Russian propaganda effort helped spread ‘fake news’ during election, experts say
this whole &quot;fake news&quot; narrative arc needs to be fucking murdered, and here&#x27;s why:<p>stories which detail items of unpopular fact surrounded by biased opinions which threaten the status quo are being lumped in with stories which fabricate facts and are transparently clickbait.<p>the first type of story headline: &quot;hillary took money from the saudis and will sell us out&quot;<p>the second type of story headline: &quot;hillary murdered young children in 1990&quot;<p>see the difference? one of the two has a fact regarding campaign finance (presented in a very slanted yet still correct way) that is tied to a speculation&#x2F;opinion (easily identifiable bias) that will validate a broad range of opinions and potentially begin to form opinions in the uninformed. the other is a bogus fact that will draw attention and validate the most extreme already-existing opinions.<p>the mainstream media is viciously desperate to make the issue of hillary losing the election into a matter of &quot;too many people fell victim to the fake news stories which claimed hillary murdered children in 1990. those stupid republican idiots are just so darn impressionable.&quot; this couldn&#x27;t be farther from the truth. masses of people falling for headline 2 generates rioting in the streets, not voting for an &quot;outsider&quot;.<p>people saw the first type of story, and believed it. facts often don&#x27;t have to be twisted in order for the reader to arrive at a certain conclusion, and hillary was laden with a billion of these facts.<p>the whining regarding russian interference in our election is very much overblown, as well as cynically ignorant&#x2F; intellectually dishonest. the USA meddles in countless other elections, consistently, via propaganda and other means. this doesn&#x27;t make it right when anyone does the same to us, but a discussion of foreign influence in our elections should be within the proper context: geopolitical powers meddle in each other&#x27;s affairs as much as they think they can get away with.<p>furthermore, russians did not start propagandizing yesterday. many of the urban russians are a technologically inclined and cosmopolitan people who are prolific on the internet, and it is certain that these people are the ones filling the ranks of putin&#x27;s propaganda forces. they simply aren&#x27;t stupid enough to try making completely counterfactual claims fly-- it&#x27;s a waste of their time. the russian angle of propaganda has been (even since the times of the early soviet union) a kernel of undeniable and ugly truth, which can be opined upon within a range of speculation. you could say that in this election, their angle was &quot;hillary clinton is corrupt&quot;. this angle of propaganda only works if people immediately recognize the kernel beneath the headline, and identify with the sentiment.<p>for many people in this country, &quot;russian propaganda&quot; fit cleanly with their own domestic &quot;not-propaganda&quot; media sources. so what if it was the russians feeding information to wikileaks? for many people, the relevant facts of the matter pre-emailgate were exactly the same as after. calling the real development of narration around the kernal of hillary clinton being corrupt &quot;fake news&quot; is a massive disservice to the public, as well as abject denial of the situation. voters didn&#x27;t like hillary because they thought she was corrupt. there were many media which supported and fostered that dislike, using facts. there were many other media which fostered that dislike using fictions. don&#x27;t throw the fact out with the fiction, regardless of the source of each.<p>btw: i voted green party, not in a swing state. if that makes any difference to you.<p>---<p>this is the part of my comment where i make a lofty call for improved critical thinking training for our citizenry. the way to kill the problem of propaganda is not via suppression of inconvenient storys, as zuckerberg wants to do with &quot;fake news&quot;, but rather an increase in general ability to identify and deconstruct malicious thoughtware. there are a few easy rules of thumb that could help people a lot. maybe i&#x27;ll write them into an ebook. the problem is that a lot of people don&#x27;t give a shit about critical thinking, and find any kind of intellectualizing to be faggy.