Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Kremlin Cash Behind Yuri Milner’s Twitter and Facebook Investments

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 204 posts

Re: Kremlin Cash Behind Yuri Milner’s Twitter and Facebook Investments

#101

Post by progman »

sgustard wrote: post #78
progman wrote: post #68

What if - theoretically - this is just "fake news"? I mean, how can you discern that the stuff the media reports is actually true, no matter in what direction? I think the most reliable source of information in this time of spreading "fake news" is personal witness by known people.

Of course you should make your own judgment of the validity of the source. In this case, it would seem to be a difficult task to invent all of this. "The Paradise Papers is a global investigation into the offshore activities of some of the world’s most powerful people and companies. The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and 95 media partners explored 13.4 million leaked files from a combination of…

What's the difference of trusting the media, or the data which backs the media?

Re: Kremlin Cash Behind Yuri Milner’s Twitter and Facebook Investments

#102

Post by dang »

toyg wrote: post #28
pinewurst wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe that wasn't good phrasing. I'm trying to say that I never saw the division between those corrupt interests and the nation state they belonged to. I always felt they were acting in their national interests. What will be interesting here is how fast it falls off HN.

Already the title has been changed to take his name off.

> to take his name off

You assumed wrong. A moderator changed it because the submitted title ("Yuri Milner's money is from Putin (via Gazprom, oligarchs, et al)") was an obvious violation of the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

We often put individual names back in HN titles when the audience here can be expected to recognize the name. I've done so above. That's a rather specialized moderation practice, which not everyone who edits HN titles knows about. The basic edit was valid and routine.

Re: Kremlin Cash Behind Yuri Milner’s Twitter and Facebook Investments

#103

Post by djrobstep »

pheldagryph wrote: post #80

Senate Intelligence Committee has expressed concerns that Jack Dorsey is favoring the Russian government over the United States government. Senator Tom Cotton, CIA Director John Brennan, transcript from Senate Intelligence Committee hearings on June 2016: https://www.cotton.senate.gov/?p=press_release&id=414 SENATOR COTTON: I want to discuss cooperation with our Intelligence Community from Silicon Valley, specificall…

Merely refusing to cooperate with the CIA is "favoring the Russian government"?

That seems like a dangerous idea.

Re: Kremlin Cash Behind Yuri Milner’s Twitter and Facebook Investments

#104

Post by conistonwater »

killjoywashere wrote: post #5

If you haven't read Bill Browder's Red Notice, read it now. Wow. Wow. Just wow. YCombinator is in the Kremlin's pocket. Wow. I fully expect this to be downvoted to oblivion. But wow. In essence, Putin used Browder's investigations of Gazprom and other oligarch-controlled Russian businesses (huge national orgs that were privatized after the collapse of the Soviet Union) to jail the richest man in Russia, effectively m…

To add to this, if you want something shorter to read, there is this prepared statement by Browder to the Senate Judiciary Committee: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/07/bill-br... Also, being a prepared statement to a senate committee, it has more meat to it than the average news interview.

Re: Kremlin Cash Behind Yuri Milner’s Twitter and Facebook Investments

#105

Post by ern »

johnrichardson wrote: post #52

Another day, another mainstream media publication shilling hysterical articles about Russia. My pet theory is that it's a big collective act of psychological sublimation to compensate for the shock of Hillary losing. I also find it ironic that the Chinese Communist Party, an institution which is at least on par with Russia in terms of shadiness and social repression, receives barely an iota of the flak that Russia re…

Another day, another mainstream media publication shilling hysterical articles about Russia. My pet theory is that it's a big collective act of psychological sublimation to compensate for the shock of Hillary losing

I’d like to buy into the “nothingburger” case on Russian interference,but how do you explain the growing weight of released evidence that the Russians actively worked to interfere in the election? Were the Russians wasting their resources trolling? Is all the evidence fabricated?

