Whether those people have been in turn influenced is a separate question.
That's a common tactic of propagadists: To paraylze people - make people feel powerless by convincing them that everything is a lie.
Everyone lies, but that doesn't mean there aren't honest people, sociopathic liars, and a big chasm between them. No publication is perfect, but there are plenty of very credible ones.
Everything really is propaganda, tho. Nearly.
It's also a basic tactic of propagandists to convince people that only approved narratives are good, and the forbidden ones are propaganda. To try normalize themselves a the self-anointed authority that decides which is which. Just like the liars, criminals and corrupt who say, "trust me, I'm honest. Some people lie a lot, but me, you can trust."
> sociopathic liars,
Like spies, conwomen/conmen and other professional liars?
> No publication is perfect, but there are plenty of very credible ones.[0]
"A bland, and in this case, meaningless statement." ;)
Safest bet is, as I said earlier: read widely!!!
The state department is not the same as the president. The previous president did not have a significant degree of control over the state department or any facet of the federal bureaucracy, in all reality.
I saw a wildly popular but politically embarrassing* article there get wiped from the front page for "just being commentary / a blog post with no evidence", when it was actually a Coundcloud link to the politician's actual words.
The story was wiped. It is no longer searchable by either Reddit or Google search. This is a post consisting of direct evidence with zero commentary, of the utmost public interest, with 20 thousand upvotes or so. Just memory-holed completely with no appeal.
* The Irish Health Minister at the time, Simon Harris, was saying that "we're on Covid-19, so there's been 18 other coronaviruses" .... In fucking MAY of last year. THe Health Minister. And this was AFTER those talking heads in America were reamed for the same mistake.
The websites you have viewed, assuming they are in English, likely have a userbase that is primarily from the United States and countries that are part of the Western world. It's reasonable to believe that these countries (which have shared values) have genuinely shifted in public opinion in support of the invaded country.
If you're looking for the other side, you can find it in forums which have a userbase from countries that are not part of the Western world, and share different values. However, the views are more neutral for pragmatic purposes (due to prior relationships with Russia), rather than actively in support. [1]
Pragmatically, the war is not in the interest of most users across the globe. It represents an escalation that could plausibly lead to nuclear war if a NATO country were to intervene, which is in nobody's interest. It also affects daily life in other countries as gasoline prices are up across the world, and the sanctions will damage to economies outside of Russia. Emotionally and ethically, it's hard to see the footage of civilians dying and getting blown up by missiles as part of the attack.
I genuinely don't see a framing where it's a reasonable position to support the war without a massive logical leap or emotional stretch, and believe that other users in Western nations have arrived at the same conclusion.
[0] https://exhibitions.ushmm.org/americans-and-the-holocaust/us...
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/02/world/asia/asia-russia-uk...
That suggests some conspiracy. Instead of complaining about persecution - a common tacitc to change the subject from the weakness of one's argument - because people disagree with you, how about making your argument and listening to others?
That's only one theory (a very attractive to the human mind one).
Another is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence#Living,_biological_s...
> Instead of complaining about persecution
I'm not.
> a common tacitc to change the subject from the weakness of one's argument - because people disagree with you, how about making your argument and listening to others?
Falsely framing people you disagree with as being conspiracy theorists or suffering from delusions of persecution is also an incredibly common tactic....although I suspect most of the time the person doing it doesn't even realize they're doing it.