It is hard to read things like this and not have a strong emotional reaction instead of the appropriate strong intellectual one. Fundamentally attacks like these need to start with the question 'What is an appropriate response?'. These attacks are having an actual impact and have likely swayed many elections. Effectively they have brought down at least parts of various governments. That reasoning arguably calls for a very strong response since it is a real existential threat to countries. I think that a major issue here however is that governments haven't actually internalized how destructive these threats are, likely because they are using them indiscriminately themselves. "It's just propaganda and only electrons" Admitting the scale and impact of actions like these would be condemning their own actions. We need stronger international understanding that things like this are actually violent attacks aimed at overthrowing a government and that they should be considered potentially acts of war. At the same time however we need to constantly fight to deescalate since this is a new area of conflict and missteps can lead to tragedy. Figuring out responses that work, without increasing attacks, both virtual and physical, is key.
Honestly, the appropriate response is to hope that the people most affected by tactics like this will say, "Gee, maybe I shouldn't believe everything I read."
I don't think we can really stop outside propaganda. But it's depressing at how much Americans are affected by it. Many prominent Americans have re-posted material that is demonstrably traceable back to Russian troll factories.
I don't believe that those are actually the source of our differences, though I do think they exaggerate them. The real problem is that we seem awfully willing to believe the worst in each other, utterly suspending any thought of verifying it.
The Russians are pushing us to do what we're already doing to ourselves. Maybe if people see this and take a moment to think, things will get slightly better.
Solid point. Not sure. I barely use social media and I don't think I have shared a meme in my life. Not sure I will change much about what I would do, but I have considered contacting my representatives about things like this. (I have contacted them in the past about other issues) Beyond that I think engaging in constructive discussions about the discussion is an important thing we are missing and I hope I am trying to do that now with responses like this. Maybe.
I think foreign influence on elections is probably much less impactful than many would think. Campaigns spend literally hundreds of millions of dollars for a single election. There was some fear mongering article an election or two ago about Russian spending $100k on influencing tactics and everyone was like “omg they’re swaying the election! My candidate lost because of $100k!”
Which to me seems like one of two options are true:
Russia knows how to spend money a thousand times more effectively than any presidential campaign we’ve ever seen, and understands how to influence voters better than any American
Or
The $100k did absolutely nothing and we should go touch some grass
I'm also skeptical about the magnitude of their effect, but I wouldn't entirely discount it, either.
The actual campaigns are limited in what they can do. They can buy a lot of advertising that insinuates terrible things about their opponent, but they can only lie so much before they are subject to defamation charges. They can't get away with paying operatives to pretend to be the other side, "concerned" about something the candidate did or said.
I don't know how effective such tactics really are. It's entirely possible that they lay a groundwork of negativity: "Sure, that troll on the Internet might have been lying, but maybe that just means that this less-unbelievable thing is actually true."
It's impossible to measure. But in an election that's close, it doesn't take much, especially with the Electoral College. Elections swing on a few thousand votes -- a microscopic fraction of the ~150,000,000 votes that are cast.
So I concur that the effect is probably small. But I'm not so sure that the small effect is unimportant. It gets to shift things in ways that the campaigns, and even the supposedly non-aligned SuperPACs, can't do.
However, reminded of critical thinking, I realized I initially accepted as truth something reported on some Web site I'd never even heard of.
I didn't quickly find any recognizable credible outlets reporting this, so now I suspect I'm not the only person who jumped at something they were biased to believe, simply because it was claimed on the Internet.
Which is humbling, when I'm thinking unflattering things about all the "other people" who gobble up propaganda without critical thinking.
I'm not saying this story is false, but simply that I and perhaps others believed it immediately, merely because we were prejudiced to believe it, and heard it claimed by anyone.
What you're leaving out is that CBS isn't posing as a "USA Citizen from Springfield", while being from another country, sponsored by a foreign state in an undisclosed way.
Do you think ID Checks on social media should be implemented to avoid those problems?
Do you? Both posts linked above were made with full identity disclosure. Does it make anyone outside of a tiny minority that understands how media works more aware of the manipulation? Does this awareness make manipulation less effective?
> Both posts linked above were made with full identity disclosure.
Well that's why I said those posts are a bad example. I'm talking about those who pose as something they're not funded to do so, covertly.
So lets say, if you had someone from a foreign country with an ID Check claim to be something they're not (you could even publicly display their country), would make all of those efforts a bit more transparent.
