[adamzk]

I think there's a crucial difference between legitimate open campaigning and deceitful clandestine campaigning. The former is an investment toward making certain facts and, possibly controversial, opinions made known to a wider, perhaps targeted, audience and the ultimate motivation for this is transparent. The latter is a deliberate attempt to sow disinformation and confusion to particularly vulnerable audiences to achieve an outcome for which the ultimate motivation is troublingly obscure. They are total opposites - truth and lies.

[porpoisely]

In the world of politics and propaganda, it's pretty much all lies. Just like the narrative that russia controls trump or russia is behind brexit. If you think one side is offering truth and the other lies, it's most likely because you favor one side over the other. Objectively, it's all nonsense.

What our "state" propaganda on both of the atlantic have been saying is something all states do when things don't go their way. Blame the "other". The chinese do that to crackdown on muslims, falun gong, etc. The russians do that for separatists. The turks do that. The nazis did it. The japanese did. We did it many times. Everyone does it.

The simplest and most effective way to manipulate and control the public is to present an external threat. It's propaganda 101. But of course, we only call it propaganda when others do it. When we do it, it's news/facts/truth.

But maybe I'm just naive. I'll wait with bated breath to see how a relatively poor country like russia has taken control over the politics of regions that are collectively nearly 40X as wealthy as russia. It's a notion as absurd as dirt poor north korea controlling china, but anything is possible.