As a reminder: algorithmic disinformation is a thing.
Russia and others have hacked Facebook in a subtle way: by spreading misinformation, which they have a long experience doing, and targeting a platform that optimized to spread dubious (at best) content for clicks and ad targeting.
In other words, they are piggyback riding the shittiest socnet on the planet to spread hate and attack target countries.
The triumph of this was, of course, the election of a certain Donald J. Trump and Brexit.
bonifartius 𒂼𒄄
@ParadeGrotesque
while it's clear that russia does this, it should also be clear that the western governments also do this. everyone tries to fuck with the minds of the populace. this isn't even a new development, it's just new methods. every government has it's minitrue.
i too think that trump & brexit were a close call, it's the result of people being pissed about politics for a long time. the algorithmic campaigns were just the tiny thing required to have the opinion swing in those directions.
a point which is unsettling for me about the "russian disinformation is to blame" idea is that it disputes that common people can reason and decide for themselves. if you turn it the other way round it means that they are too dumb anyway and should just trust our narrative. this isn't the view on humans i like to have.
i know that the spooks designing those operations are very good with psychology, but this can't be the reason to declare large swaths of the own population as dumb people who must be saved.
"disinformation" (i really hate that word, btw) is only powerful as people are dissatisfied already. if hyper-capitalism wouldn't have destroyed large paths of psychological & financial security already, those campaigns wouldn't work.
we all are manipulated all the time. the "russian disinformation"-idea is, in a sense, manipulation too.
i think my way to deal with this is to ignore anything claiming to be for a "good cause". experience shows that there always is an ulterior motive. be it covid, diversity, trump, brexit, middle east. everyone who is trying to sell me on the "right" thing to do probably also has another hidden reason to do so.
i just try to be not an asshole and scale down my consumption, both of which work surprisingly well.
meanwhile the russian federation operates a rather brilliant service where it simply translates western propaganda to russian and puts it up online so that ordinary people can see just what the west actually thinks of their country and people. not entirely coincidentally, a vast majority of russians now want nothing to do with the west. if you have to lie to get the job done, so be it, but when simply shouting the truth from the rooftops serves your propaganda aims, it's vastly more effective. (it was Göbbels i believe who reportedly hated the famous, hysterically anti-jewish rag Der Stürmer that Hitler's pal Julius Streicher ran, because it provided such excellent fodder for anti-german propaganda during WWII. Streicher ended up being hanged at Nürnberg alongside a bunch of war criminals just for publishing it.)
frankly it's bizarre that roskomnadzor even allows facebook and twitter to operate in russia at this point, they're nothing more than USG propaganda founts. china at least had the sense to shut them all out, and also handily prevented foreign companies from monopolizing their social media sector in doing so. every nation should be so wise.
> it disputes that common people can reason and decide for themselves
and that's exactly what it's designed for. at one point one of our major newspapers literally published a piece literally telling people they needed to stop thinking critically because "critical thinking can do more harm than good" and needs to be left to the experts. it's all part of a big media campaign to make the populace even more mindlessly compliant, or at least paint the noncompliant as subhumans (querdenkern, "Russian Bots," "anti-vaxxers," whatever, the terms all essentially mean the same thing: "enemy of my tribe") who deserve only to be gassed (with the extra benefit that the subhumans can then be used as scapegoats for all the chaos and misery created by the elites), and it's working. exempli gratia: the internet these days is full of goodthinkers expressing violent rage at badthinking injection-resisters, saying how much they want us all to be brutally murdered or beaten or locked up or whatever.
i have my own issues with the idea that everyone should always make up their own opinions and decide for themselves instead of following their leaders (cognitohazardous memes are real and very dangerous), but when your leadership is hostile to you, the point is moot; if you aren't careful to think critically, you become nothing more than a useful idiot to predatory people who scorn you and would just as soon carve you up to use your fat for candle wax as look at you. in countries like russia or china. people generally trust their governments to varying degrees because they're seen firsthand that their governments are actually invested in looking after the common people.
@velartrill not much time right now, but i think there just is no alternative to everyone making up his own opinion. everything else has the same dangers (leadership going mad), while if people can decide for themselves there at least is the possibility of not being fucked with.
part of how They maintain control in my home country is by keeping people too scatterbrained to work together -- they don't just program people to be untrustworthy, selfish sacks of shit, growing up as an american you're also essentially taught that it's your right and duty to have an Opinion on as many subjects as possible, and that anyone who doesn't make up their own mind is inferior -- a loyal follower is actually just a useful idiot. the end result is such fragmentation and quarreling nobody is willing to work together, even if there were anyone trustworthy to work with. you don't have to actually think critically (and that's dangerous after all, according to the NYT) or have any subject area knowledge whatsoever, just take any random stand and don't budge no matter how wrong and pig-ignorant you are, because you'll be seen as weak if you admit you're wrong about anything ever. the system then uses the media to prime people for beliefs that are crucial to the maintenance of the regime (burgerland is the land of the free, we have the most POWERFUL MILITARY in the GALAXY, xi jinping and his chinese communist apparatchiks want to invade and enslave your children in their dastardly uyghur blood mines, Putin Doesn't Have a Soul, and so forth), and lets them make up their own mind on everything else. the end result is americans are the most brainwashed people on earth, and the most adamant that they are FREE goddammit and they think all their beliefs are totally their own. it's far more effective than USSR-style propaganda, and it affects many aspects of life, including relationships. (there's a reason americans are so willing to break up with or disown each other over stupid fucking politics.) it's a horrible state of affairs that i would only wish on our worst enemies.
