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This is essentially just fifth generation warfare, of which people seem to be insanely ignorant. I often talk to people who argue about whether it exists or wh

This is essentially just fifth generation warfare, of which people seem to be insanely ignorant. I often talk to people who argue about whether it exists or whether governments can be sophisticated enough to launch these kinds of campaigns. I fear for humanity. Great talk.

cookiengineer 3y ago
It's so absurd when you work in cyber. So many fake telegram channels under the "Anonymous brand". And in the end it's either Russian or Irani intelligence when you start to observe their operators, attacks, used IPs, ASNs etc. Journalism got so bad, they are way too trigger happy on that next clickbait story. They went from keeping legislation in check to being the useful fools on the internet. I haven't seen a news story without the detail word "allegedly" in years. Putin kind of realized in 2011 that he needs to change the narrative. And western democracies are very inefficient when it comes to debunking fake information, because our legal system takes year or even decades to prove innocence. For Russia, China or other SCO Nations it doesn't matter what kind of fake information they spread. As long as it keeps us busy, it worked. Divide and conquer. Not a new strategy to be honest, but it works like a charm.
- beebeepka 3y ago
  I wonder why you single out the usual boogie men that US propaganda uses.
  - cookiengineer 3y ago
    Let me google that for you: Advanced Impact Media Solutions (in short: AIMS). Have fun in that rabbit hole.
  - MrBuddyCasino 3y ago
    The irony will be lost on most here.
  - jampekka 3y ago
    I find it rather ironic that a lot of people, probably quite a vast majority, see themselves immune to propaganda (be it state or commercial). I often play with the tought that I may well be just as brainwashed as e.g. Russians or Chinese are portrayed to be. I don't think there's really a way of knowing for certain. For most this is probably unthinkable. Or maybe I've been brainwashed by constructivist cultural marxism or whathaveyou?
    - benterix 3y ago
      For me it's very easy to tell because I've been living under a Communist regime and now in a "capitalist" (or "democratic" to use a more PC term) system so I know the difference extremely well. Many books have been written about this but essentially it boils down to the freedom of speech and the amount of punishment you can receive for criticism or being disobedient to those in power. People in the West have no idea what it means to be constantly afraid for oneself and one's family, to be totally at the mercy of a soulless system with no justice at all and no recourse, to learn not to trust anyone, even one's neighbors and family members and so on. Getting back to your question: of course we are all brainwashed (or "culturally conditioned"), this way or another. But there is an abyss of difference between living in one of these regimes that criminalize everything that is not official vs living in a Western country with all its particularities and inconveniences.
      - saiya-jin 3y ago
        Freedom of thought, freedom to travel not only for some vacation, even just a neighboring state firmly within your bloc. Not being executed on the border. Watching what you say, constantly. You have no idea how much that means to you until you properly lose it. Then suddenly there are very few things in life worth more.
      - Applejinx 3y ago
        Of course there's a cost to this. Liberal democracy is intensely annoying and always expands to embrace whatever kind of diversity is too much diversity. That's how it can be a target for fascist uprisings: people want to pretend they're open to all things and have all freedoms as long as there are no consequences. In reality, there's one cost to restriction and another cost to multiculturalism and diversity. If you look at it in a-life terms you see the autocracies as plateaus. Stuff gets locked down, and there's no progress. But progress hurts. Liberal democracies and their tolerance of diversity are about coping with all the unaligned interests of starkly different people, knowing that combining those people is what gets you startling progress. It can almost be reduced to simple mechanical terms, like recombination in a genetic soup. It's always possible to crush inconvenient genes and have everyone the same (to a point, and if you're determined enough). And then, you don't have those genes anymore, and your future's narrowed.
  - Swenrekcah 3y ago
    A boogie man is something that isn’t real. Russian disinformation warfare is very much real, no matter if it is a Lithuanian workman or the head of the CIA talking about it. The head of the CIA might have ulterior motives but it is silly to dismiss the facts though.
    - jampekka 3y ago
      There's probably a very equivalent story that a lot of Russians believe in.
      - ethanbond 3y ago
        Well, it certainly isn’t “equivalent” given that the Russian version of the story/belief isn’t created and maintained in the open air of a free information environment. In the US, you’re welcome to (and people actually do) contradict “official narratives” whenever you want.
        beebeepka 3y ago
        they just get downvoted instead of jumping out of the window
      - benterix 3y ago
        I read Russian forums and these people are more sober than you may think. They are fed up with Putin and with what is happening to Russia now. It's not so much that they care about Ukrainians but more about the terrible direction the country is heading. For many, it's the return of the dark era of the collapse of the USSR, they don't see any bright light on the horizon.
