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by mtsr 1y ago
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- Argonaut998 1y agoYes?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- 05 1y agoPretty sure the biggest propaganda channel is social media and it's wide open.
- imcritic 1y agoYou see, he isn't against propaganda, he is against propaganda he doesn't agree with.
- mtsr 1y agoI’m against propaganda that seeks to actively undermine freedom and democracy in my country and the rest of the EU. Is that so strange?
- logicchains 1y agoThere is abundant factual evidence that the US worked to undermine democracy in Ukraine in 2014 when Ukraine elected a candidate favourable to Moscow. It's not propaganda to draw attention to that.
- hkpack 1y agoAs a Ukrainian, this statement of yours is complete and utter bullshit. Where did you heard it? It is not only factually incorrect, every point is just completely wrong: no favorable candidate to Moscow was elected in 2014, US did not worked to undermine democracy and there is absolutely zero evidence of both of these things happened. This is what RT and other propaganda networks is dangerous, it creates a fake reality which people believe in. Then you act on this knowledge as if it is real.
- immibis 1y agoThere's no factual evidence of that, but there is a lot of RT screeching about it, which some individuals believe is the same thing as factual evidence. Thanks for providing evidence, to the other users in this thread, that RT has real effects, so there are real concrete reasons to block it.
- mtsr 1y agoI would be in favor of limiting these channels, because I agree with you it seems necessary. But it’s also something to be quite careful with, I feel. I think the current shift in acceptance of blocking social media for children is a start and allows us to consider it’s positive and negative effects.
- zosima 1y agoNo, it's not. Social media is massively censored in many EU countries (and UK).
- jddj 1y agoI didn't get the impression they were making any value judgement
- mtsr 1y agoYou’re right. I guess I am. I’m pretty happy RT is blocked.
- jddj 1y ago[Editing this while I still can as although I think it's a reasonable discussion I tend to regret getting too much into politics here.]
- qwertox 1y agoIt's like handing knives out on a playground. rt.com is handing out propaganda which is meant to influence those who are already distrustful of mainstream institutions.
- jstanley 1y agoWhy?
- mtsr 1y agoBecause it’s turning out that too many people are susceptible to (this specific, but also other) propaganda.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- Amezarak 1y agoIf you think the masses are too susceptible to unapproved propaganda to the extent we have to censor it, it’s not clear to me that you can consistently believe democracy should be your form of government, as opposed to some sort of rule by experts/the rich/the educated/aristocrats/something else. It’s effectively saying the masses get a choice unless it’s the wrong choice. I believe in democracy. If people want to listen to ridiculous and false Russian propaganda or support Russia against Ukraine they should be able to without hindrance, even if their politicians or the better informed don’t like it. It’s their job to persuade their fellows. They shouldn’t get to declare their beliefs are right and beyond democratic contestation. Sometimes democracies make really bad decisions. Alciabiades conned the Athenians into the disastrous Sicilian Expedition. That’s the tradeoff you get for having a democracy. Declaring some subjects out of bounds is taking away democracy and installing something else instead, with those tradeoffs, that we as a society decided we weren’t going to make, without consensus.
- poly2it 1y agoIn an ideal society there would be no need to block propaganda.
- rvnx 1y agoStill concerning that there is a Ministry of Truth. The good solution would be the educate the population about critical thinking, and to use their brain when they see information. If you just censor things, you hide the real problems, and end up with dumb people without critical judgment (or no access to information).
- simonask 1y agoThey do educate people to do that already. But the power of narrative is much stronger than the motivation to do the actual work of checking your sources. It’s very easy to convince anyone to support your cause. Just tell them they are the real victims, that they have been deprived of their rightful privilege, and that it is someone else’s fault. Give them undue credit, take away their inconvenient responsibilities. I promise you, they will have zero motivation to uncover your lies. We have a collective responsibility to protect the truth - the actual, messy, complicated, real-life truth.
- littlecranky67 1y agoClear case of "motive justifies the means". I think in a free democracy, no one should block any propaganda, as it the responsibility of the individual to asses what to read and what not. In a democracy, it is more dangerous to censor and justify the means with motive - this opens the door to unjust censorship.
- morkalork 1y agoWhat if at the end of the day, that propaganda does work and leaving it unopposed is as much a danger to democracy as censorship? It seems like a scenario where you have to pick your poison now, the last 100 years have shown populations can be manipulated.
