> I simply can't trust ANY media, search engine, or social network anymore.
It's one of the key goals of Russian information warfare: to create a feeling that you can't tell truth apart from fiction, and to force you into apathy and paralyze you, so you become unable to act and protect your interests. Russians are among the largest pushers of conspiracy theories from Covid to QAnon, and have been for a very long time, because it is cheap and very effective way to divide free societies into infighting groups. NYC station chief of Russian foreign intelligence used to visit public libraries to post conspiracy theories on Geocities in 1990s -- that's how important it was and remains.
They flood all available channels with utter nonsense to make people turn their brains off. Just today a general and the spokesperson for Russians Ministry of Defense tried to justify the war by saying that the United States was training migratory birds in secret Ukrainian laboratories to carry dangerous pathogens into Russia: https://redd.it/tb6sn8 Antivaxx groups have already switched to parroting such crap, because many of them are seeded by Russia.
By the way, Mearsheimer is an idiot and nobody takes him seriously in Eastern Europe. You might as well read books by Nazis explaining why Germans had the right to Lebensraum in the East. Instead of precompiled knowledge provided by TV talking heads or authoritative-appearing "experts", I recommend building up knowledge from basic building blocks. Start by reading general histories of the regions you are interested in to understand historic difficulties that people in those places have faced over the past several centuries and what their current goals and motivations are. Then you don't need Mearsheimers to tell you what's going on, you can derive it from your knowledge. This applies to everything else too. If you know a thing or two about basic statistics, then you're much less likely to fall for bullshit narratives like Covid conspiracy theories from people who look trustworthy. Knowledge is power.
They might be doing this. I'd be tempted, if I were Putin. But it's pretty clear that 90%+ of all claims that Russia is doing this turn out to be malevolent information operations by our own side.
Example: Hamilton 68, supposedly a website that tracked Russian "information operations" on Twitter. Except it turned out to be pure, unadulterated garbage from a US think tank that was labelling Americans who worked night shifts as Russians. That didn't stop the media reporting it as "russian disinfo" for years, and when the truth finally came out, refusing to report on their own failed reporting and complicity.
There's tons of stuff like that. If a western source is making a claim about Russian misinformation, it's pretty much a dead cert thing that they're making it up.
>People just don't trust authorities anymore, because authorities time and time again have misled them.
In some cases this is intentional. Less credibility/belief in experts allows for authoritarian governments to more easily ignore the truth.
I found the book "Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible" [0] was an entertaining read that did a good job showing how information jamming is working. Though this is about the Russian experience it is a global issue.
>Astroturfing and fake grassroots campaigns further undermine people's trust in what they hear and read.
One of the more fascinating approaches was how opposition groups are funded secretly and then later intentionally exposed to create a credibility crisis.
> Russia has been at the forefront of internet disinformation techniques at least since 2014, when it pioneered the use of bot farms to spread fake news about its invasion of Crimea.
The idea that Russian or Soviet propaganda has ever (in the last 50 years) come close in potency to Western propaganda is itself a massive lie and propaganda campaign.
By the time the USSR collapsed, many Soviet citizens had positive/neutral views of Western culture if not politics. It was a total soft power defeat.
The meat of the article may be true, all countries and large orgs create propaganda, but this framing that we in the West are somehow playing "catch-up" is utterly false and misleading. Modern Russian propaganda is relatively pathetic and Putin himself admitted as much in his recent interview (which is itself a poor piece of propaganda for many reasons).
> Truth is that people largely place trust in institutions and people they are used to and identify with, often for irrational reasons. People are prone to FUD. Theyre lazy and passive.
I think to a degree, this is a misunderstanding. The Russian approach to disinformation in particular does not sell the message "trust us!" - at least, not in the West. Instead, they push the message "trust nobody!" In fact, RT's slogan is "question everything". While that sounds enlightened, in fact, total lack of trust makes you cognitively disabled. You can't believe anything or any expert. All too often, you then "do your own research" and, as a gullible amateur, are sucked into conspiracy theories.
The problem isn't the sheeple, it's the wake-up-sheeple people.
> The thing that bothers me the most about framing this as "foreign influence" is that precisely no one knows even remotely accurately how much foreign influence is taking place in Western countries, but this meme has been repeated 24 x 7 for years now, typically with hat tips to "evidence" (which is usually just a narrative based theory based on some inconclusive circumstantial evidence, if you follow the thread of evidence through the articles), that the majority of the population seems not just completely convinced that it is an epidemic, but they will passionately argue against anyone who asks where's the beef.
