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Zelensky video deepfake
399 points by osynavets on March 16, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 281 comments
Video with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky asking to retreat and surrender their weapons was published hours ago [1]. Although I must admit the quality of the video is mediocre, the voice of the president is a little unnatural and stagy, the color of the skin of the face doesn't match, though the facial expression is not bad. Nevertheless, here we are, deepfake video created specifically for war!

(PS: I'm Ukrainian and just try to be sarcastic about the whole thing which is horrific, be careful and take care) (PS2: considering our attitude towards the situation, we're not even taking this video serious)

[1] https://twitter.com/_delanay/status/1504048298520371201




In Swedish telephone directories there used to be a section entitled "Om kriget kommer" (If there's war). Prominent among it was the phrase:

> Varje meddelande att motsåndet ska uppges är falskt.

(Every message stating that resistance has ceased is false).

No doubt something similar is stated in Ukraine.

https://www.forsvarsmakten.se/siteassets/5-information-och-f...


I'm Swedish and I've always loved this phrase. It's short and concise, and it stirs something inside you even if you're mostly devoid of nationalistic tendencies.

The continuation of the phrase mentioned later in the same pamphlet is also nice:

SV: Motstånd skall göras ständigt och i alla lägen.

EN: Resistance shall be made constantly and in all situations.

It also mentions the classic "En svensk tiger" (lit. "A Swede stays silent") illustrated by a tiger in the Swedish colors since the word has double meaning in Swedish.

Minor nitpick, the correct translation isn't "resistance has ceased" but "resistance shall cease".


> Minor nitpick, the correct translation isn't "resistance has ceased" but "resistance shall cease".

Du har rätt :)

I quoted and translated from memory, then googled for the correct quote.

The current statement is:

> Om Sverige blir angripet av ett annat land kommer vi aldrig att ge upp. Alla uppgifter om att motståndet ska upphöra är falska.


Fellow swede, same here. It always makes me think of these guys:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_holdout

Last confirmed holdout in 1974, almost 30 years after ww2 ended for Japan.


Good mottoes to adopt for FLOSS.


Interesting! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_the_war_comes


Further down that rabbit hole: https://thestrategybridge.org/the-bridge/2017/9/20/trigger-h...


That was a fascinating read. I did my military service in Sweden in 2010 and one of the quotes I remember most clearly from my commanding officers was "Hesitation kills" ("Tvekan dödar" in swedish), and that seems to be a direct heritage of the doctrine outlined in the article.


Whats is that thing the blonde soldier is holding? Brightness meter? A nokia proto-smartphone?


Might just be a pen. If the object would have the width of a smartphone, the soldier wouldn't be able to wrap her ringfinger around like in the picture.


Well the with is nearly like the length of her finger, and she has some color-table in her hand, maybe some infrared meter?


That's probably not the width of the object: It's a smartphone seen edge-on, so your "width" is actually the thickness. Well, mostly; the left half of what we see of it is probably (judging from the differing shades of black) a foreshortened view of the back of it, and the right part the edge. It has the rounded-rectangle look of an iPhone; did they have a single camera lens in the upper left (head-on) / right (from the user's side) corner with a silver-ish border around it?


She's taking a picture with her phone...

The caption implies that this is from 1993, but it's a much more recent crop of cadets on a visit to Vares later.


> The caption implies that this is from 1993,

Not necessarily. Here it is:

> Cadets view the sign on the Nordbat 2 school in Vareš and testify of the city's appreciation of the Swedish UN Federation's efforts in autumn 1993. (Johan Nordén/Försvarsmakten)

That must be intended to say the appreciated efforts took place in autumn 1993. But yeah, somewhat ambiguous.

> but it's a much more recent crop of cadets on a visit to Vares later.

Kind of a pilgrimage? If the pic was relatively recent at the time of that blog post (September 2017), many (most?) of those cadets probably hadn't even been born in 1993.


Ha thanks for the clarification, but it's a bit too late i already started a article for Vice that time travelers exist ;)


Good thing WP has a link to the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phone_book entry in that article; a lot of people nowadays probably don't know WTF that is...

I'm not middle-aged, I'm from the Middle Ages.

(Works better in Swedish: Jag är inte medelålders, jag är medeltida.)


Related: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_Resistance_(book)


Interesting!

By the way, I'm curious about the word "uppges". After running the sentence both through DeepL.com and Google Translate they seem to return the translation "Any message that the resistance should be stated is false" (though DeepL does list "abandoned" and "quit" among many options in the translation result dropdown). Also, after checking out Wiktionary [0]. I see it only lists "to give as a fact; to state" as a translation for the verb.

This is the first time DeepL has failed me in providing a reasonable translation on the first try. Is this usage of "uppges" to mean something analogous to "cease" very rare or old fashioned, and somehow missing from Wiktionary? Would the meaning of that sentence be unambiguous to any native Swede even if they had never seen that message before?

[0] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/uppge


"Uppge" is tricky because normally the way the word is used today, it means to give information, but in this case it's a way of throwing around the verb phrase "ge upp" (lit. 'give up', mentioned further down on Wiktionary), which means quite exactly to surrender.

The text is from the 60's and it shows in exactly the type of language used.


As others have said, "skall uppges" is just the passive future-tense form of "att ge upp" ("to give up" --> "shall be given up"). Someone said the text was written in the 1960s. I'm not sure about that, but I do know it was continuously re-published throughout the 1980s... And already, the usage is unfamiliar to current dictionaries and translation resources! In a few decades more, it will be as gobbledy-gook to (then-)current Swedish-speakers as stuff from the 1940s is now.

This is why we "linguistic prescriptivists" fight our lonely rearguard action: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30712765


in this context it means "to give up".

> Varje meddelande att motsåndet ska uppges är falskt.

a more direct translation: "Every message that resistence should be given up is false"


The current pamphlet is available in English, and the new text is on page 12 as printed (page 7 digitally): https://rib.msb.se/filer/pdf/28706.pdf

> If Sweden is attacked by another country, we will never give up. All information to the effect that resistance is to cease is false.


> In Swedish telephone directories there used to be a section entitled "Om kriget kommer" (If there's war).

I love this, as in California the phone directories all had a section about what to do in an earthquake and other emergency. Local knowledge for local situations.

The reason was that in those days the telephone book was the only book you could guarantee would be in every house (the unstated reason was that it was the only thing a government could use to push a message into every house -- even in the US where the phone system was nominally private, the government exerted significant pressure on their operations).

I wonder how many people even knew that section existed, much less consulted it.


> I wonder how many people even knew that section existed, much less consulted it.

The Californian one on earthquakes? No idea. But the Swedish one on war: Pretty much everybody certainly knew of it, and probably most had at least cursorily perused it.


An updated version of that section in the form of a booklet was distributed to every household a few years ago, the advice is mostly the same.

Stay Alert! Trust no one! Keep your laser handy!

(OK, that last one came from somewhere else).


"Stay Alert! Trust no one! Keep your laser handy!" is a quote from Paranoia, the role-playing game. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paranoia_(role-playing_game)


“Trust no one” is not what the newer or the older version of the pamphlet suggests, rather it quite correctly points out that during wartime the amount of misinformation can be expected to be massive, so you should be extra vigilant in verifying the source of the information. Trusting “no one” would imply a complete free-for-all which is hardly conducive to an effective defensive strategy.


> Trusting “no one” would imply a complete free-for-all which is hardly conducive to an effective defensive strategy.

Which is exactly why RT and its American (and other) repeaters are so insiduous.


The Computer wants you to be happy. If you are not happy, you may be used as reactor shielding. The Computer is crazy. The Computer is happy. The Computer will help you become happy. This will drive you crazy.


You missed the reference [1].

The Computer is your friend.

[1] https://wikiless.org/wiki/Paranoia_(role-playing_game)?lang=...


"Thank you, Computer." *ZAP* "YOU DID NOT SAY THANK YOU FRIEND COMPUTER."


Out of curiosity: with very limited knowledge of the language I would have translated "ska" as "will" or probably better "should" (in the sense of "if someone tells you you should give up resisting, it's false").

Is this a usage of ska I haven't learned?


