5 ms·

The Propaganda About Russian Propaganda

54 points by taylorbuley 10y ago

squozzer 10y ago
And now The New Yorker joins PropOrNot's shit list.
- trendia 10y ago
  McCarythism in the digital age.
kushti 10y ago
Even controversial site bellingcat producing fakes (see http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/expert-criticizes-allegations-of-russian-mh17-manipulation-a-1037125.html http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/expert-criticizes-... ) is avoiding to be tied with PropOrNot insanity but WaPo journos picked the crackpot theories up easily.
jessriedel 10y ago
The media has a terrible time reporting on anything that requires scientific understanding to assess. The only real solution to this is to put folks with technical training in the media, and to give them real veto power on stories. The current mechanism where a non-technical writer reads a summary of technical results (e.g., a university press release) then asks a few technical contacts their opinion, is hugely flawed. Ultimately, this road leads to the writing component of journalists being reduced to commodity status, so writers won't let it happen easily. And in any case, readers are selecting outlets based on their ability to tell a compelling story rather than get that facts right, so there's no market pressure.
- taylorbuley 10y ago
  journalists tend to pride being "good at everything, great at nothing." unfortunately it's tough to scale expertise when the domains are so specialized. i'd speculate this is expemplified by all the "ai" we keep hearing about lately which is probably just vanilla machine learning algos at work
onemore 10y ago
PropOrNot is american propaganda. No need for such a long article, it's quite simple.
kafkaesq 10y ago
The thing to wrap one's head about, in regard to the "pro-Russia"-slanting body of opinion (and not infrequent bursts of outright disinformation) that have become increasingly prevalent in the past few years (not so coincidently with the start of Putin's apocryphal 3rd term): These people think this stuff up largely on their own, because it suits their own (half-baked) intellectual agenda (faux anti-globalism, "the enemy of my enemy is my friend", and all that). Yes, occasionally they'll suck up snippets of dialog, or memelets that might first have originated in sources actually supported by the Russian government (and indeed, there are more than a few bonafide trolls out there in certain media outlets; and of course, the occasional Putin-enchanted celebrity here and there; etc). But by and large, this contact is incidental. And if people go around denying that the invasion of the Crimea was really and invasion, or that we "don't really know" what happened to MH-17, or (as one very educated acquaintance of mine said to me recently) "Have you read Putin's Syria speech? It was actually quite thoughtful"... it's probably not because they've been brainwashed by RT and Sputnik News... it's because that's the way they think things "ought to be" (and because they apparently don't to a lot of primary source reading... they're very susceptible to letting their intuition and gut feelings run amok over the basic chronology of recent events). Sources directed by the Russian government might provide a bit of an echo, and "fluff" this mentality up a bit... but I suspect not by all that much. Or as the quote at the end of the article puts it: “To blame internal social effects on external perpetrators is very Putinistic.”
- rahrahrah 10y ago
  > people go around denying that the invasion of the Crimea was really and invasion The USA invaded Iraq and Afghanistan and never had any consequences over it.
  - kafkaesq 10y ago
    The "Whaddabout X?" response (that is, countering mention of an unpleasant topic by completely changing the subject) is one of the classic misdirection techniques that have, unfortunately, become so popular in recent years.
gumby 10y ago
Seems like we could crowdsource these lists. We could sign up for the ones we like, inserting them into our blocker plug ins and let FB know which ones we cared about. (Then we could live in even more extremely segregated bubbles!)
reso 10y ago
Glenn Greenwald had this story nailed a few days ago: https://theintercept.com/2016/11/26/washington-post-disgracefully-promotes-a-mccarthyite-blacklist-from-a-new-hidden-and-very-shady-group/ https://theintercept.com/2016/11/26/washington-post-disgrace...
- Jerry2 10y ago
  Yasha Levine also wrote an interesting article on this: https://surveillancevalley.com/blog/on-russia-hacking-american-democracy https://surveillancevalley.com/blog/on-russia-hacking-americ...
allemagne 10y ago
Maybe if the Left really went all-in on stories like this and presented the illusion of consensus and controversy, instead of scrambling to correct each other and themselves, then maybe they'd have a better answer to the Trump phenomenon. You don't see Drudge calling out Breitbart like this. Why should the truth get in the way of getting votes and creating a liberal Trump anyway? Why not? What else should powerful Democrats take away from this year? Push a Bill Maher or Michael Moore in 2020, on the campaign promise of forgiving the debt of all citizens or something, and putting Trump in jail as a Russian spy. Mean none of it. I can only half-heartedly say that we can stop those already trying to make this a reality. That's the world we live in now.

