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Insidious Information Infection
How To Get Your Friends to Vaccinate Against Russian Influence
FRIEND LINK FOR NON-SUBSCRIBERS and SHARING
I often hear, “Yes, I’ve already tried to talk to my stupid relatives/friends a dozen times, but they still don’t understand me. It’s as if I’m hitting a wall.”
If you’re Ukrainian, you’ve heard this, too, or even found yourself in such a situation. Some people like this exist in every group, in every family, in every office.
Putin’s propaganda has been brainwashing people for what, ten years? Fifty? Three-hundred? As a full-fledged propaganda machine — at least 10 years. Before that, it has come in waves, ebbing and flowing, waxing and waning with the changes in regimes, policies, and criminality in the Kremlin. The current iteration — every day, seven days a week, for eleven years, since just before the invasion in 2014. Below is the Google Trends report for the term “Bandera.” It spikes just as Russia is invading Ukraine — before that, there was no interest, and after that, interest all but disappeared.
There is much more to it, however — the Bandera and neo-nazi themes are intended for a domestic, Russian audience, and international audience to instill confusion into who the fascist invaders are. The Russian propaganda targeted at Ukrainians is more insidious. One constant theme is that Ukraine is a corrupt country — this is repeated ad nauseum on Russian TV, blogs, radio shows, political dialogues, and everywhere else. Note that most corruption indices use some variant of “public perception of corruption” as their measuring device — not actual incidents, not number of arrests, nor any objective indicator. Public perception. What do we expect the public perception of corruption to be if they are told a dozen times a day how corrupt their country is?
There are plenty of indicators that can be used to measure actual corruption. Free and fair elections — Ukraine has had several since 1991, and Russia has had zero. Income disparity — Russia has the highest income disparity in the world, with 500 families controlling as much wealth…
