Except that there is plenty of evidence that this is really the case. Russians are crossing the border in unprecedented numbers, for instance:

https://yle.fi/news/3-12345301

Flying is getting harder and harder so while the borders are still open (there is talk of martial law in Russia, which, even though it was just denied does not seem to have much effect on calming things down, in fact the denial seems to have the opposite effect), people are getting out via the land, either by car or by train.

>there is talk of martial law in Russia

I want to highlight this, because I think it illustrates my point about propaganda. I dug around for a source on that statement, and this appears the most reliable source[0]. An anonymous EU official picking up on "signs". Again, this also may be totally true, but it's presented in such a flimsy way, how can a reasonable person be expected to believe it at face value?

Am I saying the quiet part out loud? Should I not question the propaganda if it is something that I think helps the situation? It's not my nature, but it seems like that's what people are doing.

0. https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/eu-says-it-is-picking-u...

Historically, if the news wasn't good or the situation needed a larger boot to step on people then martial law was taken out of the cupboard to control the population. With 8000+ Russian protestors arrested, a ban on factual news, lots of other restrictions put in place and so on talk of martial law is not all that strange.

Maybe for you it is strange, but for me it is a fairly logical next step in a series of domestic escalations. The same happened in Poland in the 80's in response to the Solidarity movement, authorities used it to be able to use the military against their own civilians. Not that that worked, but that's besides the point, they did in fact try.

And just like with the invasion being a total fabrication of the West right up to the point that it was a fact you could of course do the same thing with martial law.

But some elements of martial law are already present today, some more may follow and who is to say when it becomes enough to say that it actually happened? Would you be satisfied with 8000 people jailed and a ban on the media to report the facts or will it take a Russian army battalion shooting at protestors? Maybe some kids protesting the war jailed? Oh, sorry, that already happened. Or do you believe that is Western propaganda?

That makes sense, but what doesn't make sense is why it is presented in such a duplicitous way. It's one thing to say "When a country has this kind of internal turmoil, martial law is something that we need to watch out for." It's another thing to say "Unnamed official sees 'signs' on social media about martial law."

One way is transparent, re-enforces critical thinking, while the other way is "believe this because we told you."

I see the same signs, I am thinking in the exact same direction as that unnamed official. Mostly because I lived under official 'martial law' for a while to understand what it means and when dictatorial governments reach for it: when they can no longer control the narrative. As soon as that becomes the danger martial law is on the menu, because it allows the government to crack down on the second order effects (since they can't do anything about the root cause, bad news is bad news).

The main thing that right now seems to keep martial law at bay in Russia is because, besides being a tacit admission that not all is well and that there is an internal problem in Russia that that would require Putin to give the military more power, something that he is absolutely loathe to do because that very same power could be used against him. But if not for that I am pretty sure we'd already be there.

Rumours are not propaganda.

No you haven't discovered a vast EU-wide conspiracy or someone 'saying the quiet part out loud'. Nobody knows what is going on and naturally there is lots of speculation to fill the void.

Rumours are not official propaganda; but they can certainly be a psy-op.

(Not suggesting that that’s the case here; just that you shouldn’t forget how e.g. the US CIA engineers coups in other countries, when thinking about how other large states work.)

Rumors is how politics gets done in my backwards country. You start a rumor about the opposition, they start rumors about you. You start rumors about great projects, the opposition starts rumors about how bad it is. The opposition shits on your project, you start rumors about their vested interests in stopping it. Before elections you start rumors about anything and everything and then back again.

Someone in your way? Start a rumor that they do X and then attack them for not stepping down from power. Want to check if people agree or disagree with something? Start a rumor on Friday, monitor for responses, fight in rumors during the week-end and next week, if the rumors align, maybe start that something.

I don't see how rumors are never propaganda.

I didn’t use the word never. I said they are not, i.e. the two words are not equivalent.

Yes there are rumours, are they propaganda? I don’t think so in this case - young male Russians are being questioned at the border, flights are being stopped, and the idea has been floated of forced conscription of anti-war protesters. Even mentioning the word war is a crime. Russia is very close to martial law already and I’m not surprised there is speculation about it.

Also, quite frankly no one in the west cares much if Putin imposes martial law, it’s already a pariah state and a dictatorship. As propaganda this rumour would be pretty useless.

Rumors can absolutely be propaganda.

