually makes the point of the OP. We should be able to condemn Russia and still point out that we're lying when we pretend the US didn't get this ball rolling when we funded and fomented a coup in Ukraine in 2014 and installed our puppets.[1][2]

We should also be able to discuss war crimes regardless of the perpetrators.[3] The fact that anybody who points these things out gets called a Russian bot, really just proves the point. Especially considering which side 90% of the bots are on...

[1]https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-26079957

[2]https://moderndiplomacy.eu/2018/06/04/how-and-why-the-u-s-go...

[3]https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2014/09/ukraine-must-...

Ah now, if the US had formented a coup in 2014 then why didn't the pro Russian people of Ukraine reelect the original people in later elections?

It seems to me at least that the Maida revolution was driven more by anger against corruption and a desire to join the EU than the US involvement (which there definitely was, along with Russian involvement).

Because Yanukovych, after he was removed by Parliament, immediately fled to Russia.

Sure, but if it was a coup orchestrated by the US, the next elections would have returned someone similar to power, right?

That's not how coups work. Once in power the new regime changed the Constitution. Think of it as "pulling up the ladder" behind them.

Because the candidate was banned and the party dissolved.

And nazi paramilitary gangs were burning people alive and shelling cities.

But no Ukraine is pure as fresh fallen snow.

The extent to which westerners have internalised a fact free vitrolic hatred of russia is downright terrifying.

> There is no equally valid argument against man-made climate change, evolution, gay rights, the right for people of color to exist without harassment, or Ukraine defending itself.

While I somewhat agree with you, a discussion is good and necessary. Without such a discussion the subject becomes a dogma, not something reasonable. When someone is against evolution or, say, GMO they most often don't understand it. When they learned how these things work, and maybe making some experiments themselves, they can either accept the facts of decide that their beliefs are more important than facts, which is their fair choice. If you take away a discussion, you eliminate that possibility.

I'd argue that, yes, there can be a valid counterargument against everything you mention. The only dangerous trend here is pretending that there are undeniable consensus. Especially if they were forged in the last 0.5-0.05% of the lifespan of humanity.

Also nobody is critizing Ukraine from defending itself. We're critizing Reddit and redditors in general for being hypocrites. Never in history were "people of color denied from existing without harassment", etc. What does people of color even mean? Doesn't that group comprise the vast majority of human beings?

You've swallowed an entire package of propaganda and, more importantly, implying that that's The Truth (tm) and that it cannot be argued with. That's why I think people like you are our biggest pressing problem.

Insistence we should respect the possibility that arguments against say, evolution are equally valid to arguments to arguments against it whilst altogether dismissing the idea that anyone in history has ever been subject to harassment because of their colour is an... interesting juxtaposition.

> Never in history were "people of color denied from existing without harassment", etc.

I would suggest reading about Jim Crow, Red Lining, the fight against school integration, New York's Stop and Frisk, and a "Black Lives Matter" movement fighting against cops regularly shooting unarmed black men to death. I would suggest those things, if I had any indication your statements were being made in good faith.

You haven't actually mentioned the reason that American politicians are so personally pro-ukraine, which is that it's a money laundering engines for political failsons to receive political bribes on behalf of their parents. The Hunter Biden/Burisma situation is not even remotely unique.

I run a social media marketing service; we stream all reddit content (~110 posts/comments per second). We run text analysis on comments and bot detection on popular posts.

Most people don’t understand how many bots are influencing public discourse on reddit. It’s really concerning, particular that the “real” users on reddit tend to be young and impressionable.

> We run text analysis on comments and bot detection on popular posts

Can you give an overview of how your bot detection works?

I assume you don't have any proprietary information?

Are you solely using the text features of the comment to tell if it was posted by a bot?

Thanks.

Would interest me as well. Out of sheer curiosity.

fake activity is how reddit got to threshold growth, the trend continues :P

To anyone unfamiliar with the background:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4139876 ("How Reddit's cofounders built Reddit with an army of fake accounts")

> Most people don’t understand how many bots are influencing public discourse on reddit.

Well, do elaborate pls.

I mean, you even see bot comments on threads that are plain copies of previous comments on the same thread

I would def like to hear more about this if you can elaborate. I have long believed that Reddit is mostly bots because of how often (current thing) is pushed to the front, and any dissenting opinions are downvoted and buried

Or how many of those (current thing) posts end up getting deleted within a day or two. or the poster's account getting deleted. That's purely an anecdote but something I've noticed a handful of times when I've left a browser tab open. It'd be great to have mandated transparency regarding things like this for any "social media".

Reddit has gotten...weird. It's at the point where I almost consider that most of the people I'm talking to there on the mainstream subs actually are bots.