Or for example, with group of Youtubers known to promote propaganda, now we know they were paid to do so by a foreign country. Now you can completely dismiss them, and with an easy reminder, you can put their credibility in check.
> Does this awareness make manipulation less effective?
I think so, the best thing you can do is inform people. Of course, this should be done collectively, or else it would be targeted for conspiracy theories.
I don't think ID checks should be implemented. Few nation states aren't ready not abuse this. The US might be able to, but certainly not most European countries.
I don't really see how an institution being transparent about who they are, is worse about institutions hiding who they are and posing as someone they're not, while being funded by a state.
At present, the situation in the state of Israel seems very favorable for launching a major project aimed at influencing public opinion. The goal of such influence is to rip Israel out of the general Western anti-Russian agenda and to create a sustainable public opinion which would deem neo-Nazism and dictatorship in Ukraine, rendering aid to neo Nazis, and, therefore, the escalation of the conflict by the West and helping anti-Russian political emigration unacceptable. Under current circumstances, these goals could be achieved in a relatively short term, relying on forces that in fact exist within the country as well as in the Jewish diaspora in the United States. Based on this, the key indicator of the effectiveness of the project will be an increase in the number of Israeli citizens supporting Russia in the fight against Nazism."
"Israel and Poland, which have clashed repeatedly in recent years over differing interpretations of the history of the Second World War, came together on Thursday to issue a rare joint condemnation of Ukraine over its efforts to rehabilitate nationalists who collaborated with the Nazis.
The criticism came one day after Ukrainians marked the 111th birthday of Stepan Bandera, the wartime leader of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), a violently anti-Semitic organization that collaborated with the Nazis. Among Holocaust historians, the consensus is that the OUN and its military offshoot, known as the UPA, were responsible for the deaths of thousands of Jews and up to 100,000 Poles during the war (estimates vary).
In a joint letter to civic leaders in Lviv and Kyiv, Israeli ambassador Joel Lion and his Polish counterpart, Bartosz Cichocki, expressed concern regarding efforts to honor Bandera and Andryi Melnyk, the head of a competing faction of the OUN.
In Kyiv on Wednesday, local officials raised a giant banner with Bandera’s picture over the city administration building, prompting anger from Jewish activists. That came just over a week after the Lviv Oblast Council approved funding for a 2020 celebration in honor of Melnyk.
“Remembering our innocent brothers and sisters murdered in the occupied territories of Poland 1935-1945, which now constitute a part of Ukraine, we the Ambassadors of Poland and Israel believe, that celebrating these individuals is an insult,” Lion and Cichocki wrote.
“Glorification of those who promoted actively the ethnic cleansing is counterproductive in the fight against Antisemitism and the reconciliation of our People,” they continued.
...
Thursday’s letter is the second time that Lion and Cichocki have come together to call for a change in Ukrainian memory policy. In June, the pair signed a joint letter to the mayor of the Ukrainian city of Ivano-Frankisvsk, protesting the unveiling of a monument honoring Roman Shukhevych, a collaborator with the Nazis who was implicated in the murder of countless Jews and ethnic Poles.
Following Ukraine’s 2014 revolution, the former Soviet republic’s parliament passed a series of bills known collectively as the Decommunization Laws, meant to sever the country’s ties to its Russian and Soviet past. One of the bills prohibited what it called the “public denial of the legitimacy of the struggle for independence of Ukraine in the twentieth century.”
In practical terms, these bills paved the way for the rehabilitation of Ukrainian ultranationalist figures who had collaborated with the Nazis.
Over the last several years, streets all over Ukraine have been named after far-right figures and steps have been taken to rehabilitate their images, casting them as fighters for democracy whose followers saved Jews from the Germans.
Asked about the letter, Ambassador Lion told The Times of Israel that Israel and Poland “have a common interest in combating Holocaust denial and rewriting of History.” " [0]
Seconded. "This list of specific things are Russian lies" would be a useful data point. We could clean up our own internal mental databases somewhat, and we could adjust our priors as to which information sources were telling it straight.
There's one subtle aspect that we tend to lose sight of. Suppose you have an election where a regular candidate or party goes up against a troll-propped devil incarnate. The latter should have no business advancing or succeeding in politics, yet here we are. By many measures, Putin has already won at that point.
If the establishment fires off the artillery, democracy itself catches flak. Almost paradoxically, democracy's defenders are forced into measured complicity and silent legitimization. It's just a flesh wound and there's not much to see here.
