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Ask HN: How to combat propaganda?

25 points by baxtr 5y ago

Fellow HN reader. I recently talked to a Russian friend living in the West who is married to a Ukrainian. My friend told me he couldn't talk to his relatives back home anymore. He is sending them videos and images from the war in Ukraine, and nothing won't change their minds and conviction that Ukraine needs to be liberated from the Nazis. Now I wonder: Is there any clever way to combat Propaganda in such a situation? How can you establish at least doubt in the other person's mind? EDIT: I didn’t want to discuss what’s right or wrong. I am interested to learn about effective ways / processes to combat propaganda.

jl2718 5y ago
Yes. To see past propaganda, separate in your mind the concepts of a government and the people. A governments and its leaders are to the people, as you are to the earth you walk on: temporary, fickle, selfish, often destructive but ultimately irrelevant.
twoxproblematic 5y ago
h2odragon 5y ago
Would they feel safe voicing any other opinion? If not there may not be anything further to say.
- AnimalMuppet 5y ago
  I have read that propaganda can reach the point where it's about power, not truth. "We can lie to you, and you can know that it's a lie, and you still have to pretend to believe it." That's what it's like when it's about power, not truth. I wonder if Russia is at that point, or rather, if many Russian citizens are at that point.
zqna 5y ago
Exposure to and physical experience of different cultures makes it more difficult to ostracise them. Thinking of actually meeting and casual talking of "other" people. The more and longer, the better. Also, important is the capability of rational thinking, which allows to detect the lies and inconsistencies. Not sure how much of it can be taught at school. Some people are predisposed to blindly follow the authority whatever that authority is, hopefully not malicious. Thinking that maybe an empathy should be important too, but no, quite the opposite. The propaganda feeds on the feelings while the critical thought is its biggest enemy.
GoToRO 5y ago
It's not that they don't know the truth.They lived for a very long time believing o lie that now is hard to admit that they were wrong. People don't like to admit that they are / were wrong.
0xy 5y ago
I've noticed lots of commentators who seemingly couldn't point to Ukraine on a map before February have suggested that Ukraine's Nazi links are fabricated, when even mainstream media was reporting this before 2022. It includes things such as Ukraine's police departments providing operational support to Nazi groups, and the groups' history of arming themselves with heavy weapons including missiles. [1] [2] [3] [4] Ukraine has a long history of directly supporting these groups. Implying either the Nazi groups don't exist or that they're not intertwined with government is opportunistic historical revisionism. The West not only ignores the problem, but directly supports the Nazi groups through weapons shipments, propaganda lines and protection from censorship. [5] [6] [1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-cohen-ukraine-commentary-idUSKBN1GV2TY https://www.reuters.com/article/us-cohen-ukraine-commentary-... [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/15/world/europe/italy-neo-nazi-missile.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/15/world/europe/italy-neo-na... [3] https://www.bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-europe/2019/09/04/the-hardcore-russian-neo-nazi-group-that-calls-ukraine-home/ https://www.bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-europe/2019/09/04/the... [4] https://www.thedailybeast.com/ukraines-anti-russia-azov-battalion-minutemen-or-neo-nazi-terrorists https://www.thedailybeast.com/ukraines-anti-russia-azov-batt... [5] https://theintercept.com/2022/02/24/ukraine-facebook-azov-battalion-russia/ https://theintercept.com/2022/02/24/ukraine-facebook-azov-ba... [6] https://twitter.com/nexta_tv/status/1501171543371665408 https://twitter.com/nexta_tv/status/1501171543371665408
- andrei_says_ 5y ago
  A quote from the first link: > When Russian President Vladimir Putin’s seizure of Crimea four years ago first exposed the decrepit condition of Ukraine’s armed forces, right-wing militias such as Azov and Right Sector stepped into the breach, fending off the Russian-backed separatists while Ukraine’s regular military regrouped. Though, as a result, many Ukrainians continue to regard the militias with gratitude and admiration, the more extreme among these groups promote an intolerant and illiberal ideology that will endanger Ukraine in the long term. Right wing militias in the context of constant ongoing military pressure from Russia and the forceful seizure of Crimea, also by Russia.
