So many fake telegram channels under the "Anonymous brand". And in the end it's either Russian or Irani intelligence when you start to observe their operators, attacks, used IPs, ASNs etc.
Journalism got so bad, they are way too trigger happy on that next clickbait story. They went from keeping legislation in check to being the useful fools on the internet. I haven't seen a news story without the detail word "allegedly" in years.
Putin kind of realized in 2011 that he needs to change the narrative. And western democracies are very inefficient when it comes to debunking fake information, because our legal system takes year or even decades to prove innocence.
For Russia, China or other SCO Nations it doesn't matter what kind of fake information they spread. As long as it keeps us busy, it worked.
Divide and conquer. Not a new strategy to be honest, but it works like a charm.
> For Russia, China or other SCO Nations it doesn't matter what kind of fake information they spread. As long as it keeps us busy, it worked.
One thing that has bugged me for so long, and no one seems to be talking about, is, for example, how many state actors are lurking on Reddit news, specifically /r/worldnews, to control the narrative.
There are some topics where a great number of comments are from, let's say, "interested parties". That is, people whose comment history is strictly about that particular topic. They might have 5+ year old accounts, and have only commented about that topic. They don't even need to hide it, as both them and the vast majority of well-meaning ignorant passerby can shut you down with either being a conspiracy theorist or pushing an agenda for the opposite side.
This is the first time I mention this anywhere on the Internet, and I know how well it's gonna go down. Everybody is aware of state-sponsored troll farms, but any mention of it is drowned down by people that still believe either this is fiction, or "does not happen in my corner of the internet." To avoid making myself a blatant target of such responses, I will not mention which state or group is most active on that subreddit, go see for yourself.
What I can openly say, is that USA psyops is not really a thing because most of the Western Internet is US-based, and US-centered. The US government doesn't really need massive troll farms because their own citizens and companies indirectly and involuntarily do their work for them. When one's own propaganda has become part of popular culture, is it propaganda anymore?
By this point places like /worldnews have become ineffective when it comes to propaganda purposes, especially because they're so obviously controlled by bots. They're so good they're bad, that's one of the paradoxes of open confrontation/(information) war.
It needs to be read by people at least a step or two above those bots, people that actually effect political change when push come to shove. That type of people has long left /worldnews and related propaganda platforms.
Of course, the same applies to most of the Western media, i.e. it has pushed the propaganda angle way, way too much hence nobody that counts takes it seriously anymore.
The personal issue I have with all those countries involved in psyops is that the try to force their own opinion upon others, and by definition of how we structured our planet that should have been the work of diplomats.
Nations are not willing to find common ground anymore because of this, because their own people "forgot" their own values and are radicalized into useful fools for the leaders that are usually just unsatisfiably power hungry.
I fear that the high level of education of those nations (including Russia's which had many great authors and philosophers, for example) are lost in these cultural purges. And that's what I cannot understand and won't tolerate. We need to keep history alive and the knowledge that was created out of it, because we won't be able to learn from our mistakes otherwise.
But educated people are not easy to control, that's why right-wing populism only works on the uneducated which are slowly assimilating the neighboring population on the psychogram.
All the countries "in the middle" which didn't want to be involved in the West vs East debate have turned much more to communism; but not out of cultural values but more because of opportunism. And that likely will result in them being responsible for killing their own people soon enough, and that's what I would define as collateral damage that could have been prevented. Communism, by definition, has to eliminate rogue elements because it's not designed for compromise. All direct-elected parties in history at one point or the other used their power to eliminate other parties to guarantee their rule for generations to come.
In an ideal world, something like territorial disputes would be a tournament on an isolated island in the middle of the ocean; where the civilian population isn't affected, infrastructure isn't damaged, and the ground isn't poisoned with chemicals, gunpowder, metals, and plagues. The German state is still busy clearing more than 20 unexploded bombs per day, every day, more than 80 years after WW2.
The most damage wars cause is not for the current generation, but for the generations to come that have to clean up the mess of their old, idiotic grandpas that were too stubborn and too blinded to find a compromise with their neighbors. I hope at some point we (as the human species) realize that the male gender is a little too unreflected, too proud, and too stubborn in social contexts, and that's what's bad for politics.