I agree. I've been using Reddit heavily for 15 years and it's almost unbearable now. Whatever shred of credibility it had at the beginning is being intentionally destroyed to drive shareholder value. Sadly its decline is happening in tandem with Google's decline, meaning that Reddit is one of the last places to find real feedback from real people about a wide range of products, services, and topics.

We really need some decent alternatives, to lots of services.

Interesting. I’ve only ever used Reddit for like diy, maker type subreddits and those are pretty hard to fake. Between Reddit and twitter, it sounds like we are being manipulated to the moon and back.

Can someone create a Reddit where posts are videos instead of text? The community could downvote people hiding their faces if those chose. In the age of deepfakes would that even solve the problem?

You mean... YouTube?

TikTok?

I'd assume that niche subreddits are probably fine, but any that have frontpaged are probably laden with bots

That's why I've nuked all my accounts, and I find the comment sections nearly unbearable. Even when I more or less agree with the bots, it is just useless commentary.

The threads on Ukraine are particularly bad since its just a bunch of bots and kids trying to meme and be clever and edgy about how Russia sucks, which isn't actually useful discourse or information, even if you sort of agree with it.

What about HN then? This thread looks full of anti-Reddit "bots" to me…

nah this thread is just bots, reddit is very single ideological trash. it has the illusion of discourse with only a single verdict ( in almost every sub ). The amazing amount of people who have no idea about Eastern politics instantly becoming ^experts^ is dumbfounding.

The explanation for that is easy.

Most of the people knew with which side to side long before the war started.

No amount of propaganda is going to convince an average west European or American that Russians are good guys who just wanted to protect Russian-speaking people in Ukraine. Moreover, no amount of "western" propaganda will convince someone in a country that was hit by the USA or NATO bombs that Ukraine supported by "the west" is fighting for freedom and democracy.

With propaganda, you can soften these opinions a bit, but that's the limit.

And it just happens so, that both Reddit, Twitter and HN are dominated with the users from the first group, so they tend to believe Ukraine side more.

> no amount of "western" propaganda will convince someone in a country that was hit by the USA or NATO bombs that Ukraine supported by "the west" is fighting for freedom and democracy

I have at least one online friend from just such a NATO-bombed (and even relatively pro-Russia) country who is an absolutely solid supporter of Ukraine's fight against Russia's aggression.

Few people who live in countries with actual historical experience with Russia actually believe this garbage "NATO backed Russia into a corner" narrative.

According to several polls and even the Prime Minister, vast majority of Serbians (80+%) support Russia and blame NATO/Ukraine for the conflict.

Well Nato did bomb Serbia because they were genociding the Albanians so I am not surprised they are anti nato.

> No amount of propaganda is going to convince an average west European or American that Russians are good guys who just wanted to protect Russian-speaking people in Ukraine.

It's a tough sell indeed when government-controlled prime-time TV shows in Russia promote genocide: wholesale destruction of Ukraine's civilian infrastructure to deprive them of electricity, heating, food and medicine, to drive 20 million refugees to EU.[1]

[1] https://twitter.com/JuliaDavisNews/status/157049364928437862...

That depends mightily on the subreddit though, as always. The better ones flair or ban the propaganda posts.

I think you're giving Reddit too much credit. The frontpage is awash with astroturfing, agenda posts, and an obvious bias being curated by a handful of power mods. Sure, minor or niche subreddits can escape this, but that's probably only because they are non impactful to begin with.

"Flairing" posts doesn't do much good either, because the vast majority of users don't filter. I wonder if this actually makes things worse because the people who would downvote and present counterpoints have opted out of seeing such posts - furthering the echo chamber.

The real power of Reddit is to manipulate perception by a barrage of likeminded content, displayed over and over again to people who don't have their ideological defenses up because they're just browsing casually.

Minor niche subreddits are the only things that keep me on the site. The default subs are universally awful.

One of those small cozy niche subs I used to follow is now being spammed by bot reposts. Intelligent posts have dropped off dramatically. It is endemic.

The bigger the subreddit, the less tolerant of neutral-seeming Russia stories (i.e. "propaganda") and the more tolerant of heavily pro-Ukraine glory stories (i.e. propaganda).

As with all things, it's on smaller community subreddits where people are allowed to think independently to some degree.

Even my hometown's subreddit (city pop less than 500K, subreddit membership less than 100k) is so heavily group-thinked that many topics of current national debate are 100% settled on the subreddit and no-go for discussion.

That was more true a decade ago. Once a reddit gets big enough to be useful, it will be too big. After the_donald and similar, strange white supremacist posts started appearing in, say, small programming reddits that had previously been immune to shitposting.

