5 Russian Propaganda Techniques. (Please read this. Thank You.)

[DetlefK]

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2017/8/20/1690714/-Three-Russian-propaganda-techniques-being-used-by-the-Trump-administration-and-how-to-fight-them

Vanity Fair wrote about the goal of toxic cynicism in Russian propaganda:

At the heart of this mind-set is the idea that there is no such thing as objective truth or even facts, because everything is spun or disguised to reflect advantageously on one group or another. “The whole idea of values has been thoroughly debased in Russia, to the extent that if you talk about Western values you’ll just get a laugh,” says Ben Nimmo, a research fellow at the Atlantic Council. This environment of toxic cynicism allows Putin’s word to be as good as anyone else’s, because according to Moscow’s worldview everyone, including and especially westerners, is a self-righteous hypocrite and a liar.

I hear this from conservatives all the time. They think that everything that comes from the left is some sort of spin. Therefore, any spin of their own is justified.





Whataboutism is a sly sideways ad hominem attack. It’s an appeal to hypocrisy. You think Nazis running over people in Charlottesville are bad? Well, what about Antifa?

...

No matter the issue, change the subject.

Russian journalist Alexey Kovalev wrote a viral post earlier this year in which he warned the American press corp about answers from the Whitehouse packed with “false moral equivalences and straight, undiluted bullshit.”

(This is a favorite of Putin. If he gets a question he doesn't like in an interview, he changes subjects by bombarding you with memorized statistics.)





The United States isn’t here yet, but one of the tactics used by Vladislav Surkov, the inventor of Putinism, is to try to co-opt narratives across all strata of politics and communities. The idea is that if you can control these narratives, they can be controlled to the advantage of those in charge.

Peter Pomerantsev wrote this about Surkov’s strategy in The Atlantic:

The brilliance of this new type of authoritarianism is that instead of simply oppressing opposition, as had been the case with 20th-century strains, it climbs inside all ideologies and movements, exploiting and rendering them absurd. One moment Surkov would fund civic forums and human-rights NGOs, the next he would quietly support nationalist movements that accuse the NGOs of being tools of the West. With a flourish he sponsored lavish arts festivals for the most provocative modern artists in Moscow, then supported Orthodox fundamentalists, dressed all in black and carrying crosses, who in turn attacked the modern-art exhibitions. The Kremlin’s idea is to own all forms of political discourse, to not let any independent movements develop outside of its walls.

The Kremlin switches messages at will to its advantage, climbing inside everything: European right-wing nationalists are seduced with an anti-EU message; the Far Left is co-opted with tales of fighting U.S. hegemony; U.S. religious conservatives are convinced by the Kremlin’s fight against homosexuality. And the result is an array of voices, working away at global audiences from different angles, producing a cumulative echo chamber of Kremlin support, all broadcast on RT.





--------------------------

I would like to add a fourth one: lie by omission.

This is especially used by RT:
- First, they only cover stories that make the US look bad. RT doesn't even bother with hyping stories that make Russia look good. It's all about demonizing the US.
- Second, when they have a story, they cut away facts until the story has a narrative that makes the US look bad. The uninformed reader gets a (sometimes totally) wrong impression while RT is technically not lying.



And a fifth one: "I'm just asking questions!"

Andrew Feinberg used to write for the russian news-website "Sputnik" until he was fed up and quit. Why? He was fed up that his editor dictated to him what questions he was supposed to ask in press-conferences. Why is this important?

He was supposed to ask questions about rumors or questions that are are based on the premise that some rumor is true. Asking the question is not the goal: The goal is to give the rumor credibility by bringing it up. The goal is legitimizing a baseless claim by treating it like a well-known fact.
Sputnik and RT love to use a variant of this where they accuse the "mainstream-media" of censorship by not reporting about certain stories.

Example: "Why isn't the mainstream-media investigating Hillary Clinton's pedophile-ring???"
I have witnessed this myself. I got in a shouting-match with somebody from the anti-american Alt-Left about "Pizzagate". This was way, way after "Pizzagate" had fallen apart, but he insisted that journalists keep on investigating Hillary Clinton's connections to pedophiles until they can find that perfect, irrefutable, unfakable piece of evidence that clears her once and for all.
(He was also a 9/11-truther and couldn't think of one bad thing about Trump.)

[stonecutter357]

1. K&R and bookmarked .

[sharedvalues]

2. Lying by omission: Fox bread and butter

This stuff is hardly only Russian.

Goebbels knew all about it.