How do we quit being suckers? How do we stop others from amplifying the lies/propaganda that they're producing? (I mean, I guess a first step is to be more skeptical ourselves, and that we stop repeating lies. But then what? "Teach others to do the same" may not scale as well as we would like...)
What I do is remind myself that I can be fooled. We all can be. It'd easy to think that because I have a stem degree that I'm above it all - to read about propaganda and think "that's terrible, what can we do to keep _other_ people from falling for propaganda".
That's the first trap and it often engulfs us. Everyone is guilty sometimes of sit in a happy bubbles of confirmation bias and rejecting anything that doesn't feel right. Look at yourself first, look at the information you get and if it gives you a happy validated feeling then double-check it, because that might be all its supposed to do.
Start with skepticism of your own beliefs, when you talk to other people talk with the acknowledgement that we just don't know what is happening sometimes.
And teach - I tell my kids the same thing. You can be fooled, you can be scammed, don't trick yourself into believing you're too smart for it because that's what they want you to believe.
Social dissonance and alienation is what creates an attractive environment for propaganda to take hold.
Going after specific groups fails to treat the root cause. If we lived in a country where you were free to disagree without being alienated and we wouldn't have nearly as many free-radicals.
"you believe <X>, therefore you're just a typical demonic <Y>" is a great way to turn a radical idea into a radical person. Let ideas be radical so that people don't have to be
There is no substitute for teaching critical thinking skills. The childhood education system needs to prioritize that above all else, demonstration of those skills must be regularly rewarded throughout adult life, and those who flagrantly disregard them need to be properly ridiculed.
This serves our society not just for resisting foreign propaganda, but also reducing the inefficiency brought about by sycophants and the short-sighted promises of charlatans.
It doesn't scale well, it is a hard thing to maintain a society of critical thinkers, and there are powerful elements out there who actively work to oppose it, but alas the right thing is often not easy.
>The childhood education system needs to prioritize that above all else, demonstration of those skills must be regularly rewarded throughout adult life, and those who flagrantly disregard them need to be properly ridiculed.
Who you think is going to support that? Government? No matter the flag or hat color all are happy to have a herd that can be managed by the sound of a bell.
The power of Russian propaganda is that it’s based on kernels of truth:
* Germany is getting economically fucked.
* the US is wasting taxpayers’ money.
* the Polish farmers were getting screwed by cheap, low-quality grain.
The US/EU strategy of downplaying all of the above works as long as the economy’s fine. And when it isn’t, one can whine about Russian propaganda all they want, but the incumbent political parties have great chances of being voted out.
> How do we stop others from amplifying the lies/propaganda that they're producing?
By penalizing the companies that make that extremely easy and convenient for external actors to push their propaganda. Basically the whole userbase is for sale for the... really for the lowest bidder.
Learn the history of uncomfortable things. I’m reading The Wages of Destruction. It details the economic incompetence of the Nazis.
That was surprising! The Nazis (and fascists generally) are portrayed as competent to the point of ruthless roboticness. But that’s their propaganda, not reality.
Jingoism, isolationism (military and economic), racial scapegoating…these are used by extremists to consolidate power. In the medium run, they almost always fail. They rise because of dissatisfaction, almost always the fault of the elites. But at that moment of dissatisfaction, the polis has a choice: confront the problems head on, or distract with one of the above. When a society chooses the latter, it tends to fall.
Historically the nonsense leading up to all that weakens the state and prompts “integration” into a neighbour. (Conquest.) That both kept people rational and solved the problem when they weren’t. Modern warfare means that is no longer an option. So the stupidity runs longer, potentially for a lifetime, without resolution while the society rots.
> How do we quit being suckers? How do we stop others from amplifying the lies/propaganda that they're producing?
I think the crucial step is to raise awareness of this problem.
The message should be straightforward: there are covert groups of people looking to undermine and destroy what Western societies built, including our way of living - and they're doing so by passing as one of us.
They're sowing discord, they believe we're dumb, predictable, and easy to manipulate, and they want us to be in chaos fighting each other.
But the main issue is that some political actors see value in this, and prefer to leverage this dissent for the illusion of political gain, at the cost of destroying the social fabric - and this is the part I struggle to understand.
How can personal gain surpass the common good? Who knows.
One thing is internal political discord, it's part of democracy. But how do people welcome others to attack their peers?
It's like brothers who fight at home, but at school, they have each other's back against bullies.