I also experienced the reverse: programming subreddits, tv show subreddits, and even blogs and mailing lists started telling me to support BLM (which isn't a thing in my country), avoid beating up Asian people (which was easy to do since I was living in Asia), etc

I was there for Javascript tricks and they insisted that I check my privilege. It got exhausting, not because it's insulting, but because the signal to noise ratio of what I came to a subreddit or mailing list to see was way off the mark.

This seems to have improved a bit in the last year or two, since Covid stole the show, but not entirely.

That's not the reverse, we're describing almost the same problem

Reddit's weakest link is the moderators. You pay the moderators off and you subvert the whole site. I imagine that's what the Ukrainian propaganda ministry has managed.

Outside this I find it somewhat bizarre that we've let the unemployed mentally ill decide what is and isn't acceptable for millions to see.

> You pay the moderators off and you subvert the whole site.

You'll also get a sitewide permanent ban for talking about or mentioning the places where moderators sell their accounts for significant chunks of money. This is automatic and not in response to a report with certain keywords.

It's a problem they really want to pretend doesn't exist.

Do you have a link to that site? I don't think it's banned here.

> You pay the moderators off and you subvert the whole site.

See: r/startrek

Any criticism of Star Trek: Picard or ST: Discovery (or any CBS property) is deleted instantly.

And redditors still have the gall to describe themselves as anti-corporate leftist freedom fighters.

I used to be a mod of a small subreddit and I was a huge redditor a while ago. It was kind of an open secret that pretty much everything on reddit was manipulated by bots. A huge redditor at the time (unidan) was banned for using bots to pump his posts and comments, and that made bot manipulation a lot less secret for a while.

It's an anonymous site and you don't even need an email address to sign up, so it's very easy to spin up many accounts.

Yet Reddit is still much less affected by obvious and disgusting fake news than all other platforms I know.

> Reddit is weirdly overflowing with pro Ukraine propaganda and people don't seem to notice.

Can it be called "propaganda" if it's just like, an r/worldnews link to a story on some website and then 100,000 "actual users" (I don't think they're all bots?) on their own volition/will/brainpower spread/support (upvote) the "pro-Ukraine" message in the comments?

If those users are legit, sure. But lets be honest...writing bots in Reddit is stupid easy. I have done it myself. Most things that appear on the front page are most likely not legit. Darknet Diaries, a podcast on hacking, had an episode proving how Apple Podcast top 10s are rigged through bots. Episode 27, specifically. And the thing is...if we can easily do it by pushing mediocre podcasts to the top of a list, why can't we do so with Reddit posts? The API even has calls to upvote/downvote posts and leave comments. This is a thing that Reddit as a company actively supports.

I highly recommend watching two videos..."The Dead Internet Theory", by All Time, and "Reddit is Being Manipulated by Professional Shills Every Day" by Point. They go into how Reddit works algorithmically, and how there is a strong incentive for corporations, governments, and political movements to write bots to manipulate karma. If hackernews lets me, I will link both of them and the darknet diaries episode. Im new here, so Im not sure how links work on ycombinator.

Darknet diaries 27: https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/27/

Dead Internet Theory: https://youtu.be/DEn758DVF9I

Reddit is run by shills: https://youtu.be/4uIrnEIuL8o

> But lets be honest...writing bots in Reddit is stupid easy

Reddit has no captchas whatsoever?

Nope. Nowhere. You just create an account, get your api key and ID, and code it all up in Python.

If it was true then we would see an overflow of pro Putin bots as we see on other platforms such as Twitter.

Is the kgb and it’s army of trolls not aware of Reddit?

Im not so sure. Reddit isn't super popular in Russia because it got banned around 2014 right when it was really getting popular in the west. Twitter only recently got blocked there this February, so I believe more Russians are familiar with it than Reddit. Just a theory

Yes.

Propaganda is defined as:

"information, especially of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote or publicize a particular political cause or point of view."

If we accept that as a definition, it is clear that everything that is biased (* and is misleading ) is propaganda ( and if you think for more than a second, you recognize that everything is indeed biased to a degree ). Now.. whether is it is misleading.. can be in the eye of the beholder.

<< and then 100,000 "actual users" [...] upvote

Believe it or not, people do have an interesting tendency to follow the wisdom of the crowd. As such, social sentiment is a valuable indicator of what they 'should think'.

Reddit’s Pro Ukraine propaganda as you call it, is mostly telling somewhat irrelevant things as if it was a good sign for Ukraine and it’s allies. It’s rarely outright fake stories as you will see on pro Russian channels.

Unless you believe that the mass graves being found are fake. If you do, I wonder what other famous war crimes you think are fake.

