this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2023
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Ryan McBeth talks about this all the time, especially DIP (deceptive imagery persuasion). His shorts are tight and insightful.
Here's a recent article he was promoting by disinformation researcher Caroline Bueno, in this case in reference to Russian disinformation efforts around the Hawaii wildfires.
They really, really know how to manipulate the (admittedly extremely credulous) American right-wing social media and media outlets. They play them like a fiddle. Not that it's hard to do, but it is disheartening how well they do it.
Don't forget that they're more than able to manipulate the online left as well. It's not as if getting the left to fight itself is particularly challenging.
Just ask the Lemmy developers about the imperative of removing Nazis from power in Ukraine, to name the lowest hanging fruit. There's a chunk of the left that will believe essentially anything that supports a general narrative of "America bad". I remember reading a report on how Russian operatives organized pro and anti Black Lives Matter rallies in the same cities during the summer of 2020, just to maximize the chaos and division.
I'm very much not trying to 'le both sides" this; obviously online leftists are a much less prominent political force than our grandparents on Facebook. But they absolutely do know what strings to pull and what narratives to push to target people of any and all political persuasions, and we shouldn't forget that.