121–130 of 371 posts
My position is that Russia's Article 51 legal justification for the invasion is a stretch at best, but that the US policy of unnecessary, aggressive NATO expansion [1] baited Putin into this war whereas he was very clear Ukrainian NATO membership was a red line for him. We also made no effort to encourage Ukraine to honor the Minsk accords which would have almost certainly prevented this. If Mexico was hostile and Ru…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
My great hope in the early 2000s was that all you had to do was provide a route for information and the effect of propaganda would crumble once people had access to the truth. And, the internet did provide the route that did not exist before it just didnt matter. Truth is that people largely place trust in institutions and people they are used to and identify with, often for irrational reasons. People are prone to FU…
> Truth is that people largely place trust in institutions and people they are used to and identify with, often for irrational reasons. Is it really so irrational? How many people have the technical know-how and access to equipment to personally verify that COVID vaccines are safe for human consumption? (Can you even verify that on your short of running mass human trials?) And yet, by and large, most of us are not co…
Humans will always accept some axiom as truth without really verifying it. It's impossible to do so. Can any single person truly know how everything in their computer works? Or how the machines that made the semiconducter work? Nope. All we can do is try to determine the truth by proxy, which means the truth can and will always be manipulated.
This is a fair point - that people are seeing different things in Russia and Ukraine. But can we reflect for a second that we are all in the same boat? We don't know what we are presented on screens is real either. Who's to say we are receiving the truth? Are our leaders beneficent? I think not. We are all in the same boat. We are all propagandised. We don't even know what is going on anywhere else, except for what w…
The dream of the internet as some sort of great democratizing force is already dead and buried, but for any who still believes, this must surely be the final nail in that coffin. Controlling the narrative is only a problem for existing democracies with press freedom. All bets are off once the threat model includes control of the media. So cherish your freedom of speech, and exercise and defend it. I don’t know what t…
We’re surely all guilty of facilitating this. Forget the global village of a billion voices - the number of news sources I regularly read isn’t even dozens.
Anybody can still put up a web server, but it’s the attention channels that matter, and those are well and truly under control through non-internet means (money, regulation, threats, lobbying, …).
The dream of the internet as some sort of great democratizing force is already dead and buried, but for any who still believes, this must surely be the final nail in that coffin. Controlling the narrative is only a problem for existing democracies with press freedom. All bets are off once the threat model includes control of the media. So cherish your freedom of speech, and exercise and defend it. I don’t know what t…
Look at all the disinformation that you will see on the "news" channels (both sides) and "news" sites (which have replaced paper). Faux outrage is extremely profitable and as long as that is true, there will be no news, just infotainment click-bait for profit.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is TikTok, it is not a platform for freedom of speech or whatever. It is a platform to see cute dance videos and more generally a happy place to waste time. For that I'd say that the Russian TikTok is more in like with what TikTok is for and that's the Ukrainian TikTok that is unusual. I guess that you can't avoid it when there is a war in your country, despite all the efforts TikTok makes to keep things carefre…
You are parroting an old tired “it’s only protected speech when it’s the government meddling”, and to that I ask, did you not read the part where TikTok is doing this because the Russian government decided to jail people over “fake news”? Does this not constitute a textbook violation of the freedom of speech?
That freedom doesn't exist in two of the three countries involved here.
My position is that Russia's Article 51 legal justification for the invasion is a stretch at best, but that the US policy of unnecessary, aggressive NATO expansion [1] baited Putin into this war whereas he was very clear Ukrainian NATO membership was a red line for him. We also made no effort to encourage Ukraine to honor the Minsk accords which would have almost certainly prevented this. If Mexico was hostile and Ru…
Whereas in the free world, no one, not even Putin, should and absolutely will not have a say in other nations agreements, because that is a preposterous idea that no supporter of democracy would even consider to be a valid stance.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
My great hope in the early 2000s was that all you had to do was provide a route for information and the effect of propaganda would crumble once people had access to the truth. And, the internet did provide the route that did not exist before it just didnt matter. Truth is that people largely place trust in institutions and people they are used to and identify with, often for irrational reasons. People are prone to FU…
> Truth is that people largely place trust in institutions and people they are used to and identify with, often for irrational reasons. People are prone to FUD. Theyre lazy and passive. I think to a degree, this is a misunderstanding. The Russian approach to disinformation in particular does not sell the message "trust us!" - at least, not in the West. Instead, they push the message "trust nobody!" In fact, RT's slog…
Russian FUD propaganda resonates in the west because of the lack of trust in western media. That's them successfully exploiting a hole our media dug for themselves.
The fact that we've responded by banning RT highlights that that hole goes deep enough that we're responding by, as a matter of imminent practicality, violating a core value of our civilization. That both hurts and deepens the hole.
Unfortunately we cant go back in time and reinstate the fairness doctrine and render RT a pathetic waste of time. The cat is out of the bag now we deliberately eroded trust in our own institutions and autocratic regimes have been exploiting it for years.
Speaking of antivaxxers, the same thing happened in reverse. I have friends in Russia who absolutely refused to take sputnik because why the fuck would you inject something into your arm because Putin told you to?
I feel like the premis is flawed. Maybe I am a boomer but who would excpect TikTok to provied unbiased news content? It is a chinese social media app. Use established media for news. And yes I know that is how people get content, I use Youtube and Twitch for political news and its just as bad. But this is on another level.
I was asking [0] for strong evidence of TikTok being a tool to manipulate the west and it seems that this is all the evidence that satisfies this claim. It is no wonder governments would love to use this glorified recommendation algorithm as it is the new digital crack / cocaine which is effective on manipulating billions of users today. Now looking back at this once again [1], I don't even think it was a clever thin…