The Kremlin is turning to unwitting Americans and commercial public relations firms in Russia to spread disinformation about the U.S. presidential race, top intelligence officials said Monday, detailing the latest efforts by America’s adversaries to shape public opinion ahead of the 2024 election.
The warning comes after a tumultuous few weeks in U.S. politics that have forced Russia, Iran and China to revise some of the details of their propaganda playbook. What hasn’t changed, intelligence officials said, is the determination of these nations to seed the internet with false and incendiary claims about American democracy to undermine faith in the election.
“The American public should know that content that they read online — especially on social media — could be foreign propaganda, even if it appears to be coming from fellow Americans or originating in the United States,” said an official from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence who briefed reporters on condition of anonymity under rules set by the office of the director.
Russia continues to pose the greatest threat when it comes to election disinformation, authorities said, while there are indications that Iran is expanding its efforts and China is proceeding cautiously when it comes to 2024.
We have a problem with those unwitting Americans who lack critical thinking skills. The weird right wants to cultivate the poorly educated though.
We have a problem with those unwitting Americans who lack critical thinking skills.
We have people with accumulated priors who were trained to reflexively respond to certain stimuli after decades of social programming.
You can’t “critical thinking” your way past a phobia or a fixation. That’s not how the human mind works. And Americans have had these neuroses embedded in their psyches for generations, thanks to a systematic effort by corporate interests to divide and conquer the domestic labor force.
The weird right wants to cultivate the poorly educated though.
The weird right is cracking up. It no longer has a firm liberal basis for reactionary beliefs or a large evangelical base with a uniform understanding of religious obligations and taboos. What education they’re doing is fractured, confused, and contradictory. And a big part of that fracturing is coming from their dissolution of public education, public media, and post-educational institutions.
40 years ago, people talked about the Food Pyramid and the D.A.R.E. program like they were gospels. You didn’t need to hang the 10 Commandments in everyone’s classrooms, because we already knew them all by heart. Now you can’t convince half the country to get a flu shot, because the paranoia and conspiracy has gotten so out of hand. Everyone’s a weird fringe branch of a Protestant off-shot of a rapidly deteriorating central church. No “common core” seems to exist anymore. Education is just taking a thousand confusingly written word problem exams while we find new ways to replace teachers with teleprompters.
The falcon cannot hear the falconer. The center cannot hold. Slouching towards Bethlehem, etc. Either Americans find a way back to their Reagan-Era Traditional nationalist identity, they find a new center to rally around, or this thing we call a United States is going to crack like an egg.
“The American public should know that content that they read online — especially on social media — could be foreign propaganda, even if it appears to be coming from fellow Americans or originating in the United States,” said an official from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence who briefed reporters on condition of anonymity under rules set by the office of the director.
I wish they’d give some specific examples. It would be nice to know specifically what to look for.
Here’s a little exchange I saw recently on Lemmy:
A: Perhaps she should reconsider that allegiance with israel. It’s not very popular with voters.
A: Of course Kamala taking $5.000.000 from AIPAC might be related to her allegiance.
B: I knew you weren’t from the US. Where are you from?
A: What?
C: It’s because you used periods instead of commas in your total of aipac money. That’s not proper American syntax and shows you’re from somewhere else.
A: I don’t recall my calculators coming with commas. Where are you from?
D: Nobody said anything about calculators, you don’t seem to understand the question. The comments about using commas in numbers in the U.S. are 100% correct.
D: You have a keen interest in posting all day about politics in a country you arent from. Can never answer a question about your own background.
D: Incessantly talk shit about Israeli policy from an anti Democratic perspective without a whif of criticism of the Republicans, who would be far worse in their full throated approval of Israeli warcrimes. What is your native language? Are you able to vote in the USA?
A: Interesting statement that proves you have not done any research. I’ll not bother with your other baseless allegations either.
“Okay, but I think we can all agree that the sun rises in the east”
“Interest… you use the word ‘okay’ rather than ‘ok’. Only an insidious Russian computer program would spell it like that. I think I can dismiss everything you’ve said up until this point.”
One of the things I like about lemmy (or at least, the communities I sub to) is that the userbase seems quite on the ball with noticing and calling out bad faith bullshit like that. It’s WAY better than Reddit was (as of a year ago - haven’t frequented it since then).
the userbase seems quite on the ball with noticing and calling out bad faith bullshit like that
I often see people fixating on efforts to call out ‘bad faith’ as, itself, a form of bad faith discussion. The goal is always to accuse someone with a different view of having an agenda or perhaps even being a paid shill or automated response engine working for an insidious outside agency.
You’re either all uniformly in agreement on a topic, or you’re an insidious demon here to trick people into perdition.
If someone is literally arguing in bad faith, what’s the point in engaging with them? There’s no way to persuade someone who doesn’t actually care about what they’re saying in the first place.
If someone is literally arguing in bad faith, what’s the point in engaging with them?
You’re not arguing strictly for them, you’re arguing for the audience of readers in the comments.
I suppose that’s fair, but if you e.g. make a compelling counterpoint and the other person fixates on one small detail to derail the conversation, I think the people you can realistically reach will already be on your side, and anyone who wants to draw some kind of false equivalence between your respective positions wasn’t going to be convinced anyways.
It’s more nuanced than that of course, but in my experience that’s generally the way these things play out as the thread gets longer.
It’s more nuanced than that of course
That’s where the more interesting conversations (even the cynical ones) ultimately live.
I wish they’d give some specific examples.
Can’t give a specific example because it’s either going to illicit a “That’s too crazy for anyone to seriously believe” dismissive response, a “That’s absolutely true and you’re the one who is feeding from the propaganda trough!” reactionary response, or a “Okay sure that’s bullshit but everyone knows those guys are far-left/far-right, I would simply block and move on” in-group response.
That’s functionally why these propaganda gambits work. They’re heavily targeted towards people’s biases, thanks to extensive A/B testing of the social media audience. They’ll either appear as total gibberish, hard partisan coded, or perfectly believable depending on who is reading it.
