YHK - yet another hacker news clone

Barcelona unrest: how to fabricate a protest in the age of TikTok

38 points DeepLogin 1 hour ago 35 comments

soco 57 minutes ago | parent

The eternal way is: follow the money. Not politician declarations or poster designs. The money. I have some preconceptions about it - based on who could profit from a broken EU - but still, follow the money.

bombcar 55 minutes ago | parent

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.

rapist 24 minutes ago | parent

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

bigfudge 15 minutes ago | parent

I'm not really clear what you're trying to say with your choice of fresh account name, but it seems pretty offensive for no good reason.

yorwba 7 minutes ago | parent

Image-generation platforms can be subpoenaed for identifiers associated with the account that produced those images.

4gotunameagain 50 minutes ago | parent

Isn't it suspicious that EU nation most vocal about Israel's atrocities gets targeted by campaigns like these, when Israel has the most advanced propaganda machines globally ?

WakeUpPeople 42 minutes ago | parent

> 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.

potatototoo99 28 minutes ago | parent

Not failing at all: still no leaders arrested, no UN security council decision, not even sanctions by the EU. Any other developed nation would have had already seen more serious consequences.

an0malous 19 minutes ago | parent

That’s because the internet briefly left a window open for the masses to attain information outside of controlled channels, but they’ve clamped down on it severely in the last year by giving TikTok US, Paramount, and Warner Brothers to the largest donor of the IDF.

yde_java 41 minutes ago | parent

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...

usern20260720 20 minutes ago | parent

Reads like a threat

bcvvvy 5 minutes ago | parent

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.

Zealotux 42 minutes ago | parent

I live in Barcelona, it was no actual protest as the article accurately explain but weaponised youth. It's incredible how completely artificial and easy it was to make happen, literally none of my friends living in the city saw it coming, me included, these riots came out of nowhere.

spicyusername 36 minutes ago | parent

What would "seeing riots coming" look like?

Zealotux 32 minutes ago | parent

Just like in France: a planned and legitimate protest turning violent near the end, clashes with the police escalating into riots after hours of tensions.

Here, there was no context to the riots other than "go to plaça Catalunya and break/steal things", no political demand whatsoever, it was a totally opportunistic chaos and nothing like I've seen in France or Spain ever.

tel 19 minutes ago | parent

And no coordination with the camped protestors who’ve been occupying Placa Catalunya for weeks now.

defrost 24 minutes ago | parent

A great many riots result from building pressures and real issues that formed over months or years.

  In the preceding months there had been growing unease between the police and the inhabitants of ...
~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1981_Brixton_riot

Which is pretty different to this apparent clear blue sky bolt from blue spontaneous remotely weaponised flash mob.

papyrus9244 9 minutes ago | parent

Lots of social unrest on every online platform, for example what happened in the days prior to 15M (which thankfully didn't end up in riots, but riots would have been another logical outcome).

uniq7 17 minutes ago | parent

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).

4gotunameagain 9 minutes ago | parent

Solid sign of foreign interference.

4gotunameagain 9 minutes ago | parent

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

acd 40 minutes ago | parent

Digital markets act in EU Tiktok is a gatekeeper. Special rules apply

https://digital-markets-act.ec.europa.eu/gatekeepers-portal_...

spicyusername 29 minutes ago | parent

I don't know.

This itself seems like propaganda to blame the unrest on TikTok or foreign countries, rather than fundamental issues within Spain or Europe generally.

It can both be true that TikTok was a factor in the increased property damage and that Spanish citizens are unhappy and ready to protest. Or that 130 people were ready to do property damage and there also, TikTok videos.

AndyMcConachie 29 minutes ago | parent

The CIA and NED have been creating color revolutions for decades. This isn't new.

https://nonsite.org/change-agent-gene-sharps-neoliberal-nonv...

Telemakhos 12 minutes ago | parent

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.

an0malous 23 minutes ago | parent

A subtle form of propaganda is choosing what to call legitimate or not, since there’s really no first principles reason for any legitimacy

christophilus 19 minutes ago | parent

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?

darkwater 12 minutes ago | parent

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.

zug_zug 17 minutes ago | parent

This doesn't seem like a full article without bothering to interview ANY of the arrested 130 people.

What I will say is that getting tiktoks in front of hundreds of thousands of people in a coordinated way isn't easy, and they won't come out if they weren't already passionate about something. If there are written records proving this was made to cause chaos specifically then they should subpoena tiktok for exact records.

embedding-shape 6 minutes ago | parent

> 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.

christophilus 13 minutes ago | parent

In the US, I heard lots of conspiracies about who was really behind the BLM riots, Charlottesville, Jan 6th, the Trump assassination attempts, etc.

The same thing is happening here in the comments. Everyone is looking for the puppeteer. I’m not sure one way or the other.

On the one hand, it’s true that when you look through history, you often find that there was a “someone” (e.g. the Germans funding the Bolshevik Revolution, or the CIA shenanigans in the Middle East and South America).

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

embedding-shape 2 minutes ago | parent

> 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.

papyrus9244 11 minutes ago | parent

As someone from Spain: those posters weren't made by a (native) Spaniard. They contain several weird sentences absolutely nobody uses.

My bet: foreign meddling.

Pragmata 3 minutes ago | parent

"fake protest"

The people protesting there weren't fake. This is just propaganda.

embedding-shape 43 seconds ago | parent

[delayed]

comrade1234 3 minutes ago | parent

Besides Ireland and parts of the UK Halloween traditionally hasn't been a thing in Europe and some people are adamantly against it being celebrated. But here in Switzerland in the recent years it's become the night where teenagers/students go out late and vandalize and be nuisances, start fires, etc.

This year it's on a Saturday and there's also general unrest with frequent protests (Israel/Palestine, Kurds, students, etc etc etc) so it's probably going to be worse than usual.