I appreciate how absolutely sophomoric and naive this propaganda is. The US has played this game in Italy, Iran, Guatemala, Brazil, Viet Nam, and Iraq just to name a few of the literally dozens of foreign victims of US coups and regime changes bought about by their "foreign influence." Now the DHS, an agency thats only 17 years old, thinks a pictograph about pizza is going to somehow help bolster Americans from other nations doing the same thing?<p>It wont. This tactic worked for the Tobacco industry in the seventies, it worked for the cola industry in 2006, and it continues to serve diligently for oil and energy companies during climate change. This model of disinformation has also helped spread measles throughout the developed world through the anti-vax movement.<p>The problem is American education. You cannot spend 40 years cutting public education to the bone and turning colleges into profit mills without some sort of brain-drain. We've arrived in 2020 with a nation of citizens that lack the capacity for intelligent argument and critical analysis of ideas. This is also in large part due to the nature of how we get our information, namely as a "bleeds and leads" info-tainment format where our opinions are cultivated as a product of either 0 or 1, red or blue, liberal or conservative. The american opinion is largely an accessory of corporate advertisement in 2019.
I think that blaming Russians for everything is doing more harm than good. Sometimes it's not Russia, sometimes it's just ideological opponents, conspiracy theorists or 4channers who like to watch the world burn, sometimes all of them at the same time (think Pizzagate).
What is surprising to me is how poorly prepared western society has been to deal with this, considering we’ve been doing it ourselves for so many years through various NGOs.<p>The EU funds so many pro-democratic programs around the world, many have been especially focused in the Russian influence sphere. How have we been caught so completely off guard when our non-democratic adversaries started doing it to us?<p>/edit
I didn't mean to put NGOs trying to spread democracy on par with staterun propaganda, I'm just wondering why noone saw it coming in time for our systems to prepare.
An interesting thought experiment is to look at all the "for-fun" online communities that you've been a part of. For instance, game forums, enthusiast subreddits, etc., and see how the discussion there varies from discussion on political things. Of course it will be different, but I think I have started to see factionization in the larger online communities that I am a part of. However, it's hard to know whether this is human nature, or something learned from other sources. (For example, a user who visits political subreddits and then takes that attitude to the Hearthstone subreddit.)
I'm not convinced that "the GRU has access to Facebook!" is a larger internal security concern to the US than the fact that more than a third of the residents of the most populous state could legally be considered citizens of a separate country....
Social media bots are child's play. Here's how foreign interference really works:<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3lSjXhMUVKE" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3lSjXhMUVKE</a>
Can't social media enforce a harder stance to eliminate fake accounts? Forcing real info & phone number usage, constant re-validation on suspected accounts, asking real photos, with real IDs, confirmation by others etc.. I think many trolls would simply disappear if their identities are public. Maybe anonymity shouldn't be a thing in social media?<p>Though such enforcements are also not the best, then the tech companies are given too much power. Hard topic, but just asking people to be careful is never going to be enough, so much passion out there, people will reply. Or real discussion will be watered down when real people are called bots.