(This comment is likely being downvoted to hell, because I'm not patriotic enough. But honestly at this point I don't care anymore about the opinion of radicalized idiots online anymore. Idiots by definition are the radicals, and the smart ones act with kindness and understanding.)
In the Western world it's mostly Americans that care about patriotism, thanks to your propaganda and flag-waving nonsense now part of your culture. Nobody else really cares if you are or not. Thanks for the comment.
The empire is the empire and the empire controls the narrative, and as a europeean seeing the US - the worlds largest military by far - cry about various tiny media operations coming from the wastelands they and the rest of the west has created by pillaging foreign resources is a bit laughable.
Much of the south americas has been pillaged by the empire, the middle east to, the rest of the world not much less. Deaths squads, millions dead, forever wars and economic plunder but no it's some tiny russian or iranian operation we should worry about, so vote democrat, vote republican, just vote for more war!
This is what many europeans thinks, though we aren't much better with our operations in say northern africa.
America changed the narrative to be the good guys. Wars are no longer result of need for exploration, previous land claims, manifest destiny or anything else. In fact wars are no longer wars, but merely establishing freedoms to the oppressed populations. Military isn't willingfully enlisting to go kill foreigners in foreign lands, they are protecting the freedom at home. Countries that are subjugated and forced to keep military bases in their borders aren't vassal states, but partners. Yet the song changes very quickly when any other country does a tiny bit of the same. I don't dislike these rulers of our times, but one should not be naive to think that it doesn't even matter what you vote for, as you say, you're just gonna be part of the same imperialist State Department roadmap.
Exactly! You are describing classical academic gepolitics as explained by the most standard US military beureucrat before rampant ideological psyops took over.
John Mearsheimer is a good example of this line of thought but he's somehow a radical these days.
The US is fighting bloody wars for resources and control like a big game of RISK, that's how historical empire has always worked and most knew this decades ago, but now theres layers and layers of bullshit on top.
Just admit it, we live a very wealthy life partly because we've plundered the world, not because we've protected ourselves from the bad guys and became uniquely enlightened in a world of savages, that's the winners writing the history, another historical trope that has been memoryholed.
Wars are terrible! But as soon as you have some preference for the society you want to live in (or consider better), you might need to confront issues of violence in defense. I did not find the USSR model preferable, for example.
I get what you mean and me neither but the relatively modern ideological lens, that most wars are fought for democracy, or to protect liberalism is just not true from a historical or economical standpoint.
Most US wars are fought because of realpolitics, resources, opening markets, company contracts, like a game of Civilization, empires battling empires, or plutocrats taking over markets in poorer parts of the world through brute force foreign policy, just like in the rest of history.
There is no US exceptionalism even though i love many things uniquely about your country as a whole and wouldn't live in neo USSR ( unless part of the intelligentsia, which in some parts look like parts of the american plutocracy ).
Would the world be a better place if North Korea had won? Saying it is all/mostly realpolitics etc., does not mean that the outcome was always worse than not fighting or at the very least it isn't easy to make that determination across the board (doesn't excuse bad military action, either).
That is not the point. Just saying the US is a hyperaggressive war machine isn't leading anywhere. Wars have consequences and if they hadn't happened we'd have had the counterfactual, which might not always be great, either.
> Just admit it, we live a very wealthy life partly because we've plundered the world
I dont like this take. It suggest that the sole source of US wealth is natural resource theft. It is not (sole source).
The US fucks/fucked with many countries for many reasons. Ideological - fight vs spread of communism, figting 'terror' in afganistan. Those can be also tied to interest of Military–industrial complex - war is private profit.
Other reasons is to secure the flow of resources, all coups and dictators in middle east were an attempt to stabilise oil flow. State doesnt care much how it will be done. All they care is that oil will arrive cheaply at steady rate. Private companies will help for some cut.
Saudis did what us told them, they are now building indoors ski slopes on their deserts, US doesnt care - even though wahhabism is in practice an ideological opposite of US. They hardly sound like poor oppressed people who's oil being stolen.
