It’s fucking foreign grifters, because in the present day you can make money from being an “influencer”: all that fucking shit in the US has attracted every Techology savy, English-speaking scammer in the World because every fucking asshole with a computer and an Internet connection in his mother’s basement in bumfuck shitty-shit town in frigging Romenia can make more money in a day as an “influencer” feeding prejudiced, socially inept, delusions-of-grandeur-holding Americans with outrage that they can in a month working whatever job is available for them in shitty-shit nowehere-ville.
(Ditty for American grifters, by the way)
It’s targetting mainly the MAGAs because they’re the less intellectually capable population segment in the US, hence make for much easier marks.
Populism-dominated America together with the ability for “remote work” on the Internet and how one can make money from views has led to a fucking freeding frenzy for every tech-abled scammer with an internet connection and decent English-speaking skills in the World.
I bet this whole phenomenon is mainly a “emergent property” of the rewards and access structures in place in Social Media and that the top-down organised ops from state actors are but a tiny fraction of this shit show.
Nyet
In Soviet Russia, Bubba blow you!
You can tell it isn’t real because everyone in Youngstown in a mafioso
Live in Youngstown. It is a full of Midwestern turds. They should have flushed the whole city down the toilet when the steel left.
Why don’t we start to do this in reverse? “Я гей-фермер из Владивостока. Я поддерживаю слом системы.”
Because russia is not a democracy and an average russian is staying away from politics due to learned helplessness. Because of multiple factors, even protests won’t change anything. You can call for sabotage, but that isn’t what an average person would do.
Besides, their internet is far more restricted. They don’t have access to twitter. They use vk and registration there essentially requires a gov id, 1 per citizen.
You grow up in those countries, you’d soon learn to keep quiet.
My family was all born in mainland China, we live in the US right now, my parents keeps telling me to stop criticizing the government, as in neither the governments of of PRC and USA. Because in their mind:
dissent = trouble
shut up = safeWhich I mean, to be fair, seeing how PRC allegedly has overseas operatives and also the US’s current autocratization, they might actually have a point.
I don’t agree with that idea, but I get where they’re coming from. They lived through the Cutural revolution stuff. My dad was a kid during those times, my mom was born near the end of it, but she heard direct first hand accounts from my maternal grandparents. So… those fears gets passed on. My mom told me many times to not post anti-government views on the internet… even here in the US… 👀
I know what you mean. My parents (both Ukrainian) were telling me to lower my profile and don’t post anything political cause we don’t know where are we heading. They did enjoy their freedom to criticize gov at home & with the family members though, but in a very characteristic Ukrainian trait - all the politicians bad, they all steal etc.
My wife’s granny from Belarus, she switched to very quiet whisper every time she was talking about politics. Even in Ukraine, where people faced no consequences. Because walls have ears.
And re genetic memory, I know what you mean cause even people that didn’t experience Holodomor had very different attitude towards food, having stashes & wasting food was basically unthinkable.
dissent = trouble shut up = safe
That’s true in the US, anyone who thinks they have free speech hasn’t said anything that anyone cared about, and were asleep the entirety of 2020 and hasn’t turned on the news now that Trump’s ICE are so wildly incompetent they don’t even bother to obfuscate what they’re doing.
Those who don’t move don’t notice their chains.
…even protests won’t change anything.
the fact that you get Siberia’d for holding a blank poster on the street says more than enough to this end.
This isn’t the key factor. Every protest that has big political change goal is potentially dangerous for those who participate, in every country. That didn’t stop Ukrainians, for example.
But the thing that russian gov wouldn’t just go away. Even if 10 millions would be on the streets for like a month. Even if they defend against riot police instead of running away. The key figures would just stay till the bitter end. They would use army. And then what, an average russian doesn’t have a rifle at home. And who would you fight, an army?
At this point it’s easier to just join russian corps in Ukrainian army. At least it is organized.
But then again, they won’t get a million on the streets. And they won’t resist the riot police. Russian protest is a sad view.
When Russia was not in the war, protests were way more prominent. Some of them were not sad at all.
The thing is, protests don’t do shit on their own. They are tools that opposition use to organise and send a message, and Putin learned to strike where it hurts, so when you participate in a protest all you achieve is that you paint a target on your back.
This is one of the reasons Ukranian protest of 2014 ultimately prevailed, cops were targeting protesters and not the leaders, so it became an organised fight.
Not sure whether this is serious, but to provide a serious answer: you can’t create a healthy democracy by spreading misinformation. Misinformation that’s aligned with your agenda might help push it in the short term, but it also undermines trust (in this case trust in what the average person is saying, since you can’t tell who genuine participants in a discussion are). In a low trust environment, people tend to gravitate toward big personalities and believe sources and make decisions based on their own gut feelings (i.e. their personal prejudices) rather than on things like people’s real experiences and accurate information from trusted institutions.
