It also took one person to start the whole couch fucking thing.
That one was more fun
And a lot fewer people have threatened to bomb schools and hospitals because of it.
And no one ever took it seriously
I’m not so sure about that…have you seen some of the people on the internet.
But it reeeaaally pissed someone off and that’s what matters
Yes, all they had to do was laugh a bit and ignore it, but they just couldnt
In both cases, it wasn’t the original message that kicked off the firestorm, it was a deliberate strategy put forward by billion-dollar presidential campaigns.
Nobody knew about the “eating my neighbor’s cat” post even after the debate. It took weeks to track down what Laura Loomer had whispered into Trump’s ear. Nobody considered the “Hillbilly Elegy had a chapter where Vance fucks a couch” tweet important until celebrities and politicians began retweeting it as a means of disgracing a weird conservative sex pest.
If there’s a rumor started by a smear campaign run out of an office in Moscow (and they’re even halfway competent in their execution) you’re likely only going to hear about it once it becomes the focus of some rhetorical exchange-of-fire on a top tier domestic social media celebrity or in a Senatorial debate. Even then, you won’t get to hear where it originated from until the polls have long since closed, in much the same way nobody got the details on the Comey indictment of Hilary or the Georgia election-steal attempt by Trump until it was too late.
It isn’t “one person” starting a rumor. Its an industry that feeds on rumors and is constantly regurgitating them to get your attention.
even after the debate. It took weeks to track down…
It hasn’t been a full week since the debate.
Damn. It feels like its been ages. My mistake.
I too am tired of living in Interesting Times.
imagine what an ex-KGB agent with unlimited resources can do.
Oh, there’s no need to imagine: I’m on the internet right now. I’m probably staring at this kind of state-actor bullshit on a daily basis without even knowing it.
Sometimes it’s easier to recognise than other times.
Fifty-fifty.
But my history has at least one.
Like amplify the false rumor a random Facebook mom in Ohio started?
You’re pointing at a thing our own politicians and billionaires are currently doing and going “What if Russia did it too”.
Understanding that the media amplifies particular stories to promote a perspective that is in their interest and against your own doesn’t require the addition of a foreign power, that just muddies the issue.
Why not both.jpg
In September 2017, Facebook told congressional investigators it had discovered that hundreds of fake accounts linked to a Russian troll farm had bought $100,000 in advertisements targeting the 2016 U.S.
That year, CNN, Fox, and others spent billions influencing Americans.
Why do you think there is only one Russian troll farm?
That is only what got caught.
Not like Russia is going to release numbers. At least in America, companies are forced to publicise those them.
Those politicians and billionaires who have very, shall we say, friendly thoughts about Russia?
Now, why do you think that is?
Because peace is more popular than war. I assure you the western capitalist class haven’t been outbid by the Russians, although the distinction between western international bourgeoisie and Russian national bourgeoisie is complex.
TBH, I don’t think it’s that complex. They’re all obsessed with accumulating wealth and power over others. The main differences are where they are from and how direct they are able to be in their pursuits under the constraints of their societies. Modern Western bourgeoise appear to envy those in Russia who seem to be able to take actions without needing PR. In the West, the working class aren’t accustomed to people “falling” out of windows and, occasionally, the Western bourgeoise sacrifice one of their own to maintain the illusion that laws apply to them (frequently with minimal actual consequences for the sacrificee).
You’re not really addressing what they said, thouoh. A Wikipedia article doesn’t make their statement incorrect.
“What if Russia did it too”.
They did.
Did you read the rest of the comment?
Russia buying some facebook ads is utterly inconsequential next to the rest of FB, Fox, CNN, Reddit, and every other propaganda outlet directed at us by the capitalist class.
It’s funny. Putin has a personal fortune of over $200 billion and yet somehow he isn’t part of the ‘capitalist class.’
Of course he is, but telling people to focus on one tiny segment of the capitalist class instead of understanding the actual system is fascism 101.
Instead of showing people how the system works and that the whole thing is against their interest, you just tell them it’s one particular group doing it wrong.
Also the issue isn’t “anyone over X dollars”, capitalist refers to the relationship with the means of production. Putin is part of the capitalist class because Russia is a capitalist state and Putin is literally the representative of the national bourgeoisie of Russia.
People are hardly ignoring the role of American-owned media in far-right extremism, it’s just that this particular meme references Putin.
This is something that a Russian Facebook ad-buyer would say.