The purported reason for invading Iraq wasn't to steal the oil, but to maintain the petrodollar (it's claimed that Saddam was preparing to begin trading oil in Euros).
The actual reason was that Dick Cheney felt like it. There really isn't any kind of actual reason beyond that, and we didn't gain a single thing from the invasion.
Petrodollars (the foreign US dollar oil trade) are a leftover 1970s concept; they simply aren't important or a large part of support for the dollar's value. OPEC oil exports are about $300 billion a year, which isn't a lot.
The purported conspiracy theory reason. The official reasoning of WMDs were generally believed to be a nonsense casus belli presented as legal justification. More people thought it had something to do with 9/11 than WMDs.
In this case, much of the real purpose was laid out in articles and papers written just a few years earlier by a bunch of the same people crafting and implementing the policy. There may have been more reasons than that, but some were frankly stated in public documents.
Their publications (including an open letter addressed to Clinton) lay out a case for preventative (as distinct from preemptive—what we in fact did was preventative, with some bullshit to sell it as preemptive) war over concern that Saddam might do some of the stuff we lied about to claim he was already doing it.
Pure realpolitik damn-the-legality chess-playing stuff. He seems risky (to our interests in the region—who cares about his own people?) so we better depose him, that kind of thing.
This is the explanation that checks out with me. Add some impulse for Bush Jr to finish what Bush Sr started and you have yourself a ridiculous waste of resources.
Invading Iraq was very bad but it's not rubble. It's, like, still there.
Deaths in the war were less than you'd think. GWB actually comes out net positive in his presidency because he started PEPFAR (AIDS prevention in Africa) which was really, really good and saved millions of lives.
The randomness is exactly why it's so good. You'd get bad wars from other presidents, but you wouldn't have gotten PEPFAR. Gives him a good value over replacement president.
The US is still extracting and controlling oil resources in a foreign country via its military, just look at their current presence in North-Eastern Syria.
One would think so, and yet, the US does exactly that in North-Eastern Syria.
Also, see the US President asking the Saudis for some extra pumping of oil last summer (summer of 2022, that is), supposedly that was meant to help with the gasoline prices in the US and hence with said President’s greater chances of electoral success.
I'm pretty sure one of those tiny media operations managed to cut one of the EU's countries out of the herd, so they're a problem I'd like to solve, if possible. Or at least inoculate against, before it happens again.
Russia is a mafia like state, no doubt but i just mentioned hundreds of coups, deaths squads, forever wars and millions dead from western powers, eternal war machines that we are supporting.
And still you'd like to focus on what Russia maybe did in some EU elections, and while i totally agree with you, the fact that it's the part you focus on just like the US media is the psyop in itself. Look over there while multiple wars are ongoing.
That the endgame for that discourse is more war in itself is brilliant, all allowed public discourse should lead to more war from the west towards a myriad of evil people all around, and no one should look into the classes that benefit from those wars.
I see what you're saying. My point (which definitely wasn't clear) is that "small" doesn't mean "ineffective". Equivalent Western operations are hampered because they have goals. Russia is just a chaos monkey - for example I'm sure they'd bung money to XR if they could, despite being a petrostate.
Yes, it's true, I care more about Russia because they've already kicked me where it hurts once. Anyway, if there was a way to inoculate against Russian psyops, wouldn't that also solve the problems you're more concerned about?
Some people just hate to hate. A lot of the world does like the US, some even go as far to exclaim love, and rightfully so.
I've had former close friends attempt to sabotage me in my early career as well, for a multitude of reasons, but the most apparent to me was jealousy. How much of the world do you think operates in a similar way? I would bet a very significant portion does, maybe even a majority if I were at my most cynical years.
Oh those annoying endless rants, not the millions dead in wars, those who ended their lives by death squads because they wanted their own resources, they aren't that important, but those pesky rants!
There's been no stop to the US war machine, they're 100% succesfull.
Nor do I. China is heavily invested in doing business, as is the West, and this can be a limiting factor to how crazy the countries act. China wants functioning markets. It's Russia, on a massive scale, who's gone for the 'make everyone else disintegrate in civil war, what could possibly go wrong with amplifying this perennial human failing' strategy.