you know that picture of Guy Fawkes masks being mass-produced in some asian sweatshop for the US market? that's the system in a nutshell.
when you try to implement a democracy, you effectively hand the game to the most devious and amoral psychopaths around, who are also guaranteed to be the worst possible people to run any given society, because elections are nothing more than a test of who is best able to manipulate the population. america is a cautionary tale of what you're ultimately doomed to become if a patriotic leader (a putin, a xi, an orbán, a stalin, even a lukashenko in a pinch) doesn't seize control of the system first -- and there's no guarantee whatsoever you won't get a mussolini or a hitler. hell, even if you don't, it takes a certain degree of ruthlessness to be willing to seize control of a nation in the first place, democratically or otherwise -- there's no question (at least not among russians) that stalin was a hero who saved his people and bought them a few decades of relative peace and prosperity unlike anything they'd known under the tsar, but he was also an absolutely frozen-souled bastard who spent much of his career up to his armpits in blood, and probably the only reason he was an effective leader was because russia at the time genuinely really was full of people who needed killing (especially after, you know, the Wehrmacht invaded). you'd never want a guy like that taking over an already peaceful and stable nation, he'd turn it into an abattoir. so you have to be REALLY fucking lucky for democracy to be wound down in a non-nightmarish manner.
llike, shit, just look at the baltic countries that were so eager to break away from the USSR and have Freedom™ -- they're all now under the total control of pro-western quislings whose only goal in life is to be a pleasurable fucktoy for the US and EU elites that want to rape their homelands til they bleed out, and their populace is a hysterical wreck driven into a frenzy of hatred and fear of russia to maintain the illusion that NATO is their friend.
it's why china's authoritarianism and putin/united russia's meddling with elections don't really bother me, it's that or the state is taken back over by parasites and quislings.
@velartrill regarding leaders/followers, you can get to the conclusion that you _want_ someone to be in control because you think it's in your best interest. that is perfectly fine.
i don't think that a representative democracy like we currently have in most western states is a good model, i don't think having an uncontrolled-leader state is a good one. both are unfit for countries as big as ours. nobody can rule over several million of people, it's just mind bogging bullshit to assume that it will work without throwing random groups under the bus.
i think what could work is smaller countries with direct democracy. _really_ let the people decide, not some suits who are more often than not controlled by someones money.
maybe we are just too many people for everything not resulting in dystopia?
the fallacy people get into here is that it's possible to have a state where the power of leadership is "controlled." again, look at the US -- designed from the ground up around "checks and balances" that were supposed to keep the leadership in check, hardcoded into the consitution itself by people who were sick of monarchy and absolutely ideologically dead-set against ever taking the chance that kings might one day reign in their new nation, and yet those restraints all just melted away to let the president rule by fiat as soon as the powers that be decided that was in their best interest, and america has become a monster far worse than any european monarchy ever was. consitutional and legal restraints are largely meaningless against bad actors who get their hands on the levers of power, while good-faith actors are only hampered by them (consider how easily biden has ruled by diktat after blatantly stealing the election, while trump (okay, i'm stretching "good-faith" a bit here) couldn't get anything done whatsoever except for whoring us out to israel despite his genuine electoral mandate and being the supposed Most Powerful Man in the Free World®). it is, again, a model that benefits only the worst, scummiest politicians and hamstrings the nobleminded ones who want to lead their people rather than just exploit them.
these complex "democratic" systems (i reiterate: it is acknowledged by sociologists that no known society in human history, with the possible singular exception of, as usual, the Pirahã, has been anything but de facto oligarchic, at least not without collapsing rapidly into anarchy or civil war), also diffuse responsibility and make it vastly harder to root out entrenched systems of exploitation and corruption. a much better model is china's old "mandate of heaven" -- one man is sovereign so long as he holds the coveted mandate of heaven, and once heaven turns against him (i.e. he starts getting uppity or screws the pooch one time too many), well, he's just one guy and everyone knows where he lives, so you just up and march to the capital with your pitchforks and torches and chop off his head _pour encourager les autres_, and everyone knows full well you have the blessing of the Celestial Emperor in doing so. compare that to going up against the Deep State in the US, or the late Soviet _nomenklatura_. in the US now we don't even have any clue who's even in charge; everyone knows the president is a puppet but nobody has any damn idea who's pulling his strings.
tl;dr the evil leaders will get everything they want either way, may as well let the good ones play by the same rules and give them a chance to properly clean house and get the country on a better footing.
> i think what could work is smaller countries with direct democracy
smaller countries yes for sure, but direct democracy is the most terrifying political model possible short of "rule by sadistic AI god," and not even that far from it frankly. direct democracy is direct rule by the Last Man. no, better nero than the mob. the mob cannot lead, categorically (remember Occupy?), and will not ever make good decisions, but a despot at least is less likely to starve the entire country out of pure bloody-minded stupidity or allow it to collapse into civil war and utter barbarity. http://www.amerika.org/texts/crowdism/
> maybe we are just too many people for everything not resulting in dystopia?
not remotely, there are much larger countries that work just fine and maintain cohesion and patriotism among much more diverse populations than ours. but the system wants us demoralized so it encourages us to believe this. "there is no alternative," Thatcher claimed. claptrap and folderol
@bonifartius
You raise some very good points.
Like you, I do not think people are "dumb". But they can be manipulated, and sometimes a lot more easily than you think. I speak of experience, since I was manipulated myself.
Another point is that hyper-capitalism, as you name it, does not like quality education and critical thinking for all. Most people never receive education in media manipulation and propaganda. And the vast majority of people have a trustful nature.