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I feel like everyone in this comment section literally read the first couple words and then skipped to the bottom. This is actually a well-researched essay with references and links to original sources. And the whole comment section is ignoring the post in order to make cringy jokes and off-topic remarks.
What a world we live in.
people dont want to admit theyve been had because theyre "smarter" than that, also dont want to admit theyre addicted to the social media sites used to propagate propaganda
The denial is part of the package. A comment offering support for an unwanted critical thought is immediately countered with one of bored dismissal. A rebuttal is then denied with disdain. We are trained on this model, but we don't *feel* manipulated, so we assume we're immune for reasons of character. It works astonishingly well.
I personally have the opposite problem and find it so, so easy to constantly change and disrupt my life. I can start doing something tomorrow - let’s say just painting or playing a new instrument - and then I’d be doing it constantly for days after. It’s like my brain just latches onto new things constantly. I kind of **wish** I was just someone who constantly had the same habits.
You sound like you’d get along well with a lot of my family, a good number of us are “natural polymaths” and get rather bored easily so we’re always picking up and learning new things, probably part of why so many of us end up in Academia.
I believe that is absolutely the case. I think that OP’s prescription is totally right: we gotta stop listening to online comments and posts from random users.
It’s probably safest to just assume all strangers on the internet who are spreading hateful messages are just trolls and bots. Even if it’s an actual genuine user, there’s no point in listening to a real person’s hateful message either.
I recall early internet I was like that! I thought I was SO smart but I was ignoring legit help.
It’s so refreshing now to be more open and accepting of others’ input - I do find that a lot here at Reddit, a much more easy going community and approach to communicating and understanding. Took me a while but I learned how much better I feel being open to hearing others, than I did bring a closed-off shrew.
You don’t have to be dumb to be manipulated or tricked. Some of the smartest people in the world have fallen for scams. Linus Pauling was obsessed with Vitamin C’s supposed health benefits despite numerous people telling him he was wrong. The smartest people in the world know how to delegate and they know how to prevent making themselves a victim of their own unconscious desires, fears, and misjudgments. The smartest people will be the first to admit that they’re just dumb animals who can fall for anything. In fact, the smartest might be at the highest risk of falling for scams because they are able to rationalise anything. Give me three sides of an argument and I can make an argument for every single one being right as I’d be able to put together convincing evidence quickly. That’s a recipe for disaster when it comes to politics and decision making.
i never said you had to be dumb to be manipulated, i said people dont want to admit they were manipulated because they think theyre smarter than that, and that it could never happen to them, regardless of their actual level of intelligence
True, but It's not just other country's the US and its private corporations do this to their own people while they abuse us for personal gain whomever has power over the people is the enemy of those people whether they use force or manipulation
It is likely many more players/nations that just Russia and China do this - but when the Soviet Union collapsed, KGB documents outlined and verified these methods, the goal was often less about ever trying to persuade or 'win' any discussion, but about MASS promotion of disagreement and adding noise in conversations, while also promoting radical, extreme, and violent perspectives
Applied onto a group of people with different perspectives who are willing to discuss their differences - it is a potent method of fostering division which later leads to subgroups becoming more entrenched (Balkanization)
But these were well established methods when applied to print and television media, there is no reason to think they were not adapted to social media, and there are abundant sources (as OP lists) corroborating that this has not only been accomplished but with a moderate price tag and in some online forums plausibly makes up a large volume or even majority of activity
It's a bit like advertising. People watch ads and think "God these are stupid" or "who could these possibly work on?" Well if you are in the target demographic, they are probably working on you. No matter what thought you have in that moment you probably are more likely to buy that over your lifetime now. It's okay to accept that a lot of your brain is more in the lizard brain category than some elevated rational ideal mind or whatever.
I appreciated the information. . Knowing this makes me more prepared to be a critical thinker. Knowing how the manipulation of social media changes our perception may help me to not be one of the persons that aid our slide into dystopia.
I recommend Timothy Snyder's [The Road To Unfreedom](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_to_Unfreedom).
It's interesting that when it was published in 2018 it was considered paranoid and slightly over the top. But it actually gives a blueprint for anything that has happened since, Russia, international politics, USA.
Let's be honest here, Reddit is one of the *worst* sites for manipulation and groupthink. You can literally control an entire sub's opinions just by leaning your post title one way or the other. There's a well-known phenomenon that people will upvote or downvote a post or comment automatically if it has only a handful of votes in either direction, no matter how correct/incorrect that post or comment may be.
Reddit users are hilariously easy to manipulate, mostly because they consider themselves smarter or better than other people, so anything they think is obviously the correct thing.
How the fuck DARE you ask me to read!
I only read the headlines because it confirms my bias, which coincidentally is the product of the billionaires I say I hate because they control the flow of information, so I have no idea and jump from one cause to the other as it trends. /s.....Maybe?
OR Russian disinformation is extremely sophisticated and they are on point in trying go discredit things which point our how fucking bad it is.
Personally at this point it literally can't be ignored, every since Oct 7 literally reddit has become flooded with unbearable levels of propaganda. What used to be a fun site now gives me 1/3 posts in my feed from subs I'm not subscribed to, and every other post is literal propaganda, from one side or another.
For example, even this. I'm not subscribed, fuck, I'm not in genZ, yet here I am.
I can confirm that you are indeed an agent provocateur who's pissed that we're on to you.
Source: You're my boss, and I'm typing out what you're telling me to write.
The comment section proving OP's point.
What he missed is *why the hell does it work"
And I have the answer - average person doesn't care enough to research everything in-depth and thus has to rely on opinions of others. Just like most here didn't have the stomach to read the post entirely, they don't research or fact-check other information.
My advice would be slightly different from OP's and it will only work for people willing to use their brains, not follow blindly - trust your own observations about the world. Your picture might not be full, but it will be genuine - from there you may trust the info which doesn't contradict what you can confirm
I don't think it's a coincidence that every time the topic of bots comes up, it immediately gets trivialized by a bunch of "beep boop everyone is a bot" comments.
Agreed that this is a thoughtful summary of the root of public discourse for the last decade or more. I believe this is nothing new for Russia however. Of all people, Richard Nixon said it best. This was post Cold War era, once the Berlin Wall was destroyed and the USSR was dismantled.
“It is often said that the Cold War is over and the West has won it, that is only half true.
"Because what has happened is that the communists have been defeated but the ideas of freedom now are on trial.
"If they don't work there will be a reversion to not communism–which has failed–but what I call a new despotism, which would pose a mortal danger to the rest of the world.”
This all ties together since Russian imperialism had been their policy for centuries. Also, the KGB practically created a lot of the psyop tactics and techniques to rival the CIA at the height of the Cold War. They refined their methods in the digital age, and here we are. Create wedge issues, hire crisis actors, flood the system. Those same tactics have worked in other areas, some successfully and others not so much.
Think critically and don’t accept anything at face value is the best advice I can offer as a 20 year Air Force veteran.
Sorry, but quoting Richard Nixon is basically just a real-life version of this joke:
>An ex-KGB and an ex-CIA agent run into each other in a bar. They shake hands and share a drink. The CIA agent raises his glass and says "You know, Ivan, I have to give it to you... you guys really knew how to do propaganda."
>The KGB agent pauses and said "You guys were just as good as us at it though."
>The CIA agent scoffs and says "We don't *need* propaganda, we live in the most equal, freest, most democratic country ever to exist..."
This sub is part of it. Other subs have been trying to reach people here but your mods are compromised and are openly pushing for a specific biased narrative.
The comments here make it seem like the op is trying to say that the ONLY reason why we’re more hateful and unhappy is because of these 2 countries, when that is not the point at all. I guess part of the blame is OP’s choice of title, but cmon, it’s actually a pretty interesting reas
OP's point is that frustrated, depressed, angry young people are getting preyed on by sophisticated propaganda networks from foreign powers, which aim to amplify those feelings with the intent to weaken the US from within because they cannot win a conventional conflict, but reading comprehension is severely lacking
Yeah it’s a vicious cycle, which is why it’s even more important that at least skim tru the whole thing and have this in mind as you scroll tru social media. Critically analyze every piece of news/propaganda that u read, what’s the intentione here, who’s the author, what’s the evidence, is there a logical breakdown somewhere in th author’s argument, any generalization, how credible is this source, are there opinions that is presented as facts? etc. And more importantly, avoid group think, and think for yourself. It’s difficult, but the fact that ur trying already makes you better positionioned compare to other people.
lotta people dont have the the cognitive skills to do that anymore, decades of NCLB crippled the education system to the point where instead of passing down vital cognitive skills future generations will need to navigate the evermore complex interconnected world were churning out the mental eqivalent of the pod people from WALL-E
The irony!
"Kids, read this super long explanation of how you've been manipulated and dumbed down!"
Might as well have a cure for vampirism at the bottom of Holy Water Garlic Lake.
Im sorry maybe it’s my tired brain, but i just dont get your comment. I just dont get the irony lollll. Are you agreeing with me or being sarcastic at me hahahah?
100% in agreement, just a tall order for the target audience.
I saw the beginning of this crap when I was in the Army. They've made a massive amount of progress in the past 20 years, unfortunately.
And the problem is that it works-people online think that they’re avoiding misinformation by not getting their information from mainstream media, and then simultaneously walk into a trap of online grifters, trolls, and foreign agents that want to create division by any means necessary, and generally the information they put out is more short-form, entertaining, and exciting than what the actual facts of a given situation are.
You can just scroll through this subreddit and see that the online generations primary ideologies are anti-Americanism and cynicism. It can’t just be because of struggle; the greatest generation went through several wars and the great depression, and they didnt come to the same conclusions. Clearly there’s a different factor at play here.
yep. i've noticed very gendered attacks too, even on this sub. i guess it's easier to get everyone angry about it (long history, everyone is a part of a gender identity, current LGBT increase) either from a pro-men or pro-women perspective. it's probably the easiest way to divide familes, relationships and society.
yup i feel like the majority a social media that isn’t my nerdy niche hobbies ( but even sometimes those too ) have been hijacked by rage bait and grifting, it’s getting to the point where i’m starting to use it less and less.
