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Britain becoming ‘soft target’ for Russian propaganda, says security expert (www.theguardian.com)
submitted 6 months ago by to c/unitedkingdom@feddit.uk
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Britain is becoming a soft target for Russian and other state propaganda because the UK is not prepared to educate people on how to deal with information warfare, according to a former White House adviser and security expert.

Fiona Hill told a parliamentary committee that she feared the UK had become “extraordinarily vulnerable” to online manipulation feeding into the electoral system because there was a lack of discussion about civil defence.

“I think part of the problem is also on the societal level: that the UK increasingly looks like a soft target rather than a hard target, because modern war, as we all know, is fought with so many different methods now, including propaganda,” Hill said.

She contrasted the UK with Sweden, which has an idea of “psychological defence”. It is about “training people to think about how you deal with all kinds of information warfare, so people can recognise when they’re being manipulated”.

The concept dates back to the cold war, but after a hiatus Sweden set up a psychological defence agency in 2022, which tries to work with the public and highlight online disinformation.

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[–] 7 points 6 months ago (5 children)

We used to get taught about media trustworthiness, bias and intent as part of history lessons at school in the 1990s.

They'd show you a contemporary report from one side of an event, one from another point of view, then one which was written 100 years later for example, then look at why each side would have motivation to lie and what they'd potentially gain, and on behalf of who etc.

Michael Gove got rid of all of that type of learning, to be replaced by "People should repeat a list of things that the teacher says", which was the system used beforehand "in the olden days".

Anyway, I'm pretty sure that doesn't help us.

It also doesn't help that one of our political parties, with a lot of Russian money thrown at it, has its own propaganda channel (Gammon Bell-end News), not to mention the almost unanimous support it receives from most TV news programmes, newspapers and right-wing social media.

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  • [–] 6 points 6 months ago* (4 children)

    I had those exact kinds of lessons in GCSE history in 2014. It didnt matter, when i spoke to my classmates years later about it as working adults reminiscing they looked at me bewildered that i remembered something like that, they didn't seem to recall whatsoever anything specific they learned at school, even though i was the one who was awful at school and had way worse grades.

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  • [–] 5 points 6 months ago (3 children)

    That’s one of the things that I’m most concerned about. Very rarely do I talk to someone who says they remember much from school. I don’t know why, because I smoked a lot of weed in high school and was a bad student, but I still remember what we learned (generally, things like which books we read in lit, what periods of history and events we covered, what topics we studied in biology, etc., not that I remember every day or lesson).

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  • [–] 3 points 6 months ago (1 child)

    And I bet they think you're the idiom!

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  • [–] 2 points 6 months ago

    I’m definitely an idiom (probably “odd duck,” but I’m open to other suggestions).

    And I’m even more definitely an idiot, because even though I saw the joke, my first reaction upon reading your comment was thinking of fun idioms to describe myself.

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  • [–] 2 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

    Yeah, my very former classmates seem bewildered when I mention books we read for GCSE Literature. My grades weren't good at all compared to said former classmates.

    Its kind of shocking, do they just memorize stuff like robots for a few months then flush that memory?

    I could never do that, if i learned something, I likely still at least remember learning it, snd if i didn't then i still remember not understanding it.

    I can't hunker down and just memorize or somehow learn something without actually processing it and learning it proper, doesn't matter how important, but then again I was later diagnosed with ADHD.

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