The Kremlin is turning to unwitting Americans and commercial public relations firms in Russia to spread disinformation about the U.S. presidential race, top intelligence officials said Monday, detailing the latest efforts by America’s adversaries to shape public opinion ahead of the 2024 election.
The warning comes after a tumultuous few weeks in U.S. politics that have forced Russia, Iran and China to revise some of the details of their propaganda playbook. What hasn’t changed, intelligence officials said, is the determination of these nations to seed the internet with false and incendiary claims about American democracy to undermine faith in the election.
“The American public should know that content that they read online — especially on social media — could be foreign propaganda, even if it appears to be coming from fellow Americans or originating in the United States,” said an official from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence who briefed reporters on condition of anonymity under rules set by the office of the director.
Russia continues to pose the greatest threat when it comes to election disinformation, authorities said, while there are indications that Iran is expanding its efforts and China is proceeding cautiously when it comes to 2024.
“The American public should know that content that they read online — especially on social media — could be foreign propaganda, even if it appears to be coming from fellow Americans or originating in the United States,” said an official from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence who briefed reporters on condition of anonymity under rules set by the office of the director.
I wish they’d give some specific examples. It would be nice to know specifically what to look for.
Here’s a little exchange I saw recently on Lemmy:
A: Perhaps she should reconsider that allegiance with israel. It’s not very popular with voters.
A: Of course Kamala taking $5.000.000 from AIPAC might be related to her allegiance.
B: I knew you weren’t from the US. Where are you from?
A: What?
C: It’s because you used periods instead of commas in your total of aipac money. That’s not proper American syntax and shows you’re from somewhere else.
A: I don’t recall my calculators coming with commas. Where are you from?
D: Nobody said anything about calculators, you don’t seem to understand the question. The comments about using commas in numbers in the U.S. are 100% correct.
D: You have a keen interest in posting all day about politics in a country you arent from. Can never answer a question about your own background.
D: Incessantly talk shit about Israeli policy from an anti Democratic perspective without a whif of criticism of the Republicans, who would be far worse in their full throated approval of Israeli warcrimes. What is your native language? Are you able to vote in the USA?
A: Interesting statement that proves you have not done any research. I’ll not bother with your other baseless allegations either.
I usually look at the English usage, personally. Certain sorts of grammatical and syntactical errors are really common in native speakers, others, not so much. You can kinda just feel when a particular wording isn’t very American, especially if you read it out loud to yourself. While a whole bunch of ESL types are on here and that’s fine, when you encounter one with really, really strong opinions on American politics, that’s a little weird.
For me it’s usually the irrationality of the arguments. Like they don’t even really believe what they’re saying, they’re just kind of writing these disagreeable nonsense-messages and then moving on. It’s hard to explain but the stuff about calculators is a perfect example. Real humans don’t say stuff like that, and even organic trolls will usually invest some effort into their discourse. The lazy and illogical shit-commenting seems to be frequently a sign of someone who’s doing political propaganda. They genuinely just don’t even seem to give a shit if you believe them or not.
More than once I’ve had someone make some kind of leap of moon logic like that, when we’re not even talking about US politics, and clicked on their user to see what the heck their deal even is and found a bunch of “why not to vote for the Democrats” stuff and ohhhhh it all makes sense now, got it.
I went back and forth with someone that was totally a democratic but every single post was anti Biden. I asked them to literally say anything bad about, and they wouldn’t make a single statement. I said to just write a fact, like that he’s a felon, but that was too much. Maybe this person was just really stubborn, but I find it hard to believe that anyone that’s against Trump wouldn’t put in the minimal effort to show that they do in fact not like him. Most people I think have seen that user around if you spend any time in politics, but I haven’t since then so that’s nice I guess.
Another fun exercise is ask them what they think of NATO.
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I dunno I started blocking those - supposed people - after the first wave of “gEnOSiDe jOe”.
TBH I only blocked about 10 users and that’s pretty much solved it.
We’ve had our rounds too. I’m not sure which it was, but there were a good 3-5 accounts that I’d see a lot, and if I had the energy, would call out.