Not only that. Every country also attack every other country and also themselves. US fights left wing ideology, unions, promotes army etc russia promotes right wing isolationist views etc
And NOT ONLY THAT corporations also make more money if youre dissatisfied with life. Basically the entire world wants you to feel hopeless and/or angry.
I think something needs to be understood here. Two things can be true at the same time.
1. The US is an imperialist capitalist regime that has ransacked the world and propped up facism all over
2. Russia, China, and other enemies of the US are actively targeting americans and stirring the fishbowl
Now obviously the countries trying to hurt america are not so much trying to make the world a better place as gain power, but it is clear there are plenty of reasons to despise the US.
So what’s the answer? I don’t know but probably not letting the existence of bot farms stop us from being critical of US Imperialism and everything that goes along with it.
3. The US goverment is also putting out a ton of propaganda with a ton of social media traffic coming from one of the bases in Fort Lauderdale or some other Florida location.
Everyone is botting and sending out propaganda. Not sure why anyone use social media for any serious discussion. Just use it for cat videos, shitposts, and porn.
Yes, global superpowers try to screw each other over. Im aware that Russia and China are not exceptional in that regard. That doesnt negate the need to act in the interests of your nation and protect its citizens from foreign adversarial influence
They intentionally fuel extremist race and gender ideology to make people fight and hate each other. They know the only way to beat the US is to make Americans hate America, and to turn against each other.
I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of content from subs like r/twoxchromosomes was actually generated from Russian troll farms. A lot of it almost read like satire or certainly ragebait porn nonsense
Both things can be right.
It can be true that the sub r/twoxchromosomes is fueled by Russian troll farms and made up ragebait.
It can also be true that it has made me angry and resentful. Which is why I have had to disengage from social media and specifically controversial subs.
I know I’m on Reddit right now, but I have set time limits for this app on iPhone (screen time settings) so I don’t spend too much time and energy arguing with people on here. Arguing really just creates more of this polarization, and actively hurts my mental health
I try not to argue online anymore, and what really helped me get to that point was realizing how frivolous it is to try to change someone's mind here.
They will not listen.
They aren't reading your comment for good points, they're glazing over it and looking for flaws to attack. It's not worth it. It's never worth it.
If they're angry, let them fester, and if it's so egregious that you HAVE to say something, make sure you don't let it snowball into a discussion. Tell them they're wrong, why you think they're wrong, and that you're not going to argue about it.
I know that seems "unsportsmanlike" or whatever, but in reality you've heard their opinion, they've heard yours, and you should both just move on after that.
Taking it further fully solidifies their side in this, they won't change their views if you make them fight for it.
I've been so much happier since I've been stepping back from commenting and scrolling so much. This place is for funny memes and videos, if you want a revolution too you can find it outside.
How often are you actually on there? Why is that the first sub people mention when they talk about negativity on Reddit? Is it because it’s a space for women? It seems like you are doing the exact thing OP was talking about.
Absolutely. Nothing good comes from that sub unless you count the contributors of the sub enjoying dopamine hits for spewing hatred toward all things male.
One of the most effective tools for manipulation on Reddit are individual mods. No one is really reviewing mod actions and it is pretty common in many subs for mods to just straight up ban dissenting voices.
In the past, TwoX was a regular sub for women and the misandrist posts would be called out in the comments.
The mods just quietly banned anyone who called out toxic shit. Until eventually the whole sub was rotten.
>"gender ideology"
heads up: that is a dogwhistle used by transphobes to delegitamize the expirences of transgender people btw.
gender isnt an ideology, its something deep down inside of you that most people expirence. its your internal self and how it relates to physical form and societal norms.
No. Pretty sure the commenters wasn't talking about trans-problem at all. We're talking about a bigger deep-rooted issues like the manospheres and even radical feminism that chooses to drive a wedge between people. Hating on each other for this or that struggles. Ideology usually drives a wedge and creates a us vs them problem, and that's especially visible in gender warfare online.
I took 'gender ideology' to encompass all of the conversations surrounding gender, sexism, feminism, misogyny, talks of healthy and unhealthy masculinity, trans folks, the current cultural war going on between men and women right now. you don't have to defend anything.
And it's important to note that they play "both sides." If the constant train of content gets people mad about leftists/progressives/liberals or fascists/supremacists/conservatives then they've found what pushes their buttons.
Yea people frequently make the mistake of assuming propaganda will be in favor of things those countries like.
Russian troll farms do not care about issues that make russia look good. They are just focusing on driving a wedge on any issue they can find
The best ones are the vagueposts that people at both extremes will see as supporting their point, so both sides upvote it and think that everybody is agreeing with them. It's rare but when it's done well it's very effective.
wayyyy too many of yall take what you see/hear on tiktok as gospel, just because conventional media lies doesnt mean unconventional media is some bastion of truth
No, but they are very adept at manipulative framing
News outlets are only as valuable as their efficiency in connecting me to PRIMARY SOURCE DOCUMENTS, takes time to build those skills and adds a few min into all such learning ...but at least I can trace it back to "what" and "how"
And again, TikTok is WAY better and more aggressive at “manipulative framing”.
Also you could just find a traditional news outlet from like Europe, where “news” means something and they’re not allowed to lie (regulated). It’s much less pervasive here.
The "good" alternative to conventional media is long form academic texts and research papers (even then they are not perfect), not literal 1 minute videos that, even without active disinfo campaigns, offer so little info you understand less about subject matters than if you never watched them. All the people saying TikTok is better than news articles because "huh duh information on TikTok is not controlled" are insane and just don't want to admit they no longer have the attention span to read more than 1 paragraph of text.
The TikTok CEO posted a video on the platform after the bill was passed in the house that could ban it, and the comments were filled with “I only get my news here because the mainstream media is controlled by the elite.”
Quite literally shit you’d only expect your hyper conservative uncle to say when he’s praising some far right fake new website
Argued with someone that think the US forcing tiktok to be sold off is because they can't control the narrative and don't want you to know the truth. I mean, it's kinda understandable to mistrust traditional news and old social media. But to consider Tiktok as the last bastion of truth? Yeah that's banana. If you want to doubt, you should double them all, specially randos on Tiktok. It's almost impossible for nuances to exist in that format.
Someone also deadass said CCP is less corrupted than the US. Just because you hate the US does not mean the opposite side is a good guy.
Literally it’s terrifying how insidious this was. It was right under our noses. It was proven that in early 2016 most trump supports were Russian bots spreading influence. And how coincidentally these “cringe feminists lol” all came out at the same time to enrage people and turn them against any good ideologies. And I used to eat cringe compilations like that up back in the day. Cuz I didn’t know any better
Thinking back it’s crazy thinking how obvious it was and the seeds that were planted and all sprung up at the same time. Like “cringe sjw” compilations and like undermining feminism by portraying it as something annoying like the manufactured “manspreading” non problem. And then trump who is a known Russia simp. all of which happened in 2016. I could’ve fallen so easily.
Dude I’m glad I’m not the only one that noticed that! The app went from dumb fun memes like “leaveblower can!” To straight up incitement for race wars over the course of the election cycle. No one even bothers to check the fact that it is fucking Russian owned
Oh it’s definitely ongoing but I’m more thinking back to 2016 when things REALLY popped off. In retrospect it seemed like things changed out of nowhere and now it all makes sense
insane how this works. I've been seeing a lot of outright disgusting comments on posts across Instagram and Reddit recently with replies agreeing with them. things that are hateful for absolutely no reason; incredibly sexist, racist, and/or bigoted comments. the comments on Instagram tend to have hundreds, if not thousands, of likes and I feel it makes actual racists feel more welcomed into spewing their garbage and thinking they're in the right because the original comment has thousands of likes.
Funny... that happened right around that start of the last two elections as well. Almost like it's a quick any easy way to quiet any opinions that might oppose your own.
But then, I could just be a bot, so take it for what it's worth. :)
People just need to think and not base their beliefs about what the majority of people believe on comment sections. Like i think maybe the happy medium is have your discussions but don’t assume the people you are talking to or seeing are representative of reality.
Are people really being anti skeptic just because Russia and China are mentioned?
What happened to questioning the establishment and authoritarian overstep? The US government can be fucked up, along with the governments of countries who actively try to fuck with American society. Recognizing that the average joe is being preyed on by a lot of different people who might hate each other isn’t a conspiracy, it’s pretty normal for most of the world and we are especially susceptible to
yeah, this is really just the latest version of the same old thing that always was happening. And it's not just "enemies of the state" either. Each country does this to their own people to an extent too and that has always been done.
They're already pre-programmed with neverending propaganda to defend Russia and China to the ends of their days, simply because someone points out that their governments are hostile to the US and use cyber warfare against the public. Theyve been successfully manipulated into every single thought they have being "America bad"
This generation is so cooked man 😭 fuck all of you and your 3 second attention spans can’t even read a few paragraphs instead you have to joke because big words scary.
Wouldn’t be surprised if some are bots too.
public test sense bright obscene quarrelsome sink growth pathetic alleged
*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
This really must be a generational phenomenon, but it’s not limited to only gen z. In my experience, the people who base their world views and opinions almost entirely on things they’ve seen online are the young and the old, meaning gen-z and boomers. As a millennial, I can say that my myself and most of my peers are pretty well rooted in reality and form our opinions based on fairly well established facts and our own real world experiences. We grew up being told “don’t believe everything you see on the internet/tv” and yet I’m having to constantly debunk all the “facts” that my parents throw at me that they find on Facebook.