  - xg15 5y ago
noodle 5y ago
> How can you establish at least doubt in the other person's mind? Someone must be open to this in the first place. You can't change a closed mind, and there are many reasons why a mind might be closed. They kind of have to arrive at their doubt on their own, at least in my personal non-expert opinion. The most you can do is express your opinion in a relatively non judgmental way (because if you're too harsh they won't return to you later to discuss) and be available if they want to discuss.
- ShivShankaran 5y ago
  The western media also runs rampant propaganda. The director of policy for reddit is an ex-nato person (no one know why reddit hired a non tech person for it) and one reason why reddit is extremely inundated with russia-ukraine war with heavy tilt for how awesome nato is. Note that even Jeremy Corbyn was a target of heavy propaganda by the media and especially reddit since he is anti-war. Anyone anti-war in the western media is quickly character assassinated. There is a reason why someone who is a real people person and how is really best suited to be president: bernie sanders lost against a rambling senile dude. TLDR: it's impossible to have an anti-war mindset or politician in the west. The propaganda will quickly destroy them.
  - AnimalMuppet 5y ago
    I think that you can be "anti-war" to the extent of saying that NATO should not directly be at war with Russia (if possible). I think you can get away with that position without being cancelled. If you're "anti-war" to the extent of saying "we shouldn't supply Ukraine with arms", or even worse, "Ukraine should just surrender", I think that most people rightly find those positions to be abhorrent. That looks far too much like Neville Chamberlain's politics (and morals) for most of our taste. And if you're "anti-war" in the sense of "this is all NATO's fault; Russia was right to invade", you get cancelled very quickly, because you have become indistinguishable from a Russian propagandist, and we know that there are plenty of Russian propagandists trying to influence the west's cultural mindset. If you have a thoughtful, considered reason to hold one of the positions I labeled problematic, you can probably express it on HN. You'll get argued with, you may get yelled at and downvoted, but you probably won't get banned. In the wider culture... no guarantees.
andrei_says_ 5y ago
See the work of George Lakoff and specifically his concept of the truth sandwich.
evervedww2 5y ago
As a Chinese, I feel exactly the same way as your friend does. The Chinese government thinks they can lie however they want to its people and to the outside world, because there are language and internet barriers. For example, they claimed to be neutral regarding the ongoing war, but they are spreading pro-war misinformation via state owned media, and teaching pro-war ideologies at school. People now are trying to translate their lies through the big translation movement To expose their evil doings . https://twitter.com/tgtm_official https://twitter.com/tgtm_official And it worked, they winded down the pro-war education plan, at least publicly.
- sharken 5y ago
  As a European i have no problems with the individual Russian or Chinese citizen, it's entirely the government that's the problem. The Chinese government wants to be able to take over Taiwan some day, so they can't send a signal that Russia is doing the wrong thing in Ukraine. It's some progress that the people are trying to stop the pro-war plans. But i guess stopping the extreme COVID lockdown strategy is out of reach.
bjourne 5y ago
Make it worth their while to change their mind. Anti-vaxxers can be persuaded to get vaccinated by offering them rewards. Others follow the lead of celebrities they like and respect. It may not work on everyone but it works on the group-level.
- adamrezich 5y ago
  the solution to countering propaganda is counter-propaganda? how can a consumer of counter-propaganda be certain that the Truth expressed in said counter-propaganda is Genuine, when the same techniques as the ones that the opposing viewpoint is using are being deployed to propagate it? surely, if you are certain that your viewpoint is the Genuine Truth, then it will not need to be propagated through propaganda?