Removed, civility.
One of the things I like about lemmy (or at least, the communities I sub to) is that the userbase seems quite on the ball with noticing and calling out bad faith bullshit like that. It’s WAY better than Reddit was (as of a year ago - haven’t frequented it since then).
the userbase seems quite on the ball with noticing and calling out bad faith bullshit like that
I often see people fixating on efforts to call out ‘bad faith’ as, itself, a form of bad faith discussion. The goal is always to accuse someone with a different view of having an agenda or perhaps even being a paid shill or automated response engine working for an insidious outside agency.
You’re either all uniformly in agreement on a topic, or you’re an insidious demon here to trick people into perdition.
If someone is literally arguing in bad faith, what’s the point in engaging with them? There’s no way to persuade someone who doesn’t actually care about what they’re saying in the first place.
If someone is literally arguing in bad faith, what’s the point in engaging with them?
You’re not arguing strictly for them, you’re arguing for the audience of readers in the comments.
I suppose that’s fair, but if you e.g. make a compelling counterpoint and the other person fixates on one small detail to derail the conversation, I think the people you can realistically reach will already be on your side, and anyone who wants to draw some kind of false equivalence between your respective positions wasn’t going to be convinced anyways.
It’s more nuanced than that of course, but in my experience that’s generally the way these things play out as the thread gets longer.
It’s more nuanced than that of course
That’s where the more interesting conversations (even the cynical ones) ultimately live.
“Okay, but I think we can all agree that the sun rises in the east”
“Interest… you use the word ‘okay’ rather than ‘ok’. Only an insidious Russian computer program would spell it like that. I think I can dismiss everything you’ve said up until this point.”
So I’m actually not sure of your intention but native English speakers will spell it okay or ok basically on personal preference with the elderly probably spelling it O.K.
“interest…” stands out more to me as foreign, a native English speaker would say “interesting…”
I sometimes use apostrophes as my separators to keep things unambiguous. If the person were who they said they were, they would be able to explain their strange habit.
Yeah. That’s the much more damning piece to me - like if they said “Oh I’m from Brazil but I moved to the US as a kid” or “Yeah I’m not from the US but X Y Z”, you know, some kind of human reaction, then fine. I might still have suspicion but at least it is sensible.
The thing of “my calculators” “baseless allegations” is like okay now it’s confirmed they are clearly full of shit.
I worry that telling them the problem and how to fix it will make them better in the future. It’s like not using enough antibiotics.
Yeah, I did think about that. IDK; I decided that I thought the value of illustrating a strong argument to everyone else that there are shills here and it’s a problem, is more important than the danger that the shills will fix up one specific tell that’s arguably giving away their operation.
I mean, I don’t think that it is like a high intensity FSB intelligence operation or anything, such that they’re even going to put a high priority on blending in perfectly. I think it’s like 1-2 underpaid guys in cubicles somewhere in Virginia / somewhere else in the world / whereever, just shitposting away at high volume.
FSB intelligence operation or
1-2 underpaid guys in cubicles
Why not both?
I know an operator who I’ve had boxed up like this for years. He’s my canary in the coal mine for that community; when he’s gone it’ll be a sign, hopefully of something good.
It’s not the same campaign, but the fbi report on
20202016 election interference was full of screenshots and timestamped messagesIf you see anything on social media, assume it’s a lie and look it up elsewhere.
Absent any common media literacy education, that’s not a bad default.
I wish they’d give some specific examples.
Can’t give a specific example because it’s either going to illicit a “That’s too crazy for anyone to seriously believe” dismissive response, a “That’s absolutely true and you’re the one who is feeding from the propaganda trough!” reactionary response, or a “Okay sure that’s bullshit but everyone knows those guys are far-left/far-right, I would simply block and move on” in-group response.
That’s functionally why these propaganda gambits work. They’re heavily targeted towards people’s biases, thanks to extensive A/B testing of the social media audience. They’ll either appear as total gibberish, hard partisan coded, or perfectly believable depending on who is reading it.