Demagogues like Putin thrive in this environment because ultimately they don’t have (or care about) solutions to the average person’s problems. They get by based on personality, stoking prejudice etc. But policies that are based on the truth and what the average person actually needs suffer.
That’s part of why russia is like this actually. Propaganda both pro and anti soviet wasn’t telling the whole truth and shit got weird
It was a joke. I lived and worked in Russia for some years. I understand that the country has more fundamental problems to resolve.
Do you mean propagandise the Russian population? The West is already doing it by way of Radio Free Europe, NED and other NGOs. It is not a discussion that comes up often, but on occasions Russian trolls will bring up about color revolutions in Russian sphere of influence that advocate for democratic reforms, which is catalysed by the West through said media and institutions. Hence, for the Russian jingoists and Kremlin, their own propaganda against the West is justified. But if you ask the trolls what is objectively bad with promoting democracy? You will get crickets. That is certainly better than propping up illiberal and regressive groups.
Don’t forget PBS.
Sesame Street is literally one of the most effective pieces of western propaganda. Reaching, primarily, kids and moms, in oppressive, patriarchal societies…and delivering messages of acceptance and equality right into their homes.
Better pull the plug from that, right Donnie?
can’t control women and kids unless they feel helpless and scared.
kind of pathetic when you think about it. the only control that they can hold over you is the control you allow them to force upon you.
become ungovernable, fuck the oligarchy.
In this exact case you will be wadhed away with a wsve of homophoby. Because in Russia, many people with otherwise sane and non-destructive views are still homophobic. To compare with some other country, I would say it’s something like in Turkey.
So if I was trying to improve Russian society through “good kind of propaganda”(not sure it’s a thing), I would start from something else, and not from this problematic topic. Otherwise if will be generally harder to find wide support.
And when I’m thinking of that, homophobia in Russia is just a result of people “worrying too much about other people’s shit” - everyone knows how you should or shouldn’t live, and ready to tell you about it. So if you work on that in general, that would help.
I hate this shit the problems with America and its oppression isn’t primarily due to scary “foreigners” its homegrown and refusing to confront it as such makes it impossible to destroy and feeds into warmongering and xenophobia.
Foreigners are just the “others” used by the elites to point the tribalist weak minded morons towards somebody else whilst the very much local elites pillage the place.
And this is not just done to the MAGA muppets: notice the whole bitching and moaning about “foreign interference” from the rest - guess what, the influence of the likes of Russia and even China have in countries like the US is fucking nothing next to that of the local traditional fatcats owning the Press and Tech-bros owning social media or even in relative terms that cultivated by the kind of Propaganda ops we see in action here in the most popular Lemmy.world forums.
Fuck, if you want to worry about Foreign Actors, look at how Israel got most of the West, especially the US, to basically destroy in non-aligned countries at least half a fucking century of cultivate image of being Rule Of Law abiding and Freedom Promoting, which amongst other things resulted in some of those now turning towards Russia or China - all this shit to protected the fucking modern day Nazis whilst they get off from murdering little brow children.
The supposed Leftwing of the US (but not really: in World terms the Democrats are a hard Right party, just ultra Capitalist Neolibs rather than Fascists) are just as much doing the whole “it’s those scary foreigners” smoke and mirrors show to turn the mob eyes away from their sponsors as the Fascists, it’s just that in their propaganda the cartoonish bad guys are “state actors” rather than “immigrants”.
And all the fucking shit in the US (not just the propaganda but its use to distract the crowd from the pillaging by the likes of the Finance Industry, “realestate investors” and other parasites) is leaking to the rest of the World and accelerating the shitstorm elsewhere.
You missed the point. Twitter just revealed that many of the deranged MAGA influencers are from outside the US.
The main issue with MAGA is actually foreigners! Suprise surprise. That is what the meme is making fun of.
Yes, US hasn’t got a monopoly in propaganda and internet narrative manipulation. And this was in 2013.
Surprise Surprise!
It is possible to care about multiple things at a time
if a weed helps an invasive but native species grow, whose fault is it?
it’s the rich assholes fault that keep telling us that it’s the grass’ fault for growing that caused the invasive species to spread.
who planted the weeds? the rich.
While I think there is a huge honegrown issue, the foreign influence is another gigantic problem that can’t be ignored and it was just 100% proven.
Issues like this are systemic and need to be looked at in at a macro as opposed to a micro way.