Currently, one of the brothers is siding with the bullies.
For this to be successful it would need to be part of a political union, or else one side will agree with the propaganda bots stating this is the "old false boogeyman hunt, it is all fabrication of the deep state/CIA/etc". Then you have massive podcasts that love to entertain people with this stuff, once again for personal gain.
So without political union against it, it will only get worse.
Other things:
- social media profiles with more than X amount of followers would need to have id verified;
- social media personalities with X amount of views/reach would need to disclose their income statements;
if the most common social media platforms (e.g. facebook, twitter) would count downvotes (does not have to be 1-1), then the most outrageous posts would not get to the top. Pretty easy actually. Also, I do not believe that "rage" really makes a platform better in the long term (or necessarily more profitable).
Of course that is only one aspect but it would help a lot wrt online culture and propaganda.
A blanket increase in skepticism might not work, could be counterproductive, and you can argue that blind skepticism is one of the root causes of current disinformation crisis. People feel like they are superior thinkers because they reject every widely-held description of reality and embrace every conspiracy theory they find on the web.
It's not a solution 'to be more skeptical'. The sorriest propaganda victims are skeptical to a paranoid degree.
We should be more skeptical when a situation warrants skepticism, and trusting when a situation warrants trust.
Which is to say: everyone should quickly become wiser and worldlier. Sadly, that's not a realistic plan!
What we truly need is higher regulation of social media. With too much internet freedom, the world becomes increasingly unhinged. That's a bummer, but look around: the web we have now is failing us.
This is repeating the mistakes of the past due to fear, a very common reaction.
There is not undemocratic regime that came to power because people had too much freedom. It did never happen anywhere and will never happen. Even with new things like the internet or punk music.
"Never"? Napoleon Bonaparte, Adolf Hitler come to mind. It's easier to make a case for authoritarians always grabbing power by exploiting freedom.
But the world is too complicated to reveal an iron-clad rule about this - a person can pick and choose historical events to back their argument.
One looks at social media today and sees rampant mis- and disinformation, and then sees authoritarians rising to power, ostensibly due to this information environment.
I would be very pleased to believe that uncensored social media makes the world more free; I am not sufficiently imaginative to see how.
To demand censorship of free information is an inherently authoritarian policy. Perhaps even the most authoritarian demand of them all, or do you have other examples?
To err on the side of freedom remains the correct choice. I am not saying that there are no negative social media platforms, I just say that there is no authority on the correctness of information and everyone is entitled to form their own opinion. And I am sure I won't like some of these opinions either.
Hitler had a massive and extensive censorship machine. People were afraid to say the wrong things. That today some people believe freedom of expression is the cause of his rise is misinformation itself and a huge educational gap. But true, the dynamics are more complicated if you look into it more closely, but in the end resolve to the same conclusion.
With apologies, I can't muster the enthusiasm to argue this issue again. For whatever reason I had this debate repeatedly in 2017. 'Paradox of Tolerance' and so on. Cheers
Some of the first examples of fake comments on social media (e.g. 38 years old German woman saying that giving up Russian gas has damaged the country's economy and that Germany doesn't have to hurt itself for Ukraine) express perfectly legitimate and quite obvious opinions that certainly don't need a Russian agent to be spread or even suggested- probably there are millions of German citizens thinking the same.
It's definitely great for an adversary of Russia to be able to claim that such an opinion is illegitimate, having being spread by an enemy agent. Now you don't need to engage with the argument and you can just dismiss it as an example of enemy propaganda.
It is hard to read things like this and not have a strong emotional reaction instead of the appropriate strong intellectual one. Fundamentally attacks like these need to start with the question 'What is an appropriate response?'. These attacks are having an actual impact and have likely swayed many elections. Effectively they have brought down at least parts of various governments. That reasoning arguably calls for a very strong response since it is a real existential threat to countries. I think that a major issue here however is that governments haven't actually internalized how destructive these threats are, likely because they are using them indiscriminately themselves. "It's just propaganda and only electrons" Admitting the scale and impact of actions like these would be condemning their own actions. We need stronger international understanding that things like this are actually violent attacks aimed at overthrowing a government and that they should be considered potentially acts of war. At the same time however we need to constantly fight to deescalate since this is a new area of conflict and missteps can lead to tragedy. Figuring out responses that work, without increasing attacks, both virtual and physical, is key.
Honestly, the appropriate response is to hope that the people most affected by tactics like this will say, "Gee, maybe I shouldn't believe everything I read."