And Fox and Limbaugh and Breitbart all use these methods.

The best way to fight propaganda would be for journalists to #protectthetruth -- just speak the truth instead of repeating bothsides, repeating people even when they lie. That's how the right exploits our press -- Kellyanne Conway is a recent example but Tom Price, Pat Toomey and many other GOP use this approach.

[redgreenandblue]

3. "Whatabout" may be a fallacy in theory. In the real world hypocricy matters.

Standards either apply to everyone equally or they don't apply at all.

It is, for instance, hard to justify sanctions against another countries for war-crimes when one is at the same time providing cover for war criminals in ones own country.

Promoting one's own interests through selectively enforcing standards undermines the whole idea of universal justice. It is in some sense worse than not enforcing the standards at all.

[DetlefK]

5. This is not about hypocrisy. It's about sabotaging a conversation.

"Oh, you want to talk about that one person who died in Charlottesville? Do you know how many people die from crack and heroine? How come we're not talking about them? What about the babies of addicted mothers who are born as crack-addicts? How can you get so riled up about the death of ONE person when there so much bigger issues that concern all of us?"

[mopinko]

13. or a recent favorite- how about all those people who were killed in chicago.

yeah, i hate having my city be a punchline for assholes.

[Madam45for2923]

15. I guess article hit some nerves. LOL.

[yardwork]

10. Bullshit. No country is pure.

[BainsBane]

18. Common standards are one thing

Using war crimes in one country to justify another is not common standard. It seeks to normalize and excuse crimes against humanity, and that is exactly how we've seen it used by people who claim there is something an anti-war about justifyng gassing of Syrian children or the invasion of the Ukraine. They do not oppose human rights abuses; they justify and abet them. The purpose of such excuses are to ensure mass murder goes unchecked and uncriticized. People who uphold human rights do so in all situations. They don't pretend there is something pro-peace by excusing or denying atrocities committed by countries besides the US.

Besides, the very LAST thing such people uphold is common standards. Central to their world view is a fundamental belief in human inequality, so that they NEVER hold themselves or those they ally themselves with the the same standards they impose on others.

What they do is promote, justify and abet murder. They lie in order to ensure authoritarian mass murders go unpunished. Evil could not proliferate without their assistance. Every genocidal regime has benefited from the assistance of such people. By insisting no country or individual has the moral authority to object to crimes against humanity, they work to ensure such crimes go unchecked.

I would also hazard a guess that many of them were MIA when it came to protesting events like the Iraq War. I know that the protests I regularly attended were far smaller than the legions who now point to Iraq as justification for Putin, Assad, or their refusal to vote for the Dem nominee. Their interest in that war appears to be its rhetorical utility in justifying the gassing of children and murder of civilians by Russia, Asad, N Korea, and other authoritarian regimes, as well as the installation of a fascist, authoritarian wannabe in the White House.

While it would be nice to comfort ourselves in believing they are all paid Russian trolls, I think it unlikely all of them are.

[Madam45for2923]

4. Exposed how exactly social media is being used to influence elections

Robert Mercer: the big data billionaire waging war on mainstream media,

This is how they influence elections and even financial markets which has proven very successful



https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/feb/26/robert-mercer-breitbart-war-on-media-steve-bannon-donald-trump-nigel-farage



In the course of the US election, Cambridge Analytica amassed a database, as it claims on its website, of almost the entire US voting population – 220 million people – and the Washington Post reported last week that SCL was increasing staffing at its Washington office and competing for lucrative new contracts with Trump’s administration. “It seems significant that a company involved in engineering a political outcome profits from what follows. Particularly if it’s the manipulation, and then resolution, of fear,” says Briant.

It’s the database, and what may happen to it, that particularly exercises Paul-Olivier Dehaye, a Swiss mathematician and data activist who has been investigating Cambridge Analytica and SCL for more than a year. “How is it going to be used?” he says. “Is it going to be used to try and manipulate people around domestic policies? Or to ferment conflict between different communities? It is potentially very scary. People just don’t understand the power of this data and how it can be used against them.”

There are two things, potentially, going on simultaneously: the manipulation of information on a mass level, and the manipulation of information at a very individual level. Both based on the latest understandings in science about how people work, and enabled by technological platforms built to bring us together.

Are we living in a new era of propaganda, I ask Emma Briant? One we can’t see, and that is working on us in ways we can’t understand? Where we can only react, emotionally, to its messages? “Definitely. The way that surveillance through technology is so pervasive, the collection and use of our data is so much more sophisticated. It’s totally covert. And people don’t realise what is going on.”





