Reposting content from RT and Sputnik is not sufficient evidence that some outlet is a Russian disinfo op

You keep telling me things that aren’t my complete argument, and saying “That alone doesn’t prove anything!”

the completely discredited conspiracy theory that Russian interference led to the 2016 election of Donald Trump

keke

So they are clearly not an objective, neutral judge of credibility.

Hey Bob, did this guy just say, “So these people posted RT and Sputnik, that doesn’t mean anything, obviously” and “These people posted this discredited thing, and so therefore I’ve discredited them, obviously” in the same message?

That he did, Bob. That he did. Also the thing he said was discredited, was not.

Regarding Crimea - look, anti-NATO publications are going to defend Russia.

In your world where someone has to ally with one and exactly one horrifying global state-sponsored-terrorism-source. In my world, it is easily possible to oppose all sponsors of death and destruction the world over, without picking one that I have to be “on the team of.” I would say that my stance is actually the more human and sensible one, but you do you! If you want to pick a favorite, and deep-throat their boot and their boot alone, you are welcome to, although I will probably make fun of you for it.

Even the meme of “Russian disformation” is one that is spread almost exclusively by agents of the US/NATO deep state at this point.

Obviously.

Please stop spreading disinformation on this instance.

I’m trying bro! But you aren’t on board with my stopping of disinformation on this instance. I wonder why.

Why do you think it is “faulting” Mint Press for those things? It sounds like it is just reporting them.

The issue is more this:

MintPress News has reposted content from Russian state media outlets RT and Sputnik,[26][27] and is listed as a “partner” of PeaceData, a Russian fake news site run by the Internet Research Agency.[28][29][30] A report from New Knowledge includes MintPress News as part of the “Russian web of disinformation,”[31][32] and the site has published fake authors attributed to the GRU, the Russian military intelligence agency.[33] MintPress News defended Russia’s invasion of Crimea, claiming Ukraine’s post-revolution government was “illegitimate”.[34]

Mint Press News is Russian propaganda FYI.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MintPress_News

Not to say there is anything wrong with this story specifically but in general they are better avoided.

I wanted to make sure I sat down and really replied to you before because I generally like your takes and respect you as a person, and a quick reply from my phone would be impossible as a medium for replying to your thoughtful and well stated argument.

Yeah, all good. I mean maybe I am wrong, we can talk about it.

My issue with Substack isn’t that there’s Nazis on there, it’s that Substack’s owners made sure they were there, and made sure they got a cut of the revenue sharing scheme.

Okay so this is actually one of the issues that made me start to say that this is deliberate disinformation, not just people saying some stuff I don’t agree with. The thing is: I don’t think this is actually true. I saw a big article that made this claim, I dug into the details, and it turned out to be one of those “Ship of Theseus” things where, the people they invited were not the Nazis, just some random people with MAGA-type ideas, and they hadn’t expressed those MAGA-type ideas until long after Substack’s dealings with them had been and gone (pre-2017 Matt Taibbi I think was one). Basically, Substack in this aspect did nothing wrong at all. But people wrapped it up like they had sought out Richard Spenser and invited him to the platform and made sure to give him some money to get things started, which is false, and it was weird that people were trying so hard to say that that had happened. What they did was took millions of dollars from VCs and then gave it to good journalists.

Who are you talking about when you say the Substack owners made sure there were Nazis? I want to dig into this a little bit more and where you heard that from.

There’s a whole separate issue of them allowing for real neo-Nazis. I’m probably in the vast minority, but I actually think that was fine. It’s the same like I think Hasan Piker can say whatever the fuck he wants, it’s the same like I think nutomic can have transphobic views if he wants. I think it is fine.

Like I say, I’m probably the minority there.

considered it important to Substack’s future that those Nazis be present and paid.

The question I find myself asking is what views do they hold, what do they tolerate, and how long until they find a new way to promote those views or allow someone to co-opt their waveforms to broadcast their message to us.

Just to be clear: Are you saying that they’re in any way promoting or in favor of Nazis? Or just that they allow them on the platform and that’s the huge problem?

I’ve seen the first thing, and I think that’s what you’re saying, but if you are saying the second thing it’s a different conversation.

I guess ultimately, what I’m driving at, is that it is my view that Substack, like Medium, is a captured outlet. It can only ever show you a distorted version of the truth that serves its holders of power, who are ultimately aligned with the techbroligarchs that are strangling all of us.

I don’t think any of this is true. I haven’t seen any indication at all that they’re distorting anything about the blogs that are hosted there, and the very nature of them (as far as I’m aware) makes it pretty difficult for them to start rigging the algorithm to promote one instead of another, or anything like that.

