Just crazy what is happening
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It’s scary that apparently russia can significantly alter european elections by running tiktok campaigns
No, what’s actually scary is that we can see brain-washing on social media in realtime for years and you -like a lot of people- are still surprised because you are totally oblivious to what’s happening right before your eyes.
That seems like an unnecessarily rude way to put it. A major nation using the full force of its intelligence/military apparatus to manipulate the average person minding their own business using ever evolving forms of propaganda isn’t something I really feel a citizen should need to deal with on a personal level. I don’t believe most people feel or should feel they are the target of another nation, especially one they are not in a hot war with. Our governments are failing us by allowing it to happen because enough of them don’t have the desire to stop it.
It is people that look like you, talk like you, live where you do, having the support of people and organizations you trust spreading disinformation. It gets rehashed and passed along by people you see and know in your real life. There is a basic level of personal responsibility, but when no one teaches you how to spot it, when it appears in legitimate media vetted by professionals whose job it is to spot this and they all fail you, crapping on an individual just trying to live their life isn’t right.
It gets rehashed and passed along by people you see and know in your real life.
No, it usually gets rehashed by media that gives a fuck about facts or reality anymore because all that matters is clicks. And clicks are generated by creating outrage and encouraging doom scrolling, not by informing people. Because they have to compete with an even darker pit of ragebait and engagement farming that is social media. Which for a lot of people even replaced other media.
You are right in regards to singular people not being suddenly responsible for falling for a well organised propaganda campaign. Nonetheless nothing of this shitshow fell from the skly suddenly or was quickly created by one bad actor throwing money at it. We are watching the pile of crap that is persistent media failure for many, mnay years now. Without giving a shit about it.
Should governments protect us better? Sure, in a perfect world. But we, not some government, killed the media when we refused to pay for information anymore. And when we happily started shoving bullshit created on social media by algorithms with the sole intent of keeping us engaged into our brains, instead of trying to actually be informed about the world.
Things like for-profit media and social media have financial interest in getting you to devote attention to things you really have no interest in. They are not growing their market if you aren’t getting sucked in to whatever they are pushing at you.
It can be innocuous. I am only on Facebook to share stories of animal rescues here on Lemmy. That is literally all I do there. But I get pushed plenty of stuff I never asked for. I keep getting video of hoof care. I don’t have any livestock. A lot of things in the video I find absolutely repellant. But I watch so many of them now, so they keep pushing me more. At first I said, this is disgusting, I don’t want to see this. But now, I see how much work the guys have to do to keep these animals healthy, and I feel it has to be such a huge relief for something weighing so much to have its feet fixed and feeling good again. That’s the kind of thing a media algorithm will do.
But you get people with legitimate complaints with life. Not finding work, not making enough money, feeling they have no rights, wondering why life isn’t going their way. They start to get pushed things where some people give legit advice, and some will be a little darker. Linger on those mean spirited ones a bit too long, and the computer says, oh they seem to like this, send them more. Without even actively looking for it, you start to get exposed to things you never would have looked for. Pickup artists, nationalists, zealotry, racists. You get fed it in larger and larger doses and you may or may not notice.
Algorithms do what they’re built to do. But we don’t always remember they’re there. We don’t know who is making them or what behavior they are looking for. Most people probably couldn’t really tell you what an algorithm is. Most public officials are included in that. Tech will keep getting better, and hopefully we do as well.
We’ve known this since they threw the 2016 Brexit referendum, but finally a government has had the balls to call it out and re-do the vote.
A top Romanian court has annulled the first round of the country’s presidential election, days after declassified intelligence alleged Russia ran a coordinated online campaign to promote the far-right outsider who won the first round.
The constitutional court’s decision – which is final – came on Friday after President Klaus Iohannis declassified intelligence two days earlier that alleged Russia ran a sprawling campaign comprising thousands of social media accounts to promote Calin Georgescu across platforms like TikTok and Telegram.
Despite being a huge outsider who declared zero campaign spending, Georgescu emerged as the frontrunner on 24 November. He was due to face the reformist Elena Lasconi, of the Save Romania Union party, in a runoff on Sunday.
More details soon …
- Associated Press, via The Guardian
So now that a cout has ruled that there was foreign interference to such a degree that a presidential election has to be redone: At what point does this get treated as an attack by NATO or the EU?
I’m very glad they did that! Now can we please do it here in the US too? We also had a big Russian interference problem.
I’m really curious about what the hexbear version of this post looks like…
This made me reflect on multiple interesting ideas.
This has been a case of hidden-intended foreign interference, where foreign interests have supported a candidate without making it openly. Even patriotic people should feel against this… unless may be they have already voted for it, humans are like that.
An interesting alternative would have been that, for example, Elon Musk (which may still be popular among some people) decide from the beginning to openly support such candidate, trying to influence positively the candidate’s success with all his resources. Being an European country, this would be also foreign interference. You may see where this reflections are going…
Lastly, imagine a similar situation to the previous one but with a national powerful lobby. Is not foreign interference, but is the same kind of action in the end, a particular interest investing in a political candidate. This happens everywhere, and has proved to be very successful for them, with grey lines drawn mostly on direct money donations in some countries, which nowadays is a bit of a scarce control anyway.
Now, I find hard to believe that some candidate would be able to convince you that, despite benefit of being openly supported by a particular group of interest, will not represent it but the promises you want to hear once the interference is openly public… yet, considering all the media control those groups of interest invest on, I think we already are in a situation were all candidates of success in democracies around the world have strong conflicts of interest with such groups… and probably has been like that from the beginning of democracies.
It seems easy to imagine that many may find justified such actions (call out invalid the elections) under evidence of foreign interference but I see a grey line on the mechanisms that happened here, and we still do not call on responsibility to the voter on reflecting what is voting, specially when the media is influenced in spread a particular consensus or debate.
I am afraid that hope is only on the voting individual capabilities to react to media and to judge the reach of these conflicts of interest and the intelligence to decide how to vote (even to non favourite candidates or even voting in white), because in the end, a democracy blocking foreign interference can still be in the practice just a national group of interest blocking a foreign one.