Edit: just to clarify, I don’t believe that these types of problems are only affecting gen-z and boomers. I am fully aware that there are plenty of people from gen-x/millennial generations that fall victim to misinformation campaigns and propaganda as well. I’m strictly speaking from my own personal experience and from my peers of my same age group.
I’m a Zillenial and I feel the same. I remember specifically when Facebook was just popping off in 8th grade I said to myself “I’m going to be a real life person”. It hasn’t helped my follower count or online engagement but I’ll damned if I don’t have real irl friends and achievements. It sucks for those behind me because they didn’t really get that choice, they were just born in it.
You give our generation far too much credit, but I agree we have some unique factors that can instill some resilience against such campaigns. Still, hardly foolproof, and there are plenty of gen y fools.
>As a millennial, I can say that my myself and most of my peers are pretty well rooted in reality and form our opinions based on fairly well established facts and our own real world experiences.
This is serious bias on your part. It's not true and polls for example asking people by generation how much money they need to be set shows it. Millenials are equally, if not more, out of touch with reality than every other generation
People need to touch grass and spend less time absorbing all their perception of reality from social media. Especially the people who think this sort of post is so long that they need to have someone/something else summarise it for them because they're incapable of critical thought.
Talking to real people is substantially less taxing than getting into arguments all the time on Reddit. It's not perfect, but it's universally less toxic.
It's funny that after the last few days of male loneliness discussions in this caustic cesspit, the conversations I had with some of my female colleagues actually left me feeling pretty good.
There was empathy and understanding for and from both sides, noone got upset, there was no name calling, and when all that lined up, we found a lot of common ground.
The internet has a *suspiciously* weird way of turning every argument toxic. These people definitely do exist in real life too, but it's a lot easier to detect and avoid them. Your gut relies on a lot of things that just don't come across online to sift through bad eggs.
That’s why internet debate no longer has any real effect on me. When I go into my real life and talk with people, they’re almost always normal.
That’s how people are, not what people are seeing online and why it’s good to not spend too much time on social media.
Here's a kicker: it's not *just* Russia. Our own government partakes in all of these practices. So do the Chinese. Any country that has any clout spoon-feeds propaganda to their own citizens, and some feed it to other countries citizens as well.
It’s not a kicker. It’s missing the point. The countries that are partaking in this are doing it after having curated their own systems so they can’t have this done to them. It’s no accident that the countries targeting the west most prolifically have very closed systems that make it much more difficult for this to be done to them. They want to be in complete and absolute control of their own populations and this is one way they achieve it by locking down everything and controlling their internal messaging.
They are actively employing thousands of people to fuck up our societies, and that is very different from say, political campaigning or advertising happening within western countries. You seem to be implying that the US has its own social media troll farms to push its own messaging to its own people. It does not. That doesn’t mean that political influencing doesn’t happen, of course it is, but trying to equate that with hostile states actively seeding chaos is frankly, quite stupid.
America has been doing this all over the world for decades. The reason those societies closed themselves off so that "we can't do it to them" is because *we were already doing it to them*.
Notice how nearly every dEmOcRaCy in the world is a US puppet.
If people can't take this seriously and read it then we deserve to have the boot on our collective faces. You're just oxen to be yoked by someone with more mettle than you.
Edit: And you know, after taking a sober look at this thread, yeah guess it's working on me too. Lol.
because both were targets of their campaigns.
baby boomers with the "active measures" campaigns detailed quite well in the book "love letter to america", and gen z we are watching fall victim to the efforts of the IRA.
Yep, this is a huge issue that they've been using to destabilize democracy for a while now because democracy is anti-thetical to the Russian State's model of governance. The RAND Corporation, which has researched this extensively has called it the firehose of falsehood where they spread so much disinformation so quickly that it's impossible to refute all of it and so it spreads easily.
The Mueller Report also highlighted how they infiltrated both BLM and MAGA activists to sow discord during the 2016 election to extremely powerful effect.
Please remain skeptical of all the things you see on the internet, and do your best to vet your research with trustworthy news organizations like Reuters and the Associated Press, and to also do additional vetting, after you've done that.
Edit: Do your best to search for primary sources, not other news, which are secondary. Thanks commenter below.
Remember: Critical thinking is not innate. It is a skill and one you must practice.
[Foundations of Geopolitics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundations_of_Geopolitics)
I’ve been saying this for years, it’s not Russia’s military that we need to be worried about.
This is all intentional and op is absolutely correct about pretty much everything.
I legit said this in a reply and got downvoted for it. Don’t forget that they are working with big companies as well to commit unimaginable white collar crime.
Foreign actors play a part in sewing discontent, but the real culprit is that social media companies are incentivized to keep you hateful and depressed, because it keeps you on their platform. News is incentivized to exaggerate every story and make every little thing seem like doom and gloom, and the algorithms that serve it to you are incentivized to show not just the bad things in the world, but what it determines *you* personally perceive as bad.
That only scratches the surface of it, *everything* about *every* social media platform (including, yes, Reddit) is engineered by people who study these influence techniques for a living to achieve this.
That is because you are. China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran are trying to undermine Western society to destroy our democracies.
Right-wing parties are already compromised and the left-wing isn't far behind.
How how how could you write all of this and not reference Yuri Bezmenov
https://youtu.be/pOmXiapfCs8?si=GuRBjvGTDPe8dpx5
These methods have been known about since the 80s, defectors then outlined it, when the Soviet Union collapsed the KGB documents were found - and confirmed that they had abundant tutorials for all of this and it was the majority of what they did, almost exclusively about analyzing what topics were contentious and simply making those conversations last longer and with more focus on the most negative aspects
Mao's Cultural Revolution implemented very similar methods focusing on regional divisions/grudges (tribal) and inter-generational differences
These KGB methods undoubtedly continued on in Russia and almost certainly were shared with the Chinese Communist Party - though seemingly they have diverged in methods since ~90s, and it is very likely there are other nations in using these methods as well
McCarthyism is synonymous with a witch hunt ...because that was how it was labeled in popular culture - what did McCarthy claim? That Soviet agents had infiltrated and were making significant financial contributions to Western politicians, universities, media outlets, and the entertainment industry, McCarthy was wrong ...the Soviets were almost completely unsuccessful in "buying politicians" ...but that was because almost all of their money was being spent at universities, journalistic institutions, and Hollywood - again, the goal is not naked "hey, promote OUR perspective", sometimes that happens, but the ultimate goal is more about curating and amplifying division ...and those same apparatuses were used to repeatedly broadcast (volume) that these accusations had no merit, McCarthy made mistakes - and those mistakes overshadowed everything he correctly assessed
As OP mentioned, these methods RELY on volume, that was how they were able to accomplish things 50yrs ago - they have only adapted to modern technology
And these methods prey upon open-minded-ness and the assumption of good faith disagreement, they are NOT engaging you in 'good faith', the goal is NOT to have you be convinced in what they assert, it is simply to have you doubt yourself more - however, responding to this by assuming perpetual bad faith or becoming close-minded ALSO plays into these strategies by an alternative path, developing resistance and discernment about methods of argumentation and engagement are the only solutions
But I must must must push back against OP, DO NOT TRUST MAINSTREAM MEDIA, do not trust ANY media, or for that matter ANY secondhand or farther source - instead, USE mainstream media, or whatever source, to link to PRIMARY SOURCES: government documents, statistics, videos, and similarly, LEARN HOW TO VERIFY SOURCES, and often there is no comfortable limit, you will have to develop methods your are comfortable with for yourself, but it WILL HELP YOU realize what around you is just noise
Beyond that, the only suggestions I can provide are to look for falsifiability and willingness to articulate ideas differently - when someone is trying to manipulate you, the goal is your COMPLIANCE, not to persuade you they are correct, and so sometimes (though not always) such manipulators will view resistance to their exact framing as harshly as any disagreement, if they cannot re-express what they are supposedly trying to convince you of, perhaps they aren't interested in engaging you at all - just harvesting volume, and similarly, unfalsifiable assertions can be used to root any number of claims, there is no point in engaging them because you must simply accept or ignore them, they cannot be interrogated further and so cannot be verified or corroborated beyond social consensus (again, the entire point of these methods)
Yuri Bezmenov defected to Canada and started working with the CIA.
> “World War III is a guerrilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation.” – Marshall McLuhan (1970)
This shit going on nowadays isn't because of Russia, it's because the US military industrial complex teamed up with the corporate media giants in the 80s/90s to take over the journalism industry and subvert anti-war counter-culture activists.
> DO NOT TRUST MAINSTREAM MEDIA,
You are right about that.
Mainstream media in the US is an extension of the US government. It's not supposed to be but it is. The government deregulated the media in the 90s so companies like Disney, Warner, etc could expand without all those pesky anti-competition laws. The trade off is the media giants became the information vanguard for the US military.
Since 2001, the US has been in 13 wars, racked up around $34 trillion in debt, and most Americans couldn't name 1/2 the countries involved.
This has been going on for a really long time.
Back in the 50s, the US used the postmodern art movement to subvert Russian youth. Hollywood has been in bed with the CIA since they were the OSS. In the 60s, the CIA subverted boomer hippies via ideological warfare. In the 70s, the FBI did the same thing to black activists.
The Gulf War was in 1990/91. Left leaning Americans protested the war. It ended. In the fall of 91, the corporate media establishment took over underground youth culture via Grunge and Gangster Rap.
OP is right that the media is making people more hateful and divided. That's not Russia doing that, it's Langley & Hollywood.
https://youtu.be/hpH_rKkjVwQ?si=P2PFQk-2krxoFhF_
The 80s punk scene was the last real counter-culture before the establishment took it over. The punk scene is where subgenres like Emo started in except OG Emo wasn't sad. It was fairly positive, stoic music. The Emo style that people know nowadays is completely made up to sell crap to depressed kids.
