Caitlin Johnstone — Mass Media’s Russia Hysteria Is Openly Acknowledging The Power Of Propaganda

FiveThirtyEight editor-in-chief Nate Silver, a fairly reliable establishment loyalist, tweeted today about the new Russia report saying “If you wrote out a list of the most important factors in the 2016 election, I’m not sure that Russian social media memes would be among the top 100. The scale was quite small and there’s not much evidence that they were effective.”

“For instance, this story makes a big deal about a (post-election) Russian social media disinformation campaign on Bob Mueller based on… 5,000 tweets? That’s **nothing**. Platform-wide, there are something like 500,000,000 tweets posted each day,” Silver continued.…

What fraction of overall social media impressions on the 2016 election were generated by Russian troll farms? 0.1%? I'm not sure what the answer is, but suspect it's low, and it says something that none of the reports that hype up the importance of them address that question.

Then there is the question, "what to do about this?"

They tell you their concern is that Russians are trying to manipulate your mind with propaganda, but really their concern is that they want to be the only ones manipulating your mind with propaganda. They tell you Russian propaganda is so dangerous that it’s necessary to censor the internet and hide all narratives which aren’t in line with the ruling establishment in order to protect democracy, but really all they want is to have full control of the narratives you consume. This is evidenced in the article by the Washington Post which kicked off this latest round of Russia panic, which reports the following:

The report expressed concern about the overall threat social media poses to political discourse within nations and among them, warning that companies once viewed as tools for liberation in the Arab world and elsewhere are now threats to democracy.

“Social media have gone from being the natural infrastructure for sharing collective grievances and coordinating civic engagement to being a computational tool for social control, manipulated by canny political consultants and available to politicians in democracies and dictatorships alike,” the report said.

Caitlin Johnstone — Rogue Journalist

Mass Media’s Russia Hysteria Is Openly Acknowledging The Power Of Propaganda
Caitlin Johnstone