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Comment by DarkByte8 | Hacker News Reader

What other options are there to fight enemy propaganda?

Foreign propaganda should be exposed, documented, and contextualized instead of given more power by banning and removing it.

https://scottberkun.com/2013/banning-things-makes-them-power...

That sounds like the “something must be done, this is something, so this must be done” argument. Seems to be the most common argument pattern for censorship of all kinds - doesn’t matter if the course of action is ineffective or possibly harmful in the medium term.

It boils down to “if we can’t think of any good solutions to a difficult problem, then we should try bad solutions even if they’re counterproductive”.

Sometimes you need to act in the present. Russia is bombing civilians and is pumping propaganda into nations that help Ukraine trying to convince those nations to not support Ukraine. I don't see how stopping that propaganda is counterproductive. Once the war is over with Russia losing it and Putin out then we stop with the censorship and go back to counter the propaganda using education, information, etc.

The best way to fight enemy propaganda is not letting it get to the point of becoming enemies, defusing it long before the information war. The slow institutional degradation in Russia was nobody's concern - "meh, it's Russians; not my business" - until it suddenly was. To not become enemies, you have to listen and allow the other party change you. Then you can attempt to bring your point and change them.

When the communication becomes "enemy propaganda", you are forced to raise a wall which looks suspiciously like what your "enemy" does and wants from you as well. Mutual coexistence is impossible without two-way communication, and that means they will also going to influence you, whether you want it or not, even if you raise a wall. Communication here not necessarily being words but actions.

Turns out it was your business as well, after all. Think about it today because it might be too late tomorrow.

Truth and transparency?

Have better propaganda of your own? Both the delivery mechanism and the payload.

My choice: drop the strategy of keeping the population dumb and unable to realize it so they are easy to manipulate.

This. We were taught in school to recognize and analyze propaganda, advertising, and PR. I'm not immune but sometimes it almost seems like it when I talk to other people.

Who is we? YMMV, but any sort of emphasis on critical thinking wasn't my experience in an Arizona school district in the late eighties/early nineties. If such curriculum was available, the kids who took it were likely outliers in having influences to push them in that direction.

Yeah, I was homeschooled. It sounds to me like public schools actively discourage this kind of thing.

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