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If anything is creating a huge amount of controversy and “outrage”, it’s probably either entirely invented by them, or the very least significantly amplified by them. Take a memory trip to 2 decades ago and think about what we’re passionately arguing about today that just weren’t an issue back then. Those kinds of things.
Depressingly enough, they seem to have their tentacles on both the far left (due to historical reasons) and far right (due to being politically pretty much identical these days). This is also where a lot of hate towards centrists, liberalists and moderates comes from, as those camps don’t have historical or political links to them, making those groups somewhat less easy for them to manipulate.
As a recent example, see the “Both sides!” post in Political [email protected]
If you’re on here you are already cognizant enough to see the russian trolls. I think it’s more the FB circles that prey on older less tech savvy folks
If you think you’re immune to propaganda, you’re a prime target.
No one is immune to anything
In general though fediverse users are pretty tech savvy. We can identify phishing emails, and have all grown up exposed to internet trolls
Propaganda is everywhere. See if you can spot the lie in this headline. JD Vance on Wednesday January, 13th 2011, made sweet love to a couch… Answer: January, 13th 2011 was a Tuesday.
Hioooooooo
We have a problem with those unwitting Americans who lack critical thinking skills. The weird right wants to cultivate the poorly educated though.
We have a problem with those unwitting Americans who lack critical thinking skills.
We have people with accumulated priors who were trained to reflexively respond to certain stimuli after decades of social programming.
You can’t “critical thinking” your way past a phobia or a fixation. That’s not how the human mind works. And Americans have had these neuroses embedded in their psyches for generations, thanks to a systematic effort by corporate interests to divide and conquer the domestic labor force.
The weird right wants to cultivate the poorly educated though.
The weird right is cracking up. It no longer has a firm liberal basis for reactionary beliefs or a large evangelical base with a uniform understanding of religious obligations and taboos. What education they’re doing is fractured, confused, and contradictory. And a big part of that fracturing is coming from their dissolution of public education, public media, and post-educational institutions.
40 years ago, people talked about the Food Pyramid and the D.A.R.E. program like they were gospels. You didn’t need to hang the 10 Commandments in everyone’s classrooms, because we already knew them all by heart. Now you can’t convince half the country to get a flu shot, because the paranoia and conspiracy has gotten so out of hand. Everyone’s a weird fringe branch of a Protestant off-shot of a rapidly deteriorating central church. No “common core” seems to exist anymore. Education is just taking a thousand confusingly written word problem exams while we find new ways to replace teachers with teleprompters.
The falcon cannot hear the falconer. The center cannot hold. Slouching towards Bethlehem, etc. Either Americans find a way back to their Reagan-Era Traditional nationalist identity, they find a new center to rally around, or this thing we call a United States is going to crack like an egg.
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I’ve got 10 or so tagged. And not even talking ML accounts. They got quiet for a couple days after Biden stepped down. Are now running with “why aren’t the Dems having 2nd primary” because they haven’t figured out a better vector yet.
Removed, civility.
The downvotes in here prove that this is real.
The trolls do too. But for some silly reason comments calling them out get removed while their posts stay up.
I’m certainly not always PC or as nice as I should be, but I did get one of my comments removed for calling someone a Negative Nancy, which is against one of the politics rules, I think for name calling. Another one was removed for calling someone a Russian. It’s a little heavy handed and it makes calling out trolls and people spreading misinformation, but I do what I can.
The intolerance paradox will turn Lemmy sour just like it did reddit.
had nearly every one of my reddit accounts banned in 2016 for calling out shills, and I’ve received warnings here already for reporting obvious forum sliders.
We desperately need improved lines of communication between the state and the public regarding foreign disinformation. Like, a free newspaper that comes out every Monday with confirmed examples of foreign propaganda from the previous week. And official social media accounts that give up-to-date information. Surely it’s in the public interest to establish offices that rapidly assemble and distribute this kind of information. Finding out, ‘oh hey, that protest way back in 2022 was organized as part of a foreign interference campaign’, it’s just too late. This sort of information needs to be centralized, summarized, and rapidly disseminated.