> Am I saying the quiet part out loud?

Yes, in some sense. This is your own internal process of turning all the information into a picture of what is really going on.

When you start projecting it on other people and making judgements about whether they are “reasonable”, you’re going find out that they have a very different picture from you. There are a lot of people who have lived or worked in that part of the world, speak the local languages, and have a much higher ability to filter the news stream into an accurate picture of what’s actually happening on the ground.

Well, this was coming straight from Russian officials: https://tass.ru/politika/13873997

Ah found it - it denies they will institute martial law, but that definitely qualifies as it being talked about

https://tass.ru/politika/13980355

(Clearly very a pro-Russia site fyi)

Does anyone understand what this means: “Russia is considering the decriminalization of economic crimes, especially damages”?

Very interesting site to read! Perhaps you linked the wrong article though, that one is about Russia being kicked out of some EU groups and them saying they don’t care.

they essentially allow software/etc piracy, companies instead of paying back $$ loans taken abroad can pay them out in rubles to local accounts. also looks like they are going to steal all leased planes

I mean, does it even matter what the Russian government claims or denies at this point? They were clearly dishonest about Ukraine in the months leading up to the invasion. The West was clearly sharing good intel on the Russians' intentions. There is obviously propaganda on both sides, but that does not make the information from our respective governments equally worthless. I think the government that just shut out most foreign and independent press, spins insane stories about Jewish Nazis and make it illegal to even print "war" is probably the less credible propaganda maker in this situation. The truth may be the first victim in war but that does not mean it's dead.

I thought you need a schengen visa to enter finland, and there would not have been time to get one from the time the war started. I would like to hear more details on this news.

A lot of Russians do have visas they obtained for tourism.

I think you missed the parent's comment.

FTA: "Buses travelling from St. Petersburg to Helsinki, Tallinn and Riga are also fully booked."

How do I prove:

- This is true without actually seeing the data that buses are fully booked

- Yle is a trustworthy media outlet and what they are saying is true

- The Finnish government isn't booking the buses and then telling the media that buses are booked

For the record - I believe that Russians are trying to do exactly what you said and what the article says. I trust this.

However, this is precisely the issue - what outlets do you really trust? Stuff that comes from BBC? CNN? New age "influencers" on YT/TikTok? This is the problem.

You can estimate the trustworthiness by analyzing the motives of the source. YLE is the Finnish equivalent of BBC. They have a record of being extremely trustworthy (this can be analysed retrospectively). Do they have a significant enough incentive to lie about this subject to throw that trust away? I see no such motive here, thus it's highly probable that the source is not intentionally lying. The same is true when it comes to the Finnish Government.

I don't actually care what your personal threshold for believing something is, I care about mine, and mine is more than satisfied.

People say the same stuff about the number of Russian dead claimed by the Ukrainian defense forces. Are they exaggerating? Probably yes. Is it with a factor that changes the facts in a meaningful way? Probably not, given the portion that has been independently verified. Even if that's all there is then it is already enough to count as fact, and it very, very likely isn't all there is.

Something similar is happening here: the amount of evidence that Russian cosmopolitans are reading the writing on the wall is ample, it is reflected in the restrictions in how much capital Russians can take with them abroad, it is reflected in the number of trains running (those things are pretty hard to fake) and it is reflected in all of the personal stories and cries for help from Russians to try to get settled where ever they arrived.

Personally I won't give them quarter until the last of the Ukrainian refugees has been settled, but I do believe the fact that many Russians are fleeing Russia while they can. But they are fleeing for economic reasons, Ukrainians are fleeing so they can stay alive.

>However, this is precisely the issue - what outlets do you really trust? Stuff that comes from BBC? CNN? New age "influencers" on YT/TikTok? This is the problem.

see: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/bounded-distrust

Or applying your comment to a domestic news event. Suppose fox news say there's a school shooting. How do you prove:

- This is true without actually going to the school to see the dead bodies

- The US government isn't hiring crisis actors and then telling the media that there's a shooting

I generally agree with you for most stories and facts about the war, but this one is just obvious.

The ruble has declined and the Russian stock market has been closed all week. Russia has been sanctioned. Russia is sending people to fight in a war. There are rumors (whether true or not) that Russia is planning to close borders, impose martial law, etc. Those are all verifiable facts.

In the face of the above, of course people are considering leaving Russia. That is just smart and human nature.