54 points by taylorbuley 10y ago

squozzer 10y ago

And now The New Yorker joins PropOrNot's shit list.

trendia 10y ago
McCarythism in the digital age.

kushti 10y ago

Even controversial site bellingcat producing fakes (see http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/expert-criticizes-allegations-of-russian-mh17-manipulation-a-1037125.html http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/expert-criticizes-... ) is avoiding to be tied with PropOrNot insanity but WaPo journos picked the crackpot theories up easily.

jessriedel 10y ago

The media has a terrible time reporting on anything that requires scientific understanding to assess. The only real solution to this is to put folks with technical training in the media, and to give them real veto power on stories. The current mechanism where a non-technical writer reads a summary of technical results (e.g., a university press release) then asks a few technical contacts their opinion, is hugely flawed. Ultimately, this road leads to the writing component of journalists being reduced to commodity status, so writers won't let it happen easily. And in any case, readers are selecting outlets based on their ability to tell a compelling story rather than get that facts right, so there's no market pressure.

taylorbuley 10y ago
journalists tend to pride being "good at everything, great at nothing." unfortunately it's tough to scale expertise when the domains are so specialized. i'd speculate this is expemplified by all the "ai" we keep hearing about lately which is probably just vanilla machine learning algos at work

onemore 10y ago

PropOrNot is american propaganda. No need for such a long article, it's quite simple.

kafkaesq 10y ago

The thing to wrap one's head about, in regard to the "pro-Russia"-slanting body of opinion (and not infrequent bursts of outright disinformation) that have become increasingly prevalent in the past few years (not so coincidently with the start of Putin's apocryphal 3rd term): These people think this stuff up largely on their own, because it suits their own (half-baked) intellectual agenda (faux anti-globalism, "the enemy of my enemy is my friend", and all that). Yes, occasionally they'll suck up snippets of dialog, or memelets that might first have originated in sources actually supported by the Russian government (and indeed, there are more than a few bonafide trolls out there in certain media outlets; and of course, the occasional Putin-enchanted celebrity here and there; etc). But by and large, this contact is incidental. And if people go around denying that the invasion of the Crimea was really and invasion, or that we "don't really know" what happened to MH-17, or (as one very educated acquaintance of mine said to me recently) "Have you read Putin's Syria speech? It was actually quite thoughtful"... it's probably not because they've been brainwashed by RT and Sputnik News... it's because that's the way they think things "ought to be" (and because they apparently don't to a lot of primary source reading... they're very susceptible to letting their intuition and gut feelings run amok over the basic chronology of recent events). Sources directed by the Russian government might provide a bit of an echo, and "fluff" this mentality up a bit... but I suspect not by all that much. Or as the quote at the end of the article puts it: “To blame internal social effects on external perpetrators is very Putinistic.”

rahrahrah 10y ago
> people go around denying that the invasion of the Crimea was really and invasion The USA invaded Iraq and Afghanistan and never had any consequences over it.
- kafkaesq 10y ago
  The "Whaddabout X?" response (that is, countering mention of an unpleasant topic by completely changing the subject) is one of the classic misdirection techniques that have, unfortunately, become so popular in recent years.

gumby 10y ago

Seems like we could crowdsource these lists. We could sign up for the ones we like, inserting them into our blocker plug ins and let FB know which ones we cared about. (Then we could live in even more extremely segregated bubbles!)

reso 10y ago

Glenn Greenwald had this story nailed a few days ago: https://theintercept.com/2016/11/26/washington-post-disgracefully-promotes-a-mccarthyite-blacklist-from-a-new-hidden-and-very-shady-group/ https://theintercept.com/2016/11/26/washington-post-disgrace...

Jerry2 10y ago
Yasha Levine also wrote an interesting article on this: https://surveillancevalley.com/blog/on-russia-hacking-american-democracy https://surveillancevalley.com/blog/on-russia-hacking-americ...

allemagne 10y ago

Maybe if the Left really went all-in on stories like this and presented the illusion of consensus and controversy, instead of scrambling to correct each other and themselves, then maybe they'd have a better answer to the Trump phenomenon. You don't see Drudge calling out Breitbart like this. Why should the truth get in the way of getting votes and creating a liberal Trump anyway? Why not? What else should powerful Democrats take away from this year? Push a Bill Maher or Michael Moore in 2020, on the campaign promise of forgiving the debt of all citizens or something, and putting Trump in jail as a Russian spy. Mean none of it. I can only half-heartedly say that we can stop those already trying to make this a reality. That's the world we live in now.