        Applejinx 3y ago
        This is because chaos warfare and the attempts to just straight up reestablish an old school empire, are bad in the context of modern global commerce. I think it might have worked better for them had Putin run his country along more communist lines, but instead he held power in his government with the same chaos warfare tools he used overseas, and the cost of that is that he's clung to power unto death, but all the systems that are supposed to make Russia work, disintegrated.
  - benterix 3y ago
    Maybe because it's incredibly effective? > The campaigns exploit existing political fault lines like race and regionalism to increase polarization and disaffection with the political system. The complete lack of a coherent message across these campaigns is jarring until one realizes that the goal of the campaigns is not necessarily to convince anyone of anything, but rather to generate noise. In other words, they simply don't care about the message as long as it's divisive. They will loudly support BLM or alt right or whoever as long as it sparks negative emotions and increases conflicts between Americans. And this strategy works incredibly well just because instead of inventing non-existent conflicts it rekindles the existing ones. [0] https://www.brandeis.edu/now/2020/october/elections-russia-disinformation-social-media.html https://www.brandeis.edu/now/2020/october/elections-russia-d...
    - Applejinx 3y ago
      My litmus test for this is always whether the person loudly and persistently propagandizing for stuff, leads back to an insistence that the country they're working is going to collapse in race and/or civil war. It can be framed as 'yes let's go fight this!' or it can be framed as a dismaying, looming threat rumbling ever closer. Doesn't matter. I identify that behavior as an attempt to produce race and/or civil war, even from nothing. And the more persistent the calls, the more well-funded but ill-sourced the outlet (ask yourself how the person's getting paid to do that full-time with such a busy workday), the more likely I'm going to think they are part of what I've come to think of as WWIII: the attempt to destroy rival nation-states purely with the old CIA techniques, which themselves probably date from the middle ages or Machiavelli or something. Nothing is new. It's all humans continuing to bumble along as a cooperative but rabidly competitive species. These dichotomies produce this behavior and it's about whether stuff's got out of balance. I think Russia waging WWIII predominantly informationally, is out of balance and having some serious negative externalities beyond their wish for power.
- acqq 3y ago
  If you really think the fake narratives originate only from the countries which aren't "behaving" as the politicians of your preferred countries would like, I have a huge stock of bridges to sell to you. Edit: If you'd like a very recent example, research who's telling he saw the "pictures of beheaded babies", and why.
- nbzso 3y ago
  The real problem is that a lot of this “fake information” is a fact. For example, the USA foreign policy always leads to wars and war crimes and handful of corporations are the beneficiary on a global scale. Maybe if you as Americans realize that your Constitutional rights are under attack, and there is no right or left in the political spectrum (just crooks and lobbyists), the world will have a chance to follow your example. Who knows? The bigger issue is that "commie under your bed" techniques never died. Americans are the victim of mind control more than Russians. Russia is corrupt, but they lack the sophistication and resources to apply effective propaganda. Even Ukrainians kicked their but in information warfare. And please, don't put me on some "Russian propaganda" troll theory. Go listen to Judge Napolitano podcast, with real American patriots like Colonel Douglas Macgregor, Prof. Jeffrey Sachs, Ray McGovern, Phil Giraldi, Larry Johnson, Tony Shafer, Prof. John J. Mearsheimer, Max Blumenthal.
  - imiric 3y ago
    > Russia is corrupt, but they lack the sophistication and resources to apply effective propaganda. The interesting thing about information warfare is that it doesn't require sophistication and much resources at all. Set up a bunch of troll farms, pay tech-savvy teenagers to do your dirty work, give them some vague talking points, and let them loose on social media. If you really want to scale this cheaply, deploy AI instead. Russia might not have those capabilities yet, but China certainly does. BTW, I'm not picking sides here. Just pointing out that it would be absurd to think Russia or China aren't engaging in this type of warfare. They would actually prefer it, given that they can't compete with traditional physical might.
    - nbzso 3y ago
      I have a side. The truth. The most links in this rabbit hole point to the operations of the USA agencies as a whole. Russia has crumbled in the 90s and now is just starting to wake up. If I have to measure threat and I am an American, I would ask: How on earth China has developed this enormous economical advantage over all of the world? Who financed this growth? Who benefited the most? And why, after living through the Cold War, we are heading in a similar direction?
- imiric 3y ago