I don't think we can really stop outside propaganda. But it's depressing at how much Americans are affected by it. Many prominent Americans have re-posted material that is demonstrably traceable back to Russian troll factories.
I don't believe that those are actually the source of our differences, though I do think they exaggerate them. The real problem is that we seem awfully willing to believe the worst in each other, utterly suspending any thought of verifying it.
The Russians are pushing us to do what we're already doing to ourselves. Maybe if people see this and take a moment to think, things will get slightly better.
But I doubt it.
Let’s start here: what are YOU going to do about it other than high brow HN?
Solid point. Not sure. I barely use social media and I don't think I have shared a meme in my life. Not sure I will change much about what I would do, but I have considered contacting my representatives about things like this. (I have contacted them in the past about other issues) Beyond that I think engaging in constructive discussions about the discussion is an important thing we are missing and I hope I am trying to do that now with responses like this. Maybe.
Who are your representatives? Do they really represent you?
I think foreign influence on elections is probably much less impactful than many would think. Campaigns spend literally hundreds of millions of dollars for a single election. There was some fear mongering article an election or two ago about Russian spending $100k on influencing tactics and everyone was like “omg they’re swaying the election! My candidate lost because of $100k!”
Which to me seems like one of two options are true:
Russia knows how to spend money a thousand times more effectively than any presidential campaign we’ve ever seen, and understands how to influence voters better than any American
Or
The $100k did absolutely nothing and we should go touch some grass
I'm also skeptical about the magnitude of their effect, but I wouldn't entirely discount it, either.
The actual campaigns are limited in what they can do. They can buy a lot of advertising that insinuates terrible things about their opponent, but they can only lie so much before they are subject to defamation charges. They can't get away with paying operatives to pretend to be the other side, "concerned" about something the candidate did or said.
I don't know how effective such tactics really are. It's entirely possible that they lay a groundwork of negativity: "Sure, that troll on the Internet might have been lying, but maybe that just means that this less-unbelievable thing is actually true."
It's impossible to measure. But in an election that's close, it doesn't take much, especially with the Electoral College. Elections swing on a few thousand votes -- a microscopic fraction of the ~150,000,000 votes that are cast.
So I concur that the effect is probably small. But I'm not so sure that the small effect is unimportant. It gets to shift things in ways that the campaigns, and even the supposedly non-aligned SuperPACs, can't do.
[flagged]
This is plausible.
However, reminded of critical thinking, I realized I initially accepted as truth something reported on some Web site I'd never even heard of.
I didn't quickly find any recognizable credible outlets reporting this, so now I suspect I'm not the only person who jumped at something they were biased to believe, simply because it was claimed on the Internet.
Which is humbling, when I'm thinking unflattering things about all the "other people" who gobble up propaganda without critical thinking.
I'm not saying this story is false, but simply that I and perhaps others believed it immediately, merely because we were prejudiced to believe it, and heard it claimed by anyone.
No need to manipulate elections from outside. Every country does it their own way without assistance. Compare two tweets of the same agency:
1. https://x.com/CBSNews/status/1802803402545467446?t=29N_O490Q...
2. https://x.com/CBSNews/status/1823049308230324279?t=9Tr3aIPVV...
Screenshots: https://imgur.com/a/y2fDLWz
What you're leaving out is that CBS isn't posing as a "USA Citizen from Springfield", while being from another country, sponsored by a foreign state in an undisclosed way.
Do you think ID Checks on social media should be implemented to avoid those problems?
Do you? Both posts linked above were made with full identity disclosure. Does it make anyone outside of a tiny minority that understands how media works more aware of the manipulation? Does this awareness make manipulation less effective?
> Both posts linked above were made with full identity disclosure.
Well that's why I said those posts are a bad example. I'm talking about those who pose as something they're not funded to do so, covertly.
So lets say, if you had someone from a foreign country with an ID Check claim to be something they're not (you could even publicly display their country), would make all of those efforts a bit more transparent.
Or for example, with group of Youtubers known to promote propaganda, now we know they were paid to do so by a foreign country. Now you can completely dismiss them, and with an easy reminder, you can put their credibility in check.
> Does this awareness make manipulation less effective?
I think so, the best thing you can do is inform people. Of course, this should be done collectively, or else it would be targeted for conspiracy theories.
I don't think ID checks should be implemented. Few nation states aren't ready not abuse this. The US might be able to, but certainly not most European countries.