Also

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/feb/26/us-billionaire-mercer-helped-back-brexit



Cambridge Analytica, an offshoot of a British company, SCL Group, which has 25 years’ experience in military disinformation campaigns and “election management”, claims to use cutting-edge technology to build intimate psychometric profiles of voters to find and target their emotional triggers. Trump’s team paid the firm more than $6m (£4.8m) to target swing voters, and it has now emerged that Mercer also introduced the firm – in which he has a major stake – to Farage.

The communications director of Leave.eu, Andy Wigmore, told the Observer that the longstanding friendship between Nigel Farage and the Mercer family led Mercer to offer his help – free – to the Brexit campaign because of their shared goals. Wigmore said that he introduced Farage and Leave.eu to Cambridge Analytica: “They were happy to help. Because Nigel is a good friend of the Mercers. And Mercer introduced them to us. He said, ‘Here’s this company we think may be useful to you’. What they were trying to do in the US and what we were trying to do had massive parallels. We shared a lot of information.”

The strategy involved harvesting data from people’s Facebook and other social media profiles and then using machine learning to “spread” through their networks. Wigmore admitted the technology and the level of information it gathered from people was “creepy”. He said the campaign used this information, combined with artificial intelligence, to decide who to target with highly individualised advertisements and had built a database of more than a million people, based on advice Cambridge Analytica supplied. Two weeks ago Arron Banks, Leave.eu’s founder, stated in a series of tweets that Gerry Gunster (Leave.eu’s pollster) and Cambridge Analytica with “world class” AI had helped them gain “unprecedented levels of engagement”. “AI won it for Leave,” he said.

By law, all donations of services-in-kind worth more than £7,500 must be reported to the electoral commission. A spokesman said that no donation from the company or Mercer to Leave.eu had been filed.





http://www.cnbc.com/2014/11/07/robert-mercer-the-most-important-political-money-man-youve-never-heard-of.html

Thanks both to looser campaign finance rules and his promotion to help lead one of the largest hedge funds in the world, Mercer has quietly become a major player in politics since 2010. He donated more than $8 million this election cycle alone, putting him behind only Singer as the second-largest Republican booster. And Mercer was fourth overall regardless of party after hedge fund manager-turned environmentalist Tom Steyer and former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, according to data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics.


https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-07-21/renaissance-avoided-more-than-6-billion-tax-report-says



A Renaissance Technologies LLC hedge fund’s investors probably avoided more than $6 billion in U.S. income taxes over 14 years through transactions with Barclays Plc and Deutsche Bank AG, a Senate committee said.

The hedge fund used contracts with the banks to establish the “fiction” that it wasn’t the owner of thousands of stocks traded each day, said Senator Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat and chairman of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. The maneuver sought to transform profits from rapid trading into long-term capital gains taxed at a lower rate, he said.

“It meant enormous profit for both the banks and the hedge funds,” Levin told reporters yesterday in Washington. “Ordinary Americans had to shoulder a tax burden of billions of dollars, a burden that was shrugged off by those hedge funds.”

https://www.democraticunderground.com/10028716802

[Madam45for2923]

6. Tactic 1: Toxic cynicism

The idea behind toxic cynicism is discouragement.

If you believe that nothing you do is going to make a difference, you’re more likely to check out and not even vote.

We saw this in large doses in the last election: Everything is awful so f*ck it, why not vote for Trump? If everyone is lying, what difference does it make?

We’ve heard this for years from right-wing pundits in these forms:

You can’t trust the government
You can’t trust the media
You can’t trust science
You can’t trust academia
In the past, these narratives have been used to discredit traditional institutions while building up the organizations that corporate America wants us to trust: Big business.

We all know the marketing—We need to free some “markets.” We need tax cuts to unleash the power of our corporations. What’s good for business is what’s good for America. Markets regulate themselves. More consumer choice will fix all of our issues with government.

All of these narratives were designed by corporate special interest groups like the Chamber of Commerce to encourage one thing: Selling off government (organizations designed by and for people) to private industry (organizations with profit as the main goal).

We’ve heard so much of this over the years from our own propagandists that we were really susceptible to even greater levels of cynicism in this past election. Over and over again we were told that Hillary Clinton was just as bad.