If it was clearly obvious, then why wouldn't the Economist use these other sources directly, instead of leaning so heavily on Google Trends data? It's a flimsy way to present truth.

I am confused by your stance.

On one hand I do agree that there is a lot of propaganda on all sides, so one should be especially critical about data sources.

On the other hand, I think then that using Google Trends data for this is a pretty excellent source for this data, and a prime example of something that would be difficult to game. It's publicly available, so anyone can verify it. I guess a true conspiracist might think Google is faking the data, but that seems extremely unlikely and bizarre, given that there are whole swaths of terms you could search for to make similar points.

You may reach a different conclusion based on what a 4-5x increase in "Visa" searches means, but if anything this would be an example of data I would have a ton of confidence in.

At the time of my post, I was unable to verify the Google Trends searches (I was using it incorrectly, and have verified it, see other comments). My main point about using the Trends data is that if there are so many more clearly substantive sources (videos, interviews, history), why lean mainly on Google Trends.

Google Trends is actually a much better data source for this kind of thing, precisely because it's so difficult to game. The examples you give (videos, interviews, history) are trivial to use to give a biased view - just show only the videos that back your viewpoint, for example. It's easy to find a hundred videos on YouTube with "proof" the Earth is flat.

The other thing that is great about Google Trends data is that is essentially a window into "things people are actually searching for when they think nobody is looking." Yes, I realize the irony in that every Google click is tracked, but you'll get much more "honest" results looking at Google Trends data vs. plain interviews. For example, the country with the highest volume of "gay porn" searches per capita is Kenya, a country that is pretty vehemently anti-gay. The reasoning behind that is open to interpretation (I suspect many people are just genuinely curious given images of gay relationships in the media are so much less acceptable there), but for a society that basically deems gay sex extremely deviant, there sure are a lot of folks interested in what it looks like.

The Economist is a short-medium form publication. It has excellent reputation. I am wondering about what's causing you to be overly skeptical? Have there been major reputable publications who have misled you (specifically about Russia)?

That closing question is maybe a bit too open-ended? I will happily defend The Economist as one of the highest-integrity journalistic publications in the world, but they've still misled me in the past. Not in any way that I suspect is intentional, but people do honestly get things wrong sometimes. My own mother has misled me numerous times, always with the best of intentions.

I meant as an inquiry, I would love to see major publications spreading false information (such as Economist, NYT, etc.) and we can discuss about it, referring specifically to the claim of western propaganda against Russia. Not more generally.

I mentioned in another comment, and I don't want to spam, but I wasn't able to verify their Google search trends claim, using the source country as Russia, and searching both English and Russian translations of the terms they quoted in the article.

EDIT>> This is wrong! I am able to confirm the Google Trends data now.

Did you double-check the region in which you're searching? By default it shows trends for where Google thinks you are. I had to use Google Translate to get terms to search in Russian, so take my results with a grain of salt, but, even so, I was generally able to get some nice hockey sticks when I told Google to show me what people in Russia are searching for instead of what Russian-speaking people in the USA are searching for.

My first search was the English terms in Russia region. When someone pointed out I should have searched the Russian translation (I assumed Google normalized this), I accidentally switched the region back to US. So both searches had incorrect results. It would have been nice of the economist to include the direct links to the sources they were citing!

Because those things don't really directly support the article's lede the way the google trends results do. They aren't a demonstration that there is a trend; they're ancillary information explaining why that trend might be happening.

Do you expect the Kremlin to tell The Economist "We will indeed declare martial law in X days" and nothing short of that is believable? Or for the media (don't recall which it was) that announced the rumor based on a source to reveal that source's identity?

I live in Estonia. If I see news reports where they interview people from the border guard who say that there are more border crossings than usual, owner of coach company says that they have added more trips to St. Petersburg and number of russians traveling has increased, also Russian-owned bus companies have added more trips to Estonia, where busses leaving here are alomst empty but packed full of travelers when leaving St. Petersburg. Also bus companies have said that more people travel with pets or large luggage.

Are they all lying?

https://news.err.ee/1608521780/passenger-numbers-on-lux-expr...

Also Estonia isn't a prime destination for Russians in this situation. Countries that don't require a visa are. Yesterday 42 passenger planes landed in Yerevan (Armenia), normal number being 3-4 daily.