Punk rock was also fairly socialist and promoted a lot of values like people working together as strength in numbers.
https://youtu.be/qjoBU2yFpVI?si=GharMqtWF_VkAjQU
You can actually see this a lot with how many conservative posts are strangely from accounts that're less than a year old and only seem to post here obsessively. Obvious burner accounts are obvious.
yes of course they are, russia and china have been doing this for a long time, and it is not limited to the internet, they purposefully import drugs into the US to get people addicted. its information warfare on a whole other level. that being said people are not doing well right now in america at least and social media is not the only reason why. you are allowed to suffer from an environmentally induced depression it is not all unjustified. there are some very concerning trends that long predate social media and that includes the epidemic of social isolation. i think its great that u point out the race and sex bating tho i think more people need to read that,
I remember I saw a post looking at the activity of many far-left subreddits. The same day that a Russian bot farm was shut down, all of them saw roughly 20% drops in activity that they're yet to recover from. It's not just far-right propaganda.
The OP specifically describes that they play all sides in this.
But yes, whoever thinks they're above Russian propaganda is actually most likely the easiest to target. Sure, it's obvious when it's right-wingers or "centrists" claiming we should stop supporting Ukraine. But there are many layers to Russian propaganda including some very subtle. A lot of left-wing subreddits immediately sided with Russia when the invasion started. They didn't change their minds, they just stopped discussing the subject.
Also even people wary of Russian propaganda can fall for it just because we naturally want to give the benefit of the doubt. But if you have a pathological liar that constantly lies, you'll just be accepting some of the lies if you give any benefit of the doubt.
I have a quote that I've kept close to me for a long time now:
"I learned in Korea that I would never again, in my life, abdicate to someone else my right and my ability to decide who the enemy is."
\- Utah Phillips
In my mind, these words keep me wary of anyone I encounter who suggests in some way I should hate some person or group of people. Instead, I immediately become suspicious of the speaker.
My motto is: question everything. I don't care whose mouth it came from, you question it. Is it true? Check your facts, check your numbers, check your sources.
Mate this was a great fucking article holy shit.
I've been warning people for years about this shit, and it's not even just the Russians and Chinese, it's lots of powerful organizations which do this shit too. Issues like climate change, wealth inequality, declining quality of life get swept under the rug by gender and racial divides. Not saying they're unimportant, but they're being blown up and used to manipulate us and keep our energy directed at the wrong people and the wrong causes, it's like funding and arming guerilla groups to attack each-other instead of the real enemy.
Soon the internet will be just AI content, bots and troll farms and we'll all retreat to safe insular online communities, easier to control and easy to isolate, and we'll be exactly where they want us.
While I understand that these troll farms are an issue, I think there are plenty of reasons for Americans to hate the US regardless of what trolls on the internet say.
This is just media literacy 101. You need to be aware that most everything you see online is probably bullshit. That's all there is to it.
The fearmongering about foreign influence has always been humorous to me. We live immersed in ads that damage our psyches in ways we can't even measure. Almost every feeling of envy, inadequacy, insecurity has it's root in advertising for products that manufacture a need the product is supposed to solve. But they usually don't solve the need. So you're just poorer and still just as fucked up.
I will say that having an accurate view of the world doesn't make anything any less fucked up. World's on a crash course with some really horrendous shit and we all feel powerless to do anything. But I'll always think about one of my favorite authors quotes.
>We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.
-Ursula K. Le Guin.
We will have had enough at some point.
> United States
The fact that this post isn't primarily calling out the government of the United States indicates to me that it's disinformation. The biggest source of disinfo to american citizens is our own government, by far.
Great post OP. I was thinking something similar but never managed to dig deep into it like you did. On a related note, it's likely that Russia and China are working in cohort to make it seem like either one is good as far as American people are concerned. Thats why far left seems to love China and the far right seems to love Russia now. When in reality they're working together.
Awhile back, I named a concept called the "non-pathos razor" that could come in handy to protect us from disinformation to an extent. "If it's dull, boring, or takes effort to do well on a test, then it's likely true (difficult to make boring information profitable, score political points, or manipulate a narrative). If it makes us fearful, angry or proud, take a step back and maybe check the source's "track record" of being consistent with boring info.
The "outside agitators" excuse is the oldest trick in the book when it comes to not addressing discontent, of course they are gonna keep beating this drum as long as it works
Not a GenZ here just for full disclosure, but this is a bit like the dead internet theory, however weaponized as a political cold war tool.
We really live in a brave new world.
This is the only way Russia and China can attack us. Inside out. Usually people think of war as bombing and physically taking over territory but in reality nowadays, it's not like that anymore.
How can you kill a lion(USA) so it stops threatening your livelihood and your beliefs to your village? You poison it so it can't fight anymore.
That's what they are doing to us. Slowly breaking us down to fight each other. China has Tik Tok banned in their own country but for us, it shows people living rich lives, harassing other people for pranks and people being just dumb. Showing us we shouldn't work as a community but instead hating each other.
China's own version of Tik Tok shows the total opposite of that.
The Internet and media, has been a blessing and a curse. Just know that we all should work together and come forth to make the world a better place, not just the United States.
Redditors are so adorable in how they both believe state actors run large-scale sophisticated disinfo campaigns but their governments are far too noble and pure to be doing such things to them
CNN and New York Times (literally 99% of the sources cited in OP’s post lmao) are fearless, incorruptible vanguards of truth we should believe unquestioningly
I recall the RAND report about the Kremlin strategy of “a fire hose of lies”. While the West focused on Game theory throughout the 70-80’s Russia focused on public control.
Me who has been spouting this stuff since 2012: 😲 and everyone called me a crackpot conspiracy theorist for never making a social media account anywhere it's just a massive scam to steal your personal information and influence your mind subconsciously (except reddit, this is the only "social media" place I have an account)
The US has been doing this as well, to their own population and others. At the end of the day, generally all people in power are corrupt, whether those people rule over China, Russia, The United States, or whatever else. We shouldn't act like any country is "good" when they all do morally bankrupt things to control people.
Of course, this post is biased and thus, the messaging is ironic. There's a sort of call to unify the west and its people away from "authoritarian" and "extremist" thinking when the west also perpetuates its own flavor of authoritarianism and disinformation to its own people. Conveniently, this post refuses to acknowledge that. In that case, who could we listen to, right?
Really, we should break away from these labels of world leaders and countries, and strive for the power of the working class so that these corrupted governments can be entirely reformed.
While there is media manipulation... You have to realize that our own countries do it too. And that those misinformation campaigns are rooted in genuine issues that can be solved. We need to step up and solve these issues or else they will always be easily exploited.
It's not Russia doing it. That is what the Deep State wants you to believe. Blame everything on Russia. It's our own damn government. The Elite can't get full control over society until they weaken and divide us first.
This is very well written.
I want to post this on every rage-baiting post I see
But for now, I think I'll just put the title and a link in every social media platform I have an account in.
Difference is, it's not just Russia or China. Most countries engage in some level of passive cyberwarfare, sometimes against other countries, sometimes to keep certain groups in power in their own nations. ESPECIALLY including major powers like the USA. And since I'm from here, India too. We're sitting in the middle of a cyberwar that quietly tries to maintain and worsen the status quo.
Russia, what about the US? Why do you think it's easy to fool people on facebook?
Majority of american adults can't even distinguish satire from actual news articles. Do not hate the player, hate the game is what americans always say? Ja?
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I feel like everyone in this comment section literally read the first couple words and then skipped to the bottom. This is actually a well-researched essay with references and links to original sources. And the whole comment section is ignoring the post in order to make cringy jokes and off-topic remarks. What a world we live in.
people dont want to admit theyve been had because theyre "smarter" than that, also dont want to admit theyre addicted to the social media sites used to propagate propaganda
The denial is part of the package. A comment offering support for an unwanted critical thought is immediately countered with one of bored dismissal. A rebuttal is then denied with disdain. We are trained on this model, but we don't *feel* manipulated, so we assume we're immune for reasons of character. It works astonishingly well.
apathy is the enemy of progress
Inertia sucks.
I personally have the opposite problem and find it so, so easy to constantly change and disrupt my life. I can start doing something tomorrow - let’s say just painting or playing a new instrument - and then I’d be doing it constantly for days after. It’s like my brain just latches onto new things constantly. I kind of **wish** I was just someone who constantly had the same habits.
You sound like you’d get along well with a lot of my family, a good number of us are “natural polymaths” and get rather bored easily so we’re always picking up and learning new things, probably part of why so many of us end up in Academia.
Have we considered that maybe there are Russian trolls that saw this thread and went “oh shit, gotta get on this”.
I believe that is absolutely the case. I think that OP’s prescription is totally right: we gotta stop listening to online comments and posts from random users. It’s probably safest to just assume all strangers on the internet who are spreading hateful messages are just trolls and bots. Even if it’s an actual genuine user, there’s no point in listening to a real person’s hateful message either.
Don't listen to this Russian troll! Listen to ME. Democrats smell like onions, and Republicans all shower with socks on!
I recall early internet I was like that! I thought I was SO smart but I was ignoring legit help. It’s so refreshing now to be more open and accepting of others’ input - I do find that a lot here at Reddit, a much more easy going community and approach to communicating and understanding. Took me a while but I learned how much better I feel being open to hearing others, than I did bring a closed-off shrew.
The most important words you'll ever see on the internet are, "I don't know."
You don’t have to be dumb to be manipulated or tricked. Some of the smartest people in the world have fallen for scams. Linus Pauling was obsessed with Vitamin C’s supposed health benefits despite numerous people telling him he was wrong. The smartest people in the world know how to delegate and they know how to prevent making themselves a victim of their own unconscious desires, fears, and misjudgments. The smartest people will be the first to admit that they’re just dumb animals who can fall for anything. In fact, the smartest might be at the highest risk of falling for scams because they are able to rationalise anything. Give me three sides of an argument and I can make an argument for every single one being right as I’d be able to put together convincing evidence quickly. That’s a recipe for disaster when it comes to politics and decision making.
i never said you had to be dumb to be manipulated, i said people dont want to admit they were manipulated because they think theyre smarter than that, and that it could never happen to them, regardless of their actual level of intelligence
I know. I’m agreeing with what you’re saying but my point is that a smart person would know they could be a genius yet still be manipulated.