  > Putin kind of realized in 2011 that he needs to change the narrative. These operations were happening way before 2011[1]. The internet and social media were simply the most effective ways of executing them. > And western democracies are very inefficient when it comes to debunking fake information, because our legal system takes year or even decades to prove innocence. Debunking disinformation is not the antidote, and the legal system wouldn't have anything to do about that. The problem is that the West built the perfect tools for psyops, opened them up to the entire world, and are now wondering why their democracies are crumbling. This is either an act of self-sabotage or the enemy is a much stronger adversary than they anticipated. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1EA2ohrt5Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1EA2ohrt5Q
  - Log_out_ 3y ago
    The enemy is inside the house and those aristocrats always wanted democracy gone - Thiel admitted it openly.
  - davrosthedalek 3y ago
    To be fair, a democracy with open media and protections of free speech will always be harder to defend against foreign psyops attacks. Instead of having to influence enough people to revolt, you only have to influence enough to change the election outcome, which typically is close to parity anyway. And with non-state-run media and free speech protections, you have many pathways. So democracies have to harden themselves. And I think the only way to harden the populace is education. General education. Education in the scientific method. And also education about psyops.
    - nonrandomstring 3y ago
      > harden the populace is education I agree. But it is not the only requirement. Restoring control of technologies to the people is vital too. Intellectual self-defence requires a sceptical stance, but it also requires capability (other than simply switching off and opting out) Five giant websites plus endpoint computing that is neither owned nor controlled by passive "consumers" is a grave step in the wrong direction. In the "West" we've allowed this for reasons of private profit and government control, and I think in doing so we've created the very conditions for malign influence.
- MyFirstSass 3y ago
  The US is by far the largest and most succesfull at psyopping, if it was another country on the top they'd probably do the same thing. Singling out some relatively tiny economies as the bad guys is in itself an impressive display of the effectiveness of american propaganda. You should remember the US more or less propped up dictators through CIA left and right for decades, and it's still going on. Iran of today was because of the west trying to loot for oil : https://foreignpolicy.com/2017/06/20/64-years-later-cia-finally-releases-details-of-iranian-coup-iran-tehran-oil/ https://foreignpolicy.com/2017/06/20/64-years-later-cia-fina... The empire is the empire and the empire controls the narrative, and as a europeean seeing the US - the worlds largest military by far - cry about various tiny media operations coming from the wastelands they and the rest of the west has created by pillaging foreign resources is a bit laughable. Much of the south americas has been pillaged by the empire, the middle east to, the rest of the world not much less. Deaths squads, millions dead, forever wars and economic plunder but no it's some tiny russian or iranian operation we should worry about, so vote democrat, vote republican, just vote for more war! This is what many europeans thinks, though we aren't much better with our operations in say northern africa.
  - flir 3y ago
    I'm pretty sure one of those tiny media operations managed to cut one of the EU's countries out of the herd, so they're a problem I'd like to solve, if possible. Or at least inoculate against, before it happens again.
    - coldtea 3y ago
      I'm pretty sure all of EUs countries would be more democratic and sovereign "out of the herd".
      - me_me_me 3y ago
        but they would be much weaker. And weak countries are not capable of protecting democracy or sovereignty - prime example ukraine.
    - 3y ago
- flir 3y ago
  Russia, yes, but I'm not convinced China's going for an "amplify disagreements" strategy. Have you got any links?
  - Applejinx 3y ago
    Nor do I. China is heavily invested in doing business, as is the West, and this can be a limiting factor to how crazy the countries act. China wants functioning markets. It's Russia, on a massive scale, who's gone for the 'make everyone else disintegrate in civil war, what could possibly go wrong with amplifying this perennial human failing' strategy. Not a fan. We cannot ever eliminate the sparks of these fires without abandoning nations (and then getting flattened by rival nations) so I don't like chaos strategies. Chaos doesn't need help.
    - jstarfish 3y ago
      China hasn't targeted the west for the reasons you mentioned. Taiwan is the only target of theirs I'm aware of.
- sph 3y ago
  > For Russia, China or other SCO Nations it doesn't matter what kind of fake information they spread. As long as it keeps us busy, it worked. One thing that has bugged me for so long, and no one seems to be talking about, is, for example, how many state actors are lurking on Reddit news, specifically /r/worldnews, to control the narrative. There are some topics where a great number of comments are from, let's say, "interested parties". That is, people whose comment history is strictly about that particular topic. They might have 5+ year old accounts, and have only commented about that topic. They don't even need to hide it, as both them and the vast majority of well-meaning ignorant passerby can shut you down with either being a conspiracy theorist or pushing an agenda for the opposite side. This is the first time I mention this anywhere on the Internet, and I know how well it's gonna go down. Everybody is aware of state-sponsored troll farms, but any mention of it is drowned down by people that still believe either this is fiction, or "does not happen in my corner of the internet." To avoid making myself a blatant target of such responses, I will not mention which state or group is most active on that subreddit, go see for yourself. What I can openly say, is that USA psyops is not really a thing because most of the Western Internet is US-based, and US-centered. The US government doesn't really need massive troll farms because their own citizens and companies indirectly and involuntarily do their work for them. When one's own propaganda has become part of popular culture, is it propaganda anymore?