But that's the thing, if people don't really know how much trolling, extremism, and disinformation is real vs. manufactured, Russian intelligence services have achieved their goal. People will argue over nothing, accuse others of being bots, and imagine new conspiracy theories based on the idea that foreign hands are meddling in things.
The goal is to sow chaos, so if people respond with hysteria, that still achieves the goal. Understanding and not reflexively reacting to trolling, regardless of the source, is what can blunt the influence of the behavior. If people are not even aware of the deliberate trolling attempts, it's less likely they'll be able to counter it, or at least ignore it.
> Yet another form of misinformation is political lies of the sort that we’ve been seeing most notoriously from Russian propaganda lately.
Are you referring to propaganda that Russia is spreading or the labeling of anyone who disagrees with the common narrative as Russian propaganda? It would seem to be there's a lot more of the second going on. Likewise, as much misinformation as there is going around, there's just as much labeling things as disinformation in order wield political muscle, which was rampant for the last two years during covid.
> It’s Albright’s research that helped build a bruising story in The New York Times on how the Russians used fake identities to stoke American rage.
OK, so Albright has done outstanding work. His map[0] is mind-blowing.
But there's another key aspect: This isn't new. For sure, Russian propagandists are using the Internet very effectively. However, Russian influence on US culture and politics goes back many decades. Communist groups in the US during the 30s-60s. US anti-war movements in the 60s-80s. The anti-draft movement, with heavy Quaker involvement. And the Soviet-American Friendship Society. That Ramparts article about Johnson and JFK's corpse.
And since the 90s, they've been focusing more on the radical right. Pushing distrust of the US government. I saw that developing in cypherpunk communities. But I wasn't sure, until RT appeared.
And by the way, I'm not arguing that Russia isn't justified in doing all this. It's arguably just defense. Because the US does it too. In Afghanistan, supporting the Taliban. In the Balkans. In the Ukraine. In Chile. I mean, they broke up the Soviet Union, and one aspect was propaganda.
Anyway, just sayin'.
Edit: I'm not arguing that those were all Russian front groups. Just that they were Russian influenced. And here's another example: Mad Magazine :) Also, the US did the same. I mean, the US promoted modern/abstract art as a Cold War weapon!
Edit: I'm not making this up.[1] Also, re support offered to the JFK campaign.[2]
> Trouble with these "disinformation" campaigns is that when your entire "news" is disinformation people don't trust it and learn to read between the lines. And the Soviet people were experts at that by then, so almost nobody believed this bullshit.
My understanding is that the the ultimate goal of disinformation isn't get get people to believe the lies, it's to politically neutralize them by making them cynical and mistrustful of everything, including the truth.
> At home, they say the sky is red, everyone says "Yes" or gets a visit from the secret police.
That is the old(er) (outdated?) view of propaganda. The/A new view is to generally not necessarily care about about any particular message:
> We characterize the contemporary Russian model for propaganda as “the firehose of falsehood” because of two of its distinctive features: high numbers of channels and messages and a shameless willingness to disseminate partial truths or outright fictions. In the words of one observer, “[N]ew Russian propaganda entertains, confuses and overwhelms the audience.”
> The Russian destabilization playbook is (and has been for decades) to sow plausible-enough-for-some-people lies, and let the rank stupidity of the target population take it from there. Google "agitprop" for more on this.
They could never dream of doing as much damage spreading misinformation during a disaster than Fox News does. I'm only half kidding when I say Fox is likely studied by Russian propaganda agents.
"However, the bulk of the content appears aimed at creating a sense of dismay over the state of America without any clear partisan bent." This is a key point. The objective of modern Russian propaganda is to sow confusion and reap inaction. See McMaster's "Battlegrounds" book.[1] The winning strategy for Russia in eastern Europe is a non-united United States, and if possible a non-united European Union.
Classical propaganda is heavy drum-beating for how great your side is. That goes back to at least Cicero, increased when newspapers came along, and really got going during WWII. That stuff rapidly gets boring, and is usually aimed, at least in part, at stroking the backs of your own political leaders.
Increasing the noise level so that no one can believe anything isn't a new idea. British "black" propaganda during WWII used it quite a bit. "Rumor-mongering" was once a thing.[2] But it didn't scale.
It's picked up in recent years partly because it's much more effective when combined with ad targeting. This is a problem.
>There's something called information warfare, which basically means manipulating public discourse to further one's political goals. Russia is notoriously good at it, for example. West sucks at it
Funnily, both of the above points about Russia and US are basically accepted after manipulation of public discourse to further one's political goals in behalf of the latter. Arrived at through countless articles about "misinformation", "indepedent" think tanks and "fact checking" bodies, the BS stories about the 2016 elections and Steele Dossier, all major media outlets complicit, the "Twitter Files" style cooperation of state agencies with Big Tech, all the client states governments and media playing along, and so on.