I had wondered how welcoming Estonia was being to Russians at the moment. I suggested a couple of Russians that are leaving reach out and ask, because Estonia is one of my favourite countries in the world and I had faith that you would be helping Russians flee.

Hopefully, I will get to come visit again once this all calms down.

This is what russian trolls want.

So much uncertainty, that you don’t belive anything.

Not even truth.

Just today someone posted of a video involving brit journalists' car being shot

It's a 'shocker' sequence, but then someone explains "one of the journalist was involved into staging false interviews before". So I thought it would be nice to share the article talking about the previous staged interviews, as a cautious tale for all to avoid responding to shocking civilian shot videos. Few minutes ago someone told me that the article may be staged by another group to spread lies about brit journalists.

"lies" all the way up

That article was strange. The journalists say that they were in an area controlled by the Ukrainian government, full of tense checkpoints, and at the time thought that they were being fire upon by Ukrainian soldiers at a checkpoint. But then the Ukrainian government claimed it was Russian saboteurs, so all the news just uncritically repeated that.

It's not that these checkpoints aren't prone to shooting at people. Here's a Twitter thread[1] by an American journalist where the unit he's embedded with kills people in an ambulance that didn't stop at a checkpoint. Again, the ambulance is labelled as Russian saboteurs.

Keep in mind 7 days ago the New York Times were reporting about intense gun battles in Kyiv[2], which again, were blamed on undercover Russian squads. "Ukrainska Pravda, a Ukrainian news site, reported combat 400 yards from Maidan Square in central Kyiv." But there hasn't been much evidence of a Russian invasion of the city yet from what I can find, or that the city is crawling with Russian soldiers.

I think it's at least an open question right now of where the violence inside the city is coming from (and how much of it could be connected to flooding the civilian population with guns).

[1] https://twitter.com/terrelljstarr/status/1498067362595155968 [2] https://www.nytimes.com/live/2022/02/25/world/russia-ukraine...

I have given up on 'troll' almost as much as 'literally'.

A troll would pretend to support Putin and so on.

They're using the word in the context of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troll_farm

Different sources have different biases. To contrast, if you go to RT you just hear about joint task forces between Ukraine and Russia to protect Chernobyl, or Russian forces handing out food to grateful Ukrainians, both of which aren't representative at all either, and likely staged.

> Seems like most of the disinformation is currently coming from the NATO/Ukraine side.

Sure... /s

That's probably why the West has just enacted a law that whoever talks about the war in Ukraine in terms of war will face all kinds of trouble. Oh, wait.

Really, you can't make this stuff up, do you actually believe that people on HN will read what you say and then dutifully turn to Pravda for their news from now on?

> That's probably why the West has just enacted a law that whoever talks about the war in Ukraine in terms of war will face all kinds of trouble. Oh, wait.

Right, in the West, we'd never do something like ban a news outlet. Oh, wait.

Let's have your list then of news outlets the West has banned.

Even all of Rupert Murdoch's shite is still operating last I checked and until last week Russia Today was spouting its propaganda 24x7. Fortunately that one has now been squelched but let's not pretend that it was news.

Or was that not what you meant?

> West countries have similar laws.

Sorry, but no, we don't.

> They even have an entire culture: Cancel Culture.

You are either unaware of what cancel culture means or you are changing the subject.

> While I hate every discrimination of speech freedom, you can't paint Russia as something unique, West is an example they follow.

I think the repression of the free media in Russia is quite uniquely all it's own.

It's the only country that I'm aware of where the head of state gets a dead journalist for their birthday.

> Sorry, but no, we don't.

https://www.praguemorning.cz/expressing-support-for-russia-o...

https://spravy.rtvs.sk/2022/02/za-podporu-vojnovej-propagand...

I don't see any difference.

> You are either unaware of what cancel culture means or you are changing the subject.

Of course I'm aware what does it means. I'm also aware of "deplatforming" and other ways to silence unpleasing speech. Which could be described as a single word: censorship.

> I think the repression of the free media in Russia is quite uniquely all it's own.

I thought the same until Europe started to ban Russia Today and other websites. And don't even tell me that it's different. It's a perfectly legal website which tried to present alternative view point. But West is too afraid that its citizens might believe to something other than official propaganda.

> It's the only country that I'm aware of where the head of state gets a dead journalist for their birthday.

Baseless accusations. I could say that western agents killed him. It's just as likely.

