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Thank you for the thorough reply, and for arguing in good faith. I disagree with (1): I don’t see this as a ‘both sides’ issues, and I don’t believe that the left, as a whole, has been as amenable to inflammatory propaganda as the right has been. As my prime example, I’d note the Macedonian fake news phenomenon that occurred right around the election. As the creators themselves have stated, those articles targeted right wing voters because those were the people who were interested in reading, spreading , and talking about the propaganda they were spreading. Since these creators were solely interested in financial profit, it stands to reason that they would have preferred to make money appealing to left wing audiences as much as they did right wing ones. There was no explosion in fake news from these sources to the left because there was no demand. As my secondary examples, I’d maintain that most left wing media outlets (tyt, mother jones) have much higher journalistic standards than their counterparts Breitbart and infowars - and the equally opportunistic propagandadists as Russia Today. If you’d like to point me towards the cases you believe the left has pushed fake news I’d be interested in learning more. 2) that’s why I specified ‘modern’ propaganda- things like troll farms, planting anti immigrant stories (faking rapes, murders, massacres) along with investment into finer targeting mechanisms (the hacking of state voter rolls and CA data to be used for micro-targeting). I should note that I brought up the election collusion because it is propbabaly the place the left could be most prone towards conspiratorial fantasies, and the first place you’d find such ideas. 3) I liked the piece but I thinks it’s a stretch to try and use it to refute my points. We could call them active measures, political warfare, nonlinear or hybrid warfare, but the point still exists that Russia is pioneering new weapons to attack western and western leaning democracies. And you’re saying if those measures did exist the result would be making the us look weak on the international stage - isn’t that ‘exactly’ the point of them? I assume when Russia launched a chemical weapons attack in the UK the purpose was exactly the same - to underscore British weakness and estrangement from her allies. |