#fire hose of disinformation

[socialjusticeinamerica]

#traitor trump #the big lie #Republican propaganda #republican assholes #Joseph Goebbels #nazi propaganda #Republican Nazis #fascist propaganda #right wing propaganda #fire hose of disinformation #gop Nazis #Nazi oligarchs own the gop

[worldofwardcraft]

The Pecker plot.

April 22, 2024

Most media news outlets are portraying the New York trial of career criminal Donald Trump as a simple case of “hush money” payments to cover up an affair. The more responsible ones are also correctly framing it as a case of election fraud since the purpose of the cover-up was to hide that affair from the voting public. But only a few are noticing the crime behind all the others, i.e., Trump’s covert collusion with National Enquirer owner David Pecker (pictured above with indicted co-conspirator) to push disinformation at the electorate and sway the 2016 election in Trump's favor.

Pecker, at the time CEO of American Media, Inc., the company that published the tabloid, was a close ally of Trump. According to state prosecutors, Pecker met with him and his then-lawyer Michael Cohen at Trump Tower in August 2015 and agreed to help Trump’s presidential campaign by "looking out for negative stories” about Trump before they were published.

Pecker “also agreed to publish negative stories about [Trump’s] competitors for the election.” One such was a bogus report claiming that Rafael Cruz, the father of Trump’s Republican primary rival Ted Cruz, was somehow involved in the 1963 John F. Kennedy assassination. But the Trump-Pecker operation really shifted into high gear when Hillary Clinton became the Democratic nominee. In the run-up to the election, dozens of stories appeared in the Enquirer with headlines like "Hillary Failed Secret FBI Lie Detector!", "Hillary's Lung Cancer Battle!", "Hillary, Bill & Chelsea Indicted!" and "Hillary: Six Months To Live!"

Prosecutors have also charged that, “because of his agreement” with Trump and Cohen, Pecker directed AMI to pay $30,000 to a former Trump Tower doorman, Dino Sajudin, who was attempting to shop a story about a “love child” Trump had fathered. Even after AMI concluded the story wasn’t true, the agreement with the doorman was kept in place.

With a circulation of less than 300,000, the National Enquirer, though sold in nearly every supermarket, doesn't reach all that many households. But millions of shoppers were subject to its lies. Explains political scientist and author Mark Schmitt,

Even people who don't read the Enquirer were exposed to these headlines which are really political ads. Enquirer's checkout aisle real estate is invaluable for political communication.

The Trump-Pecker conspiracy was more than merely a "catch and kill" scheme to bury negative stories. It also involved a fire hose of falsehoods aimed at getting Trump elected. And, no surprise, an immunized Pecker will be the first witness to testify against Trump in today's trial.

#david pecker #national enquirer #trump trials #trump crimes

[route22ny]

The split-screen reality of the Trump era became all too real for Stephen Richer recently, and in a very literal way. On May 15, the Arizona election official — a Republican — was looking at two computer screens. On one was former President Trump’s claim that a key election database had been deleted, an “unbelievable election crime.” On the other screen was that very database, quite intact.

“Wow,” Richer tweeted. “This is unhinged. I’m literally looking at our voter registration database on my other screen. Right now.”

A couple of days later, he made his dismay even more explicit.

“What can we do here?” he asked in an interview with CNN. “This is tantamount to saying that the pencil sitting on my desk in front of me doesn’t exist.”

When Richer unseated a Democratic incumbent to become Maricopa County’s recorder in November, he thought he had won the most boring job in politics: maintaining the county’s voter files. But he had not reckoned on Trump, #StopTheSteal, and the most massive, audacious and successful propaganda campaign in modern American history — a campaign that has adapted Russian-style disinformation to U.S. politics with alarming success.

Fortunately, Richer and his local Republican colleagues have refused to be victimized. Instead, they have shown how to fight back.

Information warfare takes many forms, but it has an overarching goal: to divide, demoralize and disorient a political foe by manipulating the social and media environments. As Yuri Bezmenov, a Soviet intelligence defector, explained in a chilling 1983 interview, “What it basically means is to change the perception of reality of every American to such an extent that despite the abundance of information, no one is able to come to sensible conclusions in the interests of defending themselves, their family, their community and their country.”