Not a fan. We cannot ever eliminate the sparks of these fires without abandoning nations (and then getting flattened by rival nations) so I don't like chaos strategies. Chaos doesn't need help.
> Putin kind of realized in 2011 that he needs to change the narrative.
These operations were happening way before 2011[1]. The internet and social media were simply the most effective ways of executing them.
> And western democracies are very inefficient when it comes to debunking fake information, because our legal system takes year or even decades to prove innocence.
Debunking disinformation is not the antidote, and the legal system wouldn't have anything to do about that. The problem is that the West built the perfect tools for psyops, opened them up to the entire world, and are now wondering why their democracies are crumbling. This is either an act of self-sabotage or the enemy is a much stronger adversary than they anticipated.
To be fair, a democracy with open media and protections of free speech will always be harder to defend against foreign psyops attacks. Instead of having to influence enough people to revolt, you only have to influence enough to change the election outcome, which typically is close to parity anyway. And with non-state-run media and free speech protections, you have many pathways.
So democracies have to harden themselves. And I think the only way to harden the populace is education. General education. Education in the scientific method. And also education about psyops.
I agree. But it is not the only requirement. Restoring control of
technologies to the people is vital too. Intellectual self-defence
requires a sceptical stance, but it also requires capability (other
than simply switching off and opting out)
Five giant websites plus endpoint computing that is neither owned nor
controlled by passive "consumers" is a grave step in the wrong
direction.
In the "West" we've allowed this for reasons of private profit and
government control, and I think in doing so we've created the very
conditions for malign influence.
"Education about psyops" is impossible. Until recently this amounted to "don't trust the media, and verify everything the government says [using media sources]."
Reddit is currently being used to poison future training data for LLMs while laundering the source of the beliefs, to make it look like "everyone" believes a single narrative. Whoever "controls" the content on Reddit (and the media, while it lasts) controls what will be the Truth in the future as it's all absorbed into a attributionless knowledge pool.
So Joe Sixpack thinks he's smart, puts on his anti-media tinfoil hat and just asks WhateverGPT his question, which has been tainted by...poisoned Reddit data and media sources that draw from it. Fuck pipe bombs and meth-- this is the real danger of local LLMs. They challenge the monopoly on knowledge itself. There is no dissent.
It's currently impossible for outsiders to launch a psyops campaign on Reddit. VPNs are blocked. Those that took control of the treehouse quickly moved to pull the ladder up. The party line and public perception of it is now meticulously groomed (pun intended).
I am sorry, but what?
"Education about psyops" is not "don't trust the media". Education about psyops is "These are the methods that people use. These are examples where we know it was used. These are techniques to detect it." and much more.
If your psyops game plan is foiled by "vpn detection" of reddit, I don't think you should be playing.
If you really think the fake narratives originate only from the countries which aren't "behaving" as the politicians of your preferred countries would like, I have a huge stock of bridges to sell to you.
Edit: If you'd like a very recent example, research who's telling he saw the "pictures of beheaded babies", and why.
The real problem is that a lot of this “fake information” is a fact.
For example, the USA foreign policy always leads to wars and war crimes and handful of corporations are the beneficiary on a global scale.
Maybe if you as Americans realize that your Constitutional rights are under attack, and there is no right or left in the political spectrum (just crooks and lobbyists), the world will have a chance to follow your example. Who knows?
The bigger issue is that "commie under your bed" techniques never died.
Americans are the victim of mind control more than Russians. Russia is corrupt, but they lack the sophistication and resources to apply effective propaganda. Even Ukrainians kicked their but in information warfare.
And please, don't put me on some "Russian propaganda" troll theory.
Go listen to Judge Napolitano podcast, with real American patriots like Colonel Douglas Macgregor, Prof. Jeffrey Sachs, Ray McGovern, Phil Giraldi, Larry Johnson, Tony Shafer, Prof. John J. Mearsheimer, Max Blumenthal.
> Russia is corrupt, but they lack the sophistication and resources to apply effective propaganda.
The interesting thing about information warfare is that it doesn't require sophistication and much resources at all. Set up a bunch of troll farms, pay tech-savvy teenagers to do your dirty work, give them some vague talking points, and let them loose on social media.