CBS is posing as journalism when it’s really just propaganda, which is worse
I don't really see how an institution being transparent about who they are, is worse about institutions hiding who they are and posing as someone they're not, while being funded by a state.
Can you explain further?
These Russians bought their domains through Namecheap. That doesn't seem like a smart move when you are bombing all their Ukrainian staff.
And this is likely only the beginning. Election starts in two months.
Where can I see the 100s of leaked memes?
Some here: https://www.justice.gov/d9/2024-09/doppelganger_affidavit_9....
Memes start on page 163
yikes..
"Project goals:
At present, the situation in the state of Israel seems very favorable for launching a major project aimed at influencing public opinion. The goal of such influence is to rip Israel out of the general Western anti-Russian agenda and to create a sustainable public opinion which would deem neo-Nazism and dictatorship in Ukraine, rendering aid to neo Nazis, and, therefore, the escalation of the conflict by the West and helping anti-Russian political emigration unacceptable. Under current circumstances, these goals could be achieved in a relatively short term, relying on forces that in fact exist within the country as well as in the Jewish diaspora in the United States. Based on this, the key indicator of the effectiveness of the project will be an increase in the number of Israeli citizens supporting Russia in the fight against Nazism."
Doesn't seem to be that hard a goal.
"Israel and Poland, which have clashed repeatedly in recent years over differing interpretations of the history of the Second World War, came together on Thursday to issue a rare joint condemnation of Ukraine over its efforts to rehabilitate nationalists who collaborated with the Nazis.
The criticism came one day after Ukrainians marked the 111th birthday of Stepan Bandera, the wartime leader of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), a violently anti-Semitic organization that collaborated with the Nazis. Among Holocaust historians, the consensus is that the OUN and its military offshoot, known as the UPA, were responsible for the deaths of thousands of Jews and up to 100,000 Poles during the war (estimates vary).
In a joint letter to civic leaders in Lviv and Kyiv, Israeli ambassador Joel Lion and his Polish counterpart, Bartosz Cichocki, expressed concern regarding efforts to honor Bandera and Andryi Melnyk, the head of a competing faction of the OUN.
In Kyiv on Wednesday, local officials raised a giant banner with Bandera’s picture over the city administration building, prompting anger from Jewish activists. That came just over a week after the Lviv Oblast Council approved funding for a 2020 celebration in honor of Melnyk.
“Remembering our innocent brothers and sisters murdered in the occupied territories of Poland 1935-1945, which now constitute a part of Ukraine, we the Ambassadors of Poland and Israel believe, that celebrating these individuals is an insult,” Lion and Cichocki wrote.
“Glorification of those who promoted actively the ethnic cleansing is counterproductive in the fight against Antisemitism and the reconciliation of our People,” they continued.
...
Thursday’s letter is the second time that Lion and Cichocki have come together to call for a change in Ukrainian memory policy. In June, the pair signed a joint letter to the mayor of the Ukrainian city of Ivano-Frankisvsk, protesting the unveiling of a monument honoring Roman Shukhevych, a collaborator with the Nazis who was implicated in the murder of countless Jews and ethnic Poles.
Following Ukraine’s 2014 revolution, the former Soviet republic’s parliament passed a series of bills known collectively as the Decommunization Laws, meant to sever the country’s ties to its Russian and Soviet past. One of the bills prohibited what it called the “public denial of the legitimacy of the struggle for independence of Ukraine in the twentieth century.”
In practical terms, these bills paved the way for the rehabilitation of Ukrainian ultranationalist figures who had collaborated with the Nazis.
Over the last several years, streets all over Ukraine have been named after far-right figures and steps have been taken to rehabilitate their images, casting them as fighters for democracy whose followers saved Jews from the Germans.
Asked about the letter, Ambassador Lion told The Times of Israel that Israel and Poland “have a common interest in combating Holocaust denial and rewriting of History.” " [0]
[0] https://www.timesofisrael.com/in-row-over-holocaust-history-...
Where can I watch the video mentioned (or just fansied by the author) in the first paragraph?
Seconded. "This list of specific things are Russian lies" would be a useful data point. We could clean up our own internal mental databases somewhat, and we could adjust our priors as to which information sources were telling it straight.
Try Musk tweets. He directly posted at least one, the "When it's been 5 minutes and you haven't spread Russian propaganda"
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12589987/Perhaps-re...
uh, rather 'When it's been 5 minutes and you haven't asked for a billion dollars in aid'.