Not sure I grasp your question really. In this sense, the form you use is correct.

Do note however that Swedish is famous for multiple meanings of words.

The verb "ska" (short form of "skola"), has at least 5 meanings.

1. will do <something>: "jag ska bara äta först"

2. (conditionals), something could happen: "om du hade pengar, skulle du ha råd med en iphone"

3. (enforcing rules): "man ska inte slå sina barn"

4. (signaling intention): "jag ska åka på semester"

5. (communicating an statement, not nessecarily truthful): "han ska vara välhängd"


Thanks! I was just unsure because the translation above seemed to stress the past, "resistance has ended".


That’s because the translation is incorrect as I mentioned in one of my other comments :)


It’s always a bit of a shock to remember that “photographs lie!” goes back to the very beginning of photography. See this (probably) staged war photograph from 1855 — in Crimea, of all ironic places:

https://petapixel.com/2012/10/01/famous-valley-of-the-shadow...


To be completely fair, we don't know that it was staged just for the photograph. We don't know who moved the cannonballs, or why they moved them. All we know is that there are two photographs, and that the one without the cannonballs on the road came first.


we can infer a little bit more than that. The framing of the two photographs is exactly the same (look at the two rocks in the lower right hand corner), and so that camera was almost certainly not moved between the frames. That seems pretty improbable to me if the cannonballs were actually delivered by cannons.


On the other hand, he could've taken a photo before the road was cleared for travel, no?


I suppose that is possible. But then I'd expect to see canon balls somewhere like by the side of the road. Why take the trouble to move them all entirely out of frame?


While an interesting investigation, I have to wonder why it took over a decade to think to compare the non cannonball details in the photos to figure out which came earlier..

I guess hindsight is 20-20 but does kind of seem like an obvious place to look, no?


Interestingly Zelensky might be easier to deepfake than other world leaders because there's more footage and a wider variety of facial expressions to train on due to his acting career


the video was pretty obviously fake though imo. i saw more real deepfakes 5 years ago


Might not be so obvious to a soldier who has slept one hour a night for the past two weeks, eaten only canned corn and tuna, hasn't gotten ammo replenishment in days, and is watching this video on a tiny cracked screen with a dying battery with the volume very low as the internet connection fades in and out.


Plus, several passes of lossy video compression.


"imo" is the right word. Majority of people that are not so computer literate will think it is real.


That's true for now, but eventually, as the technology progresses, it will take very little training data to create deepfakes of anyone unfortunately. Probably just a minute or two of video.


Is this true? I don't see much evidence that the technology is progressing in a direction where models will require less training data, if anything the trend seems to be towards models with higher and higher parameter counts.


It's somewhat true.

Better models are coming out which are already pretrained on a significant amount of data, so the model already learned a lot about what is common to all example of video generation (keeping the edges aligned coherently at every frame, keeping texture and lighting coherent etc.) and will not need to re-learn that for every target.

Since initially, deepfake models were trained from scratch for every single target, you had to provide a lot of data from the person you want to target so that the model can learn what is common as well as what is specific.

Now you can get descent performance with much less data, since you only need to learn the specifities.

However, this only helps if you need a limited deepfake: The model cannot infer the exact facial expression of the target when they are, for example, laughing unless you provided an example of that in the training data (assuming there is no way to infer the laughing expression from someone by looking at other provided expressions). It will instead generate a generic laugh. All missing informations are substituted by what was seen, on average, in the pre-training phase.

That wouldn't work for a long complex deepfake meant to be sent to someone reasonably close with the target.

But for the types of deepfake where it's targeting a personality that we all know, but not very well at all, much less data is neeeded than before for a similar result.


At least in my experience - audio is much harder to convincingly fake than video. If you have heard the real person speaking, they have very specific and distinguishable patterns of speech.

You can fake it reasonably, but you need to have a very large collection of audio clips to do so, and if you do a bad job it literally jumps out at the viewer.

Video might be off, but it requires close attention and large screens to notice - much easier to miss if you're viewing on a phone.


This is called few-shot learning (or in the limit case, with a single example, one-shot learning). One way this may be achieved by first training a very general model (maybe with huge data sets), and then fine-tuning it into a specific example (this is called transfer learning). [0]

One reason researchers suspected this must be possible is that human beings, as well as other animals, can learn stuff by watching it for just a few seconds. But we have some prior baggage, because we spent our whole lives learning.. other, vaguely related stuff, and it turns out that knowledge is often transferable.

[0] This isn't the only way, there's also meta learning


Higher parameter count and less face samples aren't mutually exclusive.

You can take a huge GAN and then use a single image of a face as a guide for navigating the latent space.


Disclaimer: I know basically nothing about ML.

I think the idea is that data needed to imitate a _specific person_ would require less data. Overall a model like that might have orders of magnitude more data in general and maybe a smaller amount required to imitate the features of a particular one.

I imagine it like - A master cabinet maker can make new variations of cabinets super easily once they've made hundreds of similar cabinets?


The real threat I think will not be in trying to trick people with fake videos, but instead deep flags: create fake videos showing awful things about the politician one wants to win, and then attribute the fakes to supporters of the guy you want to lose and make them look like animals.

Especially in coordination with a media campaign, it would be an effective way of undermining the opponent by making them look simultaneously grossly unethical and desperate. Even better if you can get the FBI involved to investigate whether the video was created directly by the opponent or "only" by his supporters. And anybody describing what actually happened could easily be straw manned into sounding like a nutter.

And the quality is already perfectly fine for this.


Not to mention, while it could be hard for random online trolls, certain state actors in your country of residence likely already have a ton of your face stored on video, celebrity or not.


Random question: Does deepfake software build a 3D model of the faces involved?


No, the idea is that the model "builds" its own complex representations directly from images.


[flagged]


For him the deep fakes will be used to make considerate and respectful comments, while the real videos will be the outrageous ones :-)


That might be the best way to make him do something. When he realizes that people think the fake video makes sense, he'll claim the video was real out of spite and start defending a reasonable position.


That is hilarious. Can we use deep fakes combined with trump's spite to move him closer toward the left??


He used to be a Democrat - one of the excuses people had for voting for him was that he would really govern from the left. There are (probably authentic) photos of him palling around with the Clintons. He praised Hillary Clinton's tenure as Secretary of State.

I don't think you can deepfake Donald Trump. The man is a recursive deepfake of himself.


Trump never came around to accepting Covid had to be dealt with (doing so would have easily given him a second term), and is just barely starting to condemn Putler. This idea that Trump masterfully chooses his positions based on popular effectiveness is highly overrated.


With him, everything was a calculation. Admitting COVID was a serious issue was thought to bring an end to the stock market boom, which was the big economic win for his re-election campaign. The market crashed anyway, before recovering ahead of the election.

In any case, 2020 might be the first time enough voters realized that a bull run on Wall St doesn't move the needle much for their own economic well-being.


I don't see how this narrative makes sense, and seems to be yet another example of "4d chess". The market promptly dropped ~30% in March 2020 in response to Covid, but was then inflated with trillions of dollars of newly printed stimulus money. Which, as an aside, has finally filtered into the consumer economy causing much of the price inflation we've been suffering.

Realizing Covid wasn't going to go away and coming around to addressing Covid in June 2020 or so wouldn't have affected the market, which had already priced in Covid. But it would have made Trump an actual crisis-time leader with the corresponding popularity boost just from leading people through a difficult time - publicly validating the hardships everyone is feeling goes a long way. But instead, he dug his heels in opposition to how things were developing.

If anything, I think saying that Trump is a basic contrarian is a better predictor of his positions. The problem is that while our society has major flaws that make contrarian viewpoints compelling, contrarianism on its own does not produce useful reforms.


> But instead, he dug his heels in opposition to how things were developing

Mostly in blue states! back then, red states where doing fine, but Seattle & New York were the first major epicenters. It was a deliberate political calculus to cast Democratic-led regions as inept. Florida "banned" New Yorkers for a bit. Minimizong COVID also made businesses happy, so it appeared to be a 3-fer for Republicans, until it boomeranged.


