Fake news: Why the West is blind to Russia's propaganda today

[flamingdem]

http://www.smh.com.au/world/fake-news-why-the-west-is-blind-to-russias-propaganda-today-20170123-gtxbuw.html

Russia has skilfully exploited social media to divide the West and increase Moscow's power in Europe, the US and eventually Asia.

The use of social media as a platform to divide democracies works, in part, because the strategy preys on a fundamental blind spot in open societies: the origin and volume of voices taking part in an online discussion.

Western countries, inventors of the internet and social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, tend to see discussion on social media as an open reflection of the public's views.

That very openness means outside voices can weigh into debates – not to broaden the discussion, but to co-opt arguments and redirect them toward conclusions that undermine Western society and government.

Propaganda can be crystallised into hashtags, and the meaning can be warped to cloud the understanding of a subject or trash the reputation of ideas, parties or figures.

In this world, the opposite of free trade is not protectionism but "anti-globalism".

MORE AT LINK

[wildeyed]

1. Absolutely

We all saw this play out on this site in the primaries.

I have been exploring on Twitter. I look for shiny pro-Trump accounts that were made in the last year or so with high follower counts and +100k posts already and drop them into a private list. I have another for overt Russian propaganda sites and a third for MSM. It is informative to compare their output and watch the contagion spread.....

During the primary, I got suspicious and programmed a random word generator that mimicked the florid anti-Clinton rhetoric that was floating around. It wasn't even hard, and programming is not my job. It was clear to me then that much of the spin that was floating around is not even written by actual people, but most seem not to notice or care. It was also clear to me that a high minority of low count "people" debating were not native English speakers. Oh well.

The question is where do we go from here. Left needs to step it up and deploy some defense NOW. And then we need to figure out how to identify and control the operative, bots and liars.

[flamingdem]

2. Check out this account - via Malcolm Nance twitter acct - also recommend u follow Nance

Ghost Ryder
?@cateia97

I believe RoguePOTUSstaff is a Russian disinformation account, and I'll prove it. (Bear with me)

[Adsos Letter]

3. I follow many of the discussion threads on FB.

Much of what I'm seeing looks like troll accounts.

[flamingdem]

4. Right? And they are usually so nasty

and that poisons the atmosphere - people waste their precious time responding to them.

[Adsos Letter]

5. Absolutely, flamingdem.

They include language designed to outrage. They often have last names, supposedly American, that don't sound correct for any nationality/ethnic group. They also include an extraordinary amount of people who attended an American university for 4-5 years but whose grammar and syntax suggests otherwise.

I do know that college is no guarantee of decent writing skills, having graded undergrad papers as a History grad student; still, the amount of poorly written comments by "college educated" commenters is...interesting.

[wildeyed]

6. Once I get them going I can usually make them

either delete the sub-thread or block me I can kinda tell when they are getting ready to bolt so I start hitting 'enter' after each sentence to get a few extra licks in before they poof.

[flamingdem]

7. Imagine where they probably are located!

In some bunker in Siberia

[wildeyed]

8. Or mommy's basement.

[Rage4Bacon]

9. Because there is no control of information in the age of the internet...

And there wont ever be any control again. Its progress on the scale of the printing press and more.

Get used to a chaotic playing field... Adapt.