As someone who lives in the EU and has the same kind of relatives, what I find frustrating is how little actual engagement with the Russian narratives there is from official sides. There is presented "evidence" for US influence in Ukraine long before the war, like the Victoria Nuland video, yet there seems to be no attempts at debunking those arguments, short of a catch-all labeling of all of it as disinformation (which, I can testify from personal experience, does absolutely nothing to dissuade people who already believe it).
The Selinskyji/Trump spat felt like an extreme version of this, where Selinskyji essentially argued with the Western/Ukrainian narrative of the war and Trump argued with the Russian narrative.
The strategy of "ignore the Russian narrative and hope not many people will latch on to it" evidently failed, so I think if we want to have a hope of solving this conflict and countering Trump (and maybe get back the parts of the population that follow the narrative), we at least have to engage with it and provide counterarguments.
Is it not just that media is more fragmented and we've underfunded the fact providing media since?
I'd assume that by the time a disclaimer is written up, submitted, and accepted according to whatever the criteria is, the original un-disclaimered message has been received and digested by its target audience.
1. Viral tweets have a longer-than-average time window between the time they start to go viral and the time the median viewer sees them, so a community note can get there before the median viewer. 2. Users who interacted with a tweet before it got a community note will get a notification when the community note is added. 3. Community note writers can leave a note on a piece of media. If a tweet with a video gets a community note, and that note is about the video rather than about the tweet, that note will show on all other tweets that show that video.
Source: this excellent interview with the Community Notes team (https://asteriskmag.com/issues/08/the-making-of-community-no...), in the section that starts with "Asterisk: Another thing I wanted to talk about is speed". Really that whole interview is great, highlights how deliberate and thoughtful the Community Notes team was regarding everything about the feature. Which is, I think, why community notes have succeeded where a lot of previous fact-checking attempts have failed.
https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2025/2/21/musk-vows-to-fix...
“Never argue with an idiot. They will drag you down to their level and beat you with experience.”
I swear to god, there is no talking with these people. It's like any argument you make slides right off their reality distortion field.
Which is to say Ukrainian narrative is hard to embrace unless someone is already energized by a need for justice to nations, which might not be certain segment of America.
This is something that is unique to the administration and those who deeply agree with what it’s done.
Not that it matters… clearly people don’t care enough to vote for it. My heart goes out to the people of Ukraine.
0: https://thehill.com/policy/international/5153611-quinnipiac-...
I see plenty of people in social media (enough to be convinced that they aren't all bots) who appear to believe that continuing to support Ukraine with aid would bankrupt the US, would be equivalent in effect to fighting Iraq or Vietnam again, would lead to WW III, and so on and so forth. The conspiracy theories about Ukraine's leadership are elaborate as well. I imagine almost all these people would tell you they don't like Putin.
Out of that 81%, how many believe in appeasing Putin to "Avoid world war III" despite their animus? Too many, IMO, and Putin doesn't care for how the American populace feel about him personally, as long as he can achieve his foreign policy goals without hindrance from American bombs, intelligence or funding, which has become the status quo as of yesterday.
Yes, in Russia it happened largely in the same way, and it started much earlier than in 2011 (in 2012 we already had literal Putin cultists marching down the streets). Some people blamed an external enemy for their troubles (both troubles and the enemy were usually imaginary, with the enemy usually being the US), others who rejected the idea blamed the other half and generally had their heads in the sand, but neither wanted to admit their issues or do anything substantial, leaving the Kremlin do what they wanted to do.