> I don't see any difference.

I suspect that may be on your end.

> I'm also aware of "deplatforming" and other ways to silence unpleasing speech. Which could be described as a single word: censorship.

Well, you're still speaking, aren't you?

> I could say that western agents killed him. It's just as likely.

Sorry, but you are not arguing in good faith here.

It's funny because for sure you will see that as confirmation of your claims of censorship but all you seem to want to do is to project the weirdest kind of positions that have no support in reality and I really can't be bothered to debate if that's the case.

Not all speech is worth engaging.

> West countries have similar laws

Recent Russian law: 15 years imprisonment for protesting or even just calling the war a war.

Western countries have nothing of that scale for such general offences. Neither in law nor in culture.

The nearest things I can think of are holocaust or genocide denial laws, and protest-limiting powers. There are some similarities, but also very significant differences, so I think you are using the fallacy of false equivalence in your argument: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_equivalence

I posted two links in a neighbor thread, I'll repeat those here:

https://www.praguemorning.cz/expressing-support-for-russia-o...

https://spravy.rtvs.sk/2022/02/za-podporu-vojnovej-propagand...

Those are European countries.

I agree that probably state of freedom of speech is worse in Russia. I agree that political diversity is basically zero in Russia and all Putin opponents are either dead, imprisoned or gone from the country. That's a terrible state of things and it must be improved. Hopefully after Putin's rule, he's not eternal after all.

And if you think that everyone in Russia is going to jail for calling it war, you're wrong. Putin himself called it war. Plenty of people called it war. This is just fear mongering. And potential reason to put in jail some people if they crossed some line. At least I think so. Just as I hope that links above are fear mongering.

Go on Twitter, Telegram, YouTube, anywhere. You'll see plenty of primary videos and accounts corroborating this. You're right, 1 source alone isn't reliable. But there's a massive body of evidence out there, this whole war has been televised. And the Ukrainian narrative has way more evidence than the Russian one...

Those are all primarily western platforms. Even if they did show what you are claiming, it wouldn’t prove your point. RT is blocked on Telegram and YouTube for instance.

Telegram was created by a Russian.

Yet RT is still banned on Telegram.

Telegram is owned by Russians and operated out of Dubai... Western countries have literally warned about it for that reason... Twitter has large shareholders in the Middle East.

Also I forgot TikTok. Plenty of vids there. Owned by the Chinese. You can check that out.

But hey, keep swallowing that Russian propaganda...

> But hey, keep swallowing that Russian propaganda...

To what exactly are you referring? Everything I wrote in my comment is true. RT is factually banned on Telegram.

Of course some people would flee from Russia. What's so hard to believe about it? If you can leave country, you don't support the government and it's obvious that conditions are going to be harsh, surely you'd do that and in big country there will be thousands of people in those conditions.

Just don't make conclusions like the entire country wants to leave.

Don’t fall into the trap of thinking things are unknowable. Madness lies at the extremes of believing everything and believing nothing

This is very important. I used to believe that keeping an open mind was the most important thing, so I listened to everything. Sounds great but the problem is it leaves one in a state of complete inaction, because you're never sure of anything, and people use that to their advantage. While you're sitting around trying to figure out the state of things, they are acting on convictions which may not be 100% right but at least they are getting things done, and that means they're going to win. So while it's important to be factually right it's also important to have convictions, even if you can't justify all of them without bias.

No matter what any of the media say my conviction with this conflict is that Putin is a psychopath. You can make pretty good predictions about his intent and how the conflict will unfold, and who is doing what, and what atrocities which side are willing to commit, based on that fact alone. For example, everyone who thought he wouldn't invade and was shocked when he did saw him as a tactician rather than a psychopath. If you saw him as a psychopath his invasion of Ukraine was inevitable. The thing that shocked me was how slow-rolling the build-up to an invasion is, and how many people are not willing to call a spade a spade. I thought it had to be done in secret, but you can do it in the open if you just lie to people about your intentions. You have the history of his actions in Syria, Chechnya, and Crimea to know that at least what Western media is saying about Russia has a lot of precedent.

Now you could say I'm wrong about that but again that's my conviction and I'll need more than a little proof to sway me from it (because bad actors love to use just a little bit yet deceiving proof to sway people from their loosely held convictions)

I hope you still believe that Russian is shelling civilian cities, because that is on video

What motivation does Google have to falsify their Trends data? If anything, I think this is more valuable than anecdotal evidence. It's a relatively trustworthy source delivering the same data they always have, and letting you draw the conclusions.