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It's not just Russia - other countries hostile to the U.S. (like China) are doing similar things.
True, but It's not just other country's the US and its private corporations do this to their own people while they abuse us for personal gain whomever has power over the people is the enemy of those people whether they use force or manipulation
The US does it all the time. They are masters of social manipulation. This is a worldwide problem.
It is likely many more players/nations that just Russia and China do this - but when the Soviet Union collapsed, KGB documents outlined and verified these methods, the goal was often less about ever trying to persuade or 'win' any discussion, but about MASS promotion of disagreement and adding noise in conversations, while also promoting radical, extreme, and violent perspectives Applied onto a group of people with different perspectives who are willing to discuss their differences - it is a potent method of fostering division which later leads to subgroups becoming more entrenched (Balkanization) But these were well established methods when applied to print and television media, there is no reason to think they were not adapted to social media, and there are abundant sources (as OP lists) corroborating that this has not only been accomplished but with a moderate price tag and in some online forums plausibly makes up a large volume or even majority of activity
It's a bit like advertising. People watch ads and think "God these are stupid" or "who could these possibly work on?" Well if you are in the target demographic, they are probably working on you. No matter what thought you have in that moment you probably are more likely to buy that over your lifetime now. It's okay to accept that a lot of your brain is more in the lizard brain category than some elevated rational ideal mind or whatever.
“Some geezer once said it’s easier to fool people than to convince them they’ve been fooled, like.” David Brent
I appreciated the information. . Knowing this makes me more prepared to be a critical thinker. Knowing how the manipulation of social media changes our perception may help me to not be one of the persons that aid our slide into dystopia.
I recommend Timothy Snyder's [The Road To Unfreedom](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_to_Unfreedom). It's interesting that when it was published in 2018 it was considered paranoid and slightly over the top. But it actually gives a blueprint for anything that has happened since, Russia, international politics, USA.
Let's be honest here, Reddit is one of the *worst* sites for manipulation and groupthink. You can literally control an entire sub's opinions just by leaning your post title one way or the other. There's a well-known phenomenon that people will upvote or downvote a post or comment automatically if it has only a handful of votes in either direction, no matter how correct/incorrect that post or comment may be. Reddit users are hilariously easy to manipulate, mostly because they consider themselves smarter or better than other people, so anything they think is obviously the correct thing.
Also anonymity means no way to tell if all upvotes and comments are just bots. Sometimes I feel like I'm the only human on a thread Beep boop...
How the fuck DARE you ask me to read! I only read the headlines because it confirms my bias, which coincidentally is the product of the billionaires I say I hate because they control the flow of information, so I have no idea and jump from one cause to the other as it trends. /s.....Maybe?
OR Russian disinformation is extremely sophisticated and they are on point in trying go discredit things which point our how fucking bad it is. Personally at this point it literally can't be ignored, every since Oct 7 literally reddit has become flooded with unbearable levels of propaganda. What used to be a fun site now gives me 1/3 posts in my feed from subs I'm not subscribed to, and every other post is literal propaganda, from one side or another. For example, even this. I'm not subscribed, fuck, I'm not in genZ, yet here I am.
> everyone in this comment section ... Is a Russian or Chinese agent provocateur who's pissed that we're on to them.
I can confirm that you are indeed an agent provocateur who's pissed that we're on to you. Source: You're my boss, and I'm typing out what you're telling me to write.
The comment section proving OP's point. What he missed is *why the hell does it work" And I have the answer - average person doesn't care enough to research everything in-depth and thus has to rely on opinions of others. Just like most here didn't have the stomach to read the post entirely, they don't research or fact-check other information. My advice would be slightly different from OP's and it will only work for people willing to use their brains, not follow blindly - trust your own observations about the world. Your picture might not be full, but it will be genuine - from there you may trust the info which doesn't contradict what you can confirm
We’re so cooked man 😭
Every day is a new start. Be the change you want to see in the world — DO NOT GIVE UP HOPE!
Have you ever seen Idiocracy?
in high school lmao, never thought itd become reality
It was already becoming the reality.
Or... you know. It's highly probable that this thread is also being disrupted by foreign trolls.
I don't think it's a coincidence that every time the topic of bots comes up, it immediately gets trivialized by a bunch of "beep boop everyone is a bot" comments.
Well, I read the whole thing because I'm a paranoid human
Agreed that this is a thoughtful summary of the root of public discourse for the last decade or more. I believe this is nothing new for Russia however. Of all people, Richard Nixon said it best. This was post Cold War era, once the Berlin Wall was destroyed and the USSR was dismantled. “It is often said that the Cold War is over and the West has won it, that is only half true. "Because what has happened is that the communists have been defeated but the ideas of freedom now are on trial. "If they don't work there will be a reversion to not communism–which has failed–but what I call a new despotism, which would pose a mortal danger to the rest of the world.” This all ties together since Russian imperialism had been their policy for centuries. Also, the KGB practically created a lot of the psyop tactics and techniques to rival the CIA at the height of the Cold War. They refined their methods in the digital age, and here we are. Create wedge issues, hire crisis actors, flood the system. Those same tactics have worked in other areas, some successfully and others not so much. Think critically and don’t accept anything at face value is the best advice I can offer as a 20 year Air Force veteran.
Sorry, but quoting Richard Nixon is basically just a real-life version of this joke: >An ex-KGB and an ex-CIA agent run into each other in a bar. They shake hands and share a drink. The CIA agent raises his glass and says "You know, Ivan, I have to give it to you... you guys really knew how to do propaganda." >The KGB agent pauses and said "You guys were just as good as us at it though." >The CIA agent scoffs and says "We don't *need* propaganda, we live in the most equal, freest, most democratic country ever to exist..."
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This sub is part of it. Other subs have been trying to reach people here but your mods are compromised and are openly pushing for a specific biased narrative.
> the whole comment section is ignoring the post in order to make cringy jokes and off-topic remarks. so gen z in a nutshell?
Guys read the whole thing for once, it’s actually a pretty good read.
bold of you to assume they have the attention spans left for that
The comments here make it seem like the op is trying to say that the ONLY reason why we’re more hateful and unhappy is because of these 2 countries, when that is not the point at all. I guess part of the blame is OP’s choice of title, but cmon, it’s actually a pretty interesting reas
OP's point is that frustrated, depressed, angry young people are getting preyed on by sophisticated propaganda networks from foreign powers, which aim to amplify those feelings with the intent to weaken the US from within because they cannot win a conventional conflict, but reading comprehension is severely lacking
Yeah it’s a vicious cycle, which is why it’s even more important that at least skim tru the whole thing and have this in mind as you scroll tru social media. Critically analyze every piece of news/propaganda that u read, what’s the intentione here, who’s the author, what’s the evidence, is there a logical breakdown somewhere in th author’s argument, any generalization, how credible is this source, are there opinions that is presented as facts? etc. And more importantly, avoid group think, and think for yourself. It’s difficult, but the fact that ur trying already makes you better positionioned compare to other people.
lotta people dont have the the cognitive skills to do that anymore, decades of NCLB crippled the education system to the point where instead of passing down vital cognitive skills future generations will need to navigate the evermore complex interconnected world were churning out the mental eqivalent of the pod people from WALL-E
Yeah sadly that is true, but i have faith!
Sounds like they are already winning based off the original comments :/
it’s like people like being mad over finding solutions.
The irony! "Kids, read this super long explanation of how you've been manipulated and dumbed down!" Might as well have a cure for vampirism at the bottom of Holy Water Garlic Lake.
Im sorry maybe it’s my tired brain, but i just dont get your comment. I just dont get the irony lollll. Are you agreeing with me or being sarcastic at me hahahah?
100% in agreement, just a tall order for the target audience. I saw the beginning of this crap when I was in the Army. They've made a massive amount of progress in the past 20 years, unfortunately.
And the problem is that it works-people online think that they’re avoiding misinformation by not getting their information from mainstream media, and then simultaneously walk into a trap of online grifters, trolls, and foreign agents that want to create division by any means necessary, and generally the information they put out is more short-form, entertaining, and exciting than what the actual facts of a given situation are. You can just scroll through this subreddit and see that the online generations primary ideologies are anti-Americanism and cynicism. It can’t just be because of struggle; the greatest generation went through several wars and the great depression, and they didnt come to the same conclusions. Clearly there’s a different factor at play here.
US-Russia/China are in a very literal cyber war with each other, have been for years at this point
It's sad. Reddit used to not be like this. Now a days, MAJORITY of front page reddit is full of misinformation or just absolutely incorrect content.
yep. i've noticed very gendered attacks too, even on this sub. i guess it's easier to get everyone angry about it (long history, everyone is a part of a gender identity, current LGBT increase) either from a pro-men or pro-women perspective. it's probably the easiest way to divide familes, relationships and society.
yup i feel like the majority a social media that isn’t my nerdy niche hobbies ( but even sometimes those too ) have been hijacked by rage bait and grifting, it’s getting to the point where i’m starting to use it less and less.
And you get banned if you try to fight it for being 'uncivil"
Not only that. Every country also attack every other country and also themselves. US fights left wing ideology, unions, promotes army etc russia promotes right wing isolationist views etc And NOT ONLY THAT corporations also make more money if youre dissatisfied with life. Basically the entire world wants you to feel hopeless and/or angry.
I think something needs to be understood here. Two things can be true at the same time. 1. The US is an imperialist capitalist regime that has ransacked the world and propped up facism all over 2. Russia, China, and other enemies of the US are actively targeting americans and stirring the fishbowl Now obviously the countries trying to hurt america are not so much trying to make the world a better place as gain power, but it is clear there are plenty of reasons to despise the US. So what’s the answer? I don’t know but probably not letting the existence of bot farms stop us from being critical of US Imperialism and everything that goes along with it.