Still, acknowledging Covid as a real problem would have let him drive the density difference even more. It's harder to blame democratic leaders as inept if you are downplaying the seriousness of the underlying problem. Also by June 2020 it was quite apparent that the problem was not going to be isolated to nursing homes etc, even if the absolute numbers weren't bad everywhere.


> It's harder to blame democratic leaders as inept if you are downplaying the seriousness of the underlying problem.

On the contrary, being confounded by an inconsequential challenge is a bigger sign of ineptitude than the reverse.


> In any case, 2020 might be the first time enough voters realized that a bull run on Wall St doesn't move the needle much for their own economic well-being.

Wall Street was on a bull run leading into 2016 too, and that realization was one of Trump's arguments at the time. Once he won, he dropped that line, but if 2020 was such a time, I'd count 2016 too


The quality on this is really awful. Lighting mismatch on the neck, no atmospheric effects, voice sounds robotic, very little movement and it’s unnatural. It’s not even a useful PoC. It’s more like a meme. I think if it actually got some traction in mainstream media - like Marina Ovsyannikova’s fake Twitter account which was quoted by journos, then you could call it a legitimate first.


I don’t know, honestly I felt the opposite way, maybe because I’m not Ukrainian and it’s not my native language. But I found the level of deep fake we can achieve nowadays truly scary. Even if it was a shoddy job, I feel like that’s enough to convince a lot of people, or at least stir confusion


I don't understand a word of what he's saying, but there's a clear robotic sound to his voice. And that's ignoring that it looks like they put a moving head on a static body or that the lighting on the face doesn't match the rest of the scene.


I think the promise is there... but when I come across a deepfake right now, they often don't seem convincing to me. This one included


could be that you don't realise the convincing ones are deepfakes, and you only spot the bad ones?


The ones we can spot aren't really "deep", they're just fakes.


no doubt you're right about deepfake consequences, but i agree with parent, the quality of this particular one is bad.


I doubt that the average person will know it’s fake unless you tell them, at least not from the quality (maybe they’ll doubt he would ever surrender)


Back when I used to torture myself by seeing what Trump supporters were up to on Reddit during the 2016 campaign I saw some truly awful fake images get voted up with total credulity. These kind of fakes don't really need to be high quality to catch the kind of people who are susceptible to this kind of propaganda. Doubly so when a handful of gullible users believe it, then tell their friends who tell their friends while those in the network never actually see the original image.


It pales in comparison to those Tom Cruise ones that were going around a little while ago.


Voice sounds even more unrealistic than the video (source: I'm Ukrainian). No one in Ukraine would believe the audio part of this fake, even if video was perfect. This is a pathetic attempt.

Also, the script (the text that is being read) is written as if the target audience are Russian, not Ukrainian people (because it's based on propaganda narratives that people outside of Russia are not familiar with). This is such a poor fake from every standpoint.


I assume the good deepfakers are using social media datasets to trick unsuspecting grandparents into giving up money, not meddling in geopolitics.


Or being hired by Disney!


The idea could also be to first post something obviously fake, in order to make everyone think, that their deep fake video tech is not addvanced enough to create really good fakes. Later they post something, where they put in maximum effort to make it seem real, having people think back to the previous fake and think: "Oh but this looks real and they are not able to produce better deep fakes than that other video."


That seems self-defeating via Streisand Effect or at least Cry Wolf effect.

Most of the people who’d believe a video saying the opposite of what they’d expect is real have never been aware of deep fakes.

And now thanks to this poor deepfake they are aware of deepfakes and are primed to question future videos, even if they seem real.


> And now thanks to this poor deepfake they are aware of deepfakes and are primed to question future videos, even if they seem real.

They may also be primed to question real videos. Aka “flood the zone with shit”.


"flood the zone" makes it difficult to assess new information, so people fall back on their priors. That would be counterproductive for Russia rn, because the narrative is against them.


Fair point. I'm not sure what would be productive for them at this point though.

Years ago I read somewhere that the way Russia does cyberwarfare is less organized than most people suspect. I'm not sure if it's true, but the argument is that it's more of a lousy goosy free agent type deal. Some of these agents are very clever, but others not so much, so you have a range of competencies just trying stuff.

That could be wrong, or they may have evolved a lot since, but amateurish deep fakes could be a fit. Some random kid just trying stuff and hoping for a pay day / bounty? Pure speculation though.


Good point. Hm, it might be my bubble making me think, that of course people will have heard of usage of AI to fake videos, even if they don't necessarily call them "deep fake" or stuff like that. I wonder how likely it really is, that people have not heard about the idea of videos being fake, involving making people say things they never said and making them look realistic.


My parent's generation all forward "articles" to each other's inboxes with full text in the message body. None of them, as far as I'm aware, have yet questioned who wrote the article, where it was published, what other sources have run the story, or whether the article content in the email message body has been manipulated.

Videos being fake? That's asking an order of magnitude more scepticism from them.


The general class of 'They're pretending to be incompetent... as a trick!' theories about Russia all seem less likely by the day.


A trick? Doesn't make sense.. For what purpose? I think Russians have a really hard to to pretend to be weak, so for me this scenario was dead on arrival.

I had the feeling Russia hasn't used their best men and equipment yet, which also seem less likely bu the day


There may be something to that with specific regards to jet aircraft, but even then I'm not convinced. More generally with regards to manpower, I think you're probably wrong. VDV have been ground up like cannon fodder repeatedly, and there are reports of redoubled conscription of Russian students. I don't think they're holding their best men back, I think they've already gotten their best men killed with little to show for it.


That sounds like a bad strategy. All this does is make people think about how there are deepfakes they need to watch out for. So now people will be heavily scrutinizing videos of Zelenskyy.


We (Ukrainians) have been warned about upcoming deep-fakes, disinformation, ... since pretty much day 1.


But the Russians haven't.


I always find it interesting to watch the trickle down of news I find here on HN. I live in a very, very, very conservative part of the US. It always goes the same; see fake thing called out for being fake on HN. One week later, hear rumblings related to the fake thing in my community. One week after that, hear people openly talking about how that fake thing is true, but Google/MSM don't want you to hear about it.

Such as: Zelensky is a nazi, the Ukraine war is all CGI, anything related to Hillary or Bill Clinton (yes still), and so on and so forth.

Information dissemination must be similar to fluid dynamics. It just has to be.


Information dissemination must be similar to fluid dynamics. It just has to be.

It’s simpler and more insidious than that. I’ll use the old Eleanor Roosevelt quote:

"Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people."

Most people are not that intellectual and probably spent most of their life gossiping. They wouldn’t know how to even discuss certain topics if the low hanging fruit of gossip and conspiracy wasn’t available to them to add something in a social interaction.

Take Reddit for example, some of them wouldn’t even know what to say if they couldn’t add that one immediate punch line (followed by sequential punchlines by other people). If you take this away, they will literally have no way of joining the convo.

They won’t be able to come up with an angle, ask a probing question, entertain an alternative perspective, provide analogues or metaphors, they’d simply have no voice. It’s akin to providing these people with ‘what do you think about the weather today?’ as a lifeline in casual social interaction.


> I’ll use the old Eleanor Roosevelt quote

The quote seems appropriate for a person that doesn’t want to be talked about.

I get what it’s going for but “only small minds talk about people” feels like it serves political elites very well. Don’t talk about me and my conduct. Talk about the generalised idea of conduct by people who are somewhat like me!

I studied politics at university and learned enough about political ideology to last me a lifetime. But my biggest takeaway from history is that ideology almost always plays a back seat to human beings that want to retain or expand their power. Ideas are pretty malleable around that aim.


Eleanor Roosevelt was instrumental in blocking the forced repatriation of large numbers of displaced persons to their various home countries that were in the USSR after WW2. A large number of these displaced persons were from the Ukraine(detailed numbers not known) and even though there was a huge effort by the USSR to get these people back, these largely failed and many countries settled them and gave them landed immigrant status. Exceptions were made for war criminals, who also tried to hide. Of those sent to the USSR, many were imprisoned/killed etc. Apologies for political stuff, but the spots on the leopard remain. (nothing against the beautiful leopards either)

http://www.dpcamps.org/repatriation3.html


Talking about people in politics is almost always a smoke screen. There are weakest links in every political caucus. Personal failings are a fine reason to dislike or vote against specific people, in most democracies we each vote for a person and who that is should absolutely matter, but it generally has nothing to do with the actual issues. The fact that you hate the Clintons (with you there) or can't stand Trump isn't really relevant IMHO to whether you vote for your specific local Republican or Democrat candidate.


