I A) said I was probably paranoid and B) I didn't say they were lying, I said I assume they are. I'm describing an effective heuristic to help me accurately predict the future. I believe using data from Reddit users purporting to be Russian teenagers seems too easy to exploit and therefore unhelpful, predictively.

> I'm describing an effective heuristic to help me accurately predict the future.

Accurately predict the future, huh? Are you a fortune teller?

What you’re describing is nothing more than a hurtful bias, and please call it as such.

You can tell lies by saying nothing but the truth :) One example that comes to mind is the time of Solidarity revolution in Poland.

It was a time where most Poles only had two TV channels (own by communists) and handful of radio stations (also controlled by communists) to choose from. Now, before the strike in Gdansk docks happened TV or radio did not cover crime rates at all. After the strike started, media started filling the news with reports of every murder, rape, burglary they could find. This created the impression that Solidarity pushed the country into total chaos, paving the way to introducing martial law, while the truth is (you can check that in police statistics from that time) the crime rates actually went DOWN significantly during that period.

Now, did those TV channels lie or not? Every single crime they reported in the news was 100% truth, but the aggregate impression they created was 100% false.

I understand lies by omission.

But in this case we are being suspicious of alleged Russian teenagers saying they don't hate Ukraine but feel powerless to condition their own government in Russia. I mean, that's almost an anti-Putin statement, how can it be misconstrued as pro-Putin psyops?

Well, for one it creates an impression that "common people" of Russia are against Putin (which is false, he regularly gets 70+ percent approval ratings [1]), and this might discourage more severe economic sanctions against Russia (because sanctions would affect those "common people" more than they would affect oligarchs)

[https://www.statista.com/statistics/896181/putin-approval-ra...]

I don’t understand this logic. How is it in interest of the propaganda machine to make it appear that common people are against Putin? Surely they want to portray that majority like him and support his actions (which is also why they manipulate these stats you linked).

Also, Putin and his elite don’t actually give a damn about sanctions affecting “common people” (see eg post-Crimea sanctions), so I don’t see why they’d worry so much about it as to fabricate every single post on Reddit.

I think Russia has enough control over their home media that it actually can produce two separate narratives: one for the West, other domestic.