  - paganel 3y ago
    > specifically /r/worldnews, By this point places like /worldnews have become ineffective when it comes to propaganda purposes, especially because they're so obviously controlled by bots. They're so good they're bad, that's one of the paradoxes of open confrontation/(information) war.
    - sph 3y ago
      Being controlled by bots doesn't mean no human person ever reads any of those subs. Bots are where people are. If no one read /r/worldnews, there would be no bots.
      - 3y ago
reedf1 3y ago
Agreed. Most are very open and public about their activities and purpose. It seems like most conspiracy theories are just honeypots for institutions like the studiously benign "Behavioural Insights Team". The BBC (and other public broadcasters) are complicit in "manufacturing consent" for public policy, or other social goals. It's quite obvious to me that the average person has been woven a deliberate and simple (but critically wrong) model for reality, which complies with government goals. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioural_Insights_Team https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioural_Insights_Team
- gwervc 3y ago
  The matrix is indeed really strong in the West. At least in an autocracy you'd assume most "information" is somehow propaganda but here people believe whatever the press and government feed them. And when given information that contradict their beliefs (entirely constructed from hearsay) they become angry and violent. And I'm speaking of supposedly educated people, about information that are available in primary sources. Ignorance is also carefully cultivated: God forbid to use one's smartphone to check an information publicly and easily available.
  - Zetobal 3y ago
    I would say that the reality distortion field is way stronger in the east... and if you are in a professional discourse it's fine not to have the Junior Dev go "achtually" all the time because he googles shit he doesn't understand.
  - geysersam 3y ago
    I find the claim that people are generally more well informed about the state of the world in countries without a free press and independent institutions quite absurd. The western societies are certainly not perfect, but the messy information landscape in some of them is in my view an indication that different views are able to clash and make their cases with relatively little intervention from the authorities.
    - 3y ago
justinl33 3y ago
agreed
hyperman1 3y ago
Not only the governements. Some kid in Belgium with a horrible rare disease was cut off from the healthcare system because the medication was insanely expensive and the system just could not bear it. A grassroots protest formed to pressure the relevant politicians. Then it leaked how the big farma corp selling the medication had ordered a marketing company to create more demand. The kid was deemed a cute enough case to sway public opinion, and tailor made news was generated to cause the formation of the grassroots cause. The kid, the parents, the supporting grassroots protesters were all unknowing pawns, misused as succers in an extremely cynical marketing ploy. I've since heard about companies existing just to create databases of cute poor victims for just about anything, to support creating grassroots movements for big corporations on demand.
- candiodari 3y ago
  I wonder about this. You see I'm trying to think this through. This was a (very) "long-tail" medicine. There aren't many people who have this disease. So it's kind of tough, splitting this up, seeing who is at fault here ... 1) it's great that this medicine was made. Without that, the kid would have died, slowly, through suffocation 2) the company does need to recoup costs + profit (and it's not making excessive profits). The margin on the medicine is something like 10% to 15%. This is not price gouging. Curing this kid really is that expensive (AND, one might add, a very significant part of the cost is government mandated safety checking, which effectively gets paid to higher ups in hospitals and government) 3) the government is in fact the party that has (through the use of force, ie. legislation) taken responsibility for the health of children in Belgium. So you can't blame the parents for not taking extra insurance for this case. 4) Given that they have responsibility for the health of the child, and that it's a solvable problem, obviously it's a good thing their hand gets forced. That they're forced to cure this child. 5) Obviously the parents did the right thing (plus the only alternative is limiting which parents get to have natural kids, which is definitely a step too far) 6) Spreading the use of this medicine, ie. the marketing ... saves the lives of children. Tough to say that's a bad thing. I mean ... where is the bad? Where does this go "evil" exactly?
  - mrbombastic 3y ago
blahdeblahde 3y ago
[flagged]
mindcrash 3y ago
> I often talk to people who argue about whether it exists or whether governments can be sophisticated enough to launch these kinds of campaigns. Still need to argue it exists? IT EXISTS. Edward Snowden smuggled out proof and Glenn Greenwald wrote about it in 2014 for crying out loud! https://theintercept.com/2014/02/24/jtrig-manipulation/ https://theintercept.com/2014/02/24/jtrig-manipulation/