This seems unnecessarily elitist. I mean, I would be glad if I could get away with just discussing theory and ideas, but reality and practical matters gets in the way. We vote for people, we evaluate people from events.


Ironically, your comment is itself a perfect example of discussing an idea. In fact, I would argue that discussing people and events as proxies for the discussion of ideas does not fall foul of the maxim.

One thing is to discuss how candidate X chooses to dress, whether candidate Y cheated on their partner, or how candidate Z looked so stupid in that incident yesterday. Another very different thing is to discuss candidate X's personal background (and how it makes them more likely to understand a given issue), that candidate Y does not practice what they preach (and probably cannot be trusted), or that candidate Z has owned up to their screw-up yesterday (and self-criticism is a good trait for leadership).


Also, whether one likes Reddit or not, it has a huge userbase, and each subreddit is pretty much different than another. There are plenty of subreddits with really interesting comment chains.


It’s more frustration than elitism. Take the topic of Machine Learning for example, there’s really few people on planet earth that can discuss the implications of it in detail. To broaden membership into that discussion, you have to provide a lifeline in the context of ‘what are the implications of AI with respect to future work, will humanity ever have to work again?’ - ok, now most people can take part.

The frustration is, why is gossip and conspiracy lifelines necessary for topics that most people should have no issue discussing? You really can’t add anything without that stuff?

Anyways, I heard Hunter Biden is a drug addict, and Putin has cancer, and that’s why he’s invading Ukraine.


There are absolutely vast numbers of people who can comfortably discuss the implications of machine learning – people from all walks of life with many different perspectives, including technologists, artists, economists, politicians and more. This seems like a straw man.

Having a topic under discussion is hardly "gossip" or a "conspiracy lifeline".


Exactly. We elect people not ideas.


This is highly debatable.

Politicians generally channel ideas in order to get elected - and then screw everyone over once they have power for 4 years.


You just spread "Fake News" about Eleanor Roosevelt:

See: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/11/18/great-minds/


It was on the back of my mind, I remember hearing this :p


She left off "Galaxy-brains discuss whatever is most pertinent to their interests and goals." :-)


I live in a very, very, very conservative part of the country and it’s nothing like the caricature you just mentioned. It is, though, safe, polite, and friendly. And people are happy to leave other people alone.


90% of the time, you are correct. I like living here because people leave me alone, mostly.

That being said, you are absolutely on your own. The hospital struggles, the schools struggle, the roads are awful, and anything remotely related to 'government' is funded just above the point of being dead. And if you do not seem to be 'from here' (read: white, straight, middle- to upper-middle class, or have the right last name) you absolutely will be excluded from most social, religious, and other institutions.

In other words, it's not all puppies and sunshine.

That other 10% is political discussion. Which is a hot garbage pile covered in blatant racism and antisemitism.


New Hampshire?


Living in rural America, where it is safe, and folks are polite and friendly and happy to leave you alone (if you're white), I have to say that doesn't mean people don't believe batsht crazy things. Because lots of them do. Or at least say they do, 'cause there is a big step between saying you believe something and actually acting like you do.


Believing batshit crazy things isn't unique to rural areas. In fact, I'd say it's more common in cities simply because there are more people there.

I know a woman who lives in Chicago who doesn't believe in dinosaurs. It's not a religious thing, it's just that dinosaurs don't fit into her mindset somehow.

I dated a woman in New York (native New Yorker) whose entire family believed that the moon landings were fake.

I know a guy in Houston who believes that drinking his own pee is helping him live longer.

Crazy is everywhere. It obeys no geographic, social, wealth, or political boundaries.


Crazy is indeed everywhere. And when it is individual crazy, it likely doesn't matter much (and might even be helpful).

However, organized, coordinated crazy is a problem, even more so when it is sufficiently organized and coordinated to become an effective player in our political system.


At one time, that weirdo didn't have anybody to talk to. So he wrote his weird ideas in a journal somewhere, and he'd maybe self-publish a book, and annoy people at the coffee shops with his ideas. Now the crazy finds friends. Somewhere out there in the internets is another weirdo who had your idea too.


Oh I agree.


[flagged]


There is a certain group of people that are adamant that others obey a codified set of laws that they give lip service to. It is sad that the world has become such and openly hateful place. Part of the issue is that hate is very profitable and the infotainment and social media companies continue to cash in.


Have you tried living in any liberal part of the country?

People there don’t just think they should dictate what you do, but also what you think!


As opposed to my state attempting to ban CRT from being taught in high school (a non-issue, since it isn’t)? I have lived in liberal parts of the country, for most of my life. They have a different set of problems, but I never once had my property vandalized for having the wrong sign or flag out front. People mostly left me alone.


I think that is generally true everywhere. People are against censorship, except when they're for it. They're for religious freedom, except for "those people". They're for free speech, except when you say things they don't like. I've not seen one group that values their own speech, their own beliefs, their own values, actions and communities, that doesn't undervalue the speech, beliefs, values and communities of other people.


This is the hard truth that has taken me many years to accept. When it comes to politics, moral principles are for other people to follow. Lies, hypocrisy, doublethink, violence, etc. are all fair game if they advance the interests of your own group. I don't think there's a solution for this. It just is what it is.


It is rare for people to handle different and uncomfortable well, but some people handle it really poorly.


[flagged]


Another related lesson is that the extremist people (on both sides of the aisle) tend to be louder and more demanding than the moderates so it's easy to make the mistake of believing they are more numerous than they are.


[flagged]


No, I'm posting from my 3 bedroom ranch that I built, on 62 acres in flyover country.


> Information dissemination must be similar to fluid dynamics. It just has to be.

If you include reactions, sure. But regular fluid dynamics very much leaves the substance intact. Water flows down a stream and is still water at the end.


I think there might be a sewage plant or two having overflow issues in the clear mountain stream of this analogy (your username is on-topic in this case).


>> Water flows down a stream and is still water at the end.

Even that has fish shit added.


There are actual models for this, I think they're often similar to a spin glass.


Perhaps there are models of waterway pollution that could shed light on it?


Whenever I stumble into a political conversation with someone who prefers to live in an alternate news reality, I find it effective to not argue back at them, but rather out-flank them: inform them that not only are they correct, but also I read that insert-like-minded-improvised-obviously-ridiculous-nonsense-here and say it with all sincerity ... and then let them respond with "Well ... I'm not sure about that ..." and then insist it's true "because I saw it on Faceboook somewhere" ... and then repeat until they realize they have been out-crazied.


I like this idea in theory, but suspect I'd be depressed how often people actually agreed with my attempt to outcrazy them in practice.


What's funny is they're doing the same to you.


> Information dissemination must be similar to fluid dynamics. It just has to be.

Heisenberg supposedly said "When I meet God I’m going to ask him about relativity and turbulence. I think he'll only have an answer for the first".


"A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes."


> Information dissemination must be similar to fluid dynamics. It just has to be.

As similar as fluid dynamics are to a functional public education system


> I always find it interesting to watch the trickle down of news I find here on HN. I live in a very, very, very conservative part of the US. It always goes the same; see fake thing called out for being fake on HN. One week later, hear rumblings related to the fake thing in my community. One week after that, hear people openly talking about how that fake thing is true, but Google/MSM don't want you to hear about it.

The the root cause for that is probably the extreme distrust of the "MSM" that's been cultivated for decades. The ironic thing is many of the rank-and-file of those people think that distrust gives them greater access to the truth, when in reality it just makes them easier to lie to.


> The ironic thing is many of the rank-and-file of those people think that distrust gives them greater access to the truth, when in reality it just makes them easier to lie to.

