Information Warfare Is Without Limits and So Are Its Consequences | Hacker News Reader

Information Warfare Is Without Limits and So Are Its Consequences

schmud.de

50 pointsgrzm9 comments

Today I have listened on LBC radio a program with an expert on Ukraine from Cambridge university. Stated goal was to educate listeners on Russia&Ukraine history.

I was unpleasantly surprised by amount of facts mending and innacuracies to draw very polarized picture. All important answers were either factually incorrect (like Putin didn't have problem with Baltic's joining NATO in 2004), very flexibly interpreted or missed very important context cherry picking facts.

It wasn't blatant propaganda, but they didn't even try to show complexity of the topic.

I think the most blatant example is the story of the island garrison, that supposedly held out until death after defying the russians with a cool one linerthat was circulating yesterday. It turns out it was most likely false, and there are tons of videos of the entire garrison safe and alive after surrendering to the russians. That story in particular really was so widely circulated and believed that it makes any news from the war hard to believe without double or triple verification.

It's really amazing how easily propaganda can be spread and circulated even in an age where we are supposedly more aware of disinfo/manipulation.

Individual events can be reported inaccurately, this is understandable.

The question is, though: what does propaganda look like when it's targeted to be effective against a population that has already been loudly warned about the dangers of propaganda? Because I think it would look a lot like that.

In most cases only very few have enough time and willingness to analyze news enough to spot non-hyper-evident propaganda, make links between news/depicted facts to form a personal view etc. Having created a fast and entertained and nervous/emotional society do the trick for most.

The secondary aspect is that human life do have a limited timespan, actual rulers know a day they'll die as anyone else, so their target is not master the masses at infinitum but train "new people", some "the masses", will be trained, are already trained, to be like Chinese commoners, Ford-mode stereotypical workers, or ancient Greek "useful idiots" (not an insult, there is really a such concept in classic Greeks, ῐ̓δῐώτης to be more precise), or in practical terms obeisant workers that do whatever they are told to do with the best effort, they talk about whatever they are told to etc. Take a look at comments under most news websites: on usenet users decide topics, now with limited and contained exceptions like HN or Reddit on most platform people talk following a plot. Take a look ad Japanese/Asian TV show with the small rectangle to suggest the listener how to react to what it listen etc.

Very few will be pushed to think about propaganda and ultimately embrace it, since seeing it's effects is hardly imaginable/utopia a really free society where no one try to betray others.

Those cohorts will be the "new man" built by the actual rulers, new élites, new "middle class", ... shaped as they imaging the society.

Kind of strange to feature an interview with a USSR defector in 1984 talking about how the baby boomer generation had been brainwashed into marxist-leninism by soviet propaganda and were about to plunge the US into authoratarian communism, and then be shot by the new soviet rulers.

I'm relatively sure that didn't happen.

Only focused on Russian information warfare. Doesn't look at US and European information warfare. This article is onesided.

But it's directly related to current events that are of intense interest to the rest of the world.

Just because it's not comparing the actions to each and every other country doing similar things does mean it's content or tone is incorrect.

Western information war is also related to current events. For example NYT claiming there was no evidence of Ukrainian shelling Donbas when the OSCE reports showed that over 80 percent of shells landed in DPR/LNR even during the escalation. People just off handedly said it was a Russian false flag despite evidence to the contrary.

Current events are complex and tue information war has obfuscated it.

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