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Comment by Ididntdothis | Hacker News Reader

I thought that’s Putin’s playbook. Since you can’t control the situation anyway, just push out a lot of disinformation so nobody believes anything anymore. You could argue that the current US president plays the same game by shouting “fake news” all the time.

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But isn't the whole "Russian disinformation" thing in turn a way of discrediting information? Orwell was writing about this 80 years ago, it's never seemed more relevant.

That is how disinformation can be protected from exposure. If you fill the channels with enough disinformation, then even true information exposing disinformation is treated as disinformation. It’s very corrosive of society.

But it's also how perfectly valid discussions can be completely shut down - certainly very corrosive.

>whole "Russian disinformation"

That depends on how you define "whole." There must be examples of people either unknowingly and wrongly invoking "Russian disinformation" or intentionally invoking it for whatever purposes but there is definitely actual "Russian disinformation" occurring. Disinformation from all sorts of sources. It's imperative to be discerning now, and to be discerning about how to be discerning.

Very valid point.

The suggestion is that Vladislav Surkov [1] is behind this playbook.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladislav_Surkov

Interesting guy. It just shows that we shouldn’t correlate high intelligence and talent with virtue.

It's funny considering "fake news" was invented by liberals in the US to shut down conservative media.

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