I've had some heated discussions with my father over this. He has a disdain for anything reported by main-stream media, that is at least partially warranted. But he overcorrects to this by accepting the reporting by fringe media outlets / decentralized media figures (podcasters, youtubers, etc) without the same critical lens that he would otherwise apply. If someone says something to the tune of: "the MSM won't report on this because <insert reasoning here>, but we will!", he almost always accepts what they say next. It's very frustrating for me since he will say this line as an automatic "I win this argument" trump card on any idea regardless of the independent merits.

This shouldn't be a bold statement, but I feel like some people need this shouted at them: Just because something is reported on by a main stream media outlet doesn't mean it's automatically true. And conversely just because something is reported on by a main stream media outlet doesn't mean it's automatically false either. Alternative media is perfectly capable of presenting misleading, or false information!


What I find funny is that the most popular cable news channel--Fox News--is still not the "main stream media".


> The ironic thing is many of the rank-and-file of those people think that distrust gives them greater access to the truth, when in reality it just makes them easier to lie to.

Care to elaborate? Intuitively what you're saying sounds plausible, but not why that would be the case.


What the last few years has really brought into sharp focus is that many people who distrust "official sources" (mainstream media, scientists, etc) seem to unquestioningly accept fringe sources, so long as it matches their prior beliefs.

Many of these same people consider themselves "skeptics" because they instinctively distrust the official sources.


(i) "this is the sort if story that, if true, would be widely reported by mainstream media or at least mainstream media of a certain political persuasion" is a pretty good heuristic for discarding stuff that sounds plausible and really big but is only reported on the comment section of AltFreeIndyInfo.net

(ii) if you can't believe mainstream media, it's hard to search for information that might contradict $radicaltheory, never mind trust someone else's thoroughly researched and sourced one. So even if it's a pretty wild theory that lots of other stuff seems to contradict and very little seems to corroborate, how can we be sure it isn't a coverup. Scepticism about well established facts leads to agnosticism about the veracity of well-established fiction.

(iii)"if you tell people this and they laugh at you and say it's ridiculous it's because they're the credulous idiots who believe anything they read in certain sources" is a very powerful meme.

(iv) people who don't believe in certain sources still tend to want to get stuff they can believe in from somewhere, and the average website that concurs that MSM is not to be trusted and embraces the meme that its reader base are the true freethinking sceptics publishes considerably more fake news and terrible takes than the mainstream media


> AltFreeIndyInfo.net

> Network Error: dns_unresolved_hostname

The globalist elites have had it taken down!


They are primed to ignore any contrary evidence, that would disprove lies they are being told, that they see on MSM or in fact anywhere. Once they believe a specific channel of information or community is the only one they can trues, they can be sold on anything.


> just makes them easier to lie to.

It makes them easier to control.


The Clinton stuff is really funny. HN is not really the place for heated political commentary but there is deep irony there with regards to how a certain portion of the population responds to criticism of Trump and his policies (lately, mostly surrounding Ukraine and denying them aid) and how often they bring up the Clintons.


I have been on HN for years now. I don't recall anything in particular that would fall into "The Clinton stuff". What are you talking about?


Oh not on HN sorry. I meant in the context of general conservative discourse. I have friends and family who bring up the Clintons a lot.


The right wing political machine made Hillary Clinton out to be the devil. They, correctly, anticipated her run for president after Obama, and spent years making her out to be the worst person in America before she even began campaigning.

The result is many conservative circles are still obsessed with her even though she is relatively unimportant.


That demonizing started way before the 2016 lead-up; until Obama came into the foreground she was also a clear front-runner for the 2008 election, so the machine was targeting her even then.

I've noted this before, but being in the public eye for too long tends to be really bad news for presidential hopefuls in the US (Biden being the exception that proves the rule in that he eked out a win against a wildly unpopular incumbent who was actively discouraging his own supporters from voting).


She's the woman an entire generation of men was raised to hate, starting with Bill Clinton's first presidential run and Rush Limbaugh.


I remember seeing her in a magazine cover in the early 90s with BSDM getup and Bill as the gimp. I was pretty young at the time - but even then I knew I was being told "this is the person to hate/fear".

I'm not a fan of HRC but the demonization was in full gear 30 years ago.


"Wildly unpopular"? Maybe in the corporate and media world, but even despite that, he nearly won re-election. You can credibly attribute plenty of negative characteristics to Trump, but "nobody likes him" isn't one of them.


How about, "by all the current means of testing, the least popular in history". There are issues with polling, for sure, but even the more charitable end of the error bars put him in a bad spot.


Russia put her on the sanctions list too.


Christopher Hitchens wrote a book about the Clintons that was pretty scathing. It has a lot of what I assume is the "Clinton Stuff"

https://www.amazon.com/One-Left-Lie-Triangulations-Jefferson...


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Norm Macdonald knew all about it! Classic segment from The View [1].

"I thought it was a matter of record!"

[1]: https://youtu.be/Z3PP_SWHUQQ?t=93


Don’t bring schizophrenia into this. These people are overwhelmingly not schizophrenics nor is affinity towards conspiracy theories commonplace in schizoaffective disorders


This is important. Comments like that perpetuate the stigmatization of mental illness. People don't necessarily have to be mentally ill to have weird or harmful beliefs


The fact you are paranoid doesn't mean they are not after you.


I agree. These guys put together a lot of documentation: arkancide.com


Try reddit, it's much faster than hacker news on these things.


I don't know that I can recommend Reddit as a legitimate news source. You'd really have to make sure you're hitting the right subreddits. :/


usually the pattern is in reverse on reddit

government doesn't want you to hear people -> subject matter expert sees -> informs that information is faulty -> minority fight against the tide

Although usually this follows the covid lab grown pattern where the fight against the tide crowd usually treats their info as 100% certain which muddies the water when informed opinions have varying confidence levels.


> Zelensky is a nazi,

He's not a Nazi, of course, him being of Jewish ancestry, but it did raise some questions for me when a Russian bomb (that killed about 20 civilians) did its thing in Kyiv very close to a boulevard named after Bandera. Bandera is of course a war criminal and a Nazi collaborator. That thing with a Kyiv boulevard being named after a war criminal and a Nazi collaborator you don't see in the MSM. The bombing took place here [1], you can see the Bandera-named avenue just close by.

[1] https://www.google.com/maps/place/50%C2%B029'19.1%22N+30%C2%...


Here in the US we have street names and even monuments dedicated to slave owners and people who advocated so strongly for slavery they went to war with their own people.

Does that mean the US, today, generally supports the institution of chattel slavery? No, that's absurd.

Lots of people want those monuments removed and streets renamed, but that's apparently cancel culture. The only country I know of that has actually faced it's rotten past is Germany


Americans don't like the name chattel slavery anymore, but the demand for labourers that don't have rights as people is just a prevalent.

The treatment of "illegal immigrants" is currently better than the chattel slaves of old, but policies like getting rid of birthright citizenship points in a direction of America wanting to being back chattel slaves


But @paganel apparently thinks it’s totally okay to bomb that street while civilians are walking on it. Talk about priorities.


> But @paganel apparently thinks it’s totally okay to bomb

I didn't say that, way to go. Come on, this is HN, not some sub-reddit shithole.


You did say exactly that.

> it did raise some questions for me when a Russian bomb (that killed about 20 civilians) did its thing in Kyiv very close to a boulevard named after Bandera. Bandera is of course a war criminal and a Nazi collaborator.

A bomb killed 20 civilians. Who the fuck cares if a street it fell onto was named after a war criminal? Makes it a legit target?

So, let's carpet bomb all those Strada Ion Antonescu it took me all 15 seconds to find across Romania. After all, you are saying it's illegal to name a street like that, so let's de-nazify them. Right?


Where in the world are you getting it from that the name of the street made it ok to bomb? He's saying that he learned of the street because the Russians bombing it was newsworthy given that it killed 20 people. Then what followed from him learning that the street exists with the name Bandera, was him thinking that maybe there could be some support for Nazis still remaining in Ukraine. Similar to how seeing a street named after a Confederate fighter would make someone think that maybe there's still some love for the Confederacy in the US (which is actually accurate!)


I'm going to spare a long explanation for you, but calling Ukrainians who refer to one another as "banderivets" and naming streets after Bandera "support for Nazis" is almost, if not entirely, equal to calling American Blacks who refer to one another as "nigga" "support for racism and slavery".


