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Comment by anticodon | Hacker News Reader

> But I guess liberal governments are just too good to use the same weapons. It could be their downfall.

Western governments are spending billions on propaganda. There's so-called "Russian opposition" - a clique that receives millions from western funds such as NED (CIA proxy fund).

If you open YouTube from a freshly created Russian google account, the whole home page will be filled with videos from Radio Liberty, BBC News Russian, DW Russian, Khodorkovsky Live, and other channels. The theme of all these channels is the same: "You must surrender and bow to the great western overlords".

Even though my google account is ~15 years old, I still get such recommendations on my main YouTube page daily.

There was an interview with a former Russian lady that works for Google in London and her job is to pick such videos to push to Russian audience.

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> Western governments are spending billions on propaganda.

Perhaps, but my point is that the money could probably be spent more effectively: instead of funding high-brow videos on YouTube to preach to the choir (such longform videos are watched mostly by liberal intellectuals), just flood social networks with propaganda bots to convert the IQ-bottom of society that is increasingly addicted to social media; just like Russia is doing.

We have a saying here: "Russian propaganda is not making idiots from people. Russian propaganda is targeting the idiots." Perhaps western liberal propaganda should more effectively target the idiots, too.

If you'd be able to speak Russian, you'd already know that there's western propaganda for all levels of IQ. From highbrow to lowbrow in all the media you can find. And it's there for decades already.

Also, you can find in the Snowden's documents lots of evidence that there are entire departments in CIA and MI-6 working on this propaganda and ways to deliver it.

And it's quite effective, too. CIA managed to instigate many coups in the world using their propaganda approaches. Arab Spring, Ukraine coup in 2014. In Russia they had almost succeeded, there was (and partially is) large percent of population that believed propaganda despite that we already succumbed once in the recent history (in 1991) and results were absolutely catastrophic.

> And it's quite effective, too. CIA managed to instigate many coups in the world using their propaganda approaches. Arab Spring, Ukraine coup in 2014

Ah, I see you are one of the IQ bottoms that believes the Russian propaganda which is targeting the idiots... Sure, all those hundreds of thousands of people on Euromaidan were there because of some nebulous CIA manipulation, and not simply because they saw the much higher standard of living in the EU and wanted the same for themselves (which Yanukovich the traitor abruptly refused).

> In Russia they had almost succeeded, there was (and partially is) large percent of population that believed propaganda despite that we already succumbed once in the recent history (in 1991) and results were absolutely catastrophic.

Russia changed its whole economic system from Socialism to Capitalism. What did you expect, immediate improvements? Of course there will be a period of chaos. I am from Slovakia. It took my country almost 10 years to regain the previous standard of living after the same drastic change. But then we finished the needed reforms, joined the EU and witnessed massive economic growth. Now we are better than ever. In the end it was all worth it.

What was catastrophic for Russia is electing autocrats and warmongers. No country thrives as a dictatorship, and comparison of standard of living of our two countries shows that. Enjoy your burning refineries.

> Russia changed its whole economic system from Socialism to Capitalism.

No, it didn't. It tried to change from state capitalism (the system the Soviet Union had, not the ideology it presented) to private capitalism but ended up veering off into kleptocratic corporatism.

Could you provide a link to this interview? I am genuinely interested.

I suppose it's this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6tLCevZjHo

Can't open it now myself to confirm. Here Alfred Koch states that his daughter worked for Google in 2014 and her job was to pick so-called "opposition" media that would be pushed to users with Russian ip addresses or probably with Google account language set to Russian.

But actually you don't even have to listen to interview. If you're Russian you already know how aggressively this propaganda is shoveled down our throats on YouTube. You have to ban channels for months to minimize the amount of the recommended propaganda videos.

And you still get it because there're like millions of NED funded channels of all sorts in all languages. E.g. in the last three days YouTube aggressively pushes to my recommendations some video in English about how "Russian missiles are all hitting Ukrainian toilets instead of military targets" which is even from the title sounds like some nonsense propaganda for low IQ watchers.

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