It’s not enough for the state to simply say ‘be cautious’. Citizens need to know what to be cautious of. A general message that you shouldn’t trust anything you see on social media, that’s actually a benefit to the propagandists creating chaos in information spaces.
I just don’t see how the problem of disinformation gets addressed without intelligence agencies getting more modern and engaged in their approach to communication with the public.
I recently set up [email protected] for this exact reason. I’ll be happy to cross post in this community if the mods think it’s a good fit
Well done. I just discovered the Media Bias Fact Check - so, thank you for that!
Keep doing what you’re doing. Assembling this information and making it easy to access is critically important.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Engagement_Center
In 2017, some members of Congress, including Republican Rob Portman and Democrat Chris Murphy, co-sponsors of the FY2017 NDAA, criticized the lack of funding for GEC.
Portman and others suggested that the agency had turned a corner in 2019 when it hired Lea Gabrielle, a former Navy pilot and intelligence officer who worked for Fox News, as head of the organization. As of May 2020, GEC had a staff of only 120.
In April 2020, the inspector general for the State Department concluded that the GEC lacked safeguards to ensure that independent organizations it was working with were acting appropriately, such as when it funded a project called “Iran Disinfo” which aggressively targeted groups including the National Iranian American Council.
Critics of the Trump administration also cited Trump’s “lack of credibility on misinformation” as an impediment to advancing the agency’s efforts to combat fake news.
GEC looks like a legit project, and I like how their news releases are multilingual. Thank you for sharing that.
I note that the US Foreign Malign Influence Center is also at work in this space, and authored the alert yesterday that I think is motivating this particular news item.
I think funding these governmental agencies, incentivizing inter-agency communication, and modernizing & centralizing the communication of their findings is something America needs badly, as well as the country I live in.
It’s a bit crazy that the only way to look at & share the FMIC alert is via a direct link to a pdf. In order to find it, you have to already know what you’re looking for. Give 20 millennials a job with a mandate to find a way to organize and disseminate this information, and things would be so much better. Right now, a person has to be a sleuth to put these pieces together, and that’s not right.
Anyway, I’m not taking issue with what you posted, I’m just soapboxing. An effective response to the issue of foreign disinformation campaigns seems relatively straightforward to me. The only thing missing is the political will.
Excellent suggestion!
‘Americans are the most heavily propagandized folks in the world’ - a phrase I’ve seen bandied about recently that seems more true the more i look. I think at this point in history, Americans (and all others) should suspect that all (privately owned by the capitalist class) media they consume is trying to manipulate their opinion somehow.
Surely no one will argue FOX isn’t propaganda right? so we know it exists and is allowed (even celebrated by politicians!) on American soil.
I don’t think it’s too big a jump to suspect other billionaires wouldn’t want to own the narrative and shape people’s perception.
So if you open that website or turn on the TV news and you ain’t going in expecting to have some fast talking salesman sell you a lemon, if you’re not prepared, youre gonna get fleeced
And that’s why you should trust social media and youtube videos over established, reputable news sources.
I mean its a good soundbite but it isn’t true. Russia and China’s citizens swim in an ocean of it every day, we just wade up to our necks in it.
I also wish there was a system to differentiate between shilling for Russia/Trump and honestly shitting on the Dems… Like, it’s OKAY to point out the horrible and hypocritical shit the Dems have done and continue to do and support, and to demand better… That’s how we push them left… It’s ridiculous when people are clearly giving honest critique of a pretty corrupt party (albeit less horrible than the other party) and get shit on for it. I think there are definitely obvious DemBots on here as well who’s only job seems to be to shout down any and all criticism of the Dem Party…
That being said, there are also obvious “Russians” pushing nonsense and THOSE definitely deserve to be called out and shit on
what a great way to undermine your own citizens that disagree with your politics.
claim that they are useful idiots.
Gosh, you don’t say.
Call em what they are idiots, useful idiots