Don’t know why you’re getting down voted. Bots and media manipulation are a thing, Russia and many governments are almost certainly doing it on different scales. But you make a good point that our own governments are doing it do, and even before social media stories were prompted or hushed up for reasons other than newsworthiness or public interest. That’s not a conspiracy theory, that’s basic media history of the last century.
Oh man group think is really bad on Lemmy. If you are being downvoted you must have deserved it and the downvotea keep coming and upvoted means right and so upvoted. It’s all initial inertia.
Echo chambers work really fast here I have found.
The tone is all wrong.
Yeah, I kinda suck at rhetoric. What’s a better way to present to people that the media pointing at foreigners exercising .001% of the malign influence they do serves to distract from the 99.99% of influence they exert? CNN wasn’t presenting wall to wall coverage of Trump in 2016 because of Russia, nor are they essentially giving republicans free advertising by accepting their framing on crime and foreign policy in Israel right now because of Russia.
Yeah there’s a gulf of difference between what U.S. politicians and billionaires are attempting to do vs what the Russian oligarchs/politicians have already done.
Having been living it for the last what 10 years now? It amazes me how stupid and gullible the right wing public is.
People are gullible, not just right-wingers. You’re just more likely to perceive the other side as gullible and not notice the blind spots of your own. And well, we are living in a moment in history of a surge in right wing populism, which puts that side’s gullibility in full frontal display.
People are gullible, not just right-wingers.
See also: everyone who genuinely thinks JD Vance actually did fuck a couch.
also: everyone who genuinely thinks
One of the reasons that was fun was that it was always a joke, usually presented in the negative so it’s technically true “JD Vance denies fucking a couch”. Right from the beginning, it was presented as a joke gone viral.
Were there genuine believers?
The AP was clear: No, JD Vance did not have sex with a couch.
He still hasn’t denied it.
While technically true that “People are gullible, not just right-wingers.”, this is misleading in this context. Studies have been done! For example: https://academic.oup.com/poq/article/87/2/267/7147091
Some quotes from the study: “Accordingly, a surplus of pro-conservative misinformation may indicate, simply, that conservatives are more gullible. This logic is illustrated by the story of Macedonian teenagers who converged to producing false stories catering to Trump supporters, rather than Bernie Sanders supporters, because it worked better.” “…misinformation catered more to conservatives, and this contributes to them being on average more likely to believe false information.”
I am aware, and it’s good you brought this up. All sides are gullible, but some perhaps more than others. Although, the very study you posted a link to states clearly that other studies have had mixed results. Are you posting this one because, as a political scientist, you know the field and studies referenced and can assert with confidence acquired through disciplined study that this work provides better proof that conservatives are indeed more gullible (where other studies failed), or are you posting it because it appears to confirm your a priori views of conservatives?
Apart from the actual truth of the matter, I made my comment above because I believe that looking down on conservative concerns and viewpoints - something that is naturally aided by any perceptions of conservatives as gullible simpletons - has not served liberals well. In fact, it’s something that right wing populists have been able to exploit quite well to gain the sympathy and ultimately the vote of large swathes of said simpletons.
I am not a political scientist. I’m merely someone who reads a fair bit and tries, in my own fallible way, to get to the truth of things. Certainly this study is not the final word on the matter, and I certainly do not think that all conservatives are gullible simpletons. Just that there are more of them than non-conservatives. And maybe these are just the extremists (e.g. the gullible MAGA republicans who believed Trump’s rhetoric that the election was stolen and attacked the Capitol), but there are not such extremists on the other side.
I would be happy to read about gullible non-conservatives. I’m sure there are some!
I agree we should not look down on conservative viewpoints. But I have struggled to reason with proponents of those viewpoints rooted in gullibility. “America should not help Ukraine because it is full of Nazis”, for example, textbook Russian propaganda. I asked my brother for proof of his outrageous statement, and he sent me a photoshopped picture of Biden with his hand on Zelensky’s ass. OK, it was funny. But irrelevant. It’s not just the gullibility, they are either unable or too stubborn to reason with. I think they are unable to accept they are wrong, and yes, populists pointing out to them that we point this out somehow confirms that they are right.
Thank you for replying to my comment. Happy to read any further thoughts you might have.
Hmm well if you don’t mind a bit of unsolicited advice, I would say that (from the frustrations you express) maybe you, like most of us, enter discussions online with a mind to convince others of the absolute truth of what you believe in. It is actually more productive to listen to them, then ask why they feel the way they do about certain topics, and then try to see if you can find common ground with them. Only then can you perhaps influence their views a little. But if you are earnest about the exchange, you must allow them to influence you too.
I know that’s hard, I fail often myself and become frustrated.
