Also, Russia was but one of the examples. Is it imaginary that 2 teachers have been murdered by Islamic nutjobs in France off of social media?
> The idea that we have to be kept safe from "division" is especially hilarious given that the whole point of democracy is to allow people to work out their naturally occurring divisions peacefully.
That's hard in countries with broken political systems like the unbelievably stupid American dual party one. And is it actually working nowadays? To me from the outside it definitely seems like everything, even basic science and common sense, are immediately partisan. If one party is for something, the other is immediately against it regardless of merits. Maybe except Israel and army spending? And even in non broken systems, stuff like Covid was extremely politicised. You can't debate with a pigeon shitting everywhere.
Ah I see, you never became aware of how that story ended.
Russiagate ended with the discovery that it had all been a lie, that there was no Trump/Russia collusion and the US media had spent years knowingly propagandizing the population. There was no scandal, except the scandal of how the media could have done that. Eventually some American journalists even admitted what had happened.
https://www.cjr.org/special_report/trumped-up-press-versus-p...
But you seem to be stuck in 2018, before that had all been proven. You are yourself the victim of successful propaganda!
And again, it's one example among millions.
The big problem is not that Russian propaganda exists. The problem is that hiding behind the need to "rescue" citizens from Russian propaganda, other governments want to institute an information control regime that is very similar to what Russia has. If that happens in Russia, I feel their pain, but fortunately in my country I can still speak freely. But if this goes away and I also don't have freedom of speech, then it's not Russia that is doing that to me, it's my own government. And that's what I should be afraid of - not that Russian propaganda will take my freedoms, but that my on government, hiding behind the fact that Russian propaganda exists, will take away my rights - "for my own good", of course.
The details of the Russian influence operation are irrelevant to the broader point - malicious actors will weaponize the medium, and non curated spaces quickly devolve into a toxic cesspool.
Clearly you have never been a moderator of any community.
However the Russian info warfare playbook is a fact.
Russia was the first country to develop the most extensive Online Ops capability. (For contrast - America/Israel created Stuxnet.)
It’s not even a secret.
It's an imaginary scenario. You know that the whole Russiagate multi-year farce turned out to be nothing but lies from our own governments, right? It's been proven many times over.
The idea that we have to be kept safe from "division" is especially hilarious given that the whole point of democracy is to allow people to work out their naturally occurring divisions peacefully.