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> Trouble with these "disinformation" campaigns is that when your entire "news" is disinformation people don't trust it and learn to read between the lines. And

by ardy42 6y ago

> Trouble with these "disinformation" campaigns is that when your entire "news" is disinformation people don't trust it and learn to read between the lines. And the Soviet people were experts at that by then, so almost nobody believed this bullshit. My understanding is that the the ultimate goal of disinformation isn't get get people to believe the lies, it's to politically neutralize them by making them cynical and mistrustful of everything, including the truth.

m0zg 6y ago
There's no such thing as "truth" really. What gets reported through "official" channels is always in accordance with someone's agenda. You may agree with that agenda, but that doesn't make the reporting "true" in any sense of the word. Nor does disagreeing with the agenda make reporting automatically completely false, although people tend to perceive it as such. Soviet people knew some version of the "truth" though, from reading between the lines. When all the news is fake, "citizen journalism" naturally arises, and it did in the Soviet Union. There was always the "official" version of events that everyone knew was a lie and the "unofficial" one that you'd hear from e.g. your relatives near to where the events took place, or, if events took place abroad from Radio Svoboda or Voice of America on the shortwave (naturally, with corrections for _their_ propaganda). From that you can build up a fairly accurate version of what's really going on, if you care. Americans are only now learning this skill, I was "born in it, molded by it". To give you a concrete example, people knew about the real extent of Chernobyl well before the Central Committee of the Communist Party decided it was necessary to tell us the _sanitized_ version of the news. We did not know why it blew up until years later, but we knew it _did_ blow up pretty much the next day. We also knew firefighters were dousing an open reactor core without any protective equipment, that stuff could leak into the river and poison Kiev, etc, etc. All in spite of KGB's very best efforts to conceal the facts, and its near unlimited power.
- ardy42 6y ago
  > There's no such thing as "truth" really. What gets reported through "official" channels is always in accordance with someone's agenda. You may agree with that agenda, but that doesn't make the reporting "true" in any sense of the word. Nor does disagreeing with the agenda make reporting automatically completely false, although people tend to perceive it as such. Let me put it another way: there are agendas that are more helpful to you and your people and agendas that are more harmful; the people who put out disinformation have the goal of making it harder for you to tell the difference.

by ardy42 6y ago

m0zg 6y ago

There's no such thing as "truth" really. What gets reported through "official" channels is always in accordance with someone's agenda. You may agree with that agenda, but that doesn't make the reporting "true" in any sense of the word. Nor does disagreeing with the agenda make reporting automatically completely false, although people tend to perceive it as such. Soviet people knew some version of the "truth" though, from reading between the lines. When all the news is fake, "citizen journalism" naturally arises, and it did in the Soviet Union. There was always the "official" version of events that everyone knew was a lie and the "unofficial" one that you'd hear from e.g. your relatives near to where the events took place, or, if events took place abroad from Radio Svoboda or Voice of America on the shortwave (naturally, with corrections for _their_ propaganda). From that you can build up a fairly accurate version of what's really going on, if you care. Americans are only now learning this skill, I was "born in it, molded by it". To give you a concrete example, people knew about the real extent of Chernobyl well before the Central Committee of the Communist Party decided it was necessary to tell us the _sanitized_ version of the news. We did not know why it blew up until years later, but we knew it _did_ blow up pretty much the next day. We also knew firefighters were dousing an open reactor core without any protective equipment, that stuff could leak into the river and poison Kiev, etc, etc. All in spite of KGB's very best efforts to conceal the facts, and its near unlimited power.

ardy42 6y ago
> There's no such thing as "truth" really. What gets reported through "official" channels is always in accordance with someone's agenda. You may agree with that agenda, but that doesn't make the reporting "true" in any sense of the word. Nor does disagreeing with the agenda make reporting automatically completely false, although people tend to perceive it as such. Let me put it another way: there are agendas that are more helpful to you and your people and agendas that are more harmful; the people who put out disinformation have the goal of making it harder for you to tell the difference.