Fediverse

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[–] DomeGuy@lemmy.world 10 points 1 year ago (7 children)

Your article doesn't seem to mention Russia once.

Rumors and smears are part of free speech. To the extent that right-wing trolls and their audience are actual voters, it's essentially just a coarse form of ordinary political speech.

The extent to which a foreign government acting coverly is either creating or artificially boosting such content is scandalous.

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[+] Diva@lemmy.ml 0 points 1 year ago (1 child)

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[–] DomeGuy@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

True enough. But even a tyrannical government at least has a presumable intent of working for the betterment of its country. (Albeit through wrongheaded and small-minded means )

A.foreijgn power, especially a historical adversary and bad actor, is instead presumably working to harm or diminish us.

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[–] troed@fedia.io -4 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Your article doesn't seem to mention Russia once.

Feel free to read any other article that does, if you somehow have managed to avoid learning about russian influence campaigns over the last decade.

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[–] DomeGuy@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago (3 children)

You presented it as proof that Russia is supporting misinformation on the left. To be that, it has to both include all three parts of the claim -- that there is disinformation on the left, that Russia is covertly supporting disinformation, and that some of the disinformation on the left was supported by Russia.

If your wife sleeps around, and I engage in casual sex, it does not necessarily follow that I slept with your wife.

A common suspicion in America is that Vladimir Putin believes that Trump as POTUS is good for Russia, and that Putin interferes with US politics with a specific goal of helping Trump.

If you have some reporting that directly links Russia to left-wing disinformation I'd love to read it. But the BBC article I read after following your link didn't have any such link.

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[–] troed@fedia.io 1 point 1 year ago (2 children)

This is the third time I post this paper in this thread: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00207020241257635

There are plenty more. You spent more time writing your post than it takes to find them.

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[–] DomeGuy@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

Better. That actually supports the assertion that Russia does engage in left-targeted disinformation (in Canada, on Twitter.)

It also supports the original point you dismissed as "wrong" -- of the 90 "most influential" accounts, only 9 were subjectively identified as "Canadian far left".

Maybe you should spend more time reading the actual articles, and not just their headlines?

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[–] Goodeye8@piefed.social 3 points 1 year ago

When you make a statement it's your responsibility to provide proof because what if you're talking out of your ass? How would we find any proof in that scenario when it literally wouldn't exist? How would we know if you misinterpreted a source? How would we know we misinterpreted the correct source? What if we think what you're saying is so stupid we don't want to waste our time looking for proof? There are a lot of reasons the burden of proof shouldn't fall on us, which means the burden of proof should fall on the person who made the statement. They know if what they said is factual and if it's factual they know where they found this fact and thus it would be significantly less effort for them to find and present the source.

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[–] 9point6@lemmy.world 22 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Primary sources tend to disagree

Here's a study from 2019 about it that backs up my assertion that more is conservative https://academic.oup.com/joc/article/69/2/168/5425470

And of that propaganda being created, that conservative inclined people are most likely to fall for it: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/20563051231220330

There seem to be plenty of other papers that more or less reach those same conclusions with a good number of citations, but I can't find anything really at all on Google Scholar concluding the opposite with a quick search, let alone something also credible.

The closest some papers come is saying that they try groups all over the political spectrum, as their goal is disunity ultimately, but they seemingly don't really have any kind of continued success with misinforming those groups anywhere near as effectively. They more or less all end up concluding that most of the propaganda targets conservatives, because they're the ones that fall for it.

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[–] OpenStars@piefed.social 14 points 1 year ago

Both sides fall for it, just not equally.

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[–] JollyG@lemmy.world 7 points 1 year ago

I think one of the problems with citing that first study as evidence Russian disinfo is targeted at conservatives more than liberals is that it only studied one case, and Russian disinformation campaigns tailor their disinfo to different demographics, often through brute force/trial and error. So it is quite possible that the particular case they studied happens to be tailored to (or more successfully resonated with) conservatives, while another specific case would have resonated with liberals more thus resulting in more liberal exposure by their metrics.

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[–] masterspace@lemmy.ca 4 points 1 year ago

Your assertion that more is conservative is a meaningless assertion in the context of this discussion.

More can be conservative on average but you don't see an average view of the internet, you see your filter bubble, and that source backs up the original assertion that yes, Russia is targeting leftists too.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00207020241257635

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[–] troed@fedia.io 3 points 1 year ago

Primary sources tend to agree

Might it be that you're commenting based on what you want to be true?