How do we know that this is true?. That is todays problem - can you trust anything?
There's one subtle aspect that we tend to lose sight of. Suppose you have an election where a regular candidate or party goes up against a troll-propped devil incarnate. The latter should have no business advancing or succeeding in politics, yet here we are. By many measures, Putin has already won at that point.
If the establishment fires off the artillery, democracy itself catches flak. Almost paradoxically, democracy's defenders are forced into measured complicity and silent legitimization. It's just a flesh wound and there's not much to see here.
Important story.
How do we quit being suckers? How do we stop others from amplifying the lies/propaganda that they're producing? (I mean, I guess a first step is to be more skeptical ourselves, and that we stop repeating lies. But then what? "Teach others to do the same" may not scale as well as we would like...)
What I do is remind myself that I can be fooled. We all can be. It'd easy to think that because I have a stem degree that I'm above it all - to read about propaganda and think "that's terrible, what can we do to keep _other_ people from falling for propaganda".
That's the first trap and it often engulfs us. Everyone is guilty sometimes of sit in a happy bubbles of confirmation bias and rejecting anything that doesn't feel right. Look at yourself first, look at the information you get and if it gives you a happy validated feeling then double-check it, because that might be all its supposed to do.
Start with skepticism of your own beliefs, when you talk to other people talk with the acknowledgement that we just don't know what is happening sometimes.
And teach - I tell my kids the same thing. You can be fooled, you can be scammed, don't trick yourself into believing you're too smart for it because that's what they want you to believe.
Social dissonance and alienation is what creates an attractive environment for propaganda to take hold.
Going after specific groups fails to treat the root cause. If we lived in a country where you were free to disagree without being alienated and we wouldn't have nearly as many free-radicals.
"you believe <X>, therefore you're just a typical demonic <Y>" is a great way to turn a radical idea into a radical person. Let ideas be radical so that people don't have to be
There is no substitute for teaching critical thinking skills. The childhood education system needs to prioritize that above all else, demonstration of those skills must be regularly rewarded throughout adult life, and those who flagrantly disregard them need to be properly ridiculed.
This serves our society not just for resisting foreign propaganda, but also reducing the inefficiency brought about by sycophants and the short-sighted promises of charlatans.
It doesn't scale well, it is a hard thing to maintain a society of critical thinkers, and there are powerful elements out there who actively work to oppose it, but alas the right thing is often not easy.
>The childhood education system needs to prioritize that above all else, demonstration of those skills must be regularly rewarded throughout adult life, and those who flagrantly disregard them need to be properly ridiculed.
Who you think is going to support that? Government? No matter the flag or hat color all are happy to have a herd that can be managed by the sound of a bell.
The power of Russian propaganda is that it’s based on kernels of truth:
* Germany is getting economically fucked.
* the US is wasting taxpayers’ money.
* the Polish farmers were getting screwed by cheap, low-quality grain.
The US/EU strategy of downplaying all of the above works as long as the economy’s fine. And when it isn’t, one can whine about Russian propaganda all they want, but the incumbent political parties have great chances of being voted out.
> How do we stop others from amplifying the lies/propaganda that they're producing?
By penalizing the companies that make that extremely easy and convenient for external actors to push their propaganda. Basically the whole userbase is for sale for the... really for the lowest bidder.
> How do we quit being suckers?
Learn the history of uncomfortable things. I’m reading The Wages of Destruction. It details the economic incompetence of the Nazis.
That was surprising! The Nazis (and fascists generally) are portrayed as competent to the point of ruthless roboticness. But that’s their propaganda, not reality.
Jingoism, isolationism (military and economic), racial scapegoating…these are used by extremists to consolidate power. In the medium run, they almost always fail. They rise because of dissatisfaction, almost always the fault of the elites. But at that moment of dissatisfaction, the polis has a choice: confront the problems head on, or distract with one of the above. When a society chooses the latter, it tends to fall.
Historically the nonsense leading up to all that weakens the state and prompts “integration” into a neighbour. (Conquest.) That both kept people rational and solved the problem when they weren’t. Modern warfare means that is no longer an option. So the stupidity runs longer, potentially for a lifetime, without resolution while the society rots.
> How do we quit being suckers? How do we stop others from amplifying the lies/propaganda that they're producing?
I think the crucial step is to raise awareness of this problem.
The message should be straightforward: there are covert groups of people looking to undermine and destroy what Western societies built, including our way of living - and they're doing so by passing as one of us.