Maybe you don’t know but here in Romania we have our fair share of streets named after anti-semites and-or iron guard collaborators.

But you’d probably protest if someone called you an anti-semite for this alone.


I'm Romanian and we don't have streets named after Antonescu, which is what Bandera was for the Ukranians in WW2. It is illegal to have streets named after Antonescu, because he killed hundreds of thousands of Jewish people in WW2, apparently in Ukraine is still legal to have a street named after Bandera, who collaborated in the killings of Jewish people in Nazi-occupied Ukraine.


> I'm Romanian and we don't have streets named after Antonescu

In your town?

> It is illegal to have streets named after Antonescu

Hm, really? Then again -- and sorry if this comes as a shock to you -- Romania isn't all that well-known (at least in the northern half of the EU) for living up to the law.

From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30700460 :

> So, let's carpet bomb all those Strada Ion Antonescu it took me all 15 seconds to find across Romania. After all, you are saying it's illegal to name a street like that, so let's de-nazify them. Right?

My own search for "Strada Ion Antonescu" on Google Maps popped up seven results across Romania, but that was zoomed out from Lviv to Thessaloniki to see the whole country. Don't know if there'd be more if I zoomed in.


Stepan Bandera Avenue was called Moscow Avenue up until 2016, where it was renamed after anti-communist (and, granted, nazi sympathiser) Stepan Bandera. He was arrested by the Gestapo and put in a concentration camp after refusing to revoke an attempt to make Ukraine an independent state.

You're doing some interesting mental gymnastics here. Do you think "a Russian bomb doing its thing very close to a boulevard" is in any way evidence of the "mainstream media" hiding the Truth or whatever? Who do you work for? Do you actually believe the Russians are attacking Ukraine because of nazis? Do you believe their invasion and the murder of civilians is warranted?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stepan_Bandera


What questions did it raise for you?


Oh, you know, "where there's smoke there's fire" and "many people are saying" and "look into it, is all I'm saying" and "whether it's true or not, it just raises questions."

That's the way these things usually work. A slow erosion of public opinion through insinuation. People like Tucker Carlson aren't going to instantly go back to brown-nosing Putin, but they'll slip in occasional questions about Zelensky here and there, until certain insinuations are taken as ground truth.


How come in Romania (from where I'm from) it is illegal to have a street named after Antonescu (our Bandera counter-part from WW2) while in neighbouring Ukraine it is not? Why aren't they 100% for eliminating their Nazi past from, well, the present?


And yet you do have streets named after Antonescu in Romania:

1) Strada Ion Antonescu https://goo.gl/maps/WsVVsW13Eb9BjnRm9 2) Strada Ion Antonescu https://goo.gl/maps/Fe4Ggh3EPZyF7Z6r8 3) Strada Ion Antonescu https://goo.gl/maps/ANV22wPVDnaoFRVw5 4) Strada Ion Antonescu https://goo.gl/maps/hhN2jDvsiD9eXnVB6 5) Strada Ion Antonescu https://goo.gl/maps/a4gjwkDAzD5VrXj77


That law does indeed exist, but nonetheless you still have numerous streets in Romania named after Antonescu. They can be trivially found on Google Maps. For example, Strada Mareșal Ion Antonescu in Constanța [0] — and it was given that name in 2000!

Of course, nobody should judge all Romanians, nor even the political leaders who were not directly involved in the naming decision, for that. Countries are not a homogenous unit.

[0] https://www.google.com/maps/place/Strada+Mareșal+Ion+Antones...


It's a small street that no-one has heard about, this is a boulevard in the capital city. We had the same thing in Bucharest, when there was a church (built by Antonescu and his wife) that had a bust sculpture [1] of him in the church-yard sometime in the early 2000s. There was of course a huge scandal, with the foreign ambassadors chiming in, the law against naming things after bad people from our history got passed soon after so that we could entry into the EU, so of course that the bust sculpture had to go.

> Countries are not a homogenous unit.

I expect things that stand in your face (like a boulevard in a capital city, a bust sculpture of a genocide perpetrator in a downtown place in another capital city) to not be left to the local authorities. Even Bandera's wiki page mentions the EU and Israeli administrations not being at all happy with Ukraine naming things after Bandera back in ~2011, apparently that has all been forgotten now that Putin has attacked and everyone acts surprised how come Putin calls the Ukrainians as being nazis. And I didn't mention anything about the infamous "Freikorps" now battling the Russians close to Sumy, most definitely their name was not taken from a Heine poem or anything like that.

[1] https://foto.agerpres.ro/foto/detaliu/158701 (if you're Romanian you might recognise one of the characters in that photo)


> everyone acts surprised how come Putin calls the Ukrainians as being nazis

I mean, they should. Calling an entire country of 44 million people Nazis is ridiculous regardless of whether a boulevard in a capital city is named after Bandera.


> but it did raise some questions for me

What questions of any importance or relevance to this war would it possibly raise? Are you suggesting that if Ukraine really was wall-to-wall Nazis that maybe Russia is somehow justified here? Maybe WW2 wasn't quite finished after all? Good grief. Stop stirring the turd for no good reason other than to rile people up.


So of course those civilians deserved to die, because they happened to be on a street named after someone or other?


> He's not a Nazi, of course, him being of Jewish ancestry,

That is strong evidence that he isn't, but short of proof. A counterexample from California: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Unz


Does it actually matter though? If he was a nazi, and if he engaged in practices from WW2 nazis like putting people into concentration camps, then there would be a case.

But it doesn't warrant an unprovoked single-party invasion. We're better than that these days.


The invasion is unwarranted, I would never suggest otherwise.


>> He's not a Nazi, of course, him being of Jewish ancestry,

> That is strong evidence that he isn't, but short of proof.

It's about the strongest evidence possible. Also, I'd think a person who's such a raw contradiction of "Jewish Nazi" would show signs of obvious psychological illness (either as a cause or a symptom, e.g. suicide to help the final solution along).

Add to that the fact that the claim he's a Nazi have all the hallmarks of a lie concocted to fabricate a moral reason for the invasion, by people with a history and strategy for creating such lies, and it's proved false practical sense. It's proven beyond a reasonable doubt that Zelensky is not Nazi, in fact it's even proven beyond most unreasonable doubts.

> A counterexample from California: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Unz

I don't think so. Ctrl-F "nazi" -- zero hits.


> It's about the strongest evidence possible.

It's not as strong as the synthesis of all the other evidence, particularly: his actions and statements throughout life, none of which point towards him being a Nazi. That is stronger evidence than his ethnic identity.

With respect to Ron Unz, you might want to read that wikipedia page more carefully than a quick C-f; that guy is a big fan of Hitler and hating jews. The same synthesis of actions and statements that vindicate Zelensky will plainly damn Unz.


We have no proof you are not a Nazi either. Let's assume you are, just to be safe. And maybe we can write a few blogs about it and drum up a following?


I do not believe Zelensky is a Nazi. The evidence against it is much stronger than the evidence for it. Your ire against me is misdirected.


> Your ire against me is misdirected.

Insofar as it was ire against your implication that "there is no proof against it" would somehow validate the insinuation, it wasn't.

And, sorry, even if you claim that that wasn't what you meant to do, the mere mention of it does imply that. We don't (AFAIK) have absolute proof that the Moon isn't (mainly) made of green cheese, either (those moon rocks the astronauts brought back could just be part of a thin rock crust over the cheese[1]), but what does it imply if I throw out the claim "We don't have proof that the Moon isn't made of green cheese!" in a general discussion about cosmology?

___

[1]: Aha, so "Moon Pie" should be a cheese pie!


I, too, live in a very conservative area.

> Zelensky is a nazi

Considering Trump voters have a history of being called Nazi for the affiliation, I don't see it as a stretch to call Zelensky one for the Ukrainian "Azov Battalion." Think of it as the sword cutting both ways.

> the Ukraine war is all CGI

This one I see constantly... folks expect 4K quality LiveLeak material to be streaming out of Ukraine. Truth be told I'm surprised at the relative dearth of material, but there's still enough floating around social media to make this one rather laughable.

