Americans Believe Russian Disinformation ‘To Alarming Degree’
Americans Believe Russian Disinformation ‘To Alarming Degree’
Republicans were, though, more likely to believe Russian disinformation claims than their Democratic counterparts, with 57.6% falling for at least one Russian disinformation claim, compared with just 17.9% of Democrats and 29.5% of people who didn't identify with one particular party.
thanks to the right wing media lying to American people for decades this has become a reality
No. Shit. It's infuriating.
Well, an alarming number of Americans believe that Trump should be president. And that America is the best country in the world, and that compassion is communism.
This tells more about how gullible Americans are, and not much about the skills of unchecked Russian propaganda.
They need someone to blame. Come on now.
Gullibility appears to cut across party lines, with respondents identifying as Democrats just as likely as Republicans to believe at least one of the 10 false claims.
Republicans were, though, more likely to believe Russian disinformation claims than their Democratic counterparts, with 57.6% falling for at least one Russian disinformation claim, compared with just 17.9% of Democrats and 29.5% of people who didn't identify with one particular party.
I looked at the 10 false claims used for the test. Most of them were ridiculously easy to dismiss as false. The only one I had difficulty with was identifying whether social security cuts were part of "Project 2025" agenda, due to the agenda being very extensive (the source says 922 pages) and me not living in a country that it's about. Thus I'd have answered "not sure". I'd have also answered "not sure" about the birth place of some terrorist.
If people stumble on these, people are really poorly informed or unable / unwilling to inform themselves.
Some guesses.
In general, propaganda works. That's why people pay for it. When you have a delicate equilibrium and you can push it past the tipping point with little effort, that's the most economical way of disabling an opponent. :( Using force would require a spending a trillion, but using disinformation, you can get outcomes with a tiny amount.
Russia is spending significant amounts on promulgating misinformation in the U.S. Last year, for example, the U.S. Department of Justice indicted two people for funneling nearly $10 million through a Tennessee-based content creation company to publish misinformation about Ukraine.
The problem with these debunks is that the "false claim" is adjusted so that it is easier to debunk.
Polio vaccines contain mercury-based ingredients
By specifically focusing on polio it can be claimed this was never true. Remove the word polio and there is partial truth. Some combined vaccines still contain tiny amounts Thimerosal though most don't.
Their methodology involves asking people a bunch of questions and then if they don’t get 100% correct they’re counted as believing misinformation. Putting aside the unreliability of online polls, that’s a pretty misleading way of framing it, if you ask me.
If you asked people 10 questions about just about anything, you’d probably find a substantial number of people who don’t get every one right. In fact, they did do this under the heading, “Disinformation Nation: Americans Widely Believe False Claims on a Range of Topics.” That’s probably why they found that, “Respondents identifying as Democrats were about as likely (82 percent) to believe at least one of the 10 false claims as those identifying as Republicans (81 percent).”
Many of the people responding to the poll may not have ever encountered the claims they were asked about. If you are first encountering a claim in that context, you pretty much just have to guess whether you think it’s true based on vibes. And you can easily set up misleading vibes, like, “Conservative initiative Project 2025 proposes cutting or eliminating Social Security” which is false because it’s not explicitly stated, but it does explicitly state a whole bunch of other horrible shit, so like, if you get got by that one it doesn’t really show that you believe in an inaccurate picture of the world, just that you got tripped up by details. But that claim dings you for “believing misinformation” just as much as " COVID-19 vaccines killed 15 million people worldwide."
So like it doesn’t really tell us very much about how far reaching disinformation really is, the results are more of a reflection of their methodology.
[Reposted from the last time this study was posted]
Many of the people responding to the poll may not have ever encountered the claims they were asked about.
However, they do offer a "not sure" option, which can be taken if a person knows they're not informed.
uneducated country that wants to be even more uneducated. runs its platform based on robbing the country blind whilst using the dumbest of the population as a shield by rage baiting them into protecting them against the opposition.
the world is going to be unrecognizable in 20 years. I'm convinced its going to end up with multiple state collapses and nuclear wars.
The amount of people who are actually responsible for all this hate are an extreme minority.
We need a new constitution that forbids using the best of psychology to manipulate people. No more propaganda and public relations. No more advertising. We already have seen the results of unregulated psychological warfare on the public by corporations, governments, and billionaires.
A new bill of rights that guarantees housing, education, healthcare, and income. One that spells out what privacy really means and how important it is. A government that is not ran by a two party first past the goal post most popular vote cesspool.
The system is broken because we allow it be. Our policies and structure produce perverse results. The government has to be designed from the ground up to resist corruption. Anything less is just inviting disaster.
We have all been lead into a state of learned helplessness. The solutions to solve our problems are already there and there are many of them. There is no one right answer either, there are a lot of great ways to solve our many issues.
