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Normally I am highly supportive of volunteer based efforts. However for political causes volunteers tend have political biases, which make the results less than

by aleyan 6y ago

Normally I am highly supportive of volunteer based efforts. However for political causes volunteers tend have political biases, which make the results less than authoritative. According to this [1] article from University of Manchester researchers, even EU supported volunteer anti-disinformation campaigns seems to produce more of it themselves. And yes, I did confirm that the "reframingrussia.com" domain does belong to a University of Manchester group[2]. [1] https://reframingrussia.com/2020/04/06/covid-19-disinformation-two-short-reports-on-the-russian-dimension/ https://reframingrussia.com/2020/04/06/covid-19-disinformati... [2] https://www.research.manchester.ac.uk/portal/en/projects/reframing-russia-for-the-global-mediasphere-from-cold-war-to-information-war(12ff514a-6b46-4b0c-b190-76754ccb0033).html https://www.research.manchester.ac.uk/portal/en/projects/ref...

JChase2 6y ago
That's super interesting. It's hard to imagine what a legitimately authoritative anti-disinformation campaign would look like. Back when Operation INFEKTION was big, in the 80's iirc, the U.S. Department of State was involved in trying to counter claims of AIDS being of U.S. origin by sending out letters to many news outlets. Mostly the details of these letters were worked out by a group known as the "Active Mea-sures Working Group". As far as I know, they were basically underfunded and understaffed, but worked hard to try to tease out the truth and track down the origins of disinformation. These days I'm not sure if it would help or hurt to have the likes of the CIA, FBI, DoD, etc running these groups considering peoples lack of trust in them. It's a tough problem for sure.
- ColanR 6y ago
  That's why independent media is so important. The government will always be assumed to have a spin on things: can you imagine if Trump had the US department of state doing what you described? No democrat would ever believe it was unbiased. It's unfortunate that the government is not the only powerful player in town. Doesn't help that even Amazon owns a news outlet these days.

by aleyan 6y ago

JChase2 6y ago

That's super interesting. It's hard to imagine what a legitimately authoritative anti-disinformation campaign would look like. Back when Operation INFEKTION was big, in the 80's iirc, the U.S. Department of State was involved in trying to counter claims of AIDS being of U.S. origin by sending out letters to many news outlets. Mostly the details of these letters were worked out by a group known as the "Active Mea-sures Working Group". As far as I know, they were basically underfunded and understaffed, but worked hard to try to tease out the truth and track down the origins of disinformation. These days I'm not sure if it would help or hurt to have the likes of the CIA, FBI, DoD, etc running these groups considering peoples lack of trust in them. It's a tough problem for sure.

ColanR 6y ago
That's why independent media is so important. The government will always be assumed to have a spin on things: can you imagine if Trump had the US department of state doing what you described? No democrat would ever believe it was unbiased. It's unfortunate that the government is not the only powerful player in town. Doesn't help that even Amazon owns a news outlet these days.