cookiengineer 3y ago

It's so absurd when you work in cyber. So many fake telegram channels under the "Anonymous brand". And in the end it's either Russian or Irani intelligence when you start to observe their operators, attacks, used IPs, ASNs etc. Journalism got so bad, they are way too trigger happy on that next clickbait story. They went from keeping legislation in check to being the useful fools on the internet. I haven't seen a news story without the detail word "allegedly" in years. Putin kind of realized in 2011 that he needs to change the narrative. And western democracies are very inefficient when it comes to debunking fake information, because our legal system takes year or even decades to prove innocence. For Russia, China or other SCO Nations it doesn't matter what kind of fake information they spread. As long as it keeps us busy, it worked. Divide and conquer. Not a new strategy to be honest, but it works like a charm.

beebeepka 3y ago
I wonder why you single out the usual boogie men that US propaganda uses.
- cookiengineer 3y ago
  Let me google that for you: Advanced Impact Media Solutions (in short: AIMS). Have fun in that rabbit hole.
- MrBuddyCasino 3y ago
  The irony will be lost on most here.
- jampekka 3y ago
  I find it rather ironic that a lot of people, probably quite a vast majority, see themselves immune to propaganda (be it state or commercial). I often play with the tought that I may well be just as brainwashed as e.g. Russians or Chinese are portrayed to be. I don't think there's really a way of knowing for certain. For most this is probably unthinkable. Or maybe I've been brainwashed by constructivist cultural marxism or whathaveyou?
  - benterix 3y ago
    For me it's very easy to tell because I've been living under a Communist regime and now in a "capitalist" (or "democratic" to use a more PC term) system so I know the difference extremely well. Many books have been written about this but essentially it boils down to the freedom of speech and the amount of punishment you can receive for criticism or being disobedient to those in power. People in the West have no idea what it means to be constantly afraid for oneself and one's family, to be totally at the mercy of a soulless system with no justice at all and no recourse, to learn not to trust anyone, even one's neighbors and family members and so on. Getting back to your question: of course we are all brainwashed (or "culturally conditioned"), this way or another. But there is an abyss of difference between living in one of these regimes that criminalize everything that is not official vs living in a Western country with all its particularities and inconveniences.
    - saiya-jin 3y ago
      Freedom of thought, freedom to travel not only for some vacation, even just a neighboring state firmly within your bloc. Not being executed on the border. Watching what you say, constantly. You have no idea how much that means to you until you properly lose it. Then suddenly there are very few things in life worth more.
    - Applejinx 3y ago
      Of course there's a cost to this. Liberal democracy is intensely annoying and always expands to embrace whatever kind of diversity is too much diversity. That's how it can be a target for fascist uprisings: people want to pretend they're open to all things and have all freedoms as long as there are no consequences. In reality, there's one cost to restriction and another cost to multiculturalism and diversity. If you look at it in a-life terms you see the autocracies as plateaus. Stuff gets locked down, and there's no progress. But progress hurts. Liberal democracies and their tolerance of diversity are about coping with all the unaligned interests of starkly different people, knowing that combining those people is what gets you startling progress. It can almost be reduced to simple mechanical terms, like recombination in a genetic soup. It's always possible to crush inconvenient genes and have everyone the same (to a point, and if you're determined enough). And then, you don't have those genes anymore, and your future's narrowed.
- Swenrekcah 3y ago
  A boogie man is something that isn’t real. Russian disinformation warfare is very much real, no matter if it is a Lithuanian workman or the head of the CIA talking about it. The head of the CIA might have ulterior motives but it is silly to dismiss the facts though.
  - jampekka 3y ago
    There's probably a very equivalent story that a lot of Russians believe in.
    - ethanbond 3y ago
      Well, it certainly isn’t “equivalent” given that the Russian version of the story/belief isn’t created and maintained in the open air of a free information environment. In the US, you’re welcome to (and people actually do) contradict “official narratives” whenever you want.
      - beebeepka 3y ago
        they just get downvoted instead of jumping out of the window
    - benterix 3y ago
      I read Russian forums and these people are more sober than you may think. They are fed up with Putin and with what is happening to Russia now. It's not so much that they care about Ukrainians but more about the terrible direction the country is heading. For many, it's the return of the dark era of the collapse of the USSR, they don't see any bright light on the horizon.
      - Applejinx 3y ago
        This is because chaos warfare and the attempts to just straight up reestablish an old school empire, are bad in the context of modern global commerce. I think it might have worked better for them had Putin run his country along more communist lines, but instead he held power in his government with the same chaos warfare tools he used overseas, and the cost of that is that he's clung to power unto death, but all the systems that are supposed to make Russia work, disintegrated.
- benterix 3y ago
