Amidst recent farmer rallies, Rome’s intelligence identified pro-Kremlin social media attempts to falsely connect them to sanctions on Russia. “It’s a clumsy attempt”, says Undersecretary Mantovano during the presentation of the 2023 Security Intelligence Policy Report
It does not? Even if it turns out that a lot of the social unrest was engineered?
Here in the Netherlands we had our government collapse over a law that allows families of asylum seekers come to our country if they get residency (family reunification).
The talking heads where talking about chain migration and that is was a huge issue that must be stopped.
The next election was all about asylum seekers and how big the issue was, ending in a landslide for the right wing anti islam party.
Turns out: over the last 5 years a grand total of 800 people came to our country using this law.
We had a government fall and elections and are now in a deadlocked formation of a new government because of 800 asylum seekers.. what.. the .. fuck.
And a lot of issues are like this. We saw during the pandemic (riots for stay at home orders)… anti vac gone nuts, we see conspiracy theorists crawling out of the woodwork.. it's madness.
And I keep thinking about the story of polefucker tom.
Edit: forgot to add that there are people out there with actual grievances that deserve protests. But at this point farmers are out of line, right wing protests are out of line, anti government protests... it's all so weird.
Problem is that for every Russian bot to entice such topics there was ten coneervative and far right politicians happy to jump on the bandwagon and ten thousand voters to toss away all actual issues for that.
You cannot turn a population into a certain direction, if it doesnt want to be turned that way.
I think populations will not turn on a dime, but persistent nudging will most definately change the direction.
Fringe groups are more succeptible to the influence (the correct target audience is carefully selected) and the fringe groups are used to shift the Overton window.