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Comment by thsksbd | Hacker News Reader

" "fake news" typically amounts to false rumors, amplifying unprovable/unsubstantiated claims. "

Like the Steele dossier or the rumor of a pee-pee tape [1].

Look, Id love to silence Rachel Maddow as much as the next guy, but there is no objective function to reliably do that without also silencing inconvenient truths (Mai Lei massacre, fake WMD, Biden's corruption, etc).

[1] That's when I knew power was out to get Trump by any means. Journos seriously reporting that a hotelier is unaware that top hotels are riddled with bugs? Bullshit.

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Or, if you want better examples, how about the massively promoted "2000 mules" movie?

It was literally all lies, just proven in court, and the producer just apologized to one of the subjects for those lies and pulled it from distribution.

When one of the primary architects of right-wing strategy advocates a key tactic of "flooding the zone with bullshit", that side has no complaint. Particularly when that tactic is derived specifically from Russian dezinformatsiya techniques, where the goal is not to get people to believe the lies (the few who do are a bonus), but to exhaust reason and get people to give up and say "we can't tell what is true". At that point, they are most manipulable.

[0] https://www.npr.org/2024/05/31/g-s1-2298/publisher-of-2000-m...

[1] https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/31/media/salem-will-stop-distrib...

>Particularly when that tactic is derived specifically from Russian dezinformatsiya techniques

I think it is incorrect to call such tactics "Russian dezinformatsiya techniques". It's rather "leftist techniques". Putin just uses it because he was a member of communist party and KGB and was taught it this way.

Nonsense. First, "Russian dezinformatsiya techniques" is more specific, and specifically related to the current events. Second, no one owns them, they're not copyrighted or anything. Third, "leftist" is far more vague. Fourth, Russia has used these techniques for centuries; so if you must go with some kind of large group, if anything it'd be 'Royalist Techniques', predating the Russian revolution.

My list were the lies that the news agencies we are supposed to trust peddled. My examples were lies peddled by the respectable likes of the BBC, The Economist and NPR.

So, unless you want "The Epoch Times" to be included with the truth censors, your donkey movie is not at all like my examples.

Btw, these lies I listed cost millions of lives in the third world. But Im old fashioned like that. I still think Black/Brown lives matter.

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