Recent searches
Search options
Russia discovered already 20 years ago that it's much more efficient to spend money on affecting the discussion online than it is when spent on missiles and tanks.
Russia conducts over 60% of all disinformation operations online. In the whole world. More than everybody else put together.
The West still hasn't caught up.
Instead we have enabled the tech companies to profit from selling advertisements between shows that parrot their propaganda.
@gimulnautti We need a new norm that paid speech is not protected free speech but a commercial activity fully subject to being regulated or banned. And then ban it.
Donations and crowdfunding might make for a fuzzy line there though. Arguably it's so they can *continue* to afford whatever they're doing, but there is a risk of one doing things specifically for the money at some point (where it then becomes paid speech again).
@gimulnautti Does that include fox new's youtube channel?
Trump hasn't finished replacing the CIA and NSA brass with flunkies, who will turn them into the greatest disinformation machine the world has ever known.
Not a hard prediction...
@gimulnautti I would argue the West won big on the propaganda front during Cold war.
Maybe that's what motivated Russia to prioritize the new propaganda front.
@gimulnautti interesting. how did you come up with that 60% number ?
@slim That number is of course speculative, but based on a meta-analysis of the data behind the Oxford Internet Research Institute's "Global Disinformation Order" report in 2020.
Russia doesn't disclose their budgets so we can only guess based on number of incidences reported.
@gimulnautti Maybe the Pro-Israel LGBT Overlords of the Modern West promoted the dissidence that people considering Russia/Putin - China/"winnie pooh" options to "enjoy the online disinformation" correlated to the great insecurity, inflation and society in decay living everyday.
And Russia/China never called others opinions as "MuH FaScIsT" in first place.
Please, check yourself why "people become fascists and pro-putin" in first place before blaming them.
@gimulnautti Russia and other Axis members also run disinformation sources with websites and think tanks. Those play a crucial role of supplying and legitimizing the bot networks' talking points.
It would be a useful investigative journalism to identify the flow of money to them. Some are well known: The Grayzone, former Intercept journalists such as Glenn Greenwald and Ryan Grim, think talks such as Strategic Culture Foundation.
But there are many, and we don't know enough about them.
@pait An information war could have been fought, and won.
But the USA especially has been crippled by special interest groups asserting a libertarian form of anything-goes ”freedom”.
Hence any attempts at establishing unified counterbalances to Russian-style propaganda have been met as ”censorship”.
Russia doesn’t actually need you to believe anything. It only needs you to believe nothing. To block attempts at succesfull collective action, your confusion is enough.