Many thanks for this. There's been a fair bit of journalism recently about how overboard various agencies went with attempts to suppress disinformation of various stripes. Complain as you will about Matt Taibbi, I haven't seen anybody debunking his raw facts. It was about time to be reminded that the security agencies got that way from t…
Many thanks for this. There's been a fair bit of journalism recently about how overboard various agencies went with attempts to suppress disinformation of various stripes. Complain as you will about Matt Taibbi, I haven't seen anybody debunking his raw facts.
It was about time to be reminded that the security agencies got that way from their frustration at the sheer torrent of - I'll call it "propaganda" as a catch-all - and the difficulty of combating it. The volume of it is wild. I wouldn't worry about "ChatGPT" and friends increasing the flow, because the flow now is more than anybody has time to read; it's not limited by how much crap the troll farms can write.
Trying to make a case for the degree to which Russian influence and interference actually exists — and, separately, how much of an impact it actually has on our politics — is an infuriatingly difficult job. You're stuck explaining just how far-reaching and clandestine it can be, while also pointing out that it probably isn't *that* effective. It's much easier to claim it's massive in scale and enormous in impact, and then to have the other side point and make fun of those people.
Much like Chinese meddling, it is complicated and bad, and needs opposing. But we also can't let it take away from our own agency in being angry, paranoid, and terrible.
Many thanks for this. There's been a fair bit of journalism recently about how overboard various agencies went with attempts to suppress disinformation of various stripes. Complain as you will about Matt Taibbi, I haven't seen anybody debunking his raw facts.
It was about time to be reminded that the security agencies got that way from their frustration at the sheer torrent of - I'll call it "propaganda" as a catch-all - and the difficulty of combating it. The volume of it is wild. I wouldn't worry about "ChatGPT" and friends increasing the flow, because the flow now is more than anybody has time to read; it's not limited by how much crap the troll farms can write.
Trying to make a case for the degree to which Russian influence and interference actually exists — and, separately, how much of an impact it actually has on our politics — is an infuriatingly difficult job. You're stuck explaining just how far-reaching and clandestine it can be, while also pointing out that it probably isn't *that* effective. It's much easier to claim it's massive in scale and enormous in impact, and then to have the other side point and make fun of those people.
Much like Chinese meddling, it is complicated and bad, and needs opposing. But we also can't let it take away from our own agency in being angry, paranoid, and terrible.