  - bjourne 5y ago
    Not propaganda, but you have to realize that people are opportunistic and acting in their own self-interests. Companies pulling out of Russia and people standing with Ukraine are doing so, while at the same time ignoring decades of Israeli aggression against Palestinians, are doing so because it is opportune. Not because they care about the Genuine Truth.
kleer001 5y ago
A related but more fundamental existential question is "Can you stop of a loved one from self destructing." And, as sad as it is, I'm afraid the answer is a solid "No." on every level of analysis.
ComradePhil 5y ago
It is quite likely that he told YOU that because he knows you would be brainwashed with western propaganda so there's not much he can tell you that will change your mind. This is a strategy many foreigners have to adopt when living abroad, specially if they live in a country where nation states aren't fully aligned in propaganda matters. Chinese people have to do this while living in most of the world outside China. Indians and Middle easterns have to do the same for most of the world. Americans have to do it in most of the world, including in Europe, specially if their politics isn't fully aligned with Hollywood liberalism. There is very little likelyhood that he is totally onboard with US propaganda despite having most friends/family in Russia/Ukraine and himself living in the West. I mean he's exposed to conflicting state propaganda before for sure and knows all states use propaganda for their own benefits. He probably knows how to handle it without causing conflicts in personal relationships so he will say whatever needs to be said to keep the people in their bubble.
mjreacher 5y ago
More emphasis on videos and interviews. While it's still possible to dismiss them as also being set up it's a lot easier to dismiss news articles and text interviews as fakes with no physical proof behind them. In general more things that you can verify yourself so it becomes harder to dismiss things as propaganda.
blast 5y ago
You need to first notice how propaganda works on you yourself. If you're not aware of that, then you're probably not trying to combat propaganda at all, you're just trying to replace the other side's propaganda with your side's propaganda. Once you do notice how propaganda works on you yourself, you can start to track little movements of deviation from it. But this looks and feels a lot more like questioning your own beliefs than it does like trying to persuade others of the truth.
- 3a2d29 5y ago
  *you're just trying to replace the other side's propaganda with your side's propaganda* Words of wisdom
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
marcusverus 5y ago
If you want to bring someone around to your position, you need to have an actual conversation. First of all, you need to listen, with your mouth closed, while the other person explains their position--without being forced to defend it. You can ask probing questions, of course (They think that Ukraine needs to be liberated from the Nazis? Have them elaborate about the Nazi problem.), but avoid becoming adversarial or contrarian. Investigate their beliefs, trace them down to their foundations, and then undermine said foundations. The belief that "Ukraine needs to be liberated from the Nazis" may be based on some article claiming that Zelenski is a Nazi. Once you understand the foundations of a belief, you're in business. If you're objectively correct, you should be able to provide incontrovertible evidence that you are correct. If your evidence is not acceptable (because, for example, it comes from a source the other guy doesn't trust), then find other proof. If you can't, ask yourself what that means. After you've undermined one of these foundations, (perhaps, by proving that Zelenski is very unlikely to be a Nazi) remind the other party that their belief that "Ukraine needs to be liberated from the Nazis" was based on this fact, and ask if they still believe it. They will, of course, and they'll present some new justification. Rinse and repeat. It goes without saying that this process almost never plays out. It requires that both parties be interested in having the conversation, both parties participate in good faith, and both parties are committed to Truth more than to their on cognitive comfort. After all, how many hours of your life would you spend in conversation with a Russian relative who wanted to convince you that your worldview is based on lies?