Re: Kremlin Cash Behind Yuri Milner’s Twitter and Facebook Investments

#106

Post by JumpCrisscross »

pheldagryph wrote: post #80

Senate Intelligence Committee has expressed concerns that Jack Dorsey is favoring the Russian government over the United States government. Senator Tom Cotton, CIA Director John Brennan, transcript from Senate Intelligence Committee hearings on June 2016: https://www.cotton.senate.gov/?p=press_release&id=414 SENATOR COTTON: I want to discuss cooperation with our Intelligence Community from Silicon Valley, specificall…

Do we have a source on the Wall Street Journal articles Cotton references?

More broadly, we would need to know if Dataminr is sharing (a) its full fire hose with RT, or just a subset of it and (b) any data with the subcontractors to the Intelligence Community, in which case we can assume they made a policy decision to not work with state intelligence agencies, misguided as that may be in today's hybrid world.

TL; DR Doesn't strike me as specious solely based on what's provided here.

Re: Kremlin Cash Behind Yuri Milner’s Twitter and Facebook Investments

#107

Post by pdog »

cycrutchfield wrote: post #87
pdog wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is RT at all comparable to the CIA? Even if you accept the premise that RT is a Russian propaganda channel, it's not a foreign intelligence service.

So your argument is that a foreign propaganda entity is preferable to a domestic intelligence agency?

Yes? I hope it's not controversial to say that doing business with a television network is fundamentally different from cooperating with an intelligence agency.

Re: Kremlin Cash Behind Yuri Milner’s Twitter and Facebook Investments

#108

Post by jgome »

EGreg wrote: post #31
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Compared to what the USA does on a regular basis, Russia is a pretty good actor when it comes to external dealings It has been a while since the United States forcibly annexed another country's territory [1]. In any case, this argument is irrelevant. Irrespective of whether Russia is a "good actor" or not, they are a geopolitical competitor who surreptitiously exercised control over, or at least non-public purview…

Would you consider the Iraq war a while? Guantanamo? Norriega? Contras? How long is a while? Or is only annexation considered the red line here? If you want to blame Russians, you should blame the USSR for deporting the Crimean Tatars after WW2 as collective punishment. Being outraged at an annexation of a territory that was unilaterally given away 50 years earlier where not a single gunshot was fired while giving a…

The US doesn't need to annex any country, they just pay their "partners" overseas, or, if they go "rogue", a few US navy ships show up and that's it.

BTW, you are forgetting more recent events in which the US govt. has been involved, directly or indirectly:

Iraq (war)

Afghanistan (war)

Syria (war)

Libya (war)

Honduras (coup d'etat)

Brazil (soft coup d'etat)

Paraguay (soft coup d'etat)

Venezuela (economic blockade)

Mali (war)

Re: Kremlin Cash Behind Yuri Milner’s Twitter and Facebook Investments

#109

Post by cycrutchfield »

pdog wrote: post #107
cycrutchfield wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So your argument is that a foreign propaganda entity is preferable to a domestic intelligence agency?

Yes? I hope it's not controversial to say that doing business with a television network is fundamentally different from cooperating with an intelligence agency.

Key words here are foreign and domestic.

Re: Kremlin Cash Behind Yuri Milner’s Twitter and Facebook Investments

#110

Post by sheetjs »

pdog wrote: post #86
argonaut wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems obvious now, but you only have to look at an HN thread 6 years ago discussing Yuri Milner to see that many people in tech (or at least on HN), including pg, did not believe Yuri was an extension of the Russian state: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3143604 . (Of course, many also recognized this as obvious at the time).

Paul Graham on Yuri Milner at the time: "If there's one mistake this story makes, it's in trying to come up with complicated theories about why Yuri does well. He's simply smart." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3143894

At least the top reply at the time, by @mapgrep, addressed the concern:

> Come now, Paul. Yes, Yuri is smart. But he also has huge sacks of money to throw around, most of which comes from oligarch Alisher Usmanov

> It's kind of sad, to me at least, the extent to which a sort of amorality has really taken hold in Silicon Valley. It's nice that he's helped your investments out, Paul, but where does Yuri's money come from? Have you looked into him and Usmanov? I mean, the sad thing about Yuri Milner to me isn't that he's an ostentatious outsider, it's that he fits in so darn well in Silicon Valley. I wish this was the sort of place that looked completely alien to someone from Moscow or Wall Street. Every year, it seems that's less and less the case, at least in terms of culture.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3143960

Post reply on HN