If you really want to scale this cheaply, deploy AI instead. Russia might not have those capabilities yet, but China certainly does.
BTW, I'm not picking sides here. Just pointing out that it would be absurd to think Russia or China aren't engaging in this type of warfare. They would actually prefer it, given that they can't compete with traditional physical might.
I have a side. The truth. The most links in this rabbit hole point to the operations of the USA agencies as a whole.
Russia has crumbled in the 90s and now is just starting to wake up.
If I have to measure threat and I am an American, I would ask: How on earth China has developed this enormous economical advantage over all of the world?
Who financed this growth? Who benefited the most? And why, after living through the Cold War, we are heading in a similar direction?
These are your sources? And please, the leader in information technology and psychology warfare is known to the whole world.
Practically all the listed sources are part of the complex of disinformation.
On the grand scale of things, the troll farms of Russians are a joke.
USA has more than 900 official military bases outside the territory of the country.
Can you imagine the logistics? The agents? The infrastructure supporting this global operation? The budgets?
Is it surprising that someone interested enough to post in this thread would have had a past interest in the subject as well? It's hard for me to understand how this is a good-faith, thoughtful response. There have been many other takedowns and a lot of other reporting as well, but the link provides some decent insight with a level of detail that an HN reader would appreciate. The tl;dr: most of the "Russian bots" research was, as I summarized, bunk, and pushed by people such as Bill Kristol and other establishment people behind prior false propaganda. I am not sure what "look, you posted this before" is supposed to mean.
> Source: you
Here is an article published in Nature.
Finally, we find no evidence of a meaningful relationship between exposure to the Russian [specifically the IRA] foreign influence campaign and changes in attitudes, polarization, or voting behavior.
Sure, but you can find op-eds and comments everywhere opining that the "new" nature of disinformation and misinformation on the Internet requires corporate-state collusion to censor and repress, lest those people who are susceptible to these campaigns (never, of course, the experts or the people in government) vote the wrong way.
Although I am reluctant to even mention it due to its politicization, the Hunter laptop story is a fine example; claiming the story was Russian disinformation with a total lack of evidence (a claim that persists in some quarters to this day!) damaged the credibility of news institutions and intelligence agencies more than any actual Russian disinformation. The fact the actual story was largely a nothingburger makes it even worse. It gives the appearance that people in positions of influence and power attempted to repress a story that did nothing more than paint someone related to the President in a bad light. Indeed, it's incredible and shameful that the NYT took years to print stories like this [1] which could have been used to refute people quoting the "don’t worry unlike Pop I won’t make you give me half your salary" text because they preferred to leave responsible people with the impression that it was all total fiction and Russian disinformation. Rather than trusting the electorate, the NYT, Twitter, and government intelligence agencies believed it was better to mislead them rather than risk them voting incorrectly. In other words, people are not capable of self-government.
That link is merely disputing the argument that bots were involved in disinformation campaigns. This is irrelevant in the discussion that such campaigns were conducted, which you agree with yourself, and the fact that they're wildly successful.
We know this because of their use in influencing elections in dozens of countries by companies like Cambridge Analytica. They certainly weren't the first nor will be the last, just the ones that got the most exposure.
We also know that social media is filled with bot accounts that spread disinformation. This also isn't new, and you don't need to be a researcher to verify it.
We also know that Russia and China don't have the military capability to fight the US, but they certainly have a technological one to conduct these operations. This war is not new, as you say, but with the advent of the internet it has become the most efficient and effective way to destabilize a nation.
So, by the powers of deduction, and without using any biased sources, we can conclude that a) information warfare exists and the US and its enemies are taking part in it, b) a US election would be a major event prime for attack, and c) it would be trivial to deploy bots to run these operations.
Reaching any alternative conclusion would be delusional, and evidence that counter propaganda does indeed also work.
> This is irrelevant in the discussion that such campaigns were conducted, which you agree with yourself, and the fact that they're wildly successful.
I absolutely dispute the fact they were "wildly successful." People want to make this claim because it conveniently makes their political opposition ignorant tools befuddled by foreign powers rather than legitimate dissent. One might argue that nothing is more "destabilizing" than the polarizing idea your domestic opposition is brainwashed by foreign enemies.
