The fucking Muscovites have been playing games since Krasnov's first term.
this post was submitted on 24 Apr 2025
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Speaking of disinformation, here's the underlying article: https://www.newsguardrealitycheck.com/p/one-third-of-americans-believe-russian-disinformation-yougov-survey-finds. In case you want to skip Forbes.
thanks to the right wing media lying to American people for decades this has become a reality
No. Shit. It's infuriating.
Gullibility appears to cut across party lines, with respondents identifying as Democrats just as likely as Republicans to believe at least one of the 10 false claims.
Republicans were, though, more likely to believe Russian disinformation claims than their Democratic counterparts, with 57.6% falling for at least one Russian disinformation claim, compared with just 17.9% of Democrats and 29.5% of people who didn't identify with one particular party.
I looked at the 10 false claims used for the test. Most of them were ridiculously easy to dismiss as false. The only one I had difficulty with was identifying whether social security cuts were part of "Project 2025" agenda, due to the agenda being very extensive (the source says 922 pages) and me not living in a country that it's about. Thus I'd have answered "not sure". I'd have also answered "not sure" about the birth place of some terrorist.
If people stumble on these, people are really poorly informed or unable / unwilling to inform themselves.
Some guesses.
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the US media environment is very entertainment-focused?
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the US education system leaves things to be desired?
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the US population spends a high amount of time in social media echo chambers?
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do Republicans spend more of online time in bot-infested places?
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do they have lower bot recognition and fact checking skills?
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are they drinking the kool-aid because their great leader drank it, so it seems legit?
In general, propaganda works. That's why people pay for it. When you have a delicate equilibrium and you can push it past the tipping point with little effort, that's the most economical way of disabling an opponent. :( Using force would require a spending a trillion, but using disinformation, you can get outcomes with a tiny amount.
Russia is spending significant amounts on promulgating misinformation in the U.S. Last year, for example, the U.S. Department of Justice indicted two people for funneling nearly $10 million through a Tennessee-based content creation company to publish misinformation about Ukraine.
The problem with these debunks is that the "false claim" is adjusted so that it is easier to debunk.
Polio vaccines contain mercury-based ingredients
By specifically focusing on polio it can be claimed this was never true. Remove the word polio and there is partial truth. Some combined vaccines still contain tiny amounts Thimerosal though most don't.
Well, an alarming number of Americans believe that Trump should be president. And that America is the best country in the world, and that compassion is communism.
This tells more about how gullible Americans are, and not much about the skills of unchecked Russian propaganda.
They need someone to blame. Come on now.
Their methodology involves asking people a bunch of questions and then if they don’t get 100% correct they’re counted as believing misinformation. Putting aside the unreliability of online polls, that’s a pretty misleading way of framing it, if you ask me.
If you asked people 10 questions about just about anything, you’d probably find a substantial number of people who don’t get every one right. In fact, they did do this under the heading, “Disinformation Nation: Americans Widely Believe False Claims on a Range of Topics.” That’s probably why they found that, “Respondents identifying as Democrats were about as likely (82 percent) to believe at least one of the 10 false claims as those identifying as Republicans (81 percent).”
Many of the people responding to the poll may not have ever encountered the claims they were asked about. If you are first encountering a claim in that context, you pretty much just have to guess whether you think it’s true based on vibes. And you can easily set up misleading vibes, like, “Conservative initiative Project 2025 proposes cutting or eliminating Social Security” which is false because it’s not explicitly stated, but it does explicitly state a whole bunch of other horrible shit, so like, if you get got by that one it doesn’t really show that you believe in an inaccurate picture of the world, just that you got tripped up by details. But that claim dings you for “believing misinformation” just as much as " COVID-19 vaccines killed 15 million people worldwide."
So like it doesn’t really tell us very much about how far reaching disinformation really is, the results are more of a reflection of their methodology.
[Reposted from the last time this study was posted]
Many of the people responding to the poll may not have ever encountered the claims they were asked about.
However, they do offer a "not sure" option, which can be taken if a person knows they're not informed.
One easy trick that makes you immune to propaganda - simply respond "not sure" to every question you're ever asked. It doesn't really even save you though because they'll just lump you in with the people who chose the wrong answer. The site repeatedly uses the phrase, "failed to identify as false" to group the "not sures" in with the incorrect responses.
There's an almost endless way to present poll numbers and survey results to support whatever conclusion you like, you could say that "fewer than half the respondents were able to identify this claim as false," or you could say, "80% of respondents avoided incorrectly labeling this claim as true," depending on what narrative you prefer. And that's assuming that the raw data itself, which comes from an internet survey, is reliable and representative.