Also I’m curious, what Ukrainian propaganda didn’t turn out to be true?

Off the top of my head: Ghost of Kiev, Snake Island martyrs, Zelensky "I don't need a ride" line, Azovstal "heroes" evacuating, Mariupol hospital, Kramatorsk bomb, Putin having cancer, Ukraine bombing their own POWs, Ukraine shelling Zaporizhia nuclear power plant, old man shooting down an SU-25 with a rifle, etc.

Essentially the western media just repeats everything they hear from the Ukrainian MOD. According to an American reporter, Seth Harper, who was over their reporting on the volunteer battalion, western reporters are basically given no access so they just have to repeat everything the ministry of defense tells them. This is why we've ended up with so many ridiculously false claims printed.

Ok let’s go down the list. Ghost of Kyiv, likely fake but harmless propaganda. Snake island martyrs, you mean the go fuck your self thing ? It does have been said on radio, but then it turned out the guys were still alive. Not sure if it’s propaganda or the guys having no way to communicate that they were still alive. In any case, harmless propaganda. Azovstal heroes evacuating, well they did fight heroically, I’m not sure what’s fake about their evacuation, the last of them have been captured. Mariupol hospital I don’t what it is about, Krakatorsk bomb, you mean the train station ? It’s real, you can see the photos and it’s pure war crime. Innocent civilians trying to escape… Putin having cancer has always been rumors, no official statements, and it could be true, cancer doesn’t mean instant death. Ukraine bombing their own pows and nuclear plant, is that Ukraine propaganda?? I’m confused. Old man shooting a plan with a rifle? Never heard of that one, probably not official statement, and still harmless propaganda.

Ok now Russia’s turn. Ukraine being full of nazis, official statements, very harmful. Bio labs??? Official statements, 100% fake. Ukraine being a threat to Russia, official statements, 100% fake. Ukraine most corrupt nation on earth, well it’s military seems much more functional than Russia’s, not sure who’s the most corrupt in the end… Denial of torture and mass graves, etc…

All in all, seems to me that Ukrainian propaganda is culprit of wishful thinking, whereas Russian propaganda is just a disgusting pile of lies and hate.

Disclaimer: I'm pro ruZZian bot.

> Snake island martyrs, you mean the go fuck your self thing ?

Not quite right. Ukrainian government initially stated that 13 border guards were killed and president Zelenskyy announced that all of them will be posthumously awarded the title of Hero of Ukraine. However, all of them were alive and 19 Ukrainian salor were later released.

> I’m not sure what’s fake about their evacuation, the last of them have been captured.

Ukrainian government said that Azovstal heroes were evacuated (I'm not a native English speaker, as you may have guessed, but evacuation means release), but in reality they surrendered.

> Mariupol hospital

It is assumed that russians hit hospital w/ aviabomb. Two days before attack, russian government mentioned, that Azov batallion used hospital X as a shelter and there were no (!) patients. But then russians attacked hospital Y (looks like by mistake) and one pregnant woman died. Another pregnant woman, who appeared on photoes, after that gave controversal interview where she said that she didn't hear any bomber, hence russian media assumed that Ukrainians attacked hospital using artillery. Interview is controversal, because it confirmed: everything that russian govt/media said about hospital before was a lie.

> Putin having cancer has always been rumors, no official statements, and it could be true, cancer doesn’t mean instant death.

Second that. He definitely has neurological issues, but not sure about cancer.

And Russia's turn.

> Ukraine being full of nazis, official statements, very harmful.

As far as I can see, there are more nazis in Russia. Russian propaganda always mentioned, that there was a political party (The Right Sector) and they used Nazi symbols, however on last election they didn't surpass minimal barrier. Worth adding, even before 2014, there was a famous Ukrainian chant: "Moskalyaku na gilyaku" - very offensive term towards russians (https://bazovo.ru/en/cerebral-palsy/moskalyaku-na-gilyaku-ch...).

> Bio labs

The funny thing w/ this bio labs is that they were created during Soviet period. The US saw them as a threat after the collapse of the USSR and therefore simply sponsored them to do NOTHING. Technically, they are still bio labs and yes, they are sponsored by US, but they are not harmful.

> Ukraine most corrupt nation on earth

Partially this is true. You can read about this issue from Finnish soldier perspective https://yle.fi/uutiset/3-12602381 (Google Translate is fine) - "Some of the grants disappeared into the wrong pockets".

And finally..

> Ukrainian propaganda is culprit of wishful thinking

As a russian speaking, I read both media and Telegram channels, and I can see all the hatred towards russian citizens, who even DOESN'T support Putin and the War.