Of course there are conspiracy theories and falsehoods that are absolutely bonkers and it stymies me too why some people will gobble it all up, but a wise person is never too sure of their own truths either. Funny thing is we are all biased one way or another, we just tend to be blind to our own biases. Of course some truths are supported by more evidence than others, but especially when it comes to politics it is less about the absolute truth of a matter than it is about adopting a particular perspective. No single perspective is more valid than others inherently. It is all just ways of looking at things. Of course one can try and come up with objective criteria, but that too is quite hard.
I think you and I are mostly on the same page here. I’m going to take your advice and put more thought into the perspectives of others. Thank you!
Just like everything in the Trump era, that KGB agent would fail miserably because why would something so ridiculous work? The most significant lasting legacy of Maga-politics will be the death of comedy, because who would write something so extreme? No one would believe it
unlimited resources
Russia
… So what like a shitty laptop from 2009, a broadband connection and a full bottle of vodka as pay?
id love to get paid in 2009 laptops and vodka :/
Yeah you could flip those for a pretty penny
It probably only takes a staff on the order of a thousand people to make things go viral on the internet.
If it’s your job to just sign up for social media accounts (fill in the the captchas, type in a name, upload a few images) you could easily create at least a hundred per day.Multiply that by a thousand and that’s one hundred thousand accounts per day.
Of course you’d have to post some comments occasionally to make it look real. But that would just be re-wording the text from other comments. Of course if someone were to do this, youtube comments would look like, well… exactly like youtube comments are like right now.
So figure a a hundred thousand accounts per week with comments to make it look legit, that’s millions of accounts per year. Yeah you’d want to space it out a bit so it wouldn’t look suspicious. And you’d need to route the traffic through a botnet so the IPs are from the same country the account claims to be from. But within a year you’d have millions of accounts that all appear legit to any automated system checking them.
So now you’ve got the accounts and you want something to go viral. Have your thousand people start logging into accounts and running the video or whatever through your botnet, click like, leave a comment, maybe even check out the ad so the social media company makes a bit of money and aren’t incentivized to look at it too closely. This probably only takes around 10 seconds per account. You could have anything you want have at least a million likes and engagement within a day. Which is probably way more than is needed for the algorithms to start recommending the content to legitimate users. And then it’s all automatic from there.
Sure a few thousand people sounds like a lot. But not for the government of a country that wants to do disinformation.
It probably only takes a staff on the order of a thousand people to make things go viral on the internet.
Depending on the site, maybe less than that.
It wasn’t all that long ago that Reddit had “power users” that was just a small handful of people/one person running an account that consistently made it viral on the site.
Yep, like the jackdaw dude. No, not going to name him. He didn’t have that many alt accounts but they were enough for that initial push of his posts.
Was that unidan? I remember it being a story back then but I could be mixing up my random internet accounts.
Correct.
YouTube comments I see are usually perfectly done, bots are the exception?
Invade ukraine apparently.
Apparently not.
Create an anti-vaxx movement?
Man, the kids were really prophetic with their slang. I’m from Michigan, so I’ve always been biased against Ohio, but goddamn if they don’t give reasons to be.
Real. What the fuck is there to do in Ohio other than drugs.
Cedar point doesn’t count. As a Michigander I do not recognize Ohio’s claim over Toledo.
Ohio guy here! I definitely used to go to Cesar Point every year as a kid, but now I just do drugs and dance. You can totally dance in Ohio!
Also you’re gonna have to fight me for Toledo.
Leave
Ohio here. They put blue masking tape around the yellow lines on the floor at work so they can repaint them and I felt obliged to sneer a little bit.
Hell, I’m IN Ohio and I agree. Outside of a few places, the majority of Ohio sucks.
The closest I’ve ever been to a bar fight was while checking in to a hotel in Ohio.
Linkerbaan moment.
What they do is retweet moms in Ohio
I mean, they don’t just retweet them, they twist the narrative, write legitimate looking articles on legitimate looking websites that people can quote, and subtly propose civil unrest, as that’s their ultimate goal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_political_disinformation_website_campaigns_in_Russia
It’s moms in Ohio all the way down.
The stoopid are quite frightening
Get agitators into communities and stoke fears. So that the messages are posted by the people stoked and you are able to stay removed from it as the actual source.
Or how about a CIA agent?
Or a Mossad agent…
Memes like this always irk me because, yes Russia is underhandedly influencing online discourse, but they are just one of many.
The Russian budget for online influence is dwarfed by the efforts of first world defense and intelligence agencies.
