>> I'd venture a guess that this low-grade whataboutism directed at US comes overwhelmingly from Russian and similar bots trying to divert attention.

> I don't know why people have such a hard time believing this. A 50 cent army to steer social media opinions is certainly a lot cheaper than aircraft carriers

I will make an attempt at an explanation, or at least an unusual way to think about it. It's not that I find it difficult to "believe" it....it is very easy to "believe" it....just do it. However, forming a strong belief that it is actually true, based on sound logic and strict epistemology, this is far less easy, for me.

Firstly, consider the logic (if we interpret the statement literally): Because "A 50 cent army to steer social media opinions is certainly a lot cheaper than aircraft carriers", then therefore it logically follows that "whataboutism directed at US comes overwhelmingly[!] from Russian[!] and similar bots trying to divert attention".

Clearly, this logic is not free of flaws.

Now of course, your actual opinion on the matter is surely more complex, but then this raises the important (and typically "This is Water"-type unrealized) point that we use an amazingly crude language, on amazingly crude internet platforms, to debate (conceptualize, and form opinions upon) a problem space (reality) that is infinitely dimensionally complex, not to mention deceptive, counter-intuitive, and paradoxical. And even worse: all of this is conducted upon a not very well understood and known to be incredibly flawed platform: the human mind.

If you think about it, is the very premise (axiomatic ~~belief~~ perception) that humanity can form highly comprehensive accurate individual and shared models of this mess in the first place not obviously delusional and hubristic?

Below we have:

> To put a finer point on it: in order to believe that state actors are not major players in online discourse, you would have to assume that governments looked at Occupy, the Arab spring, BLM, Hong Kong, etc and consciously decided that opinion on the internet isn’t relevant enough to their strategic objectives to spend a few million a year on internet influence operations. That seems like an absurd assumption.

This is clearly a false dichotomy - are there really only two options here? There are many different ways to think about this, and I would be surprised if the person who wrote that comment wouldn't be able to whip up a whole bunch of other theories without breaking a sweat. And yet, they wrote that comment....and that comment was consumed (as ~correct) by other agents within the system, in turn distorting their internal model of reality (which is typically considered to be reality itself, another root cause problem), agents who will then go on to distort the models of other agents in one giant game of Telephone[1].

Day after day, year after year, generation after generation we (and here I include the much more competent than average minds here on HN) repeat this obviously (when looked at from the proper perspective, a perspective that seems to be available only in certain states of mind[2]) highly flawed behavior, and "shake our fists at God" (or the members of our outgroups) for causing these problems.

What's particularly interesting about this phenomenon: not only does it seem not possible to get people to stop behaving like this, it seems to be impossible to get them to even consider the possibility that there might be some truth to this characterization of it. Like, they might post a pithy comment ~"proving it wrong", but if one is to reply to that pointing out that it suffers from the very same phenomenon being described, the response tends to be either rhetoric (on less intellectual platforms) or solipsism &/or silence/disinterest (on more intellectual platforms).

It is a very difficult nut to crack, especially when no one else is able to be interested in cracking it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_whispers

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State-dependent_memory