Many of the supposed "leaders" are spouting Russian disinfo - Hegseth the other day was crying about the media talking about the "Russian hoax", meaning, reporting on donvict's sus ties to Putin and Russia in his first term.
The "Russian Hoax" is a hoax.
HitlerPig's ties to Putin and Russia are well-documented, all the way back to his first visit to Soviet Moscow in 1987, BEFORE the fall of the Iron Curtain, when the Soviets were shocked at how easily he could be manipulated with the most insincere flattery, and he was given the code-name designation Krasnov.
Within six months of his first visit, he was taking out his first full page ads spouting Soviet talking points.
By any objective measure, HitlerPig is the most prolific Traitor in American history, worse than all other American traitors COMBINED.
on reddit i pointed out in political subs so many times that alot of the posters were russian trolls positng russian back news to bait people. cant you people see its obvious. around the time of the gaza invasion, i reported a couple people in the pics sub for israeli propaganda, because they were posting the " attacks against palestine" as a way to frame bidenw as the sole cause of the conflict and hes doing nothing, i reminded them that both parties have always supported in great numbers, and its only currently being inflammed because BIBI was worried a new D was going to condemn or stop the financial support to israel.
Yeah, the Russian trolls pretending to be "liberals" and constantly attacking only the Democrats for some weird reason are all over the place. And then there are the people stupid enough to fall for this nonsense, too...I know a few IRL, and man, they are so very tiresome.
Usually they have all kinds of excuses and absurd purity tests that no politician that is actually running would pass, and then they proudly do shit like stay home or throw their vote away on Jill Stein or whatever. They act like they won something by doing this, too.
But when it comes to the trolls and useful idiots, I've seen some places that seem to have been overrun with them. The comments on Boing Boing, once upon a time, used to be a pretty fun place. Some years go by and I come back later and try to engage in reasonable conversation and the little clique of self-reinforcing posters/ moderators that took over that place were having none of it. It was all maximalist identity politics and Oppression Olympics to the point of cartoonish levels, and constant ripping on the Democratic Party and "shitlibs". Any deviation, most especially if you made one of the anointed look bad? Deleted, almost immediately. Didn't matter how thoughtful.
Anyway, the comment section there seemed to be designed to create reactionaries. Anyone on the fence that happens to wander into some spectacle like that is bound to come away with some impressions about what liberals are like, and it's not going to look good.
They have since taken their comments behind a paywall, go figure. I hope that little clique is happy with policing any all minute deviations from what they believe is the One True Way to think. I doubt anyone is going to pay for that kind of treatment for long, so.... shrug?
It was alarming the first time around. It isn't now. This country is filled with blissfully stupid people.
KGB handbook describes this in great detail. Amplify and boost the loudest, worst voices on both sides of every political and social issue, so that people hate each other and everyone thinks the worst of each other, thus embracing the worst image the other side has of each other.
Further, by making literally every issue, no matter how small, into a contentious debate where you can't tell what's real or not, the average voter or citizen just starts to tune it all out.
Why do you think the general public is abandoning science and basic liberal democracy? Why do you think people suddenly seem to not care about basic empathy or rights for fellow citizens?
They've all tuned out, they don't care anymore because everything is too stupid, too nonsensical, too contentious, so the alternative is to buy whatever the leadership says, keep your head down, and get back to work. Welcome to the end of the cold war. Victory to Russia.
anti-vaxxers was also pushed by russia too, it made sense since russias own people refused to take the machine, because it worked too well.
While it's definitely the KGB's handbook, I think they got a little help from Al-Qaida with 9/11. They deserve some of the credit as well for helping steer America this way. Victory to Russia. Victory to Al-Qaida.
Has anyone ever looked at the education level of population voting for different parties? (I don’t know how to query statistics in an educated way)
It's widely known. Attained education correlates with preference for left-wing policies, and in the US case, with opposition to Trump.
a sample from Newsweek's "Trump approval tracker"
Fucking pathetic.
The headline should read "Republicans believe misinformation to an alarming degree"?
Sure the numbers aren't great for independents and Democrats... but it isn't >50% bad, which clearly points to Republican ideology as brain worms.
Exactly. That's why I highlighted that portion.
~60% vs ~20% is a staggering difference. This really shows the much bigger problem of how conservatives gain power. They use the large masses of unintelligent, manipulative gullible people to get votes, and enrich themselves.
This is not freedom. This is not democracy. It's psychopaths, controlling and keeping people stupid, so they can stay in power and wealth.
Our system is so fucked.
Anyone who has ever talked to a Republican knows this. Whenever you point out half the bullshit coming out of their mouth has been debunked, they just spout some bullshit about the MSM and source being "biased". Friend, reality is biased against your 🤡 ass.