- native_samples 5y ago
  The difficulty with this approach is that whilst it can work, it requires a high degree of intellectual honesty, meaning that you have to go in open to the possibility that the person you're talking to is correct and it's you yourself who is wrong. Because the person you're talking to, of course, believes they are right and you are wrong. If you aren't open to that possibility at all why would they bother trying to persuade you of what they believe? It's only by trying to explain that, and then losing an honest debate, that the truth can be revealed. The belief that "Ukraine needs to be liberated from the Nazis" comes from the fact that whilst Zelensky himself may not himself be a Nazi, he employs people who definitely are Nazis in his military and relies on them apparently quite heavily. Apparently he doesn't have a problem with this. This has been true for many years, i.e. the Ukrainian government has been sending Nazis to kill the "pro Russian separatists" in the east (whoever they truly are or who supports them doesn't matter much for whether this claim is true or not). So if you try and stop a Russian person believing the Ukrainian government is allied with Nazis you'll probably fail, because the claim is true on its face. The better angle is probably to go with arguments like these? a. Is it ever morally right to start a pre-emptive war against a potential future adversary? Here you'll probably get something about the Iraq wars and it may be required to admit the US was at fault here, if you want to take that angle, or at least not morally superior. b. Are the fighters in the Russian military of the same level of threat as the original Nazis, just because they wear the same symbols etc? Or is this comparison overblown, for domestic propaganda purposes? c. Is this Putin's real motivation or just a handy excuse to do what he wanted to do anyway?
syntheweave 5y ago
The traditional method seen in philosophical writing is to not address Plato's cave directly, but rather to present an esoteric puzzle that interested minds can only solve by overcoming their own core beliefs. When facts are laid against other facts directly in a way that decoheres a belief, the tendency is simply to go find a scapegoat that will, if defeated, set things right, which plays into the hands of propagandists who will supply an endless number of such scapegoats to an audience desperately craving such, and willful misinterpretations of media to make it say an opposite meaning. The use of esotericism combats this by presenting a text that is nonsense - presenting easy conclusions contrary to facts - until it is analyzed and deduced, at which point it's too late and the contrary thought has been had. The core beliefs themselves tend to be set during adolescence, and the will of the individual to hold onto them or let them go involves a confluence of factors since they are often absorbed into identity. While you can present the puzzle, you can't stop people from gripping onto what they have as tightly as possible and sacrificing the rest of their life to do so. It's a strategy that appeals mostly towards development of elite thinking, rather than trying to sway the masses(who will continually look for easy beliefs to latch onto). For more on the topic of esoteric writing I suggest Arthur Melzer's "Philosophy Between the Lines".
exolymph 5y ago
You can't control what other people think, so let go of the anxiety.
willcipriano 5y ago
I'd find something else to talk to my relatives about rather than cutting them off beacuse we disagree on a topic neither of us has any influence over.

zqna 5y ago

Another way to fight propaganda is to fight those who spread false narratives and lies. Ideally by giving them a fair trial, then attaching them to a chair and forcing them to watch their creations till the end of the days. Think Orange Clockwork. Though better it would be to let them work in rebuilding the cities that their propaganda destroyed. Unfortunately these people are uncapable of creation so it's a vain idea.

squarefoot 5y ago
> Another way to fight propaganda is to fight those who spread false narratives and lies. Good luck with that. They are mostly powerful rich people with an agenda, and they're a lot better than us at being nasty. As for the victims, it's not going to work. The pandemic revealed us how deep some people are detached from reality. There still are people dying of Covid who spend their very last breath yelling at doctors and nurses, refusing treatment and calling it a hoax although it is evidently killing them. An ex friend of mine had both his unvaccinated parents hospitalized for symptomatic Covid and lost another unvaccinated relative; still he's a very active anti vaxxer. I'm becoming extremely racist against these people; I know it's not right and if there was a god she would punish me, but I can't consider them on the same level of other humans; if learning from mistakes is the basis behind intelligence, they're clearly far far behind everyone else.
- native_samples 5y ago
  There are also people who now live with crippling injuries, or who died, because they took the vaccines, despite being at statistically ~no risk from COVID. They took them because they were told, wrongly, that the shots were perfectly safe. Detached from reality, it seems. BTW, you probably shouldn't admit that you're nasty and "racist" whilst also claiming to be more intelligent than other people who made different decisions to you. It's a nonsensical claim: refusing shots is not a race, and black Americans refuse shots at a much higher rate than whites do anyway. Hating anti-vaxxers is just ordinary hatred, pure and simple. You don't need to abuse unrelated words for it.