- rvnx 1y agoDemocracy is sneaky refined domination, subtle enough that masses do not see through it, but it is elites controlling the masses. At the end, this political system is about supporting current power who settled by force (and to whom you have to pay a tax to not be sent into physical jail, and all your belongings taken). Remember that at the beginning, these nice people are actually people who killed to be in place, and collected a lot of power and money, and that are now defending their position. Kingdoms, then Dictatorship were too unstable, and this gave birth to Democracy, still with the same elites. In some way, it is a softer continuation of conquest-coercion dressed as consent. The newest generations use propaganda to settle; the approach changes, but the goal is ultimately the same.
- imcritic 1y agoThat description fits any authority, not just democratic. The state is an apparatus of coercion. Always was, always will be.
- rvnx 1y agoSadly yes. Even original Greek democracy was completely broken (women couldn't vote for example, like in many countries even recently). There is a saying: if voting would change things, it is long time that it would have been forbidden
- honeybadger1 1y ago[flagged]
- user3939382 1y agoIs Chris Hedges a Russian propagandist?
- heelix 1y agoI would. Appetite for censorship should be measured against something I find unpalatable. When one starts down the road of making decisions for others - it is only a question of time before someone does the same for you with possibly a different perspective. The moment one finds themselves outside the groupthink on spaces vs tabs, I'd like that bar to be as far away as possible.
- bootsmann 1y ago> The moment one finds themselves outside the groupthink The RT ban is not about what RT publishes, you are free to publish their arguments more or less verbatim on your own site without getting sanctioned in Europe (which indeed some people do). The RT ban is about RT being a state owned propaganda network owned by the government thats waging an active war against Europe.
- ur-whale 1y ago> The RT ban is about RT being a state owned propaganda network owned by the government thats waging an active war against Europe. And ... ?
- multjoy 1y agoDo you think allowing an enemy state free reign to broadcast propaganda to your population makes good tactical sense?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- dvdkon 1y agoFreedom of speech rarely makes "tactical sense", which is why we as citizens need to continually fight for it.
- fireflash38 1y ago
- f1shy 1y agoNot OP, but there is strong censorship. The previous government sent a police brigade to a random dud that said something like “he is a clown” or similar (don’t remember the details). In Germany you have to be extremely careful with what you say, and how you say it, because you can be in jail faster than you think. There are people who see that as positive, because are used to be extremely careful and conscious of their words. But is a very thin line, where one word can obliterate your life as you know it.
- OKRainbowKid 1y agoPlease post a source
- nani8ot 1y agoIn 2021, Andreas Grote, the minister of interior of the Germany city-state Hamburg was called a dick in a tweet. (Andy, you are such a dick). This led to a police search of the home of the Twitter account owner [1]. This sparked a discussion about how to handle hate spech, as for regular people being called a dick does not result in a 06:00 am. police raid with six officers. In the aftermath, a mural in a left wing culture center has been painted over multiple times with the tweet and a call for his resignation [1]. [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/09/09/pimmelgate-german-politician-police-raid/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/09/09/pimmelgate-g... [1] https://archive.is/hETjp https://archive.is/hETjp [2] https://images.welt.de/67dd7b08559c903aae8287ac/12efd9779a84c2f5f4291a5fc8410e23/ci23x11-w2000/pimmelgate-beschaeftigt-weiter-hamburger-polizei https://images.welt.de/67dd7b08559c903aae8287ac/12efd9779a84...
- petre 1y agoBeing called a dick on social media is now hate speech? I thought it was constructive criticism.
- f1shy 1y agoHere one: translation you can do at leisure. Also there is a sister comment with a similar case. I have a family memver that was also persecuted for hanging a flag saying “the park is for the children “ as they wanted to construct in a park. There are literally thousands of cases constantly of different severity, but freedom looks different to me. https://www.zdfheute.de/politik/deutschland/habeck-beleidigung-plattform-x-ermittlungen-100.html https://www.zdfheute.de/politik/deutschland/habeck-beleidigu...
- linohh 1y agoExactly. That isn't going to help the argument whatsoever. Blocking stuff without legal basis is an entirely different ballpark from legally mandated blocks after due process and the option for legal challenges.