The funny thing is the electoral college was created to protect us from this, but it's kinda the whole reason we're where we are.
Yes, this level of control over how the populace thinks is a step along the path toward turning human beings into livestock. I'm not fond of it.
aka kleptocracy
it also falls in line with republicans falling for scams and crypto. i once followed a bunch of asian tubers that had a veneer of progressivism, but turned heel after a mysogynistic event, last i heard they are all drinking the trump kooaild, and one thing was common a right winger form the south was peddling crypto on the channel and they lost money on it when it crashed.
later on they tried to gaslight thier fans into believe california was messing with thier business accounts/employees. turns out people were calling them out for misclassfiying thier employees, salaried over contractors. they were asking how to "evade the laws"
Republicans live in a world of lies in their Fox News + Church bubble.
the last 2 having the most significant impact on men.
I do think that is giving liberals and the left too much credit.
A lot of the infighting from among the left during the past election felt pretty artificial, to be perfectly honest, and most of the "Genocide Joe/Holocaust Harris" types seemed to just evaporate after the election ended. Maybe just because there was nothing really left to say after all was said and done, but I just find it hard to believe much of that discourse was in good faith. I'm surprised to read a number as low as 18%, but almost 1 in 5 still isn't nothing.
the absolute rage and betrayal felt by a non-trivial number of diverse, dem leaning coalition members was not artificial in the least and needed no outside aggitation to make it one of thousands of dem self-inflicted papercuts that bled the soul out of dem support.
my family has consistently voted against the fascist monster, but the dems have helped hand the country over to them for decades. the republicans made the monster, but the dems failed to bar the door and seal the windows. neo-liberalism (even by the most gentle definition) is imploding globally in a spectacular way.
it was artificial, early on in the gaza genocide, the protests were taced right back to putin, it was so blatant that a "muslim, claimed they arnt supporting biden anymore", the only influence muslim has was in michigan, and not the whole voting population.
and then it came out some of the protest were also funded by the likes of seinfelds WIFE.
That and all the bad faith arguments about "the Republicans did something terrible; this is all the Democrats' fault".
A lot of the infighting from among the left during the past election felt pretty artificial, to be perfectly honest, and most of the "Genocide Joe/Holocaust Harris" types seemed to just evaporate after the election ended.
They didn't go anywhere, I am one of those people, I will happily refer to Joe Biden as "Genocide Joe" for the rest of my life because of what he did in opening the door to the Palestinian Genocide. I also will keep labelling Trump, and Bush and Cheney and the whole lot of them as war criminals and in particular Trump is also even more in support of the Palestinian Genocide than Biden (which isn't a surprise to leftists that centrists think it is? Stop strawmanning the left).
Shame on you for letting the lazy narrative in your head that feels satisfying to pin on leftists become something you actually believe without evidence.
Hasan Piker making a speech to Pro-Palestinian anti-Genocide protestors from two weeks ago.
Sure, I am sure there are Russian bots exploiting the centrist inability to understand how cataclysmic the Palestinian Genocide is for the U.S. and the world, but the centrist position of y'all just casually asking whether most of the anti-genocide voices during the run-up to the election weren't genuine is bullshit.
Do you understand how pathetic and divorced from your humanity it makes you look? This isn't a sports game where you pick teams based on what colors you like or where you are from, this is about being against genocide... of anybody anywhere.
Edit Downvote me and don't bother responding you coward who can't face up to the genocide being directly facilitated and endorsed by the U.S.
*disinformation.
No, because many Americans who are not republicans still believe this.
An alarming amount of Americans still believe civil war disinformation and propaganda. They ain't got the critical thinking skills to deal with 250 year old shit, they sure as hell can't think past new shit
What civil war propaganda? Where can I read more about this?
Edit: States rights, ofc. I was thinking there might be something more obscure and specific because I hadn't heard of most of the falsehoods in the article before.
"The civil war wasn't about slavery, it was about states rights"
For example, the confederate supporters say the war wasn't about slavery, but rather about states rights. Now, you ask, states rights to what? And then they don't have an answer somehow.
Yeah, lost cause bullshit. Not quite 250 years old, but pretty darned old.
even worst some of them dont even know ww2 happened.
It probably sounds so familiar to fox viewers
Not only Americans. This is a global problem...
Enough to elect a Russian agent, twice
Americans Also Believe American Disinformation ‘To Alarming Degree'
Actually Americans tend to easily believe a lot of nonsense .... and have a harder time grasping reality.
