Facebook is paying people overseas promoting Alberta separatism

Post by paganel » Tue, Jun 09, 2026, 7:31 PM UTC

bryanlarsen wrote: post #71

paganel wrote: post #54

NATO (of which Canada is a founding member or) actively supports Kosovar separatism, it has even started an unprovoked and illegal war on account of it, at the end of of it all what would be wrong with one of Canada's federal states deciding to split off? If anything, the international community could send some Blue Helmets force there in order to support the local Albertans in the face of Ottawa-led occupation.

The Canadian Supreme Court has ruled that provinces essentially have the right to separate. There are a bunch of conditions, but they have the right to separate, the Federal government is required to negotiate separation in good faith. Canada is not being hypocritical.

Post by pjc50 » Tue, Jun 09, 2026, 8:58 PM UTC

throwaway27448 wrote: post #168

pjc50 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rather like the Raytheon adverts in DC airport, the aim of all this nonsense is to alter the worldview of the small number of people who make the actual decisions. It does seem to have some effect - the Trump administration withdrew support from Ukraine.

I suppose. But social media would be a very indirect way of influencing decision makers. Surely it'd be more straightforward to simply bribe or threaten them. > It does seem to have some effect - the Trump administration withdrew support from Ukraine. No, they haven't. We just haven't increased support. They still benefit from our existing aid packages and intelligence.

Post by inglor_cz » Tue, Jun 09, 2026, 9:03 PM UTC

throwaway27448 wrote: post #164

inglor_cz wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For a country of 8 million to "dwarf by multiple orders of magnitude" a country of 140 million in almost anything requires very lively imagination indeed. Soft power operations are hard to measure. You cannot measure the impact of Israeli activities either.

> For a country of 8 million to "dwarf by multiple orders of magnitude" a country of 140 million in almost anything requires very lively imagination indeed. I see you've never heard of Hasbara. Anyway, there's little reason to think that influence scales with the size of the population as opposed to the number of people involved in active influence and funding, especially with Russia locking down access to the global…

Post by somenameforme » Wed, Jun 10, 2026, 3:45 AM UTC

card_zero wrote: post #174

somenameforme wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So that page didn't exist before December 2024, and was created by a guy whose done nothing but push anti-Russian propaganda, and links to a video in Ukrainian on his user page showing Russian soldiers being killed. Interestingly the page has also had segments of its edit timeline permanently deleted as well, which is something that never used to happen on Wiki. Anyhow apparently examples of "Russian hybrid warfare"…

>something that never used to happen on Wiki Revision deletion has existed for at least 17 years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Revision_deletion (page created in 2009)

Post by account42 » Wed, Jun 10, 2026, 7:27 AM UTC

trumpdong wrote: post #143

account42 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't forget that undesirable uses of free speech can be made less effective by more speech - as long as what you desire is actually in the interest of the people you want to influence. Like for example this article. And of course in this case the root problem is not that people have free speech but that they are financially rewarded for using it in bad ways. Financial models that reward impressions are fundamentally…

Those who are making the undesirable speech can counter their opponent's speech with more speech of their own - and they can afford to outspeak their opponents at any opportunity because they are paid to speak and their opponents are not.