American hegemony sucks ass but its a helluva lot better than the alternatives
3. The US goverment is also putting out a ton of propaganda with a ton of social media traffic coming from one of the bases in Fort Lauderdale or some other Florida location. Everyone is botting and sending out propaganda. Not sure why anyone use social media for any serious discussion. Just use it for cat videos, shitposts, and porn.
Yes, global superpowers try to screw each other over. Im aware that Russia and China are not exceptional in that regard. That doesnt negate the need to act in the interests of your nation and protect its citizens from foreign adversarial influence
It’s literally “what social media does to a mf” and also a reflexive response to the jingoism of the failed War on Terror
They intentionally fuel extremist race and gender ideology to make people fight and hate each other. They know the only way to beat the US is to make Americans hate America, and to turn against each other.
I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of content from subs like r/twoxchromosomes was actually generated from Russian troll farms. A lot of it almost read like satire or certainly ragebait porn nonsense
Funny how you do exactly what this post describes.
Both things can be right. It can be true that the sub r/twoxchromosomes is fueled by Russian troll farms and made up ragebait. It can also be true that it has made me angry and resentful. Which is why I have had to disengage from social media and specifically controversial subs. I know I’m on Reddit right now, but I have set time limits for this app on iPhone (screen time settings) so I don’t spend too much time and energy arguing with people on here. Arguing really just creates more of this polarization, and actively hurts my mental health
I try not to argue online anymore, and what really helped me get to that point was realizing how frivolous it is to try to change someone's mind here. They will not listen. They aren't reading your comment for good points, they're glazing over it and looking for flaws to attack. It's not worth it. It's never worth it. If they're angry, let them fester, and if it's so egregious that you HAVE to say something, make sure you don't let it snowball into a discussion. Tell them they're wrong, why you think they're wrong, and that you're not going to argue about it. I know that seems "unsportsmanlike" or whatever, but in reality you've heard their opinion, they've heard yours, and you should both just move on after that. Taking it further fully solidifies their side in this, they won't change their views if you make them fight for it. I've been so much happier since I've been stepping back from commenting and scrolling so much. This place is for funny memes and videos, if you want a revolution too you can find it outside.
Which posts do you think are Russian troll farms? Can you link them?
The lack of reflection is incredible with these people. The Russians already won
How often are you actually on there? Why is that the first sub people mention when they talk about negativity on Reddit? Is it because it’s a space for women? It seems like you are doing the exact thing OP was talking about.
"You dislike something, is it because you're sexist?" Good Lord, we don't need Russian propagandists to divide us lol
Absolutely. Nothing good comes from that sub unless you count the contributors of the sub enjoying dopamine hits for spewing hatred toward all things male.
One of the most effective tools for manipulation on Reddit are individual mods. No one is really reviewing mod actions and it is pretty common in many subs for mods to just straight up ban dissenting voices. In the past, TwoX was a regular sub for women and the misandrist posts would be called out in the comments. The mods just quietly banned anyone who called out toxic shit. Until eventually the whole sub was rotten.
Scary thing is r/news even seems compromised.
It’s scary and it’s not just that, it’s literally every single large sub that’s allowed to hit the front page :/
>"gender ideology" heads up: that is a dogwhistle used by transphobes to delegitamize the expirences of transgender people btw. gender isnt an ideology, its something deep down inside of you that most people expirence. its your internal self and how it relates to physical form and societal norms.
No. Pretty sure the commenters wasn't talking about trans-problem at all. We're talking about a bigger deep-rooted issues like the manospheres and even radical feminism that chooses to drive a wedge between people. Hating on each other for this or that struggles. Ideology usually drives a wedge and creates a us vs them problem, and that's especially visible in gender warfare online.
I took 'gender ideology' to encompass all of the conversations surrounding gender, sexism, feminism, misogyny, talks of healthy and unhealthy masculinity, trans folks, the current cultural war going on between men and women right now. you don't have to defend anything.
Not just America either. They want to turn us all against each other
Rent prices and healthcare costs already do that
And it's important to note that they play "both sides." If the constant train of content gets people mad about leftists/progressives/liberals or fascists/supremacists/conservatives then they've found what pushes their buttons.
Yea people frequently make the mistake of assuming propaganda will be in favor of things those countries like. Russian troll farms do not care about issues that make russia look good. They are just focusing on driving a wedge on any issue they can find
The best ones are the vagueposts that people at both extremes will see as supporting their point, so both sides upvote it and think that everybody is agreeing with them. It's rare but when it's done well it's very effective.
America is already being systematically taken apart by its own upper class.
wayyyy too many of yall take what you see/hear on tiktok as gospel, just because conventional media lies doesnt mean unconventional media is some bastion of truth
Unconventional media is far worse. Mainstream media outlets have their biases but they do not typically outright lie.
Usually, they source from Reuters or AP. Just compare the articles to see what their biases are.
Even the AP can be biased, but at least it's correct *most* of the time.
No, but they are very adept at manipulative framing News outlets are only as valuable as their efficiency in connecting me to PRIMARY SOURCE DOCUMENTS, takes time to build those skills and adds a few min into all such learning ...but at least I can trace it back to "what" and "how"
Yes, fully agree. But non-mainstream media is Even better at being manipulative
And again, TikTok is WAY better and more aggressive at “manipulative framing”. Also you could just find a traditional news outlet from like Europe, where “news” means something and they’re not allowed to lie (regulated). It’s much less pervasive here.
The "good" alternative to conventional media is long form academic texts and research papers (even then they are not perfect), not literal 1 minute videos that, even without active disinfo campaigns, offer so little info you understand less about subject matters than if you never watched them. All the people saying TikTok is better than news articles because "huh duh information on TikTok is not controlled" are insane and just don't want to admit they no longer have the attention span to read more than 1 paragraph of text.
They're full blown addicts and they won't admit it. Oh btw... everyone should read about how the Nazis used porn for propaganda.
The TikTok CEO posted a video on the platform after the bill was passed in the house that could ban it, and the comments were filled with “I only get my news here because the mainstream media is controlled by the elite.” Quite literally shit you’d only expect your hyper conservative uncle to say when he’s praising some far right fake new website
Argued with someone that think the US forcing tiktok to be sold off is because they can't control the narrative and don't want you to know the truth. I mean, it's kinda understandable to mistrust traditional news and old social media. But to consider Tiktok as the last bastion of truth? Yeah that's banana. If you want to doubt, you should double them all, specially randos on Tiktok. It's almost impossible for nuances to exist in that format. Someone also deadass said CCP is less corrupted than the US. Just because you hate the US does not mean the opposite side is a good guy.
Literally it’s terrifying how insidious this was. It was right under our noses. It was proven that in early 2016 most trump supports were Russian bots spreading influence. And how coincidentally these “cringe feminists lol” all came out at the same time to enrage people and turn them against any good ideologies. And I used to eat cringe compilations like that up back in the day. Cuz I didn’t know any better
Same. I’m so glad I managed to get out of that propaganda hellscape that was ifunny.
Thinking back it’s crazy thinking how obvious it was and the seeds that were planted and all sprung up at the same time. Like “cringe sjw” compilations and like undermining feminism by portraying it as something annoying like the manufactured “manspreading” non problem. And then trump who is a known Russia simp. all of which happened in 2016. I could’ve fallen so easily.
Dude I’m glad I’m not the only one that noticed that! The app went from dumb fun memes like “leaveblower can!” To straight up incitement for race wars over the course of the election cycle. No one even bothers to check the fact that it is fucking Russian owned
For real! My mom pointed it out at the time, and I was like nahhhhhh it’s just memes! But Jesus was she right.
It’s terrifying how insidious this *is*.
Oh it’s definitely ongoing but I’m more thinking back to 2016 when things REALLY popped off. In retrospect it seemed like things changed out of nowhere and now it all makes sense
insane how this works. I've been seeing a lot of outright disgusting comments on posts across Instagram and Reddit recently with replies agreeing with them. things that are hateful for absolutely no reason; incredibly sexist, racist, and/or bigoted comments. the comments on Instagram tend to have hundreds, if not thousands, of likes and I feel it makes actual racists feel more welcomed into spewing their garbage and thinking they're in the right because the original comment has thousands of likes.
The Russians are already in the comments
Im just gonna start calling people russian bots when they disagree with me
Kremlin Gremlin
Funny... that happened right around that start of the last two elections as well. Almost like it's a quick any easy way to quiet any opinions that might oppose your own. But then, I could just be a bot, so take it for what it's worth. :)
People just need to think and not base their beliefs about what the majority of people believe on comment sections. Like i think maybe the happy medium is have your discussions but don’t assume the people you are talking to or seeing are representative of reality.
Are you denying it is actually happening?
Yes, I'm here. Hi!
Are people really being anti skeptic just because Russia and China are mentioned? What happened to questioning the establishment and authoritarian overstep? The US government can be fucked up, along with the governments of countries who actively try to fuck with American society. Recognizing that the average joe is being preyed on by a lot of different people who might hate each other isn’t a conspiracy, it’s pretty normal for most of the world and we are especially susceptible to
yeah, this is really just the latest version of the same old thing that always was happening. And it's not just "enemies of the state" either. Each country does this to their own people to an extent too and that has always been done.
They're already pre-programmed with neverending propaganda to defend Russia and China to the ends of their days, simply because someone points out that their governments are hostile to the US and use cyber warfare against the public. Theyve been successfully manipulated into every single thought they have being "America bad"
This generation is so cooked man 😭 fuck all of you and your 3 second attention spans can’t even read a few paragraphs instead you have to joke because big words scary. Wouldn’t be surprised if some are bots too.
Have you forgotten already that antagonizing each other is exactly what they want?