  Maybe because it's incredibly effective? > The campaigns exploit existing political fault lines like race and regionalism to increase polarization and disaffection with the political system. The complete lack of a coherent message across these campaigns is jarring until one realizes that the goal of the campaigns is not necessarily to convince anyone of anything, but rather to generate noise. In other words, they simply don't care about the message as long as it's divisive. They will loudly support BLM or alt right or whoever as long as it sparks negative emotions and increases conflicts between Americans. And this strategy works incredibly well just because instead of inventing non-existent conflicts it rekindles the existing ones. [0] https://www.brandeis.edu/now/2020/october/elections-russia-disinformation-social-media.html https://www.brandeis.edu/now/2020/october/elections-russia-d...
  - Applejinx 3y ago
    My litmus test for this is always whether the person loudly and persistently propagandizing for stuff, leads back to an insistence that the country they're working is going to collapse in race and/or civil war. It can be framed as 'yes let's go fight this!' or it can be framed as a dismaying, looming threat rumbling ever closer. Doesn't matter. I identify that behavior as an attempt to produce race and/or civil war, even from nothing. And the more persistent the calls, the more well-funded but ill-sourced the outlet (ask yourself how the person's getting paid to do that full-time with such a busy workday), the more likely I'm going to think they are part of what I've come to think of as WWIII: the attempt to destroy rival nation-states purely with the old CIA techniques, which themselves probably date from the middle ages or Machiavelli or something. Nothing is new. It's all humans continuing to bumble along as a cooperative but rabidly competitive species. These dichotomies produce this behavior and it's about whether stuff's got out of balance. I think Russia waging WWIII predominantly informationally, is out of balance and having some serious negative externalities beyond their wish for power.
acqq 3y ago
If you really think the fake narratives originate only from the countries which aren't "behaving" as the politicians of your preferred countries would like, I have a huge stock of bridges to sell to you. Edit: If you'd like a very recent example, research who's telling he saw the "pictures of beheaded babies", and why.
nbzso 3y ago
The real problem is that a lot of this “fake information” is a fact. For example, the USA foreign policy always leads to wars and war crimes and handful of corporations are the beneficiary on a global scale. Maybe if you as Americans realize that your Constitutional rights are under attack, and there is no right or left in the political spectrum (just crooks and lobbyists), the world will have a chance to follow your example. Who knows? The bigger issue is that "commie under your bed" techniques never died. Americans are the victim of mind control more than Russians. Russia is corrupt, but they lack the sophistication and resources to apply effective propaganda. Even Ukrainians kicked their but in information warfare. And please, don't put me on some "Russian propaganda" troll theory. Go listen to Judge Napolitano podcast, with real American patriots like Colonel Douglas Macgregor, Prof. Jeffrey Sachs, Ray McGovern, Phil Giraldi, Larry Johnson, Tony Shafer, Prof. John J. Mearsheimer, Max Blumenthal.
- imiric 3y ago
  > Russia is corrupt, but they lack the sophistication and resources to apply effective propaganda. The interesting thing about information warfare is that it doesn't require sophistication and much resources at all. Set up a bunch of troll farms, pay tech-savvy teenagers to do your dirty work, give them some vague talking points, and let them loose on social media. If you really want to scale this cheaply, deploy AI instead. Russia might not have those capabilities yet, but China certainly does. BTW, I'm not picking sides here. Just pointing out that it would be absurd to think Russia or China aren't engaging in this type of warfare. They would actually prefer it, given that they can't compete with traditional physical might.
  - nbzso 3y ago
    I have a side. The truth. The most links in this rabbit hole point to the operations of the USA agencies as a whole. Russia has crumbled in the 90s and now is just starting to wake up. If I have to measure threat and I am an American, I would ask: How on earth China has developed this enormous economical advantage over all of the world? Who financed this growth? Who benefited the most? And why, after living through the Cold War, we are heading in a similar direction?
imiric 3y ago
> Putin kind of realized in 2011 that he needs to change the narrative. These operations were happening way before 2011[1]. The internet and social media were simply the most effective ways of executing them. > And western democracies are very inefficient when it comes to debunking fake information, because our legal system takes year or even decades to prove innocence. Debunking disinformation is not the antidote, and the legal system wouldn't have anything to do about that. The problem is that the West built the perfect tools for psyops, opened them up to the entire world, and are now wondering why their democracies are crumbling. This is either an act of self-sabotage or the enemy is a much stronger adversary than they anticipated. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1EA2ohrt5Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1EA2ohrt5Q
- Log_out_ 3y ago
  The enemy is inside the house and those aristocrats always wanted democracy gone - Thiel admitted it openly.
- davrosthedalek 3y ago
