Russian intelligence is operating a systematic program to launder pro-Kremlin propaganda through private relationships between Russian operatives and unwitting US and western targets, according to newly declassified US intelligence.
I’d still say it’s news, it’s just confirming that Russia has continued their same pattern of behavior. Early on the troll farms actually infiltrated communities (I remember reading that they targeted the Bernie subreddit too), but now they just upvote, like, and share unwitting US pawns
I remember posts with thousands of upvotes from this website called thedurian. I googled the people who ran it, one of them had a linkedin which mentioned his location as Moscow and that he had previously worked for RT.
Given I was banned for posting screenshots, I suspect the mods of /r/thedonald were in on it.
TheDonald started as a joke that was legitimately funny. As soon as anyone tried to call it out as a joke, that person would be banned within seconds. That's not normal, volunteer moderation.
There were people with the power to ban paid to control that sub. They took shifts, likely from Russia.
Oh SHIT I actually forgot that was a thing commonly heard. Frankly it's been brain breaking news headlines (and usually the even with context it was accurate headlines) since 2015 so hard to remember it all.
And there is literally nothing to declassify. This has been happening out in the open for years. The FBI has been warning us about this shit multiple times. Yet the funny think is that people don't think it is happening to them.
I noticed a decent number of Russian memes (before Trump) trying to make Russia and Putin look cool, and remember wondering if they were from Russians actually trying or from Westerners having lolz.
My anti-mask friend kept linking Zero Hedge articles to support his stance. Not recognizing the source, I did 10 minutes of research and told him his sole source of information appeared to be a Russian propaganda vehicle. He went on a very aggressive rant about my arrogance at dismissing his "alt media" out of hand.
About a year later, the FBI publicly outed zero hedge as pedaling Russian propaganda. But apparently that was fake news too.
It's impossible to talk to that guy anymore. He doesn't live in reality.
I too have lost friends to “anti-western alt media”
They tell me how YouTube is censoring everything and thus rumble is the place to go. Gave that site a quick search and learned all I needed to know lol.
They also claim Russia a victim of western aggression but cannot put together a reasonable answer in relation to the invasion of ukr. To no surprise, they also have nothing to say in regards to the persecution of lgbt and non-Roman Catholics, the joke that is their “democracy”. The US is disgusting to them, will trot out foreign policy…. but Russia is A-Okay somehow!
“Oh well I’m not sure of the specifics so maybe they have a good reason”, and yet you’re so sure Russia is the victim? Fucking sad as hell. Lost fucking cause
They say shit like how Iran is one of the most moral countries around. I pointed to the uprisings of women after killings related to hijabs and I was told that I can’t be sure of what’s happening over there. It’s just so fucking obvious that it’s propaganda being parroted, I just don’t understand how you can be so fucking dumb
Not all of the online ones are that dumb. Some are just straight up Russian. Meanwhile 80% of the GOP won't speak out against it because they don't want to lose their seats.
I can't believe we still have operational coal plants in 2023. That fact alone is insane. We should be making a bipartisan plan to phase out the common use of gasoline and diesel. Even just saying we'll tax gas to a price of $10/gallon by 2030 would be enough to make the transition happen.
We should be taking action against anything on the seas burning bunker fuel.
The easiest shit to combat climate change really is low hanging fruit. Of course at this point we'll need active measures as well. We've gone too far to just stop polluting.
Had a similar experience on a forum during peak pandemic, all the sources provided ended up being linked to Russia and mostly to the same person that was involved in a bunch of "news" websites. Try explaining to someone that they don't know how to validate a source... Yeah...
Yuuup. One of his sources saying that covid was overblown was Frontline Doctors of America. I spent 20 minutes looking into who they were. Not a single virologist, pathologist, etc in the bunch, claiming that covid was curable.
He literally said "he lost respect" for me that day when I laughed that one of his source's doctors was on video saying vaginally cysts were caused by demon rape in your dreams. He gave me a back faith victim argument about being disrespectful to other people's cultures.
Yeah dude. Sure. That's what you're upset about, dude who literally told me, verbatim, "emotions are stupid" after I gave him a long thought out multiple page explanation of my side, telling him about seeing my parents waste away because they couldn't go outside because my mother's immuno compromised from chemo, etc etc.
I never understood this. We know who is writing those articles, we know where he lives (ffs it is Mahwah New Jersey, right on his Wikipedia page), we know he is being funded by the Russian government and yet nothing. How is my government can just randomly murder people for normal activities and yet can't even put the fear of God in this guy? Grab him, perp walk him, throw him in a jail cell with two rival gangs for the night, interrogate him for a day, and ditch him two hours away with no money sne a dead cellphone.
Are they registered foreign agents? If so, they're probably in the clear. If not, they may be violating federal law. Americans acting on behalf of a foreign government are required to register with the DOJ.
If I have to read another comment about all the evil things tankies are defending without ever actually seeing a tankie on Lemmy I'm going to fucking lose my mind
Your instance has defederated from most of them. You won't see them. It's Lemmygrad and hexbear if you're interested, but you'd have to go to a different instance to see them.
Aww, how cute. They think these people are doing this unwittingly. I'm convinced there are some people doing this quite wittingly -- and a bunch are in office...
The Russian information doctrine is to fuel any fire that has two sides. They don't actually pick sides, they just want nations more divided, because nation that is divided cannot function properly.