> anything related to Hillary or Bill Clinton

Oddly, I haven't heard anything on this one. Though I have seen a meme going around referring to Biden, Romney, Pelosi, and Kerry having "children involved in the UA energy business." This, at least partially false, but with a rooting in the truth... Hunter Biden as well as advisors / associates of the others have all done business in the UA energy sector. I'm still not quite sure how and why Biden's handling of the former UA prosecutor that had an investigation going against Burisma which employed Hunter isn't a larger political scandal.

All in all there does seem an age gap (IME) with your typical Boomer / Fox types spreading the garbage content, folks towards the Millenial side don't.


Whether intentional or not, the way you presented these (including the one about CGI) is how these sorts of conspiracies get wings and spread.

"Oh of course this is not true... except for maybe this little sliver here..."

That's the thing that gets latched onto and eventually the conspiracy nuts argue the whole thing must be true.


> That's the thing that gets latched onto and eventually the conspiracy nuts argue the whole thing must be true.

Exactly how things operate, "Project Northwoods was true, therefore the government is bad, therefore very real 'Government Program X' is bad" is the general algorithm.

With that said, I'm hacker. I seek the truth and will discuss it regardless of whether some wingnut seizes on it to make a false assumption.

I also have no problem attempting to correct the Boomer Doomers I run into at work and in life... they're just usually happy to go "Oh well, fair enough..." and then go back to watching whatever it is they're on about.

Cotdamn Gell-Mann Amnesia


"isn't a larger political scandal" - somehow I have the feeling, nowadays only wacky assertions are able to trigger big discussions (and big feelings). Lots of things having a grain of sense are left aside, maybe for being not ridiculous enough...


> I'm still not quite sure how and why Biden's handling of the former UA prosecutor that had an investigation going against Burisma which employed Hunter isn't a larger political scandal.

I would speculate that some kinds of corruption are beyond the scandalous and into the range of bipartisan consensus. In the sense that if certain cans of worms were opened, and government bureaucrats educated to treat them as illegal, investigate and prosecute people for them, then it would affect too many key people in both parties and/or covert/intelligence operations abroad.

Having family members serve on boards of directors of things for improving access to politicians seems to be one of those. So is the issue of divesting from one's commercial holdings when assuming an office which creates conflicts of interests. Trump got a total pass by just saying "Oh, I let my sons manage it" - as if that removes the problem at all. But too many house representatives and senators have stocks or other such stakes which they would rather just keep.


After the Gulf of Tonkin [0] and Nayirah Testimony [1], is it really surprising that people don't believe the mainstream media on war anymore?

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_of_Tonkin_incident [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nayirah_testimony


What do either of these incidents have to do with trust in the media? Both incidents were fabrications of the government. In both cases the media was a tool used by government to spread the lies.


> One week after that, hear people openly talking about how that fake thing is true, but Google/MSM don't want you to hear about it.

There is an implication by the OP that people in very conservative parts of the state don't believe Google / MSM and point to deep fakes instead. In the past, they would've been more receptive to the MSM who could've debunked this. I posted these two incidents to show that the MSM did, in fact, lie in the past and this may be shaping why people don't believe them now but instead go online looking for "the truth."


Bingo. And I'm all for skepticism, and I understand a healthy skepticism. BUT

What is a problem, though, is that their sources are always things like americafreedompatriot, thetruereporter or other similar blog bullshit that claim to have 'the truth' (my personal favorite is welovetrump that's definitely unbiased).

My experience is they tend to look for sources that feel good and agree with what they believe, then use that as truth. No critical thinking.


I've seen a deep fake with Putin "surrendering" on 28th of February: https://youtu.be/ZbudZw1LlHg I guess the video itself was made even earlier than that.

The video is not excellent, but the audio is pretty spot on, if you ask me.

Edit: re-worded the first sentence.


-258 views

-nonsensical title

-no comments

-all videos on account are unlisted

-you just found it

Hmmm. How did you “find” this?


> Hmmm. How did you “find” this?

To be clear: the video is not mine. I simply uploaded it to youtube as an unlisted video to support my point. This original video was posted on Feb 28th to one of telegram channels I'm subbed to. The channel is https://t.me/wildwildhack which is a channel for "wild wild hack" hackathon organized by the reface.ai guys.


To add on:

- Largely inactive since 2019 until ~15 days ago.

- Ukrainian with ML background[1]

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20083793#20093381, Archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20210224044558/https://news.ycom...


> - Largely inactive since 2019 until ~15 days ago.

I'm a lurker, sorry for that.

> - Ukrainian with ML background[1]

Thanks. I did finish Yandex's school of data science (2015-2018). I've been to Moscow in 2018 for their graduation ceremony.

Edit: My remark about me visiting Moscow is to demonstrate that I did not harbor any anti-Russia sentiments.


No need to apologize for being a lurker!

The explanation that you found it and uploaded it makes perfect sense and clarifies things for me anyway.

Similar to GP, I read your post as though that Youtube video was the initial source, rather than something you uploaded.


That's my old gmail account that I've since abandoned because I moved to yuriy@znovyak.com (my first name @ my last name). My google apps account (znovyak.com) doesn't have youtube enabled, so I uploaded this to youtube channel associated with my old (since high school) gmail.


dude, the youtube channel name is the same as his profile here. maybe he just uploaded it, but got it on telegram or whatever. it's not about how he found/made it. but the quality compared to OP.


Most communities and bot network coordinators these days organize through Telegram. There's ton of easily fake materials (propaganda stuff, staged fakes, deceptively out of context or material first claimed to be something then appearing on another channel as something else).

After the initial piloting fake information spreads like virus.


Give it a couple of years and the tech will spread A LOT.


The tech is already good enough for anyone to make a convincing deepfake, I think, and especially state actors - or people with deep enough wallets - can perfect it. I mean some of the memes of e.g. Obama saying something he never did are convincing enough.


The Tom Cruise ones going around a while ago were indistinguishable from reality for me. Granted I'm not intimately familiar with Tom Cruise, just watched some of his movies, but I could see believing them if I didn't know they're deep fake.


I think right now only a single-digit number of people in the world can produce a convincing fake. And while they could be working for the government, I don't think they do.


Is this really even a deepfake? It just looks like a juxtaposition.


Seems more effective than the peculiarly hokey MIT efforts recently discussed on HN.

Deepfakes, can you spot them? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30606263


It does seem worse than what people create with DeepFakeLab.

https://github.com/iperov/DeepFaceLab


Is a deep fake asking Ukrainians to surrender an Article 37 violation of Geneva convention for perfidy?

I know false surrender is a crime, but using propaganda to trick the enemy into a surrender by pretending to be them, I wasn't sure.

I guess - is this a tool we will see more often or a tool not fit for civilized warfare?


It's a form of what is called 'black propaganda': https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_propaganda


They could definitely have done a better job. It makes me think that the purpose is not to actually fool people, but to sow seeds of doubt for future genuine Ukrainian government communications. Surely it benefits Russia for people to not trust what they see online.


We all saw this coming. Even if this instance is low-quality, eventually a similar scenario will happen with one that is good enough to fool most people. I think it is not long until official videos come with cryptographic signatures.

I am just realising that Star Trek: Deep Space Nine actually had a similar scenario in an episode that aired in 1998. Essentially, a deepfake of a meeting of military leaders is created in a plot to persuade a neutral nation to join a war: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Pale_Moonlight


I'm curious about the usefulness of deepfakes in the face of 'momentum'.

Russia has largely been seen negatively, not just for the invasion, but also their military performance. Underdogs are popular and Ukraine's stiff resistance vs what was thought to be a vastly stronger power and they have has captured a lot of the West's enthusiasm / support.

Russia's propaganda about nazis, being liberators, chemical weapons, 'military operation' vs war really hasn't penetrated much of the west / just comes off as absurd.

With that, is a video like this likely to do much?

This seems like a fake that only the fakers would think would work...


War is war... russia just has a worse propaganda machine in the west, than the west has. Internally (in russia), the propaganda was probably better, but so was the eg. "iraq has weapons of mass destruction" in the west.

But this video looks like someone from 4chan made it "for the lulz".


