[cowpig]

> I watch the Russia Today (RT) streams on YouTube. It's good to have a differing point of view.

How does watching a state-controlled propaganda channel offer a "differing point of view"?

Isn't the goal to be exposed to truth, as opposed to a smorgasbord of different forms of propaganda?

Is it that you want want to understand what the perspective of someone who lives in Russia is going to be, acknowledging that the average person's information sources are likely highly state-propaganda-filtered?

[pastacacioepepe]

I watch both western and eastern media because I don't trust either. By putting together information from both sides, I try to get an objective point of view.

Anyway I must say, the west has put out many more lies for what I've seen so far.

[cowpig]

Just think about that from a logical perspective: if you start your proof with false axioms, you can never produce anything true. You can only produce a universe of internally-consistent false statements.

The only way out of the propaganda trap is to find organizations that legitimately care about good journalism. They definitely exist!

One place to start might be Wikipedia, the culture there is very much "organize knowledge" as opposed to "achieve some political end".

[pastacacioepepe]

> One place to start might be Wikipedia, the culture there is very much "organize knowledge" as opposed to "achieve some political end".

There's a crowd right now trying to remove any reference to neo-nazism in the Azov Battalion wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Azov_Battalion&ac...

Please go ahead and verify it yourself. Among this crowd there are the same people that curate the sections about the Uyghur oppression in China. I don't fully trust Wikipedia either for these reasons.

> Just think about that from a logical perspective: if you start your proof with false axioms, you can never produce anything true. You can only produce a universe of internally-consistent false statements.

I strongly disagree. By watching propaganda from both sides, I can easily understand what are the interests in play and what is each side's reasoning. By confronting it then with the rest of the independent information I can form a cohesive opinion. I won't trust anyone to provide me with "news" at the moment. We have to do the hard job and create our news with the sparse information available.

[cowpig]

> There's a crowd right now trying to remove any reference to neo-nazism in the Azov Battalion wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Azov_Battalion&ac...

There are always going to be people trying to push certain agendas anywhere.

There's a major difference between an organization whose overarching goal is to produce accurate information, and an organization whose overarching goal is to push for some kind of political gain.

I checked the article you linked to and there's a reference to neo-nazism in the opening paragraph. So your example seems to indicate that Wikipedia is able to withstand ideological attacks (which agrees with my general impression).

> I can easily understand what are the interests in play and what is each side's reasoning.

While I can see that it would be hard to get a feel for what different actors' motivations are from raw facts, I believe that you would still need them as a baseline to understand the propaganda. And it sounds like a lot of (error-prone) work!

Although I speak from ignorance as I am not on any social media and am pretty extreme about filtering my information sources. But I have to say, having had conversations with two people who take this approach, that I am skeptical: both have ended up with very strange/distorted world views and have trouble trusting any institutions (Which makes sense! A core goal of someone trying to destroy a system is to undermine its credibility!)