I don't trust the conclusions I draw. The average person is very bad at coming up with explanations, and the pandemic misinformation has illustrated this.

"If you die with COVID they put you down as having died from COVID, therefore they're trying to inflate the numbers" is an explanation. If you aren't good at coming up with multiple alternatives and selecting the best one, you're likely to select the one that fits, or the one someone already gave you, and not the real one.

but what about Yandex? as far as I recall, they're bigger than google in russia, hence any google data is missing most of the picture

maybe someone else is falsifying google trends ?

I can't even confirm their statements, but I may be using google trends wrong:

>More Russians are asking Google “how to leave Russia” than have done so in 18 years since such data became public.

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&ge...

Here is the Russian translation (I am not Russian speaking, just used a translator) that is much more proof and addresses another comment on your post. https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&ge...

Why would they be searching in English? Also those numbers are "relative popularity" on a scale of 0-100. I'm seeing what the article claims here, more or less. But it's a little unclear exactly what search terms they were all checking.

>Why would they be searching in English?

Good point, here's the Russian translation of "how to leave Russia", which doesn't appear to be much different than the English version.

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&ge...

EDIT>> This is wrong! My mistake, when I translated, I accidentally switched the source country back to USA.

I'm not sure what some of the spikes in years past were about, but again it's a scale of 'how popular the terms were' from 0-100 not a raw count. You can see it spiking hard recently compared to the average. Without seeing the raw numbers it's hard to tell exactly how significant it is though.

The article gave you the search terms they used. Why would you make up your own? https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%203-m&ge...

The problem with this assumption is you think people “don’t know how to leave” so they must look it up on Google. I’m pretty sure people flee with family and friends together and don’t need instructions on how to get out of Dodge. You can look at news reports of the foot traffic coming from Russia. You can look at social media on the dissent with the war before Putin axed access. This skepticism is good for assessing the feasibility of a solution, it’s not good when peoples lives are on the line and there’s plenty of reporting from the ground. Wake up.

It's an aggregate over (almost) all the search traffic on the internet. That would be an awfully tall order even for the US government to pull off undetected.

Official sources are less reliable: Russia is heavy on propaganda at the state and media levels, and destination country reports will be spiky, slow, or nonexistent.

This presentation is interesting because it is a data presentation that is large, direct, and open: Of Russian IPs using a Google, search terms associated with leaving are going up, even pre-war. Your own research can now be on alternative hypotheses like maybe Google became that much more popular in the last few months in spikey per-keyword patterns, or that the Russian population using Google is big (some X%) but has opposite beliefs of all non-Google users. For both, you can check against something like Yandex, which has a similar feature.

There was a story on front page yesterday for russian IT specialists who want to get out.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30552091

There are 100's such stories, all of which center on the very lucky few who still have the means to move themselves around and some hard currency. For the remainder it will be very hard to do anything at all.

It will be, but it does not mean that they don't want to try.

And this is the exactly why lies and dis/misinformation are so dangerous to society. It makes every source questionable, even one’s like the economist that have tended to give fairly accurate balanced news.

The first amendment is a double edged sword, but all false statements need to be challenged so that a free and Democratic society can function properly. The problem is that lies are cheap to produce, and the truth is expensive to prove.

That imbalance of cost is a real struggle to overcome.

Herman and Chomsky effectively disproved the notion that mainstream media gives "balanced" perspectives on news in Manufacturing Consent. The trouble is that media has a massive reliance on government institutions for sourcing information and advertisers for revenue. The way that information is withheld from government sources in the case of dissent from doctrine, or money is held back from corporations in the case of dissent from their interests creates patterns and frameworks of self-censorship and framing that twist information. None of this means our news networks are evil, but they are subject to the rules of the game and the only reason they are still going today is because they learned to play ball.

You can question the lack of a perspective in reporting, or doubt the framing of provable information without losing faith in the system. It should almost be seen as your job as a responsible news-reader to look past the propaganda (i.e. systemic limits on information conveying) as best you can, while not becoming entirely jaded or entirely untrusting.

Chomsky is/was a regular on Al Jazeera and RT, but his appearances on domestic news networks are extremely rare (he was a regular on PBS in the 80’s and 90’s).