I do think it’s a problem that Substack is a centralized platform. That I will 100% agree with you on. The point being that regardless of whether the current owners are up to anything, there’s the strong likelihood in the future that it will succumb to the inevitable like so many before it.

I think Ghost is probably a much better model, to be honest. On the other hand, because Substack is centralized, they were able to subsidize good journalism to get the ball rolling, and I think that was a really good thing. And, of course, it’s absolutely impossible to keep Nazis off of Ghost either. Actually, even the purge of Nazis that Substack eventually did, would be impossible on Ghost, because its decentralized nature means they would be there to stay if they chose Ghost. It’s more or less impossible to stop, generally speaking. (Which is part of why I agree with Substack’s original stance on it.)

Does this make sense?

The equation “Substack = Nazis” is textbook political misinformation: A thing with a technical grain of truth, entirely missing the point and then dishonestly presented, for the purpose of splintering and confusing the left and getting them to attack each other. I suspect it is deliberately promoted by enemies, because while it has a technical little fig-leaf of truthfulness, it bears so little resemblance to anything real or relevant and is a convenient way to shit on one of the chief leftist platforms for thought and journalism, and leftists love nothing more than a contest of “I am so pure that I hate this thing that everyone else likes because it’s actually evil and I’m super clever and informed so I can see that and you can’t and I’m the first one.”

I guess it is possible that people came up with this all on their own as a purity-test (actually I do think that the original campaign which persuaded Substack to get rid of most of the Nazis, was that), and it’s just a general leftist self-own because of that tendency. I do feel like it’s pretty likely that it has started coming in in some way from outside though. When this argument is presented in print form, it often has so many hallmarks of propaganda or slanty dishonest framings associated with it that it’s hard for me to think that it is entirely self-created organic purity testing gone awry.

Here was my conversation about the details of the underlying Substack Nazi issue the last time it came up. I don’t have a lot to add to it: https://ponder.cat/post/1721638/1949850

Hey, look, I found some.

But to address your request for more information on that admittedly poorly chosen example: that was at the start at the Russian invasion, so I don’t have the source readily available. It might have been Jacobin or a YT geopolitical analyst based in Europe.

Not what I asked. I asked you for general reliable sources about the world, since your international friends are in touch with them and all read them and they’re 100% up to speed on things that idiot Americans are not aware of. I want to know these sources, not this specific claim, but just in general. Surely you want to help me not be a blithering idiot in my news consumption anymore?

IDK, maybe your answer is “YouTube and Jacobin.” I do watch YouTube and I’m familiar with Jacobin.

I come to Lemmy for conversations that are fun, funny, thought-provoking, and helpful. So, on that note, I’m out. Enjoy your day.

Seems to me like you come to Lemmy to snidely insinuate weird pro-Russian points of view, and then become super-friendly and say it was all a big misunderstanding, brother, when someone calls you on it, and then say it wasn’t important and flee into the darkness when asked for details. I stand behind my rudeness to you, it seems like it was well-earned. You’re welcome to defend “US manipulating geopolitics with UA and RU so as to bring the EU to heel,” if you want to, but since you don’t want to, have a wonderful evening.

even I said “WAT,” i.e. my disbelief regarding conclusions at which some people outside the US arrived.

That’s not what you said. You said that it was, more or less, a universal consensus outside the US that the US had manipulated events in Ukraine to weaken the EU, because they couldn’t stand having the EU around because it was a real democracy. So much so that you’re a “blithering idiot” “out of the loop” “depth and breadth of ignorance” and so on because you don’t see it that way because you consume US media, whereas the whole rest of the world knows that that’s going on. Right?

That assertion (that it’s universally believed outside the US, not even touching on whether it is true) is absolutely wrong. And then, you said “WAT” about your own reaction to it, but also seemed to take it very seriously, comparing it favorably to your own ideas which you were very negative about.

Would you care to elaborate on how I called commenters here misinformed?

You said “us,” as in “it becomes very difficult for us to be anything other than idiots”.

I feel like you are digging for an argument that doesn’t exist.

If you would like more clarification or elaboration, rather than making assumptions, I’m happy to discuss.

Okay, sure. Maybe that’s fair. So tell me: What are these reliable sources that your more wise and knowledgeable international friends read, what’s some of what they tell you about geopolitics and the war in Ukraine? Specifically as pertains to “US manipulating geopolitics with UA and RU so as to bring the EU to heel.” Since you’ve identified the idea that that is not happening as the “blithering idiot” viewpoint by contrast, maybe you can help me out of my idiocy by helping and elaborating.