And the biggest lie so far is stories about the sexual rape. Notable fact is that Ukrainian ombudsman Denisova was sacked for excessive lies about woman rapes. The Commissioner of the President of Ukraine for Children's Rights Daria Gerasimchuk on the Polish TV channel "Belsat" exposed fake Ukrainian propaganda about the alleged violence by the Russian military against Ukrainian children (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GfUBRGUH-Kc). The Prosecutor General's Office of Ukraine has not a single confirmed fact of violence so far.

That's because you're reading western websites and west is in alliance with Ukraine (mildly saying). So you're basically reading a newspaper written by a party being in war. Of course it'll be overflowing with propaganda.

Try reading Chinese news on that topic, for example. They're neutral party on this one.

What terrifies me is that you people don't seem to notice it.

China isn't especially neutral. They want Russia to win. In fact, they want to change the world order in partnership with Russia, and they talk openly about doing so.

But they aren't going to hitch their future to Russia, especially when Russia shows itself to be both weak and incompetent. They aren't going to aid Russia in this war. But they're not neutral. Their news about the war is going to have a definite slant.

I'm guessing sentiment is "well even if it's a lie, it's a lie in good cause". And it's not exactly easy to even fact check anything

>Any even neutral story about Russia

People tend to approach a country differently depending on whether it's a genocidal regime invading another country, or the defending nation. When thinking about WW2 we think of Nazis in a fundamentally different way than we think of their victims.

Another thing is, it's been six months and we can tell how close to reality Ukrainian and Russian propaganda turns out to be afterwards. And from that we can tell that while the Ukrainian one is pretty close - you can compare their estimates of Russian losses with eg Oryx - the Russian propaganda is... far out. The joke about Russian Air Force completely destroying Ukrainian Air Force three times over is not a joke - that's official Russian stats.

It is common for military forces to wildly exaggerate claims of enemy equipment destroyed. During the NATO strikes against Serbian forces in 1999 they claimed to have knocked out hundreds of armored vehicles but in reality mostly hit decoys or caused only minor damage.

https://www.newsweek.com/kosovo-cover-160273

To be clear, I am not trying to justify Russian lies or imply any sort of moral equivalence. Just pointing out that you can never take such claims at face value.

I think that's fair if you're talking about the warfront. But I disagree that we cannot talk about policies around the war and what the implications are for this Winter, for example.

Sure but what's the discussion?

Will winter gas prices suck for European countries? Yes. Is there anything they can do about it? No. Even if they tried to they can't exactly get Ukraine to give up and surrender and it's in Europe's intrests to help Ukraine win

Of course we should talk about the implications. We got completely dependent on cheap Russian gas, we failed to diversify, and now we reap the fruit when it's too late and we have to face the dilemma: should we fund the genocide or help our economies.

Regardless, when thinking about WW2 we look for evidence for claims, and take neither Nazi propaganda nor Allied propaganda at face-value. Propaganda from those days seems almost comically transparent in retrospect.

During war time even today, propaganda is a powerful and pervasive weapon.

The weird thing is Redditors seem to understand this fully, and yet assume this rule applies only to one side.

What would be the benefit of being able to identify the propaganda, practically speaking. I get being principales against it, but are there any big ballot measures I missed? I have no ability to impact the war, why does it matter if I want to rah rah for the invaded a bit?

If you're reading about the war for entertainment's sake, there's no benefit to being able to identify propaganda. If anything, propaganda makes everything more entertaining.

In my case, I have real-life interests, friends, and family involved and the reality of what's happening and the eventual outcomes impact my life in significant ways.

Imagine if the USG had this power in the 60s and 70s as draught dodgers and war protestors sought to provide an alternative perspective. With this technology and todays psyche, they would have been buried and labeled as foreign agents and bits and what have you. People cannot lose sight of that. We need dissent, even when we're right.

What makes you think this didn’t happen? It seems to me that the 60s and 70s were full of this.

It did, but due to the limitations of technology it was not pervasive and did not have control over people's psyche. It did not control students, colleges and libraries, even private companies the way it does today. Not by a long shot.

Alleged Russian bot here, I was torn apart in a thread about the European energy crisis for attempting a balanced perspective. It's sad to see, but not really worth the time trying to fight against it. The vast majority of folk seem actively happy to be misinformed, so long as that misinformation is consensus among their social circles. Better to use the information as some kind of indicator of the demographic you are interacting with, and act accordingly (most probably, find something better to do)

Don't let it get you down. I was recently banned from a subreddit after one (neutral) comment for being a white supremacist.

If I'm a white supremacist, I'd hate to find out what actual white supremacists are.