  - squarefoot 5y ago
    Every medicine has its own risks and contraindications, whoever tells the opposite is lying. We however keep taking medicines when prescribed because the balance of risks vs benefits strongly leans towards the benefits, right now in my country over 95% of hospitalized Covid patients are either not vaccinated or not fully vaccinated; those are solid numbers that anti vaxxers are free to ignore until it hits them directly. I take Aspirine every day, although every year people die because of it, but how many people would die if there was no Aspirine around?
    - native_samples 5y ago
      Sorry for the slow response. "Every medicine has its own risks and contraindications, whoever tells the opposite is lying" Correct. Yet here's Bill Gates' GAVI saying "Vaccines are safe. Here's why" and of course there are hundreds of thousands more cases where people are told things like that by trusted authorities: https://www.gavi.org/vaccineswork/covid-19-vaccines-are-safe-heres-why https://www.gavi.org/vaccineswork/covid-19-vaccines-are-safe... This is standard - either claim the issue is black/white, or claim that whilst vaccines might have bad side effects in theory, in practice they basically never do (which is not the case). This is deceptive misinformation, but it's not being spread by randoms on the internet, it's being spread by governments and health authorities. Consider the following: 1. The stat you quoted is meaningless (and almost certainly wrong but we'll get to that in a second). To understand the costs/benefits you have to understand the absolute risk of injury or death from vaccines vs the absolute risk of injury or death from COVID. Authorities never present such stats because the true absolute risk of COVID death or even hospitalization for most age groups is so low that it'd just cause people to wonder why they'd bother taking a vaccine at all. 2. Even if they do present such comparisons, vaccine injuries are being systematically ignored or misclassified by the medical system so there's no way to do an accurate comparison anyway. As such nobody can truly make an informed decision on this topic. Now the 95% stat is almost certainly wrong anyway. I don't mean you're quoting it wrong, I mean it's not being calculated correctly. For quite some time, observers outside the health system have been pointing out that there are methodological errors in the way vaccine efficacy stats are being calculated, all of which significantly inflate the apparent effectiveness. The problem comes from two places: 1. The vaccines have an immunosuppressive effect. From the start, sceptics like Berenson noticed that there were non-seasonal COVID waves happening that appeared to always line up perfectly with the start of vaccine rollout. Some speculated that this was due to people gathering together in vaccination centers, others that the vaccines themselves were temporarily suppressing the immune system. Seems like the latter explanation was more correct. As part of the Pfizer document releases just a few days ago, a document came out that showed the vaccines do in fact reduce immune system operation due to lymphocyte migration and that Pfizer knew this after the stage 1 trials. So vaccine programmes actually make people more susceptible to COVID, temporarily. This was also confirmed by data accidentally released by the Albertan health authority that showed this in action: https://dailydose19.substack.com/p/government-of-alberta-canada-scrubs?s=r https://dailydose19.substack.com/p/government-of-alberta-can... That's clearly a major issue if you repeatedly vaccinate people during a pandemic. However this effect is hidden by a statistical trick - they only count someone has vaccinated starting from two weeks after their second dose. Until that point every infection or death counts as unvaccinated, even though that isn't true. So what happens if you give someone an immunosuppressant and then allocate all the resulting infections to the "did not take" bucket? You make it look like the vaccines are far more effective than they really are. 2. Second problem; the claims vaccines are highly effective against infection (which is strongly related to hospitalization stats given how they're derived) are broken by two sub-problems: 2a. Some countries like the USA and Germany count people as unvaccinated if they couldn't locate proof of vaccination. They conflate unknown status with unvaccinated, which is wrong (a lie, really). 2b. They aren't comparing case rates as you'd expect but deltas in test positivity ratios. This isn't valid because the methodology assumes no differences in test behavior between groups i.e. that the patient doesn't control whether they get tested or not. Clearly not true with COVID. End result - all claims like yours, even when made earnestly and with the best intentions, rest on a completely and deliberately corrupted set of stats. We actually cannot tell whether vaccines are effective or not, but given that raw case rates in the few places that report them (like the UK) show vaccinated people getting COVID at quadruple the rate of unvaccinated people, it seems unlikely. The cause is probably OAS/priming effects.