Has anyone ever looked at the education level of population voting for different parties? (I don’t know how to query statistics in an educated way)
It's widely known. Attained education correlates with preference for left-wing policies, and in the US case, with opposition to Trump.
a sample from Newsweek's "Trump approval tracker"
Generally, studies have shown that the more educated a person gets the more they lean left. People at the PhD level tend to be far more liberal than people with only a high school degree.
I expected that. But, is there specific statistics? Numbers? Graph? Pie Chart?
I Googled "political orientation and educational level," and the first link was this
It is highly detailed, with lots of graphs and charts, and eventually comes to the same conclusion that I posted in my previous comment.
There are plenty of other links that confirm it as well.
Thank you. I completely agree with you, and this study. I was trying to find a “dumbed down” version.
uneducated country that wants to be even more uneducated. runs its platform based on robbing the country blind whilst using the dumbest of the population as a shield by rage baiting them into protecting them against the opposition.
the world is going to be unrecognizable in 20 years. I'm convinced its going to end up with multiple state collapses and nuclear wars.
The amount of people who are actually responsible for all this hate are an extreme minority.
We need a new constitution that forbids using the best of psychology to manipulate people. No more propaganda and public relations. No more advertising. We already have seen the results of unregulated psychological warfare on the public by corporations, governments, and billionaires.
A new bill of rights that guarantees housing, education, healthcare, and income. One that spells out what privacy really means and how important it is. A government that is not ran by a two party first past the goal post most popular vote cesspool.
The system is broken because we allow it be. Our policies and structure produce perverse results. The government has to be designed from the ground up to resist corruption. Anything less is just inviting disaster.
We have all been lead into a state of learned helplessness. The solutions to solve our problems are already there and there are many of them. There is no one right answer either, there are a lot of great ways to solve our many issues.
Many of the supposed "leaders" are spouting Russian disinfo - Hegseth the other day was crying about the media talking about the "Russian hoax", meaning, reporting on donvict's sus ties to Putin and Russia in his first term.
The "Russian Hoax" is a hoax.
HitlerPig's ties to Putin and Russia are well-documented, all the way back to his first visit to Soviet Moscow in 1987, BEFORE the fall of the Iron Curtain, when the Soviets were shocked at how easily he could be manipulated with the most insincere flattery, and he was given the code-name designation Krasnov.
Within six months of his first visit, he was taking out his first full page ads spouting Soviet talking points.
By any objective measure, HitlerPig is the most prolific Traitor in American history, worse than all other American traitors COMBINED.
on reddit i pointed out in political subs so many times that alot of the posters were russian trolls positng russian back news to bait people. cant you people see its obvious. around the time of the gaza invasion, i reported a couple people in the pics sub for israeli propaganda, because they were posting the " attacks against palestine" as a way to frame bidenw as the sole cause of the conflict and hes doing nothing, i reminded them that both parties have always supported in great numbers, and its only currently being inflammed because BIBI was worried a new D was going to condemn or stop the financial support to israel.
Yeah, the Russian trolls pretending to be "liberals" and constantly attacking only the Democrats for some weird reason are all over the place. And then there are the people stupid enough to fall for this nonsense, too...I know a few IRL, and man, they are so very tiresome.
Usually they have all kinds of excuses and absurd purity tests that no politician that is actually running would pass, and then they proudly do shit like stay home or throw their vote away on Jill Stein or whatever. They act like they won something by doing this, too.
But when it comes to the trolls and useful idiots, I've seen some places that seem to have been overrun with them. The comments on Boing Boing, once upon a time, used to be a pretty fun place. Some years go by and I come back later and try to engage in reasonable conversation and the little clique of self-reinforcing posters/ moderators that took over that place were having none of it. It was all maximalist identity politics and Oppression Olympics to the point of cartoonish levels, and constant ripping on the Democratic Party and "shitlibs". Any deviation, most especially if you made one of the anointed look bad? Deleted, almost immediately. Didn't matter how thoughtful.
Anyway, the comment section there seemed to be designed to create reactionaries. Anyone on the fence that happens to wander into some spectacle like that is bound to come away with some impressions about what liberals are like, and it's not going to look good.
They have since taken their comments behind a paywall, go figure. I hope that little clique is happy with policing any all minute deviations from what they believe is the One True Way to think. I doubt anyone is going to pay for that kind of treatment for long, so.... shrug?
those idiots thought by showing pics of people getting injured was a NEW phenomenon under biden, it has been happening for decades, lol. and almost no party got any flak for supporting israeli genocide, they decided to put it on the news to hurt bidens chances, it was purely that.