YHK - yet another hacker news clone

Wherever there's change, there's money to be made. We just don't really care about people making the dosh from changes we like.

poster designs came from an ai subscription which, even if free, is still a better trail than "the money"

> when Israel has the most advanced propaganda machines globally ?

What an interesting claim. Unless you're saying that despite Israel having the "most advanced propaganda machines" (whatever that means), it's failing miserably. The amount of hate towards Israelis and the Israeli government is at all time high.

Pro-Israel organizations like this one suggest what you say is true: "Analysis: Riots Show the Price France Has Paid for Turning Against Israel" [0]

[0] https://combatantisemitism.org/special-features/analysis-rio...

Israel are easier to blame than the reality, which is some people are entirely feral and will turn legitimate protests into an excuse to riot and loot. It doesn’t need a state actor to amplify this stuff. Just a bunch of idiots in social media bubbles.

What would "seeing riots coming" look like?

  In the preceding months there had been growing unease between the police and the inhabitants of ...

To me, it was shocking to watch the street interviews with the rioters, where they were just repeating the same exact slogans from the French protests, but badly translated to Spanish (like a literal word-by-word translation that was weird and made no sense).

Pro Israel media: "Analysis: Riots Show the Price France Has Paid for Turning Against Israel" [0]

[0] https://combatantisemitism.org/special-features/analysis-rio...

yde_java pointed it out on a comment below

Something similar has been going on in Washington, DC, but ours is organic. Someone fires up a “teen takeover” to a popular area, it floods with kids 99% of which are just there to harmless goof off and see their friends, and of course a small group of jerks starts a fight with no regard for the people around them.

The city council is treating this like a curfew issue. The problem isn’t the kids, it’s the algorithm. But nobody seems to have any power to bang on TikTok’s door and tell them to cut it out.

at least at 16:30 a lego store on passeig de gracia announced that there was a demonstration starting and they were closing and police was everywhere around so looks like it was a planned protest rather than just some unexpected tiktok looting flashmob

I found it interesting that two of the AI posters in the article have the three-pointed “no kings” crown, and one has a two-pointed version. The AI hallucinated icons from American partisan propaganda into an EU context in a country with a monarchy.

I agree with your first statement, but I’m not sure I understand what you’re saying here:

> there’s really no first principles reason for any legitimacy

Do you mean in this case, or are you making a blanket statement about the nature of morality and power?

Yes, there are. A popular protest (and even riots!) should come entirely or at least in the vast majority from a sentiment spread across the people. If it's 500 youngsters that come out of the blue following a campaign orchestrated most probably by a foreign state actor, then it's not legitimate.

Yes, we could start doing verbal and mental gymnastics about how an external actor could be legitimately interested to try and drive the political landscape of a country one month before elections, sure. But it's not the point here.

> What I will say is that getting tiktoks in front of hundreds of thousands of people in a coordinated way isn't easy

Literally trivial: https://getstarted.tiktok.com/gofulltiktok?lang=en

> and they won't come out if they weren't already passionate about something

First time protesting and/or rioting in Barcelona? There is definitively always people taking advantage of our peaceful protests to cause chaos and mayhem, this happens every time there are protests, and especially once the police wants to shut down the events but people want to keep on partying.

> they should subpoena tiktok for exact records

Absolutely, straight up attempts to subvert democracy, should be met with investigations immediately.

> On the other hand, can’t these things also legitimately arise from disenfranchised groups without needing to point to a boogie man?

I think that's the crux, they do, constantly! We have "real riots" in Spain all the time, and protests, both peaceful and violent ones. We have experience of the actual process of seeing people getting more and more frustrated, and things slowly bubbling until it reaches a threshold, then bubbles over.

This doesn't seem to be that. There is zero political parties/groups involved, which is very uncommon, we have strong groups that are always up for causing some property damages and similar things, when these "real riots" happen, but none of these were involved.

When you have basically groups of individuals all acting in uniform way, based on the same misinformation, with zero association or relation to our existing political factions, then it's quite easy to see that things didn't happen as they "normally" do, that's why people are asking questions right now about it.

Maybe try reading the article, it isn't claiming "all protests in Spain are fake".