Saturday, January 12, 2019

Home grown dezinformatsiya/дезинформация

“Russian internet trolls worked overtime in 2016 to inject disinformation into American elections. A year later, as news reports now reveal, Democratic operatives, some funded by LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, tried out these same tactics to boost Senator Doug Jones in Alabama. Russia’s online dezinformatsiya has gone native, and it will get worse.”  Wall Street Journal, Jan. 12, 2019

Disinformation, fake news, false narratives, conspiracy theories,  obfuscation, propaganda, yellow journalism, and flat out lies have always been a part of the American political process.  Disinformation is more a government embedded plan, but how are we to know our own government doesn’t do the same.  It was the Clinton campaign in 2008 which launched the “Obama birth certificate” story, which then made numerous evolutions through the right wing.  Her campaign also funded the fake dossier about Trump in Russia. None was done without the help of the deep state.

Not sure why WSJ is giving all the credit for our own home grown mischief and tactics to the Russians or even social media and the internet.  After all, we’ve got George Soros and all his many sticky fingers into U.S. non-profits and churches.

Review: Social Media, Weaponized 

“The Kremlin’s “dezinformatsiya” campaign—whether carried out against Ukraine, Estonia, Germany or the U.S.—involves “a bewildering array of narratives designed to distort truth and confuse its enemies,” Mr. Patrikarakos writes. And of course it isn’t just the Kremlin that operates in such a way. “Obfuscation has found its perfect platforms” in the realm of social media, he notes, reaching “audiences to a degree unprecedented in modern history.” The conditions are ripe: “In the postmodern Western world, where academics decry the notion of an ‘objective truth,’ where the lack of trust in institutions is lower than at any other time in living memory, this type of information finds a receptive audience.”” (War in 140 Characters)

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/11/26/before-fake-news-there-was-soviet-disinformation/?

Disinformation: Former Spy Chief Reveals Secret Strategies for Undermining Freedom, Attacking Religion, and Promoting Terrorism by [Rychlak, Ronald J., Pacepa, Lt. Gen. Ion Mihai] 

(WND books, 2013)

Go to the Amazon site and “look inside” for an overview of this book.

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