this post was submitted on 08 Jun 2024
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You don't have to be a professional to parrot Russian propaganda. How it works is they find a sympathetic ear, and then spoon feed this garbage content with them with the knowledge that someone will post it. Sometimes the content is targeted, other times it's just pushed through these low quality / fake news sites and then gets picked up on social media and spreads. Sometimes the content starts out neutral-ish, then they build up this pro-Russian slant over time, slowly mixing in all this nonsense. No propaganda feed (for any nation) is 100% propaganda - it's going to be 20% real news, 20% opinion, 20% opinions parroting Russian state media, etc. etc. It's similar to the magic mix Facebook gives you in your feed.
Beyond the main issue that this thinly-veiled propaganda community is going to attract the wrong audience and expose the existing/future audience here to utter bullshit, I take specific issue that the end goal is to undermine the security of our fucking country. Russia has been fighting a cyber and information war against us for over a decade and we can't just look away and pretend it's harmless. Between allowing state sanctioned cybercriminals to flourish and attack our hospitals with ransomware, to trying to undermine democracy across the globe, we need to step up our game and put our foot down against this shit because it's going to get a lot worse, and the sooner we nip it in the bud, the better.
And I remember when Reddit, Facebook, and Twitter turned a blind eye to blatant astroturfing and widespread manipulation from around 2015-2020, pretending their sites weren't overrun with inauthentic behaviour. The lesson from that is that you need to take disinformation and coordinated manipulation seriously if you want to have a viable community on the internet. Lemmy.ca has to get in front of this stuff. (who am I kidding - Reddit and Twitter are still at least 50% bots.)
If everyone on Lemmy thought in such broad, sensationalist strokes and/or identified as a passive consumer of information, then maybe gatekeeping acceptable and unacceptable ideas above and beyond hate speech might make sense (as it might on FB and other mainstream social media platform).
Personally, I don't need information to be censored to help me identify truth. I take great pride and responsibility in my critical thinking skills. If the range of ideas acceptable to post on Lemmy were restricted to those acceptable to our mainstream media, this would cease being an intellectually engaging platform.
I really hope we don't need to put up the same kind of cognitive bumpers on here as on other platforms because our userbase lacks critical thinking skills. But the more users who abdicate responsibility for critical thinking, the more we'll be pushed in that direction
Can you clarify what you perceive as sensationalist about what I wrote? Based on the number of upvotes this thread has, I'm not the only one that thinks this way. (My tax dollars are currently going to fighting cybercrime sponsored by Russia, fighting Russian disinformation campaigns, and providing materiel to fight the Russian military.)
Me too, but as I mentioned in another thread, the issue is that not everybody is gifted with those same critical thinking skills, and the impact on those less equipped can be catastrophic. (see: pizzagate shooting)
I do think we disagree on this here - For me, mainstream media is primarily good journalism where information is fact-checked and vetted. (Don't forget there's libel laws that keep journalists in check too in most countries.) Opinions and editorials represent the views of the writers or newspaper. Every organization has a slant in what they choose to cover and find newsworthy, you just need to be aware of it. With this in mind, I don't see mainstream media as a bad thing at all or something that needs to be rebelled against. It serves a different purpose from Lemmy.
Where I see Lemmy being useful and interesting is as a news aggregator with insightful discourse in the comments that's not dominated by inauthentic behaviour. Reddit is completely flooded and driven by marketers and bots, where the content and discourse quality have become low and repetitive, which seems to be the end state of 2000-2010 era social media platform.