>Mikael Tofvesson, head of the new agency’s operative division, says aggressors are increasingly trying to sow division by targeting areas of public concern such as crime, Covid vaccinations, the government’s response to the pandemic, and immigration. “These are low-intensity campaigns that are constantly in operation, and when a specific issue is in the news the activity increases,” he tells me.
>The Swedish Psychological Defence Agency will monitor malign influence by exposing both the aggressors and their methods. I believe it should go further, by launching information counter-strikes against the offending country’s ruling elite. In future, Nato and its allies could respond to disinformation campaigns by revealing some of the overseas properties owned by senior officials in the hostile country.
Did things like lying en masse used to be admitted so openly in the past? Or is this a new development?
I keep saying that everyone feels like a genius now because we've all been taught exactly how to spot lies, but so many of those tactics can also be applied to truth we don't like that truth itself is now often too hard to prove. You can't trust someone just because they wear a suit and claim to be an expert, but real experts still do precisely that, so do we trust them or not? How do we know if they're a real expert or a grifter?
This, combined with the fact that we all know that fake news does exist, means that trying to win arguments using truth and facts is just not a worthwhile tactic any more. Instead, if you know who's funding the fake news, you might as well just throw a load of ad-hominem spam at them and hope it discourages them. The well cannot be poisoned any further. So honestly, I am inclined to say this is actually a good idea.
There have always been groups lying to people for political ends or personal gain, whether that's a pastor, laird or Big Grunk. I suppose think tanks are just a specialisation of it, same as in every field.
>>5510 Shill - no but seriously, that sounds like the type of demoralised attitude propogandists and psyoperatives hope to produce on the opposing general public. "Everyone else is throwing shit, I might as well play with it too".
Whatever happened to letting them dig thier own hole? All you need is sharp enough people to monitor, point out and argue against the lies, and hold the offender to account for it.
>You can't trust someone just because they wear a suit and claim to be an expert, but real experts still do precisely that, so do we trust them or not?
I hope that at some point we can teach eachother just how a statements measure of truth can be determined, via an awareness of psycological biases and personal emotional attunement.
It's possible to find what sounds more reasonable than the other, with enough consideration, but otherwise we'd just be discussing alethiology (thanks, google!)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alethiology
>Did things like lying en masse used to be admitted so openly in the past? Or is this a new development?
It's called political warfare and has been used throughout history. The quote your losing your shit over isn't even slightly evil or about lying, it's suggesting white propaganda where the source is clear and something we should be doing anyway - we should tell populations of their government's corruption, especially when they don't have a free press of their own.
The efficacy of this kind of offensive warfare is also overstated imo. The most basic level of critical thinking can unpick Russian propaganda and it doesn't really even try to hide itself, people consume it anyway because it conforms to their already preconceived biases just as they have done since the days of the October Revolution. Placing the blame for Brexit and Trump on foreign actors is a mechanism to ignore the systemic forces that drove the outcomes. Obviously internal propaganda is its own beast.
>>5512 >Whatever happened to letting them dig thier own hole? All you need is sharp enough people to monitor, point out and argue against the lies, and hold the offender to account for it.
Unfortunately, I have lost confidence in this and I don't think it can be regained. You can't prove a negative (I checked Wikipedia for this and it acknowledges this in the sense that I mean it, while using the old cope about statistical probability which I don't believe works in these contexts), and so when a tweet says someone is lying, it's not possible in all contexts to prove that they aren't. And in the cases where it is, you would often need to become an expert in mRNA vaccines or secret NATO documents to do so. Even if you did that, not everyone will do that. If you became the ultimate expert and shared your expertise with everyone else, they would still need to trust you, which we already know the sceptics don't do. And after several years devoting your life to investigating whether or not the Bilderberg Group conspired to stop people from voting for Jeremy Corbyn, that's still only one question you can answer and you still won't know a damn thing about the Moon landings.
Society could do a much better job of what you're asking for, undeniably. But when it fails, that lends legitimacy to every conspiracy theory that facts haven't been able to tackle, and Sandy Hook just becomes more likely to have been a Democrat false-flag to take guns from freedom-loving American citizens. Meanwhile, the thing that I find most persuasive against the Sandy Hook one, since that's the one I suggested last, was the proof that some people do encourage these theories, that foreign governments fund disinformation in general, and that the NRA operates as a lobby group more than anything else. That certainly resonates with me a lot more than just Barack Obama pointing at the lunatic theories and saying, "Come on." But maybe not everyone is like me.
It's that thing about how the further you think you are from ideology, the more neutral and unbiased you think you are, you are more likely just blinded to your own biases.
Ideology feeds into everything and cannot be ignored in this context, because as much as we hate to confront it, there's really very rarely such an easy, cut and dry thing as an objective truth. Yes, there are facts, there are statistics, like for example how many times Phil "The Power" Taylor won the world darts championship. You can deliver an objective truth on simple things like that. But when it comes to joining these facts and statistics up to answer the bigger questions, we lose sight of objectivity extremely quickly.
I don't mean to sound patronising, I don't mean to sound condescending, I don't mean to sound like I'm some clever cloggs who has figured out something that you thick cunts haven't, but this is largely the problem when it comes to anything like "fact checkers". They're never objective either. They are in service to their own biases, and most often financial interests. It's never neutralising disinformation, it's just spreading it's own counter-propaganda. People's attitudes range from complete blindness, to a self-aware but absolute conviction that it's okay, because their side is the right side. But it makes no difference.
For me personally, I have resolved that the easiest thing to do is follow the money. You don't get owt for nowt, and nobody who's paying for anything is doing it for the good of their health.