I messaged the mods asking which rule I'd broken (because I hadn't broken one). They responded by muting me for 28 days.

Forget it Jake, it's Reddit-town.

It’s not just Reddit, either. This same story has played out for me on Anime News Network’s forums, some gaming forums, etc.

Ultimately I just take my toys and go home - they don’t want me there, and it’s their legal right to say so.

But it results in a forum of views that appear to show unanimous consensus that {x} is good or {y} is bad, which is potentially dangerous for society at large and certainly bad for an open society of debate and knowledge sharing.

Even worse, I’ve seen instances where a blatantly bigoted, racist, or violent extreme view is allowed to stay (down voted to hell, of course) while my and others’ more nuanced or intelligent takes are scrubbed and banned.

I can only presume this is intentional with the effect of demonstrating that “only violent extremists are anti-{x} or pro-{y}, and you wouldn’t want to be associated with those people, now, would you?”

I only wish I had an example handy to share, because it’s been pretty blatant at times.

Ultimately the moral judgements associated with every political argument is getting ridiculous and (intentionally?) stifling debate while stirring unrest, and most of it feels artificial.

I've always been against "hate speech" bans or modifiers for this reason.

Real, actionable incitement to violence and bodily harm is already covered by law as not legal speech.

You're left with either superficial hateful sentiment or someone who has a nuanced position. It's fine to say "don't do that here, thanks." But, it's being used as a cudgel from the top down to constrain public discourse and manufacture consent as what is "hate" becomes more and more abstract and more and more inclusive. If PETA is suddenly in control of the "community guidelines" on a site, would sharing the fact that I had eggs for breakfast be a form of hate speech?

Intentionally stifling debate: Yes, because it's easier to paint your opponent as a monster/dishonest/Nazi/murderer than it is to actually answer their position in a way that other people can follow and understand. It's easier to shut down debate than it is to win debate.

> I was recently banned from a subreddit after one (neutral) comment for being a white supremacist.

I'm curious what you said. There is lots and lots of actual-neo-nazi recruitment material/copypasta out there that is deliberately written to sound "neutral." I can maybe see that if you accidentally drifted to close to that then you could get caught in the crossfire.

But Ukrainian nationalists who use real Nazi symbols get a pass?

Did I suggest that?

> somehow Redditors still take it at face value

There's a clue in there.

I hate Putin and his regime in Russia right now but Ukraine (atleast from the pictures I’m seeing) seems to be overrun with explicitly neo nazi groups. In my ideal scenario they both take each out without effecting the actual EU.

Where do you see those pictures? I follow some pro-Russian propaganda groups on Telegram just to see the other side of the argument and even they don't seem to have such pictures.

A small side-story: In one of those groups I told them I am Turkish (as they really kindly asked the non-Russians following the group to state their reasons for doing so) and out of nowhere they went 15 mins about how disgusting my race is and when I asked how is that different than the behavior of alleged nazis in Ukraine, they banned me :)

A lot of them on Reddit, they even go through the trouble of censoring the flags before they post them.

I'm not a reddit aficionado so I googled "reddit ukraine", which landed me on "r/ukraine" and I went through the first page. The only nazi-like symbol is worn by a bear depicted as a caricature of Russia, on this post: https://www.reddit.com/r/ukraine/comments/xfqauu/go_away_rus...

How do I see "a lot of them"?

I believe they're referring to this removed thread that was on the Reddit frontpage 2-3 days ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/xdgv20/chechen_and_uk...

The thread has over 33k upvotes but has since then been removed by its author. You can find the original image online by looking up the url on webarchives.

The image shows mercenary fighters holding flags in front of a landmark. There are two Chechen flags, one flag depicting a skull associated with a certain ideology and one censored flag.

Search "Nazi patch Ukraine" or some variation on Twitter. I'm not exaggerating when I say that there's hundreds of examples - many of them posted by the BBC, Reuters, or Zelensky himself.

A lot of them are taken out of context see:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mhg8AXXHoRE

I did find some photos of supposedly nazi-symbol-wearing Ukrainian solders but I didn't recognize the symbol before reading the explanation, maybe they didn't too?

Also, I found some photos of Russian soldiers wearing such symbols too:

https://www.businessinsider.com/russia-fighter-neo-nazi-symb...

If you want to look more into the Russian equivalent of those symbol-wearing soldiers, the Russian soldier in the second link also wears a patch belonging to the 'Rusich DShRG' group

> Ukraine [...] seems to be overrun with explicitly neo nazi groups

So is the US. Rising fascism is simply the state of the world right now.

To pick the first story at the top of my feed right now: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/15/us/jan-6-camp-auschwitz-h...