  To be fair, a democracy with open media and protections of free speech will always be harder to defend against foreign psyops attacks. Instead of having to influence enough people to revolt, you only have to influence enough to change the election outcome, which typically is close to parity anyway. And with non-state-run media and free speech protections, you have many pathways. So democracies have to harden themselves. And I think the only way to harden the populace is education. General education. Education in the scientific method. And also education about psyops.
  - nonrandomstring 3y ago
    > harden the populace is education I agree. But it is not the only requirement. Restoring control of technologies to the people is vital too. Intellectual self-defence requires a sceptical stance, but it also requires capability (other than simply switching off and opting out) Five giant websites plus endpoint computing that is neither owned nor controlled by passive "consumers" is a grave step in the wrong direction. In the "West" we've allowed this for reasons of private profit and government control, and I think in doing so we've created the very conditions for malign influence.
MyFirstSass 3y ago
The US is by far the largest and most succesfull at psyopping, if it was another country on the top they'd probably do the same thing. Singling out some relatively tiny economies as the bad guys is in itself an impressive display of the effectiveness of american propaganda. You should remember the US more or less propped up dictators through CIA left and right for decades, and it's still going on. Iran of today was because of the west trying to loot for oil : https://foreignpolicy.com/2017/06/20/64-years-later-cia-finally-releases-details-of-iranian-coup-iran-tehran-oil/ https://foreignpolicy.com/2017/06/20/64-years-later-cia-fina... The empire is the empire and the empire controls the narrative, and as a europeean seeing the US - the worlds largest military by far - cry about various tiny media operations coming from the wastelands they and the rest of the west has created by pillaging foreign resources is a bit laughable. Much of the south americas has been pillaged by the empire, the middle east to, the rest of the world not much less. Deaths squads, millions dead, forever wars and economic plunder but no it's some tiny russian or iranian operation we should worry about, so vote democrat, vote republican, just vote for more war! This is what many europeans thinks, though we aren't much better with our operations in say northern africa.
- flir 3y ago
  I'm pretty sure one of those tiny media operations managed to cut one of the EU's countries out of the herd, so they're a problem I'd like to solve, if possible. Or at least inoculate against, before it happens again.
  - coldtea 3y ago
    I'm pretty sure all of EUs countries would be more democratic and sovereign "out of the herd".
    - me_me_me 3y ago
      but they would be much weaker. And weak countries are not capable of protecting democracy or sovereignty - prime example ukraine.
  - 3y ago
flir 3y ago
Russia, yes, but I'm not convinced China's going for an "amplify disagreements" strategy. Have you got any links?
- Applejinx 3y ago
  Nor do I. China is heavily invested in doing business, as is the West, and this can be a limiting factor to how crazy the countries act. China wants functioning markets. It's Russia, on a massive scale, who's gone for the 'make everyone else disintegrate in civil war, what could possibly go wrong with amplifying this perennial human failing' strategy. Not a fan. We cannot ever eliminate the sparks of these fires without abandoning nations (and then getting flattened by rival nations) so I don't like chaos strategies. Chaos doesn't need help.
  - jstarfish 3y ago
    China hasn't targeted the west for the reasons you mentioned. Taiwan is the only target of theirs I'm aware of.
sph 3y ago
> For Russia, China or other SCO Nations it doesn't matter what kind of fake information they spread. As long as it keeps us busy, it worked. One thing that has bugged me for so long, and no one seems to be talking about, is, for example, how many state actors are lurking on Reddit news, specifically /r/worldnews, to control the narrative. There are some topics where a great number of comments are from, let's say, "interested parties". That is, people whose comment history is strictly about that particular topic. They might have 5+ year old accounts, and have only commented about that topic. They don't even need to hide it, as both them and the vast majority of well-meaning ignorant passerby can shut you down with either being a conspiracy theorist or pushing an agenda for the opposite side. This is the first time I mention this anywhere on the Internet, and I know how well it's gonna go down. Everybody is aware of state-sponsored troll farms, but any mention of it is drowned down by people that still believe either this is fiction, or "does not happen in my corner of the internet." To avoid making myself a blatant target of such responses, I will not mention which state or group is most active on that subreddit, go see for yourself. What I can openly say, is that USA psyops is not really a thing because most of the Western Internet is US-based, and US-centered. The US government doesn't really need massive troll farms because their own citizens and companies indirectly and involuntarily do their work for them. When one's own propaganda has become part of popular culture, is it propaganda anymore?
- paganel 3y ago
  > specifically /r/worldnews, By this point places like /worldnews have become ineffective when it comes to propaganda purposes, especially because they're so obviously controlled by bots. They're so good they're bad, that's one of the paradoxes of open confrontation/(information) war.
  - sph 3y ago
    Being controlled by bots doesn't mean no human person ever reads any of those subs. Bots are where people are. If no one read /r/worldnews, there would be no bots.
    - 3y ago