Edit: Rephrasing

Let’s set aside the veracity of the US manipulating geopolitics in the UA/RU war

Let’s not. That’s the exact point at which you departed from accuracy into fantasy-land, and what I was taking note of.

Can we all agree that the US has a long history of fuckery when it comes to stomping out anything it doesn’t like or isn’t in line with corporate interests?

Yes, 100%.

Even if the independent journalist were absolutely presenting the truth, it’s still feels like tinfoil hat shit because of how severely we’re inculcated by “trustworthy” news sources in the US.

I like to think I’m a teeny bit media- and news-savvy, but damn… most days I really feel like a blithering idiot.

This is an impressive type of sophisticated negging whereby you criticize yourself as a way to implicitly criticize the reader, and tell them they’re an idiot.

Most of Lemmy and most of the content on Lemmy isn’t from the US as far as I’m aware. This whole media blackout you’re talking about is a very real thing for most US people, but it simply won’t apply on Lemmy or the sources that are usually prevalent on Lemmy. For example I host some news sources on rss.ponder.cat; four out of the top five of the popular ones are non-US sources.

If you are telling the truth about your self-assessment, I would really urge you to re-examine that leap you took from “most US readers are misinformed” to “most of the people in these comments are misinformed” and definitely the one you took to “US is skillfully manipulating the Ukraine situation, and definitely not fucking it up because they don’t care about much of the issues involved all that much, except insofar as their friends can sell tons of weapons to all parties involved.”

Talking with my longtime acquaintances and friends in CA, DE, VN, and JP, the conversations invariably become “Did you hear about [current event causal factors]? This is super obvious, and here is [their reliable news sources].” Well, shit.

Tru dat

For example, the one that really blew me away was the US manipulating geopolitics with UA and RU so as to bring the EU to heel.

Lolwut

Never change, lemmy.world. Your opinions are always a magical adventure.

Most times of state-created suffering do not feel abnormal to most people.

Milton Mayer interviewed a bunch of German civilians after World War 2, and most of them remembered the concentration camp years as good times and had a positive view of Hitler. Only the professor among them really even had much awareness that anything important had been happening during that time; most of the others were just concerned with issues of family, their work life, their economic situation, and so on.

the Great Depression + the Gilded Age + the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand + the Civil War + segregation + Asian-American internment camps, but instead of happening over the course of a hundred years, we’re packing it all in to Thursday.

You forgot that on top of all that, the people on top have in their possession an integrated surveillance state superweapon the likes of which has never really been seen before.

How effective they’ll be able to make it, in service of destroying anyone who opposes them politically, remains to be seen, but people who’ve managed to build pale imitations of it have in the past been able to accomplish terrifying things, and they got this version all for free and all complete, someone else having built it for them.

I definitely wasn’t saying it will be a straightforward struggle or a fun time.

People were getting born into slavery, live their whole lives working in the fields not knowing how to read, and there was a massive political and paramilitary fight over whether that was going to continue and how and where, which presaged the explicit military fight the whole country had about it.

Then we had the civil war.

Then we had the labor movement, people getting born basically into slavery again, and having paramilitary battles to fight for their right to simply live and exist and have some kind of voice in how their daily life was organized, and have some life outside of their slavery existence, instead of living on corporate fiefdoms obeying the owner of their company like a king.

Then we had segregation, poll taxes and voter literacy tests, police brutality, water cannons and tear gas and police dogs and lynching. When people talked about making lynching illegal it was a huge debate. Without lynching, what would we even do? To keep order?

Somehow, from that, we made it to today. People today can expect that they can vote, they can have newspapers or web sites that say whatever they want, they can be free of police public or private just coming around and fucking up their shit because they irritated someone powerful. (That last one is debatable in the modern day, but for 99.9% of people I would say that most of what I just said is still true.) But none of that happened because “constitution” or because “America.”

It happened because people fought and died to make it happen. Maybe it’s useful that there was a piece of paper somewhere that was giving them something to hope for when they wanted to give up, give an end goal in mind and remind them why it was important. They had something to talk about to other people about why they were doing it. But “the country” didn’t do shit to help them in that fight. They just had to go and do it.

Fuck that, man. Stay and fight.

Have a passport (definitely apply for one today if you do not), have a plan, if shit really goes sideways then it’s every person for themselves and their family. But as hard as it might seem if you’ve grown up in a time of stability, we’ve been through way worse than this bullshit in this country, and we’ve usually come out of it stronger and wiser.

“I wish it need not have happened in my time," said Frodo.

“So do I,” said Gandalf, "and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

Are you comfortable running a little python script to do it? I’ve done something like this for myself for exactly the same reason, I could polish it up and show you and you could use it locally for yourself.