- sorushn 1y agoCan't take the "propaganda" and "misinformation" excuses seriously when the German establishment media has been blatantly lying to their teeth about an ongoing genocide, and smearing anyone who stood for an obvious moral cause with 0 repercussion. They make the Israeli far-right newspapers blush.
- klabb3 1y agoNot parent but I'm skeptical because normalizing blocking is a very real slippery slope. Last night I debugged an issue with one of my apps for 1h, it turned out one of the Cloudflare IPs my device got were legally blocked in Spain. Not even ISP DNS, but the IP. And this is because of some CF customer hosting a football (soccer) streaming site. This is the new normal, in a democratic country. What the post is talking about in Germany seems similar. And these are democratic countries with many constitutional freedoms. This is not a hypothetical, but happening today. ID verification is already implemented in the UK. Chat control is possibly next. So let me flip the question: if a certain thing is illegal in a jurisdiction, but hosted outside, is it justified to block access to the hosting provider (notably, including Cloudflare and other giants)?
- ur-whale 1y ago> Are you seriously crying about the biggest Russian propaganda channel being blocked The decision to classify something as propaganda should never be the role of a government, much less blocking it. But that's something that's close to impossible for continental European cultures to ever understand, at a gut level.
- jamesnorden 1y agoSurely it will stop at blocking them (the Bad Guys), it will never extend to blocking us (the Good Guys). What a naive way of thinking.
- Spooky23 1y agoIt’s a cycle. The Russian propaganda spends a lot of resources on reinforcing high-minded ideals that provide a scaffolding for the intellectual types to climb on. The suckers and idiots fall for the more odious stuff.
- vintermann 1y agoIt's true, Russia could be said to engage in full-blown hybrid warfare according to some definitions. I don't want to downplay what they do at all. But if you applied it consistently, you'd have to admit that Germany, the US, and many other Western countries also engage in full-blown hybrid warfare, against their own populations.
- jijijijij 1y ago> But if you applied it consistently, you'd have to admit that Germany, the US, and many other Western countries also engage in full-blown hybrid warfare, against their own populations. Just because two things superficially share some traits doesn't mean they are equivalent, at all. "Full-blown warfare against their own populations" is a bit dramatic, don't you think? As a German, I can tell you, while the government doesn't much act to my benefit, I am not exactly at war with them either. Intelligence, military and police don't have the competence or power, either. Most importantly, like in many proper democracies, there is a plurality of opinions and oversight in parliament, which prevents this sort of thing at scale. "Full-blown warfare" would imply a grand conspiracy, that's simply not factual. Apart from the UK, Hungary and Poland, I think that's true for most western countries. The US is a bit exceptional, of course, since... well, I don't know what the fuck they are smoking there.
- zahlman 1y agoI must ask sincerely: do you know of concrete instances where RT has been shown to claim things that are objectively untrue, that they reasonably ought to have known were untrue? Or is this just about them using the same techniques (selective reporting / emphasis on stories salient to particular worldviews, editorialization etc.) that everyone else uses? For that matter, in most cases where RT has been linked to me, I couldn't see any clear way that the story advanced Russian interests, except perhaps by trying to paint the USA as full of internal social and cultural conflicts. But, frankly, American media does a pretty good job of that, too. (And many of those media outlets have also grossly misrepresented many events relevant to those conflicts — including ones where I know very well that they were misrepresented because I witnessed them first-hand. For example, I watched the Rittenhouse trial live-streamed, and then read media coverage describing something barely recognizable as what I just saw.) (Besides, it's not like they're trying to hide that "rt" stands for Russia Today.)
- petre 1y agoWho cares. Just make it go away, there's too much noise already. I for one don't care about the arguments of some "news outlet" paid for by the ones who attacked Ukraine. The Global Times isn't banned because the CCP is outlining issues using restraint.
- GuB-42 1y agoWhich German laws did RT break? Propaganda usually isn't banned, except in specific cases (defamation, hate speech, etc...). But AFAIK, RT is not special in that regard, it is just the kind of content one would expect from a website openly affiliated with Russian authorities.
- tomp 1y agoThat is a retarded justification. It’s incredibly valuable to understand how the enemy thinks.
- djfobbz 1y agoInteresting...so facts are just whatever comes pre-approved by your worldview? Handy system!