In the US you don't have regiments with swastikas on their flags. In Ukraine you do.

The US has the luxury of not being invaded by a country 3x as big. Ukraine doesn't really have the luxury of picking and choosing who is allowed to defend.

Sure but to an external observer it matters, especially if my country is explicitly supporting their cause.

Why does it matter? I'm also an external observer in a country that's supporting to Ukraine but I recognise the reality that Azov is an unfortunate necessity created by multiple Russian invasions.

How though? Ukrainians were in the same boat as the polish as undesirables under nazism so I don’t see why it would be a necessity.

It was a pragmatic necessity for Ukraine's government to allow them to fight once they were created because of the size differential. Ukraine's government didn't create them.

Had the Nazis been purged between 2014 and today Russia would have most likely not invaded.

Least we forget that during that period Nazi death squads killed more people in the break away regions than have so far died in this war. The last time US citizens were killed abroad in large numbers by the army of another country was the Alamo and we still remember it.

You obviously don't like nazis but you openly suggest "purging" humans.

I’m going to be honest, Nazis don’t feel like people worth having around and so subhuman in many ways. A bloodthirsty person isn’t a human, it’s a monster that needs to be… purged, like we do with common murderous criminals. Yes, I’m actively campaigning for the lynching of Nazis.

Nazis were chanting along the same lines against Jews. I don't want to believe you really mean what you are saying. Spreading hate on the internet is much removed from really wanting to kill humans and that's also much removed from being able to actually do it.

The problem isn't really purging Nazis per se, it's the sleight of hand that Russian propagandists use at the last minute to switch "Nazis" with "Ukrainians" or "Ukrainian government".

In the abstract, sure, we all want to purge Nazis. But not if you're saying Nazis == Ukrainians. If you defined Nazis to mean Putin's Wagner Group (headed by a guy with SS tattoo), then sure, I'd agree.

What's so cynical about all this is how they've undermined our language and our ability to talk about fascism (as exemplified by modern Russia) by coopting the linguistic tools that we use (the word Nazi) to do so. It's depressingly effective propaganda.

Ukraine is the only country in the world to have _literal_ nazi swastikas on regimental flags.

Somehow the same people who thought the OK symbol was a secret white supremacist dog whistle are now coming out of the wood work saying that akshually it's only 40% of the Ukrainian army that has Nazi tattoos and it's fine.

It's nowhere near 40% of the Ukrainian army. It's more like somewhere between 20%-100% of Azov, which themselves are less than 1% of the Ukrainian army.

And as we've already been through, Ukraine has no ability to pick and choose who is allowed to defend them from multiple Russian invasions. They are significantly smaller. Such luxuries only apply to strong countries that aren't being invaded. You keep dishonestly comparing Ukraine (small country being invaded) to the US (country not being invaded).

If Ukraine wasn't under constant threat of invasion from Russia, then I'd be the first to criticize their decision making around Azov.

No, your first sentence presumes that the Kremlin propaganda is truthful. Putin's ambitions have nothing to do with neo-Nazis in Ukraine, as his own writings over many years reveal. It's imperial ambition.

Ukraine was smart not to get rid of Azov. Putin invaded once for made up reasons, no reason to think he won't do it again. Ukraine's understanding of fascist Russia's true self was correct.

Sure, but if they had killed a few hundred Nazis 14,000 civilians wouldn't have been killed by Nazis.

That sounds like a win no matter what.

Are you saying 14,000 civilians were killed by neo-Nazis in the Donbas? Do you have a source for that?

It’s not the same, it’s very, very explicit in Ukraine.

Russians have no issues with Nazis - it’s propaganda. Eastern Europe has a far right problem; it isn’t unique to any country.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wagner_Group#Rusich_unit

The right wing "ultranationalist" party Svoboda (In electoral alliance with National Corps, Right Sector, Ukrainian Volunteer Army (Azov), Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, and Congress of Ukrainian Nationalists) managed to get 2.15% of the votes at the 2019 Ukrainian parliamentary election.

It's pretty difficult for me to see how Ukraine can be "overrun with explicitly neo nazi groups" with that amount of support for their right-wing parties.

Unless of course you live in Russia's fantasy world where a Jewish president can be a neo-nazi

> Unless of course you live in Russia's fantasy world where a Jewish president can be a neo-nazi

Without arguing about the rest of the comment, Russian narrative sees Nazis as a group that want to exterminate Russians, based on what actual Nazis in WW2 did when they attacked. And this "Jewish president" who banned Russian language, banned almost all political parties and organizations of russian-speaking people and sent an army to punish the rebellion in Donbas fits the Russian definition of Nazi pretty well.

