Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/08/24/online-russian-trolls-hyped-va.html
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Internet trolling and political corruption. Two infectious diseases we really could use vaccines for.
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As clumsy as the I.R.A. has been in the execution of its astroturf disinformation campaigns, it’s been very good at identifying and exploiting divisive issues. As with Nigerian 419 scammers they knew how to use anti-vaxx nonsense to identify the born suckers on both the right and the left.
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The more I read about these Russian politburo trollfarms the more I’m convinced that they’re run by Robert Anton Wilson. I mean they’re not even targeting political issues now, they’re just spreading surreality and chaos.
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The more conspiracy theories someone believes, the more it destroys their critical functions.
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I think it’s a lot simpler than damaging critical reasoning by making people believe crap, I figure it’s just if you can disable herd immunity in the western countries or cause the resurgence of shit like polio then the economies of those countries will be damaged dealing with the health issues.
In a zero-sum view of world politics the country that does not fall for anti-vax is stronger, and is thus the winner.
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Hmm, I think this qualifies as a bioweapon.
I think that by now, the evidence is in: Large national powers hurt more than they help.
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Fnord.
Superman was here.
-the mgmt.
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The more stories like this I read, the more I wish for a simple way to reverse this trend among the sheeple. They keep setting up the rest of us to be slaughtered, too.
If only there were vaccines against stupidity.
Yes, I know there actually is one. It’s called education. But looking at the world around me, something you could just spray from vehicles like they did with DDT in the 1950ies would be handy.
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You’re right.
Russian griefers pushing antivax propaganda certainly are a problem, and it’s good to let people know about them, but there’s no way their influence is in the same league as that of Islamists or Scientologists.
I see no solutions other than education or massive censorship.
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I wonder how much of the CIA’s budget is spent on evil shit that are countermeasures for previously executed evil shit that were countermeasures for other evil shit the agency did as a countermeasure for…
Probably not that much.
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In close elections, you don’t need all that much in order to swing things your way.
This is why I listen to folk who understand these things.
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“We’re #1!” Except in campaigns such as this, where the Russian intelligence is better at it than the US is. This is about social disruption, discord, disinformation. Putin is better off when the US is weaker than it used to be.
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Yeah, but the lollipop comes a close second.
Or third, if you bring your own Wonder Woman bandaids too (and share them with the kids getting their shots at the same time. 'cause sharing bandaids is not at all like sharing needles)
That is the whole point of the exercise. They want us too busy arguing with each other to have an organized, united response to whatever horrors their government is perpetrating globally.
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It’s subversion! Yuri Bezmenov was right all along!
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You should read Mitrokhin archive to get a sense how the KGB outplayed the US intelligence agencies for many decades. It’s pretty wild how complete their dominance was for example around WW2. Even while Stalinist purges were decimating their agents.
Of course they had then the advantage of an alternative ideology that supported the recruitment of agents, current Russia doesn’t have that advantage.
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I can’t quite believe how much people in US believe in Russian psyops conspiracy stories. How are people so sure the Russian scare isn’t a corporation man in a wolf costume frightening people back to the US agency shepherds they’ve rightly lost faith in after discovering we live under totalitarian levels of surveillance and propaganda? To disbelieve Russian PR messages, must one necessarily believe US PR?
“Universal literacy was supposed to educate the common man to control his environment. Once he could read and write he would have a mind fit to rule. So ran the democratic doctrine. But instead of a mind, universal literacy has given him rubber stamps, rubber stamps inked with advertising slogans, with editorials, with published scientific data, with the trivialities of the tabloids and the platitudes of history, but quite innocent of original thought. Each man’s rubber stamps are the duplicates of millions of others, so that when those millions are exposed to the same stimuli, all receive identical imprints. It may seem an exaggeration to say that the American public gets most of its ideas in this wholesale fashion. The mechanism by which ideas are disseminated on a large scale is propaganda, in the broad sense of an organized effort to spread a particular belief or doctrine.”
― Edward L. Bernays, the father of propaganda (rebranded as PR), 1928
Source: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/275170.Edward_L_Bernays
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