Yeah, man. I have emigrated from Russia to EU five years ago and it is heartbreaking to see the developed US and some European countries go through the same bullshit we were going since 2011. Like half the country starts living in wild, completely imaginary world, and you can always tell what is the current agenda of the propaganda machine just by talking to some relatives who fell through that rabbit hole
As someone who lives in the EU and has the same kind of relatives, what I find frustrating is how little actual engagement with the Russian narratives there is from official sides. There is presented "evidence" for US influence in Ukraine long before the war, like the Victoria Nuland video, yet there seems to be no attempts at debunking those arguments, short of a catch-all labeling of all of it as disinformation (which, I can testify from personal experience, does absolutely nothing to dissuade people who already believe it).
The Selinskyji/Trump spat felt like an extreme version of this, where Selinskyji essentially argued with the Western/Ukrainian narrative of the war and Trump argued with the Russian narrative.
The strategy of "ignore the Russian narrative and hope not many people will latch on to it" evidently failed, so I think if we want to have a hope of solving this conflict and countering Trump (and maybe get back the parts of the population that follow the narrative), we at least have to engage with it and provide counterarguments.
Twitter community notes are popular and pretty effective at calling out misleading information that has gone viral (organically or inorganically). I think writing off facts and arguments is premature.
Is that sort of stuff actually effective against propaganda though?
I'd assume that by the time a disclaimer is written up, submitted, and accepted according to whatever the criteria is, the original un-disclaimered message has been received and digested by its target audience.
There are a few things working in favor of community notes there
1. Viral tweets have a longer-than-average time window between the time they start to go viral and the time the median viewer sees them, so a community note can get there before the median viewer.
2. Users who interacted with a tweet before it got a community note will get a notification when the community note is added.
3. Community note writers can leave a note on a piece of media. If a tweet with a video gets a community note, and that note is about the video rather than about the tweet, that note will show on all other tweets that show that video.
Source: this excellent interview with the Community Notes team (https://asteriskmag.com/issues/08/the-making-of-community-no...), in the section that starts with "Asterisk: Another thing I wanted to talk about is speed". Really that whole interview is great, highlights how deliberate and thoughtful the Community Notes team was regarding everything about the feature. Which is, I think, why community notes have succeeded where a lot of previous fact-checking attempts have failed.
Plus, the propaganda also strongly paints fact checking as a mere ploy by other_team to try to cheat and win. So even if the community notes get to them, they will chalk it up to "liberals trying to hide the real truth."
Well, in "real politics" terms, the Russian narrative becomes "we stole this fair and square - we conquered this much territory, it has historically been ours, so you should make a treaty giving us this and we're done" whereas the Ukraine's narrative is basically "Russia holding that territory is unjust and fundamentally violates the democratic aspirations of the people there, so we need X many years of war and X thousand dead to regain that land".
Which is to say Ukrainian narrative is hard to embrace unless someone is already energized by a need for justice to nations, which might not be certain segment of America.
I agree it’s a huge disgrace and half of the US is living in a fantasy land. However polls show that Americans don’t like Putin. A poll two weeks ago[0] actually showed 81% of Americans do not trust Putin. Finding 81% agreement about anything is hard.
This is something that is unique to the administration and those who deeply agree with what it’s done.
Not that it matters… clearly people don’t care enough to vote for it. My heart goes out to the people of Ukraine.
That poll in isolation means nothing. A person who "does not trust Putin" but nevertheless subscribes to Russian propaganda is still doing his work.
I see plenty of people in social media (enough to be convinced that they aren't all bots) who appear to believe that continuing to support Ukraine with aid would bankrupt the US, would be equivalent in effect to fighting Iraq or Vietnam again, would lead to WW III, and so on and so forth. The conspiracy theories about Ukraine's leadership are elaborate as well. I imagine almost all these people would tell you they don't like Putin.
> However polls show that Americans don’t like Putin.
Out of that 81%, how many believe in appeasing Putin to "Avoid world war III" despite their animus? Too many, IMO, and Putin doesn't care for how the American populace feel about him personally, as long as he can achieve his foreign policy goals without hindrance from American bombs, intelligence or funding, which has become the status quo as of yesterday.
You're talking about domestic propaganda. The parent blames external propaganda, instead of doing something or at least admitting that the domestic propaganda pipeline backfired. It's usually extremely hard to make people see their own issues. It's always someone else, not them.
Yes, in Russia it happened largely in the same way, and it started much earlier than in 2011 (in 2012 we already had literal Putin cultists marching down the streets). Some people blamed an external enemy for their troubles (both troubles and the enemy were usually imaginary, with the enemy usually being the US), others who rejected the idea blamed the other half and generally had their heads in the sand, but neither wanted to admit their issues or do anything substantial, leaving the Kremlin do what they wanted to do.
I agree mostly, but the mechanisms of domestic and external propaganda are basically the same, it's just that autocratic regimes have a "home field advantage" domestically via repressions. And yes, it started before 2011, but this is approximately the year when IMO the tide really started to change for worse. Before that there were some more or less free press and a semblance of political discourse in the country, but since the peak of election fraud protests it progressively got weaker, and by now it feels like the "opposition" is completely destroyed
