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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 5th, 2023

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  • GEC looks like a legit project, and I like how their news releases are multilingual. Thank you for sharing that.

    I note that the US Foreign Malign Influence Center is also at work in this space, and authored the alert yesterday that I think is motivating this particular news item.

    I think funding these governmental agencies, incentivizing inter-agency communication, and modernizing & centralizing the communication of their findings is something America needs badly, as well as the country I live in.

    It’s a bit crazy that the only way to look at & share the FMIC alert is via a direct link to a pdf. In order to find it, you have to already know what you’re looking for. Give 20 millennials a job with a mandate to find a way to organize and disseminate this information, and things would be so much better. Right now, a person has to be a sleuth to put these pieces together, and that’s not right.

    Anyway, I’m not taking issue with what you posted, I’m just soapboxing. An effective response to the issue of foreign disinformation campaigns seems relatively straightforward to me. The only thing missing is the political will.



  • We desperately need improved lines of communication between the state and the public regarding foreign disinformation. Like, a free newspaper that comes out every Monday with confirmed examples of foreign propaganda from the previous week. And official social media accounts that give up-to-date information. Surely it’s in the public interest to establish offices that rapidly assemble and distribute this kind of information. Finding out, ‘oh hey, that protest way back in 2022 was organized as part of a foreign interference campaign’, it’s just too late. This sort of information needs to be centralized, summarized, and rapidly disseminated.

    It’s not enough for the state to simply say ‘be cautious’. Citizens need to know what to be cautious of. A general message that you shouldn’t trust anything you see on social media, that’s actually a benefit to the propagandists creating chaos in information spaces.

    I just don’t see how the problem of disinformation gets addressed without intelligence agencies getting more modern and engaged in their approach to communication with the public.







  • It’s so baffling though. Sincerely believing “these are just left wing accusations” and maga/swamp slogans, maps onto “the judge had a conflict of interest, this was a witch hunt” etc., by the exact same route of illusion.

    The only way I can make sense of this, is to assume that we’re not really dealing with sincere belief. It’s hard to imagine a rational Republican that stood behind the former president through everything since the birth certificate thing, and are now somehow chastened. Maybe they simply think it’ll be a bad look for their guy to be wearing an ankle bracelet on inauguration day / in the first 100 days in office, and it will compromise their party’s future election chances. A question of ‘ick’ factor, and not some extension of actual values and beliefs, like we might hope. “Convicted felon” is a soft Dean scream, maybe.