>? We also know that social media is filled with bot accounts that spread disinformation. This also isn't new, and you don't need to be a researcher to verify it.
Except we keep finding the alleged bots aren't bots at all. My own Twitter account was, according to these groups, a bot. Perhaps we don't really "know" that at all. Perhaps most actual bot accounts have close to zero engagement.
> This war is not new, as you say, but with the advent of the internet it has become the most efficient and effective way to destabilize a nation.
No amount of Facebook ads can destabilize a nation, and nothing out of the Internet-era has come even close to the impact of past influence campaigns, although no doubt as t -> infinity, we'll see something.
> I absolutely dispute the fact they were "wildly successful." People want to make this claim because it conveniently makes their political opposition ignorant tools befuddled by foreign powers rather than legitimate dissent.
You're disputing this based on... what exactly?
The effectiveness of propaganda is widely studied and known, so it's unsurpising that an industry that applies it using modern tools would be very profitable. Companies like Cambridge Analytica have been successful all around the world for decades now. See https://www.propagandamachine.tech/ca-map
How instrumental their impact was in achieving a specific result in elections is debatable, simply because the effects of propaganda are difficult to quantify by definition. But it's ignorant to claim that this impact is negligible, or that the current sociopolitical climate can be explained by "legitimate dissent".
> No amount of Facebook ads can destabilize a nation, and nothing out of the Internet-era has come even close to the impact of past influence campaigns
How do you reach this conclusion? The internet is the greatest propaganda delivery method the world has ever seen, and we've known the effects of propaganda for a long time. It doesn't take a genius to put two and two together, yet you're actively claiming otherwise without a shred of proof.
> How instrumental their impact was in achieving a specific result in elections is debatable, simply because the effects of propaganda are difficult to quantify by definition.
> Finally, we find no evidence of a meaningful relationship between exposure to the Russian foreign influence campaign and changes in attitudes, polarization, or voting behavior
> It doesn't take a genius to put two and two together, yet you're actively claiming otherwise without a shred of proof.
The burden of proof is on people claiming that foreign countries doing the same thing they've always done with a new delivery mechanism has changed anything. And given the amount of bad faith disinformation already put out by the primary actors insisting this is the case - not people in comment threads, I mean organizations like New Knowledge and other sources used by NYT and USGov - the burden of proof is pretty high. If you have to blatantly make stuff up, your credibility goes down.
> that the current sociopolitical climate can be explained by "legitimate dissent".
Why?
This seems like a very puzzling statement when considering the past century. Aside from the impacts of increasing atomization and social disintegration related to population churn and mass media (not news, but movies, TV, Instagram, etc.), the only really unusual thing about today's socio-political environment is the degree to which dissent is not tolerated and treated as fundamentally subversive. And even that's not too unusual; for example, the pacifists and isolationists today are Russian bots, the pacifists and isolationists of yesteryear were Nazi apologists, secret communists, etc.
Macgregor and Mearsheimer are bullshitters, and Russia absolutely doesn't lack the sophistication to be effective at propaganda. Unfortunately their top leaders (and China's to a lesser extent) are also the victims of some of our own propaganda, and some fringe LaRouche propaganda too.
Sarcasmitron has a great video series on YouTube about it:
Trying to list Mearsheimer in a list of smart people is going to fail you since people can just look him up and see him being wrong about everything he's ever said.
(He's a "realist", which is an international theory that treats countries as being rational with no domestic divisions, except for the US which is irrational because of liberalism. Also, he doesn't speak Russian, which doesn't stop him claiming to know what they think.)
Max Blumenthal is literally a Russian agent and professional genocide denier.
"John Mearsheimer is one who foresaw the very real possibility of a war against Ukraine. I think he is quite wrong about NATO as the provocation, but if you are grading him on predictions alone obviously he wins some serious kudos."
Mearsheimer is my go to expert for international relations. He is a scientist where many people are pundits and propagandists.
I hesitate to accept Tyler Cowen as a source for anything. He's similarly a type of public intellectual where everyone else goes "well he's wrong about this but he's very smart" and then you count that up and realize he's never actually right about anything.
