I'd ask: How are people like Laura Ingraham allowed anywhere near anything with "news" in its name? For that matter, how is it that #Fox has managed to have free rein to be the voice of #disinformation & assaulting #truth ?
Once upon a time broadcasters were required to serve the public by offering actual, you know, #facts.
Now there's a bubble for anyone who wants to stay comfortably immersed in #TrumpVirus and #GQP#cult messaging.
Rachel Maddow discusses her research into fascism, disinformation, and propaganda.
It's not merely an attempt to foster animosity towards a particular group. Fascist disinformation is to erode our democracy by convincing us that a specific group is perilous, untrustworthy, and should be disenfranchised.
What has transpired since 2016 with the former president is not just the vilification of ethnic minorities. He, along with Fox propaganda and other purveyors of disinformation, have escalated lies and disinformation into a violent domestic terrorist movement and a MAGA-driven fascist party. The presence of Republican fascists is a reality now.
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Fascism ... is about getting us to undo #democracy and we shouldn't stand for it.
Journalists in the west now seem to finally be admitting that our media environment has seen a radical shift towards anti-democratic forces.
Yet. This didn’t come out of nowhere.
Remember those same people posting RT clips daily back in 2015?
As far as my home country goes, we have pretty solid evidence that even if we have only ourselves to blame for supporting these people, #Russia had an #influence and provided a lot of the #disinformation ammo they shot with.
Jay Kuo in the "increasing evidence that the Russians are pulling the GOP’s puppet strings":
"Russia is now keenly aware of how easy it is to sow confusion, mistrust, and outright lies by managing to plant false stories, whether through the internet or through an intelligence source, with those willing to exploit them for their own political gain."
This works because many Americans are eager to gobble up disinformation.
"In Applebaum's eyes, the deployment of propaganda by authoritarians — and authoritarian wannabes such as Trump — is one of the most profound issues of our time.
'I think it is at the center of one of the worst crises for American democracy this century, certainly in recent decades,' Applebaum told me by phone Tuesday."
"'"If we can't agree on what happened yesterday, then how do we write legislation about it? If we don't share the same reality in the democracy, then how do we debate how we should organize our world?' …
Applebaum explained that Vladimir Putin's Russia "pioneered" the "firehose of falsehoods," a tactic that Trump has employed in the U.S. and others have used across the world to seize and maintain power. "
"Republicans have been waging legal war on our democracy, using the courts to take away our reproductive, voting and other rights, and they have been waging a parallel information war that sets the stage for the reception of those legal arguments and decisions."
"The decision of the Supreme Court to hear arguments about the need for Trump to have total immunity from prosecution is a victory in itself for far-right information warfare, because it prepares public opinion to consider dictatorship as a possibility for America.
To normalize extreme ideas, you get them circulating through institutions and the public sphere, aiming for prestigious platforms that offer maximum legitimacy. Enter the Supreme Court …."
"Here is a difficult truth: A part of the American political spectrum is not merely a passive recipient of the combined authoritarian narratives that come from Russia, China, and their ilk, but an active participant in creating and spreading them."
"Like the leaders of those countries, the American MAGA right also wants Americans to believe that their democracy is degenerate, their elections illegitimate, their civilization dying. The MAGA movement’s leaders also have an interest in pumping nihilism and cynicism into the brains of their fellow citizens, and in convincing them that nothing they see is true."
#AI#GenerativeAI#Propaganda#DeepFakes#Disinformation: "AI propaganda is here. But is it persuasive? Recent research published in PNAS Nexus and conducted by Tomz, Josh Goldstein from the Center for Security and Emerging Technology at Georgetown University, and three Stanford colleagues—master’s student Jason Chao, research scholar Shelby Grossman, and lecturer Alex Stamos—examined the effectiveness of AI-generated propaganda.
#Europe#Russia#Sabotage#Disinformation: "European intelligence agencies have warned their governments that Russia is plotting violent acts of sabotage across the continent as it commits to a course of permanent conflict with the west.
Russia has already begun to more actively prepare covert bombings, arson attacks and damage to infrastructure on European soil, directly and via proxies, with little apparent concern about causing civilian fatalities, intelligence officials believe.
While the Kremlin’s agents have a long history of such operations — and launched attacks sporadically in Europe in recent years — evidence is mounting of a more aggressive and concerted effort, according to assessments from three different European countries shared with the Financial Times.
Intelligence officials are becoming increasingly vocal about the threat in an effort to promote vigilance.
“We assess the risk of state-controlled acts of sabotage to be significantly increased,” said Thomas Haldenwang, head of German domestic intelligence. Russia now seems comfortable carrying out operations on European soil “[with] a high potential for damage,” he told a security conference last month hosted by his agency, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution."
These insidious little pests eat the protective earths from electrical installations, plugs and devices. Copper and plastic sheathing both disappear without a trace, as if they were never there.
These dangerous insects are very common around here. Sometimes even the shops selling electrical installation materials are infected and replacement plugs on shelves are entirely missing their PE pins.
"Last Saturday, I was at a community gathering of around 30 Vietnamese immigrants, all in their 50s and 60s, in Oakland, California, when I asked if anyone knew anything about AI or artificial intelligence.
None of them had ever heard of it...And in this room full of elders from my community, the Vietnamese community, no one knew about it, which meant no one knew to look for it."