But I ignore him since the enlightened here told me it’s all propaganda.

To be fair, if the best endorsement you can provide for the Economist is that they tend to be fairly accurate, then it doubles my resolve to be skeptical and vigilant of any claims made by media.

This article sounds reasonable, even logical - and it may be, but I was manipulated by so much propaganda in the past weeks about the Ukraine situation that I no longer trust any source without verification from multiple sources that I seek out.

Propaganda is by far most effective on those who believe themselves immune to its effects. The first casualty of war is the truth.

For example, how many of you believe you are not manipulated by Ads and yet companies spent billions and billions to advertise to you. Why would they do that if it had no impact?

I used some weaselly words there, mostly because I agree with your broader point that it’s important to question sources, question the information. There is media that tends to do a decent job on fact checking sources, etc.

At the end of the day, all I can do is go off the track record of those sources, and that’s why for pretty much any media source the best we can say is tend and fairly accurate because even if they are telling the truth most of the time, there is a question on if it contains all the context and nuance.

What made media outlets questionable and untrustworthy is their blatant agenda, not outside misinformation. I don't even need them to be accurate, balanced, or some other high quality, but they have turned into straight-up propaganda and present almost fact-free moralistic view of the world.

Are you suggesting that free speech is responsible for misinformation?

The first amendment is absolutely not a double-edged sword. The alternative is STRICTLY worse. You end up with governments, like China's, who lie and challenging that lie is punishable.

It fits a pretty strong definition of a double edged sword. It protects the rights of people say false statements as equally as true statements. The false statements are dangerous as it makes it difficult to make good decisions with it because those are based off of bad information.

Calling it a double-edged sword is not meant to say it’s not valuable. It absolutely is. It’s the bedrock of our democracy in the US. The question is only, how do we make sure the truth is more widely known than the lies?

I understand how you're invoking the idea of a double-edged sword. I just don't usually hear it in a context where the alternative is living in dystopia.

> The question is only, how do we make sure the truth is more widely known than the lies?

Listen to alternative perspectives. Engage with ideas you don't agree with. Be aware of your biases, and other peoples' biases. Defend your perspectives using reason and evidence, not emotion or moral values (note: reason and evidence are the only things we can somewhat objectively agree on; though we still have to be aware of people doing shady stuff with studies and using statistics to misrepresent real-world phenomena).

The trend I'm starting to see is that a lot of disconnects stem from ignorance.

Censorship has always been a thing in authoritarian regimes. My concern is that it increasingly an issue in traditional western liberal democracies.

Whether it is by state decree (see Covid), state-subsidized media self-censorship (see Canada), de-platforming (see Google/Twitter/Facebook), or cancel culture - the effects of censorship are equally chilling.

Free speech is only legally protected from government intervention - and only in the US. Canada for example imposes strict limits on allowable speech.

I stand with Elon Musk as a free speech absolutist so I think it is high time we revisit free speech protections beyond their current boundaries. I struggle to call our current system truly free.

Another alternative is Canada, where free speech isn't an absolute right but somehow the whole country hasn't descended into a totalitarian dictatorship.

You should still believe the reporting of actual events done by the major international news orgs. You don't need to go into opinion pieces or into hypothesizing.

> You should still believe the reporting of actual events done by the major international news orgs.

Would you say we should believe major russian news orgs? Healthy skepticism is required, especially during times of war. There is a reason why each side banned the other's media, social media, etc. So that they can spread propaganda without pushback. The first casualty in war is the truth.

Skepticism is fine but this isn’t a symmetrical problem where you should treat the two sides equally. Their incentives and credibility aren’t the same.

The ole, "the science is unsettled argument" a classic. Repurposed for propaganda very fresh, Tasteful even

To filter a lie you can try to use logic and critical thinking. It's clear that sanctions and isolation are gonna be devastating. Many people joke that Russia is heading towards "stone age". Thus, it's absolutely logical that people just want to flee the sinking battleship.

it's very counter intuitive, there's so much information that we cannot know anything (for certain)

trust is at an all time low and getting lower

Really? They all have cellphones now filming it.

it s not like there are no checks at airports, it should be obvious if there is a trend

Many Blacks, Asians faced racism near Ukraine border. But according to reddit they are all Russian propaganda, some met even with more racist comments. Of course HN cleverly avoided it by not discussing it as all.