(And he runs an economics blog where all the commenters are anti-immigration racists, about the most economically senseless thing you can be.)
An example of other people right there would be a war on Ukraine was US intelligence, which is why we started that deterrence strategy where Biden gave speeches saying what Russia was about to do the week before they did it.
It does not include Mearsheimer getting all the details wrong, making up an excuse about NATO even Putin doesn't believe, and predicting Russia would instantly win or else that resisting would lead to nuclear war.
For other highlights, Mearsheimer thinks Japan didn't want to invade China in 1937 and Chiang Kai-Shek provoked them! Realism is just victim blaming.
Tyler Cowen writes and says all sorts of things, sometimes even sheer nonsense. But the post about the IR community asks good questions.
In view of the current catastrophe, one can ask oneself whether mistakes were made, whether full speed ahead was the right strategy for NATO and Ukraine.
NATO doesn't have anything to do with Ukraine. Ukraine was never going to be allowed into NATO before this.
Putin and Russians don't actually care about this - they want Ukraine's farmland back and hate their people for being ungrateful and pretending not to be Russian.
(If Russia really cared about NATO on their border they wouldn't have started a war that caused Finland to join it.)
> The campaigns exploit existing political fault lines like race and regionalism to increase polarization and disaffection with the political system. The complete lack of a coherent message across these campaigns is jarring until one realizes that the goal of the campaigns is not necessarily to convince anyone of anything, but rather to generate noise.
In other words, they simply don't care about the message as long as it's divisive. They will loudly support BLM or alt right or whoever as long as it sparks negative emotions and increases conflicts between Americans. And this strategy works incredibly well just because instead of inventing non-existent conflicts it rekindles the existing ones.
My litmus test for this is always whether the person loudly and persistently propagandizing for stuff, leads back to an insistence that the country they're working is going to collapse in race and/or civil war.
It can be framed as 'yes let's go fight this!' or it can be framed as a dismaying, looming threat rumbling ever closer. Doesn't matter. I identify that behavior as an attempt to produce race and/or civil war, even from nothing. And the more persistent the calls, the more well-funded but ill-sourced the outlet (ask yourself how the person's getting paid to do that full-time with such a busy workday), the more likely I'm going to think they are part of what I've come to think of as WWIII: the attempt to destroy rival nation-states purely with the old CIA techniques, which themselves probably date from the middle ages or Machiavelli or something.
Nothing is new. It's all humans continuing to bumble along as a cooperative but rabidly competitive species. These dichotomies produce this behavior and it's about whether stuff's got out of balance. I think Russia waging WWIII predominantly informationally, is out of balance and having some serious negative externalities beyond their wish for power.
I find it rather ironic that a lot of people, probably quite a vast majority, see themselves immune to propaganda (be it state or commercial).
I often play with the tought that I may well be just as brainwashed as e.g. Russians or Chinese are portrayed to be. I don't think there's really a way of knowing for certain. For most this is probably unthinkable. Or maybe I've been brainwashed by constructivist cultural marxism or whathaveyou?
For me it's very easy to tell because I've been living under a Communist regime and now in a "capitalist" (or "democratic" to use a more PC term) system so I know the difference extremely well. Many books have been written about this but essentially it boils down to the freedom of speech and the amount of punishment you can receive for criticism or being disobedient to those in power. People in the West have no idea what it means to be constantly afraid for oneself and one's family, to be totally at the mercy of a soulless system with no justice at all and no recourse, to learn not to trust anyone, even one's neighbors and family members and so on.
Getting back to your question: of course we are all brainwashed (or "culturally conditioned"), this way or another. But there is an abyss of difference between living in one of these regimes that criminalize everything that is not official vs living in a Western country with all its particularities and inconveniences.
Of course there's a cost to this. Liberal democracy is intensely annoying and always expands to embrace whatever kind of diversity is too much diversity.
That's how it can be a target for fascist uprisings: people want to pretend they're open to all things and have all freedoms as long as there are no consequences. In reality, there's one cost to restriction and another cost to multiculturalism and diversity.
