Not all disinformation is created equal, and that's a critical difference.

The Russian and Ukrainian sides are not moral equals.

If Russia says Ukraine is full of drug addicts, whores and nazis, and that bombing hospitals is necessary to protect itself from Ukraine - that's of course disinformation.

If Ukraine says they have killed 10,000 Russian soldiers, when the real number is closer to 5,000 - that too is disinformation (exaggeration) and I'm not interested in seeing it strictly censored for multiple reasons. 1) It's not a radical exaggeration, such as claiming they've killed 250,000 soldiers or entirely stopped the Russian assault; and 2) it contains quite interesting information: a claim of significant invader deaths (from the supposedly mighty Russian military), which prompts inquiry as to just how bad Russia is fairing. While Ukraine for example has exaggerated their successes, their successes have been remarkable and have shown Russia to be mismanaged, incompetent, weak, and everything else one would expect of a typical authoritarian regime - it looks like a duck, it quacks like a duck, and how wonderful it is a duck. Probably the most remarkable thing about Putin's Russia - considering the kleptocracy - was that it had supposedly managed to maintain a very potent, mostly competent military, which is unusual for such a long authoritarian slog. That turned out to be false, Putin is wildly incompetent as are most authoritarians historically. He's no different than what we've seen in the past with other strong-man dictatorships like Hussein (also a paper tiger military, no coincidence the US chewed through their mediocre Soviet hardware too).

Not all disinformation provides anything valuable to the context as far as anti-fog-of-war information goes. Some disinformation is particularly worthless garbage. Plenty of what Ukraine is revealing does reveal valuable information, whereas very little of what Russia has been saying does the same.

And morally I'm not interested in Russia winning. I'm interested in Russia losing in humiliating fashion, getting isolated, having its economy chopped down by 75%, and in the coming decades seeing the nation split into three or four countries and overall massively weakened to prevent the Russian empire from attempting to emerge again with the next Putin that must inherently follow from their culture of power and conquest lust.

I'm no more interested in leveling the playing field for Russia as I would be for Nazi Germany. They're increasingly similar monsters, and Putin is only likely to get worse as time continues on. The absolute last thing the West should do is treat Ukraine and Russia similarly. We should do whatever it takes to defeat Russia, including winning the propaganda war - the only alternative is to vacate that space to Russia (a neutral outcome in propaganda is next to impossible).

" their successes have been remarkable and have shown Russia to be mismanaged, incompetent, weak, and everything else one would expect of a typical authoritarian regime"

And doesn't make you excited for the war and enthusiastic about joining the fight for Ukraine? Great - but having only information and announcements from one side would give me pause. Somehow the war hasn't ended yet, despite of the zillions of Russian tanks that have been destroyed by now.

"Somehow the war hasn't ended yet, despite of the zillions of Russian tanks that have been destroyed by now."

Well if we're going to be pedantic and childish, then for your information, Russia started the war with 12.3 zillion tanks and the war is still going on because the Russians still have more tanks. The fact that zillions of tanks have been destroyed and that Russia still has plenty more tanks is not somehow a proof that the information about destroyed Russian tanks is false...

True. Many tanks have been destroyed. But the zillion tanks destroyed are often presented without context, and used to imply that resistance has a better prospect than is realistic. The number of remaining enemy tanks (or whatever) is seldom mentioned. Well, I guess that's what the GP was implying.

>If Russia says ... that bombing hospitals is necessary to protect itself from Ukraine - that's of course disinformation.

Actually this story is really "wag the dog" style https://waronfakes.com/civil/fake-russian-aviation-struck-a-...

Every story you read now is propaganda. West is just better and more experienced in this stuff than Russia.

>I'm interested in Russia losing in humiliating fashion, getting isolated, having its economy chopped down by 75%, and in the coming decades seeing the nation split into three or four countries and overall massively weakened

This scenario includes about 150 millions of people dead/suffering and world economy wrecked. How is this "moral"?

>Every story you read now is propaganda. West is just better and more experienced in this stuff than Russia

You have such a good eye for propaganda! Congrats. Thanks for the education I will make waronfakes.com my homepage. From flipping link to link it looks perfectly fine, covers everything from all parties: Ukraine lying, NATO lying, lies about Russia lying, lies about DNR/LNR. Perfectly balanced

To be fair, they do not claim to cover both sides:

> We are the owners and administrators of several Russian non-political telegram channels.

> We don't do politics. But we consider it important to provide unbiased information about what is happening in Ukraine and on the territories of Donbass, because we see signs of an information war launched against Russia.

Granted, I would have liked to see a "FAKE: US funding biological weapon labs in Ukraine" there too.

How is it fake?

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/03/11/1566-m11.html

I am wondering about how your initial response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine was so ambiguous: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=vogre&next=30589151

And then all of your subsequent comments seem to be extremely consistent with Russian government talking points.

You were initially kind of concerned that the invasion was not justified, but now you believe the Russian government positions whole-heartedly?

It is a very interesting transition of opinion in a short amount of time! What's up?

My guess is that it is a result of russophobia. Kind of Newton's third law of motion, but for opinions.

Given how hard it is to find out what kind of research happened in Wuhan, despite it was possible to inspect it for as long as needed, I find it hard to believe that one can that quickly and single handedly (esp in the current context) be certain that some biological weapons were actually developed in that lab.

I've also witnessed a lot of biased "journalism" in India to push that unreasonable narrative.