> who banned Russian language

That's an invention by Sergey Lavrov. Of course Ukraine didn't ban the native language of 30% of it's population.

https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2022/jun/08/sergey-lav...

> banned almost all political parties and organizations of russian-speaking people

Ukraine did in fact ban pro-Russian parties. While I must admit I don't particularly like the idea of banning any parties in a democracy, it is understandable why you would ban parties and organizations supporting the enemy while you are at war.

This is, however, a long shot from the claim the he banned almost all political parties and organizations of russian-speaking people.

Per Wikipedia, the 2019 law says "All schools and universities are required to teach in Ukrainian". I don't know how Politifact managed to find the opposite of that statement

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_policy_in_Ukraine#Ana...

On the other hand, a president who natively speaks Russian himself who respected the ceasefire with the Russian-administered "independent" republics and took a more dovish stance than his predecessor doesn't seem like someone who is obviously on the cusp of exterminating Russians. Putin's armies killed far more Russian-Ukranians than even the worst Ukrainian racists could have managed.

There is a grain of truth in your statement though: Russian narrative does define Nazis differently from the rest of the world (and indeed, from Hitler). It defines everyone that doesn't wish to be subjugated by Russia as Nazis.

It's interesting because if you watch one of the interviews with Azov members, this is how they see themselves, as well. They adopt the Nazi aesthetic and ideology not because a hatred of Jews, but a hatred of Russians, and rejection of Russian culture. They look at the battle of Stalingrad and say 1 million wasn't nearly enough, and call modern Russia a communist state. It's really wild to hear.

If you spend a fair amount of time living in Ukraine, you're unlikely to encounter or notice Neo Nazi groups. They certainly do exist and you'll see a swastika spray-painted on abandoned buildings here and there. You can probably find and join a Neo Nazi group more easily than you could in the West, sure.

But generally people don't seem to have much problem with Jews (at least publicly). Middle-aged people and older don't like homosexuals, but the younger generation is totally LGBQ-friendly, albeit not sure about 'T'.

Black people aren't revered or hated- if anything they're so rare that they're either a subject of curiosity or ignored when walking by on the street.

WW2 never left the public consciousness. Older people remember cowering from Nazis and seniors remember fighting them.

It's not "overrun" with Neo Nazi groups. Ya they exist though, but they don't seem to have much sway if any at all.

Antisemitism is significantly higher in Russia than Ukraine according to polling.

Where are you seeing this? Genuinely asking because I always thought that the whole ukraine neo-nazi thing was entirely made up

It’s no more or less made up then the white supremacist narrative in the US. Yes they are real, yes you can fill a football stadium with them,no they are not even a noticeable percent of the population thanks to how large both counties are. This makes it easy to fill a tv screen with Nazis and sell whatever narrative you want.

It's real, but it's only used for its anti-Russia symbolism. It's my understanding that they don't actually adhere to other parts of the ideology.

My understanding was that they do have a neo-Nazi militia that was incorporated into the official army, and they made at least some effort to clean them up a bit, after that. This happened because the militia rose up and started having significant success against the Russians in 2014 while the Ukrainian army was struggling, so there was a "the enemy of my enemy..." aspect. Whether they have any sway over, say, policy, I do not know.

> Whether they have any sway over, say, policy, I do not know.

Far-right political parties only got ~2% of the votes in elections. Not enough for even a single seat in Parliament.

If there still are any Nazis in Ukraine, their influence is much smaller than the far-right factions in Poland or France.

"At least from the pictures I'm seeing". There you have it folks, pictures. Ukraine with their centrist democratically elected leader and lowest amount of neo-nazism in the region compared to all their neighbors according to Pew polling is actually a fascist country justifiably being taken out by Putin's Russia, a mafia dictatorship who promotes known Nazis to high positions (such as the founder of Wagner who has SS tattoos on his neck).

It's so ironic that this thread about purported Ukrainian propaganda is so thick with Kremlin propaganda.

For real. Criticize the British monarchy on hn? Verbotin. Spread Kremlin propaganda? Just part of a "curious discussion".

^this commenter is an example of a pro-russian troll and /or bot

Yep, either someone pushing propaganda, or someone who has ate it all and is regurgitating it.

The problem with them taking each other out is the millions of innocents they’d kill along the way.

The only good outcome is a peace agreement.

Unfortunately that was tried post Crimea and didn't work.

True, sadly the Ukranian state refused to uphold the Minsk agreements guaranteeing regional autonomy to the Donbas. Instead, they kept bombing the region.

> I hate Putin and his regime in Russia right now but

I'm not saying you are one, but this opening "I hate Putin/Russia/etc. but..." is typical opening line of Kremlin trolls.