If you look at it in a-life terms you see the autocracies as plateaus. Stuff gets locked down, and there's no progress. But progress hurts. Liberal democracies and their tolerance of diversity are about coping with all the unaligned interests of starkly different people, knowing that combining those people is what gets you startling progress. It can almost be reduced to simple mechanical terms, like recombination in a genetic soup.
It's always possible to crush inconvenient genes and have everyone the same (to a point, and if you're determined enough). And then, you don't have those genes anymore, and your future's narrowed.
Freedom of thought, freedom to travel not only for some vacation, even just a neighboring state firmly within your bloc. Not being executed on the border. Watching what you say, constantly.
You have no idea how much that means to you until you properly lose it. Then suddenly there are very few things in life worth more.
Everyone is engaged in propaganda. I called this guy out because he only named the usual "bad guys". You don't have to talk to me like I am 12 but since you insist, i am going to repeat it: everyone is doing it.
That said, the ones doing it the most are those with most resources. So, the US and us vassals working for our "partners" across the Atlantic.
I didn’t intend to be demeaning so apologies if you felt that way.
The thing is that your comment felt to me a bit like a somewhat common dismissal of real and corrosive problems facing democracy these days.
Like for instance now you say that “everyone is doing it” but what is “it” there? Because not everyone is actually spreading disinformation about everything. People, corporations and governments have agendas of course but how they go about things really matters.
There is a clear difference between the ways and behaviour of western democracies on the one hand and Russia and China on the other hand.
I know in which places I do and don’t want to live for instance.
Oh, I do agree there are significant differences between the ways countries conduct themselves. It's just that i do hold the EU and the US to higher standards because that's what they have been promoting.
False advertising is a very serious offence in my book. Wouldn't move to Russia unless they change course.
I’m sure there is yet it’s not NATO troops trying to occupy land in Eastern Europe. When one party openly behaves like a villain then they most likely are one. You can blab about the US invasion of Afghanistan but the US didn’t go in to setup a totalitarian kleptocracy that replaces their culture with another.
Afghanistan opium cultivation in 2023 declined to one in 20 compared to earlier (95% less), following drug ban by those who are now in power (official United Nations statistics):
Noy sure if you are joking or not, but US definitely installed cleptocrats, if you ever actually cared about say afghan local news. Generals switching sides for money, while investing in massive real estate projects around big cities.
They may be local but in society like afghan one that can have various meaning too since there are many distinct clans who often openly fight each other. Ie British previously loved in their colonies to give power to some minority to focus hatred within locals and keep eyes from their exploitation business. Quite a few of that caused some recent conflicts in Africa.
Well, it certainly isn’t “equivalent” given that the Russian version of the story/belief isn’t created and maintained in the open air of a free information environment. In the US, you’re welcome to (and people actually do) contradict “official narratives” whenever you want.
I read Russian forums and these people are more sober than you may think. They are fed up with Putin and with what is happening to Russia now. It's not so much that they care about Ukrainians but more about the terrible direction the country is heading. For many, it's the return of the dark era of the collapse of the USSR, they don't see any bright light on the horizon.
This is because chaos warfare and the attempts to just straight up reestablish an old school empire, are bad in the context of modern global commerce. I think it might have worked better for them had Putin run his country along more communist lines, but instead he held power in his government with the same chaos warfare tools he used overseas, and the cost of that is that he's clung to power unto death, but all the systems that are supposed to make Russia work, disintegrated.
So many fake telegram channels under the "Anonymous brand". And in the end it's either Russian or Irani intelligence when you start to observe their operators, attacks, used IPs, ASNs etc.
Journalism got so bad, they are way too trigger happy on that next clickbait story. They went from keeping legislation in check to being the useful fools on the internet. I haven't seen a news story without the detail word "allegedly" in years.
Putin kind of realized in 2011 that he needs to change the narrative. And western democracies are very inefficient when it comes to debunking fake information, because our legal system takes year or even decades to prove innocence.
For Russia, China or other SCO Nations it doesn't matter what kind of fake information they spread. As long as it keeps us busy, it worked.
Divide and conquer. Not a new strategy to be honest, but it works like a charm.