That's more likely propaganda doubled as a humorous reminder of the WMD in 2003, in my opinion.

It sure seems like that "war on fakes" site is full on non-debunkings of things.

This article for example is just re-printing Russian government talking points:

https://waronfakes.com/civil/fake-russian-soldiers-wont-let-...

Which is fine, the authors can believe the Russian government if you want, but declaring the statements of the other side "fake" on only that basis isn't very credible.

Please we don't need more hatred nor more call for escalation.

Nice try.

All the more important to not rely on mechanism that mirror Putins crackdown on information. The damage from disinformation is just smaller than to openly crack down on content you dislike. Fact checkers don't exist for too long and there are countless issues where they just reiterate the "correct" opinion.

I think there is a lot of projection in your goal here, but that is beside the point.

DDG also already downranks outlets that are not related to Russia.

I agree that the two sides aren't morally equal. However, that doesn't mean that more moral disinformation is less so disinformation, and choosing to let one over the other is being biased.

You could argue however that this a good bias to have, and that's definitely a discussion that deserves to be had and where I'm personally not decided. However, it's good to agree that this is indeed a bias beforehand.

Forget leveling the playing field. Removing western disinformation is still important too. Forget specific positives or disinformation about Russia specifically attacking Ukraine. There’s plenty of other misinformation from western powers relating to Russia. I haven’t seen much chatter at all about the western specifically America’s role in what Russia is today. How often is the IMF and related neoliberal capitalist/imperialist intervention in Russia, starting the second the USSR dissolved, brought up?

This is important stuff to know. I did a few sample searches. The results aren’t wrong. They are incredibly dry. Many being direct studies and long PDFs. People aren’t going to go through that stuff when seeing how Russia is getting rekt or Ukraine is suffering or gas prices are up are consumable via many pics, quick takes, social media takes, and more.

I think it’s important also because of your wording. Russia being the kleptocracy. You didn’t say the west isn’t. It is heavily implied IMO though.

Another unfortunate issue is this all will cloud the west in even more misinformation. The best non dense news knowledge from TV I gained regarding Yemen was from RT. The west is awful at covering the tragedy there. Not to mention complicit too. RT was slanted ofc. Not saying that’s what should be aimed for.

Similarly if Russian economy collapsing by 75% and screwing with the lives of 100M avg Russians as it splits into 3 or 4 is something to aim for. The non mention of NATO being a pointless organization today but especially in a collapsed Russia world would be good to know. That info won’t be given out much I presume. Also to note. No one really suffers remotely like 100M+ Russians if NATO disbanded. Though I’m sure the massive amt of misinformation when the west doesn’t want to keep helping out the millions of Russian refugees in your dreamt future will be absolutely insane. Just like relatively minor amounts of refugees now keep getting called things like the migrant crisis.

Russia should not be hurting and killing Ukrainians. America and others should not be helping Yemen or Palestine or other places have innocents suffering or killed. Most of all, we shouldn’t get ourselves into a state where we keep patting ourselves on the back and pointing to boogeymen to escape culpability. Which is pretty much guaranteed in a future of a collapsed Russia with millions of refugees that NATO will have little interest in helping but will engage in a massive amt of misinformation to escape the very obvious moral failings. At least this is all almost certain to happen based on the present (excluding the help Ukrainian refugees are getting which may be proving the pt more by being such a markedly unique exception) and past.

"The non mention of NATO being a pointless organization today but especially in a collapsed Russia world would be good to know."

WHY ISNT MY RIDICULOUS OPINION BEING PRESENTED AS FACT BY THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA??????????????

You realize how insane your arguments are, right?

“ridiculous opinion” is also your opinion. Who said no mainstream media is talking about this?* Who said it should be presented as fact? Even I don’t believe it should be presented as fact. That would be misinformation. Even presenting something I whole heartedly agree with — bigotry is wrong. That’s not fact.

*I was obviously exaggerating with “non mention”. It was also one small part in my thought out, serious and long comment.

However your exaggerations of all caps, “being presented as fact” and “ridiculous opinion” (again which is just your opinion) are all negatives and don’t help any sort of dialogue.

This topic is discussed in the mainstream. Off top of head: BBC, Guardian, Al Jazeera, PBS, NPR, WNYC, WBEZ, WHYY, CBC, The Daily Show, The Young Turks, AJ+, NowThis, Pod Save America, Slate, Vox, Vice all have certainly covered this. Previously, Fox, Tucker Carlson (within Fox and his other affiliations), OAN, NewsMax, Daily Wire, and more on the right have also covered this and before changing their stances because of the public, were very much anti NATO.

I can see how a few listed can be claimed as non mainstream. That’s fair. Though other media listed like Pod Save America and Daily Wire have top 10 most popular podcasts. I think that can count as mainstream.

If publications like WaPo or the biggest podcast, Joe Rogan, have no discussed this yet. They will at some point to some degree.

I’m curious why you thought this fairly basic and quite common rhetoric necessitated an all caps response and hints of insanity that the mainstream cover it. I am respectfully, going with you being in your own bubble and not knowing too much about politics as my hunch and/or enjoying/preferring the status quo. However that’s just a hunch.

wasn't nato created to counter the ussr?

The USSR or whatever country rulled by whatever regime, as long as they maintain a large enough army, all while preventing Europe from building its own, is my guess.

Who’s preventing Europe? At most Germany is prevented to some degree.