They definitely pick sides. There are cases where they'll specifically support the other side for a specific rally or action if they think it can cause disruption and strife, but those cases are an exception to the rule.
Everyone is focusing on "unwitting Westerners" while I'm focused on "laundering propaganda." Like, that's just how propoganda from other countries works right? Starts from a source, then people who believe the source spread it around their own country.
This seems to be acting like it's some new fangled way to spread fear and misinformation when that's the way it's always worked. The only difference now is that it's all online and people rarely verify sources so they take what they read as facts at face value.
Lemmy is not a big enough platform for any psyops to care about and probably never will be. Sorry to tell you but those are just real people and I've gone to raves with them.
Have you seen Gab? That is where most of it is dumped and consumed.
Russian trolls will push a US political point on Gab and right wing politicians will pick it up and spew it out on the news. It's really sickening if you ever decide to dig into that mess.
I love that you've chosen the "can't trust the intelligence agencies, only Noam Chomsky" hill to or on, and yet this articles conclusion is just laughably obvious
"can't trust the intelligence agencies, only Noam Chomsky"
The model isn't a personal opinion. It was created by Chomsky, yes, and Edward Herman, but it's just a framework for analyzing media and appeared first in a published work alongside numerous "case studies" featuring a litany of citations detailing not only the stark difference between how our media covers our own actions vs "enemy states" but also how those very own intelligence agencies meddled in multiple other countries, including Vietnam, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and more.
At least they're trying to. Fortunately, the Russian psyops seem pretty poor in this war and they haven't even managed to pull off any false flag operation to the point of causing contoversy among Ukraine's western allies, and the support remains as strong as one could hope for this long into the war.
It's scarey how much of the popular conservative media in the US seems to be paid off by Russia.
But you see it everywhere you look, there were just news reports of Nicholas Sarkozy bending over backwards to talk about how reasonable he thinks Putin is and how France needs Russia.
Fucking crazy, but some people really do listen to this shit and end up having their world views shaped by what they see as their trusted sources.
The opposite side can equalily say this about you. How can you know that it's not your world-view, rather than theirs, that's been shapped by the US propaganda that you listen to?
The two countries with the most vaccines and the least number of people vaccinated are the US and Russia. Russia's vaccine isn't even from the evil west! But still people won't take it.
You propagandize enough people and they don't trust you when you're telling them the truth.
Orban, and his comrades are no unwitting... they know what are they doing, and for how much, and for what (putin has all of the KGB files about him, and his comrades).
Their dumb followers are the unwitting, just like trumpists
So... Was the propaganda false propaganda or true propaganda?
US propaganda during the Cold War included things like "our grocery stores have bananas" (true) and "we will totally definitely not expand NATO if you dissolve the USSR" (false).
True propaganda is just a fact that makes you look bad.
US intelligence agencies believe that the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) is attempting to influence public policy and public opinion in the West by directing Russian civilians to build relationships with influential US and Western individuals and then disseminate narratives that support Kremlin objectives, obscuring the FSB’s role through layers of ostensibly independent actors.
“These influence operations are designed to be deliberately small scale, the overall goal being US [and] Western persons presenting these ideas, seemingly organic,” a US official authorized to discuss the material told CNN.
“The co-optee influence operations are built primarily on personal relationships … they build trust with them and then they can leverage that to covertly push the FSB’s agenda.”
Maxim Grigoriev, who heads a Russian NGO, made multiple speeches to the UN presenting a false study that claimed the humanitarian group the White Helmets – which operates in Syria – was running a black market for human organs and had faked chemical attacks by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, with whom Russia is allied.
One man, Andrey Stepanenko, founded a media project in 2014 that sponsored journalists from the US and the West to visit eastern Ukraine and learn “the alleged truth” about what was happening in the region.
The US official also cited Natalia Burlinova, the founder of a Russian NGO who routinely coordinated FSB-funded public diplomacy efforts aimed at influencing Western views.
The original article contains 770 words, the summary contains 229 words. Saved 70%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
So Russia is hiring propagandists to spread its narratives to US citizens... same as US does to another countries with its NGO and USAID shills. So maybe it's not good, but it's definately fair.
So... No evidence, just "these people happened to be spreading ideas that didn't fit with the Western perspective"
Are we back to McCarthyism already?
I'm not doubting that Russia's trying to spread propaganda: so are we, and so is any major player that wants to play the game. I'm just skeptical that this mess of a source is worth a damn.
Back in the day, /r/thedonald had plenty of (highly upvoted) stories from a site called thedurian. I googled the editor, and his linkedin mentioned his location as Moscow and mentioned he'd previously worked for RT. Their stories were also spread on other subreddits. Stuff like that was rampant on reddit.
It's rampant in the fediverse too. Lemmgrad and tankies spout Russian/Chinese propaganda all day long, thinking they're top tier minds for being critical of western media, when in reality they simply ended up falling for another country's propaganda.
If you think there's no evidence, when it's everywhere including on social media, you're in denial or worse.
Well I mean it's CNN. It's been utter shit for years. The only thing you can say about it is it isn't as blatantly politically biased as Fox, but is absolutely corporatist.
Russian intelligence is operating a systematic program to launder pro-Kremlin propaganda through private relationships between Russian operatives and unwitting US and western targets, according to newly declassified US intelligence.
I'd hope the West is doing the same to get western propaganda out in Russia, China, Northern Africa, etc. Would be embarassing if this wasn't happening.