Russia is at best mediocre or insignificant in this, China is non-existant, and the US has every major force in this game, selling its own discourse, including on the EU side.
> Russian disinformation is not trying to create consistent counter-narrative to the West. They just throw out stuff wildly to sow confusion, doubt and distrust.
Adam Curtis covers this in his 2016 HyperNormalisation in "A World Without Power":
Yet somehow this was not known beforehand for years and somehow only became "apparent" when Russia became the public enemy.
> The article makes it sound like Russia has been at war with the US since 2014, but the US hasn't realized it, yet.
This article makes it sound like military industrial complex fat cats don't get their pockets filled with tax money fast enough, so plebs need some pushing.
Retroactively changing the past to accommodate the present day narrative is a common political trick, similarly to how Radio Free Europe's reports on Ukrainian ultranationalists challenging the monopoly on violence had suddenly become "Russian propaganda".
Another tiny step closer to the hot phase of WWIII, I guess.
> The persuasive benefits that Russian propagandists gain from presenting the first version of events (which then must be dislodged by true accounts at much greater effort) could be removed if the true accounts were instead presented first.
Or at all. Just about every news outlet threw credibility away in a frenzy of mass hysteria these last 18 months. There's simply few bastions of impartiality left.
> corrections that provide an alternative story to help fill the resulting gap in understanding when false “facts” are removed.
So, like "alternative facts"?
> Our fourth suggestion for responding to Russian propaganda: Compete!
A bigger, better firehose! One on the right side of history™.
The sad reality is that people don't care about the truth nearly as much as they care about information which validates their worldview. The market acknowledges this and behaves accordingly.
Furthermore, not all truths are equally palpable and I'd argue that repeated censorship of uncomfortable/offensive truths has caused a breach of trust so wide that it has cast doubt on sources of information as a whole. See the 'Fake News' phenomenon.
It's from this set of experiences that people are lured to RT and 'alternative' sources of news. The next thing you know they're buying a years supply of Survival Shield X-2 Nascent iodine on infowars.
> In the process, Russia has built the most effective propaganda operation of the 21st century so far, one that thrives in the feverish political climates that have descended on many Western publics.
Maybe I'm just being paranoid, but I wonder how much of that "feverish political climates that have descended on many Western publics" is due to Russian agitprop and other "active measures".
The article you cited mentions "evidence". If there was indeed "evidence", we would know it for a fact.
These articles merely try to attract facts-ignoring audience to which they can then spread misinformation that cannot easily be disproved. While these people are busy theorizing about the plausibility of the suggested idea, they are easily manipulated. The reason is that they would only be trusting the misinformation spreaders because only their opinions would be compatible with their understanding of the world.
It is, unfortunately, as simple as that. Create misinformation that cannot possibly be disproved. Spread it out. Watch as people waste years coming with crazy constructions of hypothetical worlds where whatever you claim might potentially be true. Profit off of their stupidity by having huge influence on their opinions. Rinse and repeat.
This is how Putin's propaganda works. And this is also how Trump's lies work.
It's one of the key goals of Russian information warfare: to create a feeling that you can't tell truth apart from fiction, and to force you into apathy and paralyze you, so you become unable to act and protect your interests. Russians are among the largest pushers of conspiracy theories from Covid to QAnon, and have been for a very long time, because it is cheap and very effective way to divide free societies into infighting groups. NYC station chief of Russian foreign intelligence used to visit public libraries to post conspiracy theories on Geocities in 1990s -- that's how important it was and remains.
They flood all available channels with utter nonsense to make people turn their brains off. Just today a general and the spokesperson for Russians Ministry of Defense tried to justify the war by saying that the United States was training migratory birds in secret Ukrainian laboratories to carry dangerous pathogens into Russia: https://redd.it/tb6sn8 Antivaxx groups have already switched to parroting such crap, because many of them are seeded by Russia.
By the way, Mearsheimer is an idiot and nobody takes him seriously in Eastern Europe. You might as well read books by Nazis explaining why Germans had the right to Lebensraum in the East. Instead of precompiled knowledge provided by TV talking heads or authoritative-appearing "experts", I recommend building up knowledge from basic building blocks. Start by reading general histories of the regions you are interested in to understand historic difficulties that people in those places have faced over the past several centuries and what their current goals and motivations are. Then you don't need Mearsheimers to tell you what's going on, you can derive it from your knowledge. This applies to everything else too. If you know a thing or two about basic statistics, then you're much less likely to fall for bullshit narratives like Covid conspiracy theories from people who look trustworthy. Knowledge is power.
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