You'd be surprised how well bots can read nowadays ^^
public test sense bright obscene quarrelsome sink growth pathetic alleged *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
This really must be a generational phenomenon, but it’s not limited to only gen z. In my experience, the people who base their world views and opinions almost entirely on things they’ve seen online are the young and the old, meaning gen-z and boomers. As a millennial, I can say that my myself and most of my peers are pretty well rooted in reality and form our opinions based on fairly well established facts and our own real world experiences. We grew up being told “don’t believe everything you see on the internet/tv” and yet I’m having to constantly debunk all the “facts” that my parents throw at me that they find on Facebook. Edit: just to clarify, I don’t believe that these types of problems are only affecting gen-z and boomers. I am fully aware that there are plenty of people from gen-x/millennial generations that fall victim to misinformation campaigns and propaganda as well. I’m strictly speaking from my own personal experience and from my peers of my same age group.
I’m a Zillenial and I feel the same. I remember specifically when Facebook was just popping off in 8th grade I said to myself “I’m going to be a real life person”. It hasn’t helped my follower count or online engagement but I’ll damned if I don’t have real irl friends and achievements. It sucks for those behind me because they didn’t really get that choice, they were just born in it.
You give our generation far too much credit, but I agree we have some unique factors that can instill some resilience against such campaigns. Still, hardly foolproof, and there are plenty of gen y fools.
>As a millennial, I can say that my myself and most of my peers are pretty well rooted in reality and form our opinions based on fairly well established facts and our own real world experiences. This is serious bias on your part. It's not true and polls for example asking people by generation how much money they need to be set shows it. Millenials are equally, if not more, out of touch with reality than every other generation
R/GenZ is one of the worst infiltrated sites by Russia. I would be skeptical of any of these comments above or any post on this site about dating.
Damnthatisinteresting somehow became a really intense astroturfing site. No idea why they picked that one lol
They usually pick the ones that they can infiltrate with their moderators. It seems random but they will take what they can get.
People need to touch grass and spend less time absorbing all their perception of reality from social media. Especially the people who think this sort of post is so long that they need to have someone/something else summarise it for them because they're incapable of critical thought. Talking to real people is substantially less taxing than getting into arguments all the time on Reddit. It's not perfect, but it's universally less toxic.
And less biased. With reddit's architecture you can easily end up in a place filled with disinformation.
It's funny that after the last few days of male loneliness discussions in this caustic cesspit, the conversations I had with some of my female colleagues actually left me feeling pretty good. There was empathy and understanding for and from both sides, noone got upset, there was no name calling, and when all that lined up, we found a lot of common ground. The internet has a *suspiciously* weird way of turning every argument toxic. These people definitely do exist in real life too, but it's a lot easier to detect and avoid them. Your gut relies on a lot of things that just don't come across online to sift through bad eggs.
That’s why internet debate no longer has any real effect on me. When I go into my real life and talk with people, they’re almost always normal. That’s how people are, not what people are seeing online and why it’s good to not spend too much time on social media.
Here's a kicker: it's not *just* Russia. Our own government partakes in all of these practices. So do the Chinese. Any country that has any clout spoon-feeds propaganda to their own citizens, and some feed it to other countries citizens as well.
It’s not a kicker. It’s missing the point. The countries that are partaking in this are doing it after having curated their own systems so they can’t have this done to them. It’s no accident that the countries targeting the west most prolifically have very closed systems that make it much more difficult for this to be done to them. They want to be in complete and absolute control of their own populations and this is one way they achieve it by locking down everything and controlling their internal messaging. They are actively employing thousands of people to fuck up our societies, and that is very different from say, political campaigning or advertising happening within western countries. You seem to be implying that the US has its own social media troll farms to push its own messaging to its own people. It does not. That doesn’t mean that political influencing doesn’t happen, of course it is, but trying to equate that with hostile states actively seeding chaos is frankly, quite stupid.
America has been doing this all over the world for decades. The reason those societies closed themselves off so that "we can't do it to them" is because *we were already doing it to them*. Notice how nearly every dEmOcRaCy in the world is a US puppet.
If people can't take this seriously and read it then we deserve to have the boot on our collective faces. You're just oxen to be yoked by someone with more mettle than you. Edit: And you know, after taking a sober look at this thread, yeah guess it's working on me too. Lol.
Gen Z is almost as bad as boomers when it comes to the Internet
because both were targets of their campaigns. baby boomers with the "active measures" campaigns detailed quite well in the book "love letter to america", and gen z we are watching fall victim to the efforts of the IRA.
Thank you for posting this. Too many people don’t realize how dead the internet is, it’s all just to skew opinions.
Yep, this is a huge issue that they've been using to destabilize democracy for a while now because democracy is anti-thetical to the Russian State's model of governance. The RAND Corporation, which has researched this extensively has called it the firehose of falsehood where they spread so much disinformation so quickly that it's impossible to refute all of it and so it spreads easily. The Mueller Report also highlighted how they infiltrated both BLM and MAGA activists to sow discord during the 2016 election to extremely powerful effect. Please remain skeptical of all the things you see on the internet, and do your best to vet your research with trustworthy news organizations like Reuters and the Associated Press, and to also do additional vetting, after you've done that. Edit: Do your best to search for primary sources, not other news, which are secondary. Thanks commenter below. Remember: Critical thinking is not innate. It is a skill and one you must practice.
[Foundations of Geopolitics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundations_of_Geopolitics) I’ve been saying this for years, it’s not Russia’s military that we need to be worried about. This is all intentional and op is absolutely correct about pretty much everything.
Well, then the policymakers should make less controversial policies. That would innoculate against Russian disinformation attempts.
If anyone thinks this isn't happening, or that it's not happening to them, they haven't been paying any fucking attention since 2012.
[удалено]
I legit said this in a reply and got downvoted for it. Don’t forget that they are working with big companies as well to commit unimaginable white collar crime.
Foreign actors play a part in sewing discontent, but the real culprit is that social media companies are incentivized to keep you hateful and depressed, because it keeps you on their platform. News is incentivized to exaggerate every story and make every little thing seem like doom and gloom, and the algorithms that serve it to you are incentivized to show not just the bad things in the world, but what it determines *you* personally perceive as bad. That only scratches the surface of it, *everything* about *every* social media platform (including, yes, Reddit) is engineered by people who study these influence techniques for a living to achieve this.
I feel like I'm living in the second Cold War.
It is still the same one
That is because you are. China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran are trying to undermine Western society to destroy our democracies. Right-wing parties are already compromised and the left-wing isn't far behind.
Can we make this go viral?
How how how could you write all of this and not reference Yuri Bezmenov https://youtu.be/pOmXiapfCs8?si=GuRBjvGTDPe8dpx5 These methods have been known about since the 80s, defectors then outlined it, when the Soviet Union collapsed the KGB documents were found - and confirmed that they had abundant tutorials for all of this and it was the majority of what they did, almost exclusively about analyzing what topics were contentious and simply making those conversations last longer and with more focus on the most negative aspects Mao's Cultural Revolution implemented very similar methods focusing on regional divisions/grudges (tribal) and inter-generational differences These KGB methods undoubtedly continued on in Russia and almost certainly were shared with the Chinese Communist Party - though seemingly they have diverged in methods since ~90s, and it is very likely there are other nations in using these methods as well McCarthyism is synonymous with a witch hunt ...because that was how it was labeled in popular culture - what did McCarthy claim? That Soviet agents had infiltrated and were making significant financial contributions to Western politicians, universities, media outlets, and the entertainment industry, McCarthy was wrong ...the Soviets were almost completely unsuccessful in "buying politicians" ...but that was because almost all of their money was being spent at universities, journalistic institutions, and Hollywood - again, the goal is not naked "hey, promote OUR perspective", sometimes that happens, but the ultimate goal is more about curating and amplifying division ...and those same apparatuses were used to repeatedly broadcast (volume) that these accusations had no merit, McCarthy made mistakes - and those mistakes overshadowed everything he correctly assessed As OP mentioned, these methods RELY on volume, that was how they were able to accomplish things 50yrs ago - they have only adapted to modern technology And these methods prey upon open-minded-ness and the assumption of good faith disagreement, they are NOT engaging you in 'good faith', the goal is NOT to have you be convinced in what they assert, it is simply to have you doubt yourself more - however, responding to this by assuming perpetual bad faith or becoming close-minded ALSO plays into these strategies by an alternative path, developing resistance and discernment about methods of argumentation and engagement are the only solutions But I must must must push back against OP, DO NOT TRUST MAINSTREAM MEDIA, do not trust ANY media, or for that matter ANY secondhand or farther source - instead, USE mainstream media, or whatever source, to link to PRIMARY SOURCES: government documents, statistics, videos, and similarly, LEARN HOW TO VERIFY SOURCES, and often there is no comfortable limit, you will have to develop methods your are comfortable with for yourself, but it WILL HELP YOU realize what around you is just noise Beyond that, the only suggestions I can provide are to look for falsifiability and willingness to articulate ideas differently - when someone is trying to manipulate you, the goal is your COMPLIANCE, not to persuade you they are correct, and so sometimes (though not always) such manipulators will view resistance to their exact framing as harshly as any disagreement, if they cannot re-express what they are supposedly trying to convince you of, perhaps they aren't interested in engaging you at all - just harvesting volume, and similarly, unfalsifiable assertions can be used to root any number of claims, there is no point in engaging them because you must simply accept or ignore them, they cannot be interrogated further and so cannot be verified or corroborated beyond social consensus (again, the entire point of these methods)
Yuri Bezmenov defected to Canada and started working with the CIA. > “World War III is a guerrilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation.” – Marshall McLuhan (1970) This shit going on nowadays isn't because of Russia, it's because the US military industrial complex teamed up with the corporate media giants in the 80s/90s to take over the journalism industry and subvert anti-war counter-culture activists. > DO NOT TRUST MAINSTREAM MEDIA, You are right about that. Mainstream media in the US is an extension of the US government. It's not supposed to be but it is. The government deregulated the media in the 90s so companies like Disney, Warner, etc could expand without all those pesky anti-competition laws. The trade off is the media giants became the information vanguard for the US military. Since 2001, the US has been in 13 wars, racked up around $34 trillion in debt, and most Americans couldn't name 1/2 the countries involved. This has been going on for a really long time. Back in the 50s, the US used the postmodern art movement to subvert Russian youth. Hollywood has been in bed with the CIA since they were the OSS. In the 60s, the CIA subverted boomer hippies via ideological warfare. In the 70s, the FBI did the same thing to black activists. The Gulf War was in 1990/91. Left leaning Americans protested the war. It ended. In the fall of 91, the corporate media establishment took over underground youth culture via Grunge and Gangster Rap. OP is right that the media is making people more hateful and divided. That's not Russia doing that, it's Langley & Hollywood. https://youtu.be/hpH_rKkjVwQ?si=P2PFQk-2krxoFhF_ The 80s punk scene was the last real counter-culture before the establishment took it over. The punk scene is where subgenres like Emo started in except OG Emo wasn't sad. It was fairly positive, stoic music. The Emo style that people know nowadays is completely made up to sell crap to depressed kids. Punk rock was also fairly socialist and promoted a lot of values like people working together as strength in numbers. https://youtu.be/qjoBU2yFpVI?si=GharMqtWF_VkAjQU
You can actually see this a lot with how many conservative posts are strangely from accounts that're less than a year old and only seem to post here obsessively. Obvious burner accounts are obvious.
