The only way this sort of rhetoric can be fought is at the level of moderation. This site has user-driven moderation, which in theory means that you can fight the tide this way, but in practice the authoritarians and fascists have access to these tools as well, and bad faith use is rarely punished, so these tools are less of a panacea and more of a race to who can down-vote who first.
The only other alternative is for the paid moderation of this site to put their foot down and say "We are not okay with fascists and authoritarian apologists on our site" and ban them. The admins of Hacker News are another on a very long list of social media site hosts who have decided to wash their hands of the responsibility. They don't care.
Sorry to be the bearer of bad news. If you decide you still want to engage, I recommend viewing the interaction through the lens of an attention economy; spend less time on a rebuttle than they did on their post, and only in places where you think it will actually be seen.
Unless one verifies every single user by ID, there needs to be at least a platform-level detection of user jurisdiction and the application of appropriate penalties and limits to their activity.
It's the old way that social spaces on the internet used to work, and you don't need ID verification for that, you just need spaces that are conducive to that style of community-building. Think Discord, not Instagram. Think (invite-only) Mastodon, not Twitter. Think lobsters, not HN. Think Tildes, not Reddit.
Yes, that's why I need others to help. There are actually less of them (bots) than us. There is one pretty strange "tiktok-like" site, that has the worst kind of people and memes out there showing up regularly, something like 4chan but for images, but somehow most trolls (there are trolls from many different groups operating there) still can't hold on and every such trolling post is pretty fast met with a big wave of downvotes and counter-comments.
> The only other alternative is for the paid moderation of this site to put their foot down and say "We are not okay with fascists and authoritarian apologists on our site" and ban them
The owners of that site can't manage such a big firehose of hate and most users say that they are racist degenerates (and they say they don't care if you are black or white racist, if you are racist they like you).
> The admins of Hacker News are another on a very long list of social media site hosts who have decided to wash their hands of the responsibility. They don't care.
They DO care and a lot of users here also care. Every stupid comment that I've seen could be from troll was very quickly downvoted and counter-commented. We didn't see a lot of them, because they are deleted pretty fast and often and trolls just can't get easy foothold here.
They pose as citizens of European, African, Asian or American countries online and try to steer discussion to subvert the local society. The Twitter location reveal showcases that it has an immense scale.
There are many examples such as Scottish independence movement going offline when iran goes offline.
On websites like HN and reddit you cannot even see where someone is originating from. But you can ALWAYS detect them by the cognitive biases they're using to drive their propaganda: false equivalency biase, false choice dilemmas, and so on.
Yes, and there are more Russians than Ukrainians, yet somehow they can't overcome a smaller country in 4 years. Trolls want you to give up in countering them. Their work is about pushing propaganda AND demoralising people so that they give up fighting. When you think "why bother", they won.