While true, American stupidity is not unique. Every nation has shown that they have tons of idiots willing to believe whatever the Internet tells them
Yep. Poilievre, Brexit, Meloni, AFD, just off the top of my head.
it's like our education & welfare systems have been intentionally defunded for decades to keep us in line with our ruling classes' desires and make us buy into silly groupthink ideas like american exceptionalism; but, of course, that's the not true since that can only happen in oligarchies like russia or china and, also, could never happen to us, the greatest country that the world has ever seen. /s
while blue states arnt as bad as red state in funding education, it is still heavily underfunded, it might as well be bad as red areas in some cases, they have participation grades to run people through to graduation. i had a friend who dint want to be a public district teacher in the west, because starting salary was very low, plus they lock you into multi-year contracts . you can tell its bad when the armed services are trying to recruit in middle income areas, not poor but not rich more like close to the lower end of middle class. i noticed at least 2 of the branches are in 2 different malls where HS, college goers frequent.
our HS paraded around a handful of "succesful students who were getting scholarships" and tried to rub it into the rest of students faces, by piratically saying "look at these people, and look at you", of course everyone rolled thier eyes when they did this. i assume this was also common in the district, when people were struggling in certain classes they would shunt them all in to a "useless elective" class which is a babysitting class, so we dont affect the qouta and metrics statistics of the school for funding.
by the time around CC, there were mutlitudes of people struggling in arithmetic classes, not from the same school, as it mostly like a nationwide problem as people from all over us came to this cc because its cheap.
And are history as a nation is very white-washed, and even still it makes places like Florida have hurt feelings enough that they create laws to remove even the tiny bits of truth we actually still taught. You can't talk about black history, that is reverse discrimination! You can't talk about treating everyone fairly, that's the work of Satan's DEI program!
Using the rules/laws to further their racist/fascist views by talking in code and carefully crafted arguments that sounds "fair" to people with no critical thinking.
It's not so much that education has suddenly been defunded (for white people maybe). It's more that "education" has always been about privilege and indoctrination. It has always been directly opposed to "critical thinking".
But in the US the lunatics run the asylum.
“When you're born into this world, you're given a ticket to the freak show. If you're born in America you get a front row seat.”
― George Carlin
If any population needs help with media literacy, it's Murcans and Canucks.
So many people are repeating Putin's narratives that even anti-cons are believing them.
So much of what is being flagged as "Russian disinformation" is being parroted (if not straight up propagated) by western news media, western social media, and western talking heads.
At what point does a Mercer-funded, MAGA-coded, Texas based, English language broadcast constitute American Media? Is this a "just one drop" rule, where any positive (or insufficiently negative) news item or talking point or image marks the entire operation as "Russian"? Are guys like Tim Pool and Alex Jones still Americans? Or are they Russian? Is Tucker Carlson, the son of a CIA director and a midwestern cattle-country heiress, a Presidential speechwriter and US cable news pundit and avowed Cold Warrior, a Russian? Is CNN Russian? Is Exxon Russian?
If I sing the Russian national anthem it doesn't become an American anthem because an American is repeating the words
Edit: you cant muddy the water fuckface. Russian propaganda is still Russian propaganda idiot
If you take money from an American businessman to go on an American TV show hosted by an American pundit with a big American flag in the background to join a conversation about how American politicians should vote on American policy, and then you finish the discussion by singing the Mexican anthem, is the entire enterprise captured by Gloria Shenbaum?
Ok, cool story. But nobody is singing the russian national anthem. I don't think any of these people are smart enough to know the words, tune, etc.
Literally not happening.
*read and analyze content critically
It threw off everybody's bullshit calibration when the FBI announced in 2020 that the Hunter Biden laptop scandal, which included implications of Joe Biden taking foreign bribe money, was "Russian Disinformation".
They also ordered (technically only "asked nicely") Facebook and Twitter to engage in censorship campaigns based on this.
Later, after helping Biden win the election, they admitted that the laptop was real and not a Russian psyop as publicly claimed. Internal text messages revealed even later prove that while the FBI may have thought the laptop was not real at first, they did not believe it was a Russian plant, in other words, they lied.
So stuff like that might be why Republicans tend to believe "Russian Misinformation".
I'm gonna need a source for those claims.
Russia
^ Found the "twitter files" fan. lol
There was no real scandal here and it was definitely pushed by Russian disinformation.
There was truth to the story though. A laptop was stolen from a private citizen and used as a political talking point. Also, Hunter greatly benefited from his father's position.
Surprised Pikachu face
Everyone is vulnerable to manipulation. If you doubt this start a discussion about the Yemeni civil war and count the people blaming Saudi Arabia for starting the civil war that factually begins with the Houthi Militias attacking the capital. Those folks bought Iranian propaganda hopk line and sinker
Cool story... But what about american disinformation? I guess it doesn't exist... jfc.
This article doesn't deny American disinformation. Nor does it imply there is no American disinformation. What's your point?
They're being sarcastic