>But this video looks like someone from 4chan made it "for the lulz".

That would make a lot more sense.


I doubt that any propagandist ever thinks a single piece of propaganda will single-handedly turn the tide of a war. I am no expert but I assume it's more a case of 'every little bit helps'


I wonder though, as it gets more absurd does the sell get harder?


The head doesn't even look attached to the body. Wow.


People calling it looks fake are not exactly the targeted audience. My mom and dad have been countless times fooled by whatsapp forwarded videos which obviously looks fake to me but not to them. I have to explain them to look for certain clues to identify anything fake but I have been fooled countless times by videos looking legit. Captain disillusion does a good job in debunking real looking viral videos.


You're kinda late to the party - these two are over two weeks old.

https://streamable.com/8inzvg

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


How is this worse than the last 30 years of Photoshopped war images?


People are less aware how well video can be faked with few resources, so they're more likely to believe it.


That's the same moral panic there used to be about Photoshop.

It turned out that people don't believe tricked imaged without any context.


That's the same moral panic there was about Photoshop, but it turned out that people don't believe tricked imaged without any context.

Photoshop exists because people believe images that have been modified. Pretty much every billboard, magazine cover, print advert, or Instagram post you see has been photoshopped literally because people believe images enough to make it worthwhile spending the time changing it to be 'better'.

Adobe built a multi-billion dollar business on the basis of tricking people with images that aren't real.

The assumption that it wouldn't work for video, or that people won't believe modified news images, is counter to all of the available evidence.


Although every mildly surprising authentic image is also now greeted by inevitable shouts of "FAKE!".

In a world of easy image trickery, people stopped believing any image they didn't want to believe.


O, well, let me see: because people are more susceptible to believing a video than a picture and some accompanying text when it comes to statements by a person?


Has there been any effort to introduce cryptographic signing of media in a way that makes it easy for viewers to validate authenticity?


and how do you verify the signature?

public key infrastructure has always stumbled over issues of authenticity, more than just indexing.


Interesting. Pretty bad quality as far as deepfakes go, as you say. But I can imagine this fooling some people nevertheless.


I had an idea to do a site that verifies the authenticity of such movies, the content creator should sign the link through this site: https://movieverify.com/ If it interests someone, please contact me, any help will be appreciated.


I wonder who is viewing that thinking it's real? It's obviously fake and a bad fake at that.


This kind of belief doesn't survive contact with the kind of person bad fakes are targeted at. They're not stupid people, they're just people who've lived long enough to feel confident in their understanding of the world, and that understanding has at best an abstract concept of deep fakes. It only has to be more convincing than what they expect a fake to look like.


It's also to drive a narrative: think of all the discussions on HN where we're reacting to the headline and not the article.

This is a dynamic we've not seen before - Zelensky is out and about so he's seen by his people, but a huge amount of this entire effort is being shared online through social media. You don't have to convince people its authentic - you can just convince everyone that everything is fake.


I would argee that if it confirms a view they already hold or are inclined to believe then that is all that is needed.


Put this deepfake through a couple levels of email forwards, GIFs with burned in captions and lots of dodgy media spots of "Did Zelensky actually say this or didn't he? Some people are saying he did." and it's going to be taken for ground truth.

There's a subreddit called "AteTheOnion" which chronicles people mistaking wildly obviously fake and humorous articles from The Onion and other sites.

If people aren't able to discern those articles from reality what hope is there?

1 - https://www.reddit.com/r/AteTheOnion/


> Some people are saying

ISWYDT.


If you are going to start using deepfakes as part of your campaign you first want to make couple bad ones so people feel good about themselves and trust their ability to spot the fake. Then start drip feeding the actual good material.

Same tactics as with what Internet at large nowdays calls "trolls". The onces that you spot were probably ment to be spotted, so you lower your guard against the actual propaganda that isn't as obvious.


It doesn't have to be good; there's a lot of people who just skim things, who see this a meter away on a section of a smartphone, or who see a headline without checking the contents.

I mean I like to think of myself as fairly critical and I do this. I'm sure there's a ton of subliminal messages that have established themselves as facts in my head.


Old people, many folks with IQ in the lowest 20% spectrum... and these are just the honest types. Then there are whole groups of folks so deep in the hoax echo chambers they treat anything coming from outside as fake and yet another attempt to get them.


Is there a mirror of this somewhere? Looks like it's been removed by twitter


> the quality of the video is mediocre

That's generous. This video and it's audio are so bad, I wonder if this is a PSA, to remind people that this stuff exists, that the next one you see might also be fake.


I'm surprised this sort of thing isn't done far more widely (and better).

Can anyone comment on reasons why it's not more widespread? Especially in social media, where provenance is nonexistent.


Is there an easy way (online service or something) to distinguish audio deepfakes from real recordings? I'd like to check one war related audio recording.


GAN networks make this a flawed endeavor.

you can train a network to detect it, then a network to convince it, ad nauseum.

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


I was hoping some inevitable property of deep fakes, that could help detecting them.


any such property will eventually be selected against by the discriminator.

https://developers.google.com/machine-learning/gan/discrimin...


Ban on Deep Learning is coming. It's going to be classified as a weapon and practitioners will need a background check/license to perform it.


hah! it would be funny to see politicians try that - not far from legislating Pi.


@osynavets , not clear what you meant by

"Volodymyr Zelensky asking to retreat and surrender their weapons"

did it mean:

Volodymyr Zelensky asking invaders, Russia, to retreat and surrender their weapons

?


Definitely in uncanny valley territory with this one.


Does Zelenskyy have a public-private key pair he can use to digitally sign videos which are to be uploaded to the internet?


I doubt the public targeted by this video knows what a key pair is, let alone how to use one.


I was thinking more the infrastructure, though I guess the video streaming services are probably hostile actors too. Something like “this video was not signed by the president” similar to a blue check mark on the bird app.


I agree. And afaik he always posts on the same official channels, which makes these videos identifiable as fake.


The way the eyes blink is pretty revealing…


Now if the head didnt oscillate sideways like it wasnt connected to the neck and perhaps they used a grainy pixelated recording, they might have got away with the visuals. Cant comment on the voice recording, but so far most deepfake software isnt that good because its not aware of other variables.

Good laugh though, still the existence of sky fairies like god, ie something that cant be proved is still order of the day for now it seems!


Sure, it's not perfect. But you also knew it was a fake before seeing it, right?

Maybe I should be, but I'm generally not looking for inconsistencies like that in everything I watch.


> Sure, it's not perfect. But you also knew it was a fake before seeing it, right? Open mind. Do you trust everything you see and hear in the news or internet? There is fake news, fake science, fake lots of things, some call it Magic entertainment, its been going on for how many hundreds if not thousands of years, irrespective of maliciousness or not. Sometimes its best to follow the money or look at the resulting change in behaviour to get an idea of whats going on.

Edit: How many people have followed their sat-nav into lakes and rivers?

You cant give anything absolute trust, even binary on a cpu is just voltage ranges.


Why do rusdians waste time on this when they should be getting fuel to their fuel starved convoys?


You can see how his shoulder isn't moving, only his head on that still body.


Flipping through the tweet-replies, it looks like a lot of people noticed this.


Well they did one of trump and that was pretty good: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h_jrebvmPlk&t=14s


I'd like to put in a request for Putin in Drag performing Lucille Ball's classic Vitameatavegamin skit, please!

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/apr/06/russia-bans-pi...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KY3eOtJwOhE


So much of the video I’ve seen online is fake. I’d argue most of the video on Twitter; particularly of burning vehicles and tanks.


would you mind posting an example of allegedly fake content? If I've been getting duped the past weeks, i'd like to be able to tell how


Boy... that is so obvious!


Far from believable.


MIT had an interview with a Putin deepfake a while ago[0].

[0]: https://www.businessinsider.com/vladimir-putin-deepfake-mit-...


That is social media for you. Disinformation still existing on there despite multiple calls to remove it.

Just don't straight up believe everything you see on the internet. The 'propaganda' happens on either side.


If nobody believes this poorly executed deepfake, but it is used as a pretext for further censorship, whose agenda does it advance?


I hear Putin is a horrible pervert.




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