Vanity Fair wrote about the goal of toxic cynicism in Russian propaganda:

At the heart of this mind-set is the idea that there is no such thing as objective truth or even facts, because everything is spun or disguised to reflect advantageously on one group or another. “The whole idea of values has been thoroughly debased [in Russia], to the extent that if you talk about Western values you’ll just get a laugh,” says Ben Nimmo, a research fellow at the Atlantic Council. This environment of toxic cynicism allows Putin’s word to be as good as anyone else’s, because according to Moscow’s worldview everyone, including and especially westerners, is a self-righteous hypocrite and a liar.
I hear this from conservatives all the time. They think that everything that comes from the left is some sort of spin. Therefore, any spin of their own is justified.

[Madam45for2923]

7. Tactics for fighting cynicism

Pointing out propaganda techniques is not the most effective way of fighting them. With this in mind, I like to talk about a few ways of countering them if you encounter them personally.

1. If you know folks who just like to dump on everything on social media, get rid of them. I call these commenters “seagull commenters” because they just like to take a shit on everything. This doesn’t mean conservatives. It means trolls.

2. Form groups of allies where the moderators can get rid of these people.

3. If you see people who are liberal getting down, pick them up. Tell them what they’re doing does matter. Talk about how it does make a difference. It takes psychological energy to fight movements and we need to pick people up, not tear them apart.

4. Work to establish trust with people.

5. Hold conversations at a values level rather than a policy level. If you can recognize when people you know have the same values as you do, it’s easier to see them as on your side even if you disagree about a candidate or a policy.

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2017/8/20/1690714/-Three-Russian-propaganda-techniques-being-used-by-the-Trump-administration-and-how-to-fight-them

[saidsimplesimon]

8. thanks DetlefK

I have enjoyed watching a MSN team(not joe's) shred politicians who try these moves.

[dalton99a]

9. Kick.

[certainot]

11. looks like what 1500 radio stations do every day and

have been for 30 years.

at some point, maybe after rove lost the white house and central control of talk radio and then limbaugh got pissed at them the russians could use something like breitbart to get more influence in it.

soon we'll find out they've been paying limbaugh and hannity, etc. for years

[Madam45for2923]

12. I think Putin found them to be low hanging fruit calling out pick me pick me. Putin heeded the call

[certainot]

25. i hope they all have cyprus bank accts and get found out, whether

they knew they were working for putin or not.

[Madam45for2923]

26. Yep! May it all backfire spectacularly!

[longship]

14. "Just asking questions" JAQing off

R&

[rpannier]

16. Bookmarked

Thanks

[BainsBane]

17. That really sounds familiar

and exactly what we would hear from the Putin apologists who used to frequent DU.


Excellent OP.

Also people can see which stories Kremlin trolls are pushing here. http://dashboard.securingdemocracy.org

[speaktruthtopower]

19. Russia..

isn't anywhere near as good at propaganda as our people. We're the home of Madison Ave.

[paleotn]

21. We created the tools, analytical and psycological...

that are being used against us, so that Putin and oligarchs become and remain rich as croesus.

[DetlefK]

22. Example:

https://www.rt.com/op-edge/400353-us-military-charlottesville-imperialism/

----------------------

This article is bashing American Exceptionalism and the notion that the US somehow have the right to intervene in other countries.
(And btw, according to the article, everybody in the US loves US imperialism. Including Liberals and Democrats.)

What the article does not mention is that every country has a similar "exceptionalism". Including Russia.

Why is Russia freaking out about Finland joining NATO?
Why is Russia freaking out about the Baltic States joining NATO?
Why is Russia freaking out about Ukraine joining NATO?
Why is Russia freaking out about Georgia joining NATO?
Why is Russia freaking out about Moldavia joining NATO?

Because those countries belong traditionally into Russia's sphere of geopolitical influence. And now those countries are daring to break with that tradition and do what they want.
Russia is pissed because other countries don't care about "Russian Exceptionalism".

Just look at the mythology they have constructed for modern Russia! Russia as the last bastion of goodness, of Christianity, of morals, of honor, of peace, in a depraved world. Isn't that the sort of exceptionalism that is bad if the US does it?

[KewlKat]

20. recommend

[niyad]

23. k and r and bookmarking--have to watch eclipse

[Madam45for2923]

24. Eclipse done. Back here. Kicking.

[AlexSFCA]

27. there is one more (and a big one) - Projection

One of putin's favorite and heavily overused technique by trump. Before you get blamed for something you know is truth, immidiatey project on the opposition. E.g., clinton collusion, clinton drug test, lock her up, etc. All the things trump is guilty of himself and his opponet is not. You can bet trump used cocaine.