- xg15 5y ago
  That is unfortunately true. It seems to me, at some level, the whole problem is less about knowledge than about which sources someone regards as trustworthy and which not. We can only experience very little of the world directly. For most of our knowledge, we have to rely on intermediaries which tell us about the world. If some of those intermediaries offer contradictory information or offer information that contradict with your own experiences or discredit other intermediaries then things get problematic and you have to pick side about which intermediaries to trust. I think psychologically, this is a hard problem to solve.
xg15 5y ago
Except just declaring something as a "lie" will not solve the problem. You have to at least explain why it is a lie.

marcusverus 5y ago
I think we are generally on the same page, but your arguments seem problematic in that they are neutral and abstract enough that, even if you chased that line of argument down to bedrock, you might find yourself having a discussion about philosophical opinions, which are not subject to the undermining attack I’ve got in mind. If my ‘opponent’ responded in the way you suggested, I’d be in good shape. I would observe that employing a single militia of people with abhorrent views hardly makes Ukraine at large in need of liberation. Since there is an implied expectation that Ukraine should spurn the help of these Nazis, I would ask whether, when the US found itself at war with the Nazis, it had a moral obligation to spurn the aid of the Soviets, who themselves had quite an evil record on matters of human rights. And, of course, I would ask to be educated on the nature of these Nazi militias. Are they members of a party? Is the militia exclusively made up of Nazis? What proportion of the armed forces are they? I’d be interested to learn more, because an officially Nazi institution is quite difference than an institution which has a few known skinheads in its membership, and the difference seems material.
- native_samples 5y ago
  "I would observe that employing a single militia of people with abhorrent views hardly makes Ukraine at large in need of liberation." My guess is they would then respond by observing that it's not a single group, there is at minimum Azov, Svoboda, and Right Sector, probably more. Azov has rather notoriously been officially integrated into the Ukrainian military so it's unclear if it even makes sense to talk about it as if it were an entirely separate group now. And they would argue that if you indeed thought it was only a single militia then it'd be you under the influence of propaganda, not them, so this would probably backfire. Now, does this justify 'liberation'. That's indeed a more fruitful ground for discussion. Highlighting the USA/Soviet alliance is maybe a good tactic, albeit it may backfire (perhaps this Russian hated the Soviet Union, a lot did). And it takes you down the more philosophical road, which I recommend, because the actual details of Ukraine are so messy that debating it may not result in the clean outcome you seek. "I would ask to be educated on the nature of these Nazi militias. Are they members of a party? Is the militia exclusively made up of Nazis? What proportion of the armed forces are they?" I'm not an expert, have just read a few articles about this (pre 2020). But to answer your questions: 1. Yes, it's called Svoboda. Also, after the 2014 revolution/coup/whatever it was, many were directly appointed to the government by the new president. "After the coup, the neo-Nazis were awarded for their effectiveness. When "Yats" took power with US support, he appointed neo-Nazis to 4 ministries in his govt. Andriy Parubiy, a founder of Svoboda, and a commandant of the 2014 coup’s "self-defense forces," became the national security chief. Right Sektor and the Azov Battalion were incorporated into the National Guard of the military. Poroshenko, who succeeded Yatsenyuk, praised them as "great warriors" and dispatched them to fight the ethnic Russians and separatists in the Donbas in eastern Ukraine." https://www.antiwar.com/blog/2022/03/27/msm-cover-up-of-neo-nazis-in-ukraine/ https://www.antiwar.com/blog/2022/03/27/msm-cover-up-of-neo-... 2. Militias like Azov are entirely Nazi, it seems, but are an integrated component of the wider Ukrainian military, which is not. Though I suppose we may wonder how non-Nazi they really are if they fight alongside them. 3. This I'm not sure about. A relatively small overall part of the military but their most effective and motivated fighters by far, seems to be the general consensus.