Beginning to think that Americans on social media are feeble minded babies with no agency of their own swayed in whichever direction foreign shills and bots want to take them in.
It’s not just Americans. It’s anyone who stays on social media for too long. You can actively defend for some time, but if you spend 4-5 hours a day on Facebook, you’re bound to get trapped in this shit.
Hell, even here on Lemmy there are instances full of nutjobs circlejerking over the political flavor of the week…
The bigger point is that the USA is pretty much the technological leader of the world and a frontrunner in information warfare. All the major social media companies have to have close ties with the US state department to be able to function at the scale at which they do. So why is it that Russo-Chinese bots and shills are running circles around Americans?
Projection, as always. Ever heard about google ads running pro-ukraine videos? Or perhaps about auto-callers, dialing numbers in Russia with pre-recorded anti-government messages?
And that’s even before we get into the NGOs
Russiagate has always been copium for Western liberals who cannot accept the fact that reactionary tendencies are weaved into the fabric of their culture and institutions so they tell themselves bullshit like how their redneck racist uncle only voted for Trump and is anti-abortion because Putin seductively whispered some arcane incantation in his ear. In truth Russia’s propaganda is not very effectual
- In 2017 before RT was shut down in the UK, it accounted for 0.04 percent of the UK’s total TV audience.[1]
- A New York University study published earlier this year found that the supposed Russian Twitter influence campaign ahead of the 2016 election which dominated headlines for years had had “no measurable impact in changing minds or influencing voter behavior”.[2]
- An earlier study found that suspected Russian accounts showing up in Facebook’s news feed during that time amounted to “approximately 1 out of 23,000 pieces of content.”[3]
- A study by Adelaide University found that despite headline after headline warning us about a massive wave of Russian bots manipulating online discourse after the invasion of Ukraine began last year, the overwhelming majority of fake accounts they examined (more than 90 percent) were pro-Ukraine accounts.[4]