They're sowing discord, they believe we're dumb, predictable, and easy to manipulate, and they want us to be in chaos fighting each other.
But the main issue is that some political actors see value in this, and prefer to leverage this dissent for the illusion of political gain, at the cost of destroying the social fabric - and this is the part I struggle to understand.
How can personal gain surpass the common good? Who knows.
One thing is internal political discord, it's part of democracy. But how do people welcome others to attack their peers?
It's like brothers who fight at home, but at school, they have each other's back against bullies.
Currently, one of the brothers is siding with the bullies.
For this to be successful it would need to be part of a political union, or else one side will agree with the propaganda bots stating this is the "old false boogeyman hunt, it is all fabrication of the deep state/CIA/etc". Then you have massive podcasts that love to entertain people with this stuff, once again for personal gain.
So without political union against it, it will only get worse.
Other things:
- social media profiles with more than X amount of followers would need to have id verified;
- social media personalities with X amount of views/reach would need to disclose their income statements;
if the most common social media platforms (e.g. facebook, twitter) would count downvotes (does not have to be 1-1), then the most outrageous posts would not get to the top. Pretty easy actually. Also, I do not believe that "rage" really makes a platform better in the long term (or necessarily more profitable).
Of course that is only one aspect but it would help a lot wrt online culture and propaganda.
A blanket increase in skepticism might not work, could be counterproductive, and you can argue that blind skepticism is one of the root causes of current disinformation crisis. People feel like they are superior thinkers because they reject every widely-held description of reality and embrace every conspiracy theory they find on the web.
[dead]
We should be more skeptical when a situation warrants skepticism, and trusting when a situation warrants trust.
Which is to say: everyone should quickly become wiser and worldlier. Sadly, that's not a realistic plan!
What we truly need is higher regulation of social media. With too much internet freedom, the world becomes increasingly unhinged. That's a bummer, but look around: the web we have now is failing us.
This is repeating the mistakes of the past due to fear, a very common reaction.
There is not undemocratic regime that came to power because people had too much freedom. It did never happen anywhere and will never happen. Even with new things like the internet or punk music.
"Never"? Napoleon Bonaparte, Adolf Hitler come to mind. It's easier to make a case for authoritarians always grabbing power by exploiting freedom.
But the world is too complicated to reveal an iron-clad rule about this - a person can pick and choose historical events to back their argument.
One looks at social media today and sees rampant mis- and disinformation, and then sees authoritarians rising to power, ostensibly due to this information environment.
I would be very pleased to believe that uncensored social media makes the world more free; I am not sufficiently imaginative to see how.
To demand censorship of free information is an inherently authoritarian policy. Perhaps even the most authoritarian demand of them all, or do you have other examples?
To err on the side of freedom remains the correct choice. I am not saying that there are no negative social media platforms, I just say that there is no authority on the correctness of information and everyone is entitled to form their own opinion. And I am sure I won't like some of these opinions either.
Hitler had a massive and extensive censorship machine. People were afraid to say the wrong things. That today some people believe freedom of expression is the cause of his rise is misinformation itself and a huge educational gap. But true, the dynamics are more complicated if you look into it more closely, but in the end resolve to the same conclusion.
With apologies, I can't muster the enthusiasm to argue this issue again. For whatever reason I had this debate repeatedly in 2017. 'Paradox of Tolerance' and so on. Cheers
Popper certainly did not refer to speech here. Alright, we disagree then.
I am curious about:
- how much of this is actually true
- if it is necessarily possible for civilians to determine what is true here
- how many others wonder about these same sorts of things
Note that I have made no assertion one way or the other about the true epistemic status of these accusations.
Some of the first examples of fake comments on social media (e.g. 38 years old German woman saying that giving up Russian gas has damaged the country's economy and that Germany doesn't have to hurt itself for Ukraine) express perfectly legitimate and quite obvious opinions that certainly don't need a Russian agent to be spread or even suggested- probably there are millions of German citizens thinking the same.
It's definitely great for an adversary of Russia to be able to claim that such an opinion is illegitimate, having being spread by an enemy agent. Now you don't need to engage with the argument and you can just dismiss it as an example of enemy propaganda.
Some here: https://www.justice.gov/d9/2024-09/doppelganger_affidavit_9....
It is interesting and relevant, but does not address the questions as stated (which was not accidental).
I doubt many people would notice that, which is a big part of why it's so easy to herd Normies.
[dead]
[flagged]