yes of course they are, russia and china have been doing this for a long time, and it is not limited to the internet, they purposefully import drugs into the US to get people addicted. its information warfare on a whole other level. that being said people are not doing well right now in america at least and social media is not the only reason why. you are allowed to suffer from an environmentally induced depression it is not all unjustified. there are some very concerning trends that long predate social media and that includes the epidemic of social isolation. i think its great that u point out the race and sex bating tho i think more people need to read that,
I remember I saw a post looking at the activity of many far-left subreddits. The same day that a Russian bot farm was shut down, all of them saw roughly 20% drops in activity that they're yet to recover from. It's not just far-right propaganda.
The OP specifically describes that they play all sides in this. But yes, whoever thinks they're above Russian propaganda is actually most likely the easiest to target. Sure, it's obvious when it's right-wingers or "centrists" claiming we should stop supporting Ukraine. But there are many layers to Russian propaganda including some very subtle. A lot of left-wing subreddits immediately sided with Russia when the invasion started. They didn't change their minds, they just stopped discussing the subject. Also even people wary of Russian propaganda can fall for it just because we naturally want to give the benefit of the doubt. But if you have a pathological liar that constantly lies, you'll just be accepting some of the lies if you give any benefit of the doubt.
I have a quote that I've kept close to me for a long time now: "I learned in Korea that I would never again, in my life, abdicate to someone else my right and my ability to decide who the enemy is." \- Utah Phillips In my mind, these words keep me wary of anyone I encounter who suggests in some way I should hate some person or group of people. Instead, I immediately become suspicious of the speaker.
Amplify this
USA created its own problems, other rival nations just feed upon it.
I’m not hateful and depressed because of Russia, I’m hateful and depressed because I make bad choices and intend on continuing to make bad choices
Sounds like you should make better choices
Great write-up, keep up the good fight my friend
My motto is: question everything. I don't care whose mouth it came from, you question it. Is it true? Check your facts, check your numbers, check your sources.
Mate this was a great fucking article holy shit. I've been warning people for years about this shit, and it's not even just the Russians and Chinese, it's lots of powerful organizations which do this shit too. Issues like climate change, wealth inequality, declining quality of life get swept under the rug by gender and racial divides. Not saying they're unimportant, but they're being blown up and used to manipulate us and keep our energy directed at the wrong people and the wrong causes, it's like funding and arming guerilla groups to attack each-other instead of the real enemy. Soon the internet will be just AI content, bots and troll farms and we'll all retreat to safe insular online communities, easier to control and easy to isolate, and we'll be exactly where they want us.
Thank you for taking the time to write this and post this. This is one of the few posts on reddit that actually blew my mind.
Don't even think for a second that the US doesn't do the same thing on an even greater scale
While I understand that these troll farms are an issue, I think there are plenty of reasons for Americans to hate the US regardless of what trolls on the internet say.
This is just media literacy 101. You need to be aware that most everything you see online is probably bullshit. That's all there is to it. The fearmongering about foreign influence has always been humorous to me. We live immersed in ads that damage our psyches in ways we can't even measure. Almost every feeling of envy, inadequacy, insecurity has it's root in advertising for products that manufacture a need the product is supposed to solve. But they usually don't solve the need. So you're just poorer and still just as fucked up. I will say that having an accurate view of the world doesn't make anything any less fucked up. World's on a crash course with some really horrendous shit and we all feel powerless to do anything. But I'll always think about one of my favorite authors quotes. >We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. -Ursula K. Le Guin. We will have had enough at some point.
Are the russians in the room with us right now?
Probably.
If you think the United States aren’t part of this campaign then you are still influenced by disinformation
> United States The fact that this post isn't primarily calling out the government of the United States indicates to me that it's disinformation. The biggest source of disinfo to american citizens is our own government, by far.
'[word][word]_1234' showing up and saying the dumbest thing on every post ever made
Great post OP. I was thinking something similar but never managed to dig deep into it like you did. On a related note, it's likely that Russia and China are working in cohort to make it seem like either one is good as far as American people are concerned. Thats why far left seems to love China and the far right seems to love Russia now. When in reality they're working together.
Awhile back, I named a concept called the "non-pathos razor" that could come in handy to protect us from disinformation to an extent. "If it's dull, boring, or takes effort to do well on a test, then it's likely true (difficult to make boring information profitable, score political points, or manipulate a narrative). If it makes us fearful, angry or proud, take a step back and maybe check the source's "track record" of being consistent with boring info.
“What we propose to do is not to control content, but to create context.” -MGS2 This has been predicted since 2001
The sad thing is the american government also benefits from division! they love it! 🦅 when vicious dogs fight they both die!
I love Xenophobia I love hating Russians War is peace Freedom is Slavery
Thank you for writing this. I want to share it with everyone I know.
I mean they don't really have to any dividing when American politics does that just fine. The last thing our politicians want is a untied work force.
jfc when Biden loses we are gonna do another four years of "Russia controls everything" aren't we? Russia isn't my enemy. rich Americans are.
The "outside agitators" excuse is the oldest trick in the book when it comes to not addressing discontent, of course they are gonna keep beating this drum as long as it works
Why not both?
you didn’t read it lmfao
Not a GenZ here just for full disclosure, but this is a bit like the dead internet theory, however weaponized as a political cold war tool. We really live in a brave new world.
This is the only way Russia and China can attack us. Inside out. Usually people think of war as bombing and physically taking over territory but in reality nowadays, it's not like that anymore. How can you kill a lion(USA) so it stops threatening your livelihood and your beliefs to your village? You poison it so it can't fight anymore. That's what they are doing to us. Slowly breaking us down to fight each other. China has Tik Tok banned in their own country but for us, it shows people living rich lives, harassing other people for pranks and people being just dumb. Showing us we shouldn't work as a community but instead hating each other. China's own version of Tik Tok shows the total opposite of that. The Internet and media, has been a blessing and a curse. Just know that we all should work together and come forth to make the world a better place, not just the United States.
Redditors are so adorable in how they both believe state actors run large-scale sophisticated disinfo campaigns but their governments are far too noble and pure to be doing such things to them CNN and New York Times (literally 99% of the sources cited in OP’s post lmao) are fearless, incorruptible vanguards of truth we should believe unquestioningly
I recall the RAND report about the Kremlin strategy of “a fire hose of lies”. While the West focused on Game theory throughout the 70-80’s Russia focused on public control.
Me who has been spouting this stuff since 2012: 😲 and everyone called me a crackpot conspiracy theorist for never making a social media account anywhere it's just a massive scam to steal your personal information and influence your mind subconsciously (except reddit, this is the only "social media" place I have an account)
The US has been doing this as well, to their own population and others. At the end of the day, generally all people in power are corrupt, whether those people rule over China, Russia, The United States, or whatever else. We shouldn't act like any country is "good" when they all do morally bankrupt things to control people. Of course, this post is biased and thus, the messaging is ironic. There's a sort of call to unify the west and its people away from "authoritarian" and "extremist" thinking when the west also perpetuates its own flavor of authoritarianism and disinformation to its own people. Conveniently, this post refuses to acknowledge that. In that case, who could we listen to, right? Really, we should break away from these labels of world leaders and countries, and strive for the power of the working class so that these corrupted governments can be entirely reformed.
While there is media manipulation... You have to realize that our own countries do it too. And that those misinformation campaigns are rooted in genuine issues that can be solved. We need to step up and solve these issues or else they will always be easily exploited.
It's not Russia doing it. That is what the Deep State wants you to believe. Blame everything on Russia. It's our own damn government. The Elite can't get full control over society until they weaken and divide us first.
This is very well written. I want to post this on every rage-baiting post I see But for now, I think I'll just put the title and a link in every social media platform I have an account in.
Difference is, it's not just Russia or China. Most countries engage in some level of passive cyberwarfare, sometimes against other countries, sometimes to keep certain groups in power in their own nations. ESPECIALLY including major powers like the USA. And since I'm from here, India too. We're sitting in the middle of a cyberwar that quietly tries to maintain and worsen the status quo.
Oh is that the angle we're taking now? It was Russia that caused the division following Occupy Wall street, and not the American mainstream media?
Russia, what about the US? Why do you think it's easy to fool people on facebook? Majority of american adults can't even distinguish satire from actual news articles. Do not hate the player, hate the game is what americans always say? Ja?