reedf1 3y ago

Agreed. Most are very open and public about their activities and purpose. It seems like most conspiracy theories are just honeypots for institutions like the studiously benign "Behavioural Insights Team". The BBC (and other public broadcasters) are complicit in "manufacturing consent" for public policy, or other social goals. It's quite obvious to me that the average person has been woven a deliberate and simple (but critically wrong) model for reality, which complies with government goals. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioural_Insights_Team https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioural_Insights_Team

gwervc 3y ago
The matrix is indeed really strong in the West. At least in an autocracy you'd assume most "information" is somehow propaganda but here people believe whatever the press and government feed them. And when given information that contradict their beliefs (entirely constructed from hearsay) they become angry and violent. And I'm speaking of supposedly educated people, about information that are available in primary sources. Ignorance is also carefully cultivated: God forbid to use one's smartphone to check an information publicly and easily available.
- Zetobal 3y ago
  I would say that the reality distortion field is way stronger in the east... and if you are in a professional discourse it's fine not to have the Junior Dev go "achtually" all the time because he googles shit he doesn't understand.
- geysersam 3y ago
  I find the claim that people are generally more well informed about the state of the world in countries without a free press and independent institutions quite absurd. The western societies are certainly not perfect, but the messy information landscape in some of them is in my view an indication that different views are able to clash and make their cases with relatively little intervention from the authorities.
  - 3y ago

justinl33 3y ago

agreed

hyperman1 3y ago

Not only the governements. Some kid in Belgium with a horrible rare disease was cut off from the healthcare system because the medication was insanely expensive and the system just could not bear it. A grassroots protest formed to pressure the relevant politicians. Then it leaked how the big farma corp selling the medication had ordered a marketing company to create more demand. The kid was deemed a cute enough case to sway public opinion, and tailor made news was generated to cause the formation of the grassroots cause. The kid, the parents, the supporting grassroots protesters were all unknowing pawns, misused as succers in an extremely cynical marketing ploy. I've since heard about companies existing just to create databases of cute poor victims for just about anything, to support creating grassroots movements for big corporations on demand.

candiodari 3y ago
I wonder about this. You see I'm trying to think this through. This was a (very) "long-tail" medicine. There aren't many people who have this disease. So it's kind of tough, splitting this up, seeing who is at fault here ... 1) it's great that this medicine was made. Without that, the kid would have died, slowly, through suffocation 2) the company does need to recoup costs + profit (and it's not making excessive profits). The margin on the medicine is something like 10% to 15%. This is not price gouging. Curing this kid really is that expensive (AND, one might add, a very significant part of the cost is government mandated safety checking, which effectively gets paid to higher ups in hospitals and government) 3) the government is in fact the party that has (through the use of force, ie. legislation) taken responsibility for the health of children in Belgium. So you can't blame the parents for not taking extra insurance for this case. 4) Given that they have responsibility for the health of the child, and that it's a solvable problem, obviously it's a good thing their hand gets forced. That they're forced to cure this child. 5) Obviously the parents did the right thing (plus the only alternative is limiting which parents get to have natural kids, which is definitely a step too far) 6) Spreading the use of this medicine, ie. the marketing ... saves the lives of children. Tough to say that's a bad thing. I mean ... where is the bad? Where does this go "evil" exactly?
- mrbombastic 3y ago

blahdeblahde 3y ago

[flagged]

mindcrash 3y ago

> I often talk to people who argue about whether it exists or whether governments can be sophisticated enough to launch these kinds of campaigns. Still need to argue it exists? IT EXISTS. Edward Snowden smuggled out proof and Glenn Greenwald wrote about it in 2014 for crying out loud! https://theintercept.com/2014/02/24/jtrig-manipulation/ https://theintercept.com/2014/02/24/jtrig-manipulation/