One potent weapon of mass distraction is the “fire hose of falsehood,” a torrent of lies that aims not so much to persuade as to confuse and disorient. After Russian intelligence services got caught poisoning a defector and his daughter in the U.K. in 2018, the Russian government responded with a blizzard of mutually contradictory lies: Britain did it, Ukraine did it, a jealous lover did it, it was a suicide attempt and so on.

Another standard technique: conspiracy bootstrapping. First you spread a rumor. Then you demand an investigation. Failure to investigate just confirms the conspiracy, but so does an investigation with a negative finding. It’s a trap: either ignoring or debunking the conspiracy theory propagates it.

Those techniques are not new. Intelligence services and propaganda experts understand them well, and master propagandists like Josef Goebbels and Vladimir Putin have used them to powerful effect. What no one imagined was that they could be deployed by an American president and his party — and not against a foreign antagonist, but against the American public.

Pundits often say that, whatever his authoritarian tendencies, Trump is too inept and inattentive to have done much lasting damage to democracy. They are wrong: In the realm of information warfare, Trump is a genius-level innovator. It was he who figured out how to adapt Russia-style disinformation to the U.S. political environment, no mean accomplishment.

His use of the fire hose of falsehood was masterly. In his 2016 campaign, according to PolitiFact, 70% of his checkable claims were false or mostly false, a flood of untruths whose like had never been seen in a presidential campaign. He began his presidency by lying about the weather at his inauguration and also lying about the size of the crowd. By the time his presidency was over, Washington Post fact-checkers had clocked him at more than 30,000 confirmed falsehoods, with nearly half coming in his final year.

Similarly, he was a master of conspiracy bootstrapping. He retailed conspiracy theories and falsehoods on the grounds that a lot of people were saying them, although of course he was the sayer-in-chief. Truth and common decency need not apply; when a prominent cable news host criticized him, Trump peddled an absurd (and deeply cruel) lie that the host was suspected of murder.

The black arts of disinformation had the intended effect, at least from Trump’s point of view. They exacerbated the country’s divisions, commandeered the country’s attention, dominated his opponents, disoriented the media and helped him establish a cult of personality among followers who trusted no one else.

Still, he saved the worst for last. His pièce de résistance was the propaganda attack on the 2020 election. Beginning months before the election, he launched a drumbeat of unfounded attacks on mail-in voting. Pundits were puzzled. Many Republicans vote by mail, and the pandemic was especially dangerous to older voters who lean toward Trump; why discourage them from voting safely and conveniently?

But Trump was aiming for the post-election. He saw he was in electoral trouble. With the anti-mail campaign, he was organizing, priming, and testing an unprecedented propaganda network, ready for use if he lost.

And then came #StopTheSteal itself, a disinformation campaign whose likes the country had never witnessed. It mobilized the White House, Republican politicians, social media, conservative cable news and talk radio, frivolous litigation, and every other available channel to broadcast the message that the election was rigged. The Big Lie, as it was aptly named, failed to keep Trump in office, but it succeeded at its secondary goal: turning the Republican Party itself into a propaganda organ.

In April, only a fourth of Republicans believed Joe Biden was legitimately elected, and GOP politicians who insisted on truth were persona non grata.

With that as background, we can see more clearly what is going on right now in Maricopa County, Arizona’s largest. In 2020, Biden carried Maricopa by more than 45,000 votes, and with it the state. The result was certified by the Republican governor, double-checked twice by the county’s election officials, and then confirmed by two independent audits.

But in classic bootstrapping fashion, Trump and state Republican leaders seized on conspiracy theories, such as that phony ballots had been smuggled in from Asia, to launch an unnecessary recount conducted by an unqualified company whose boss had promoted uncorroborated charges of election fraud. In textbook fashion, the controversial recount drove yet more public attention to the conspiracy theories, engendering yet more suspicion and spawning me-too demands for partisan “audits” across the country.

The Arizona shenanigans will not change the outcome of the 2020 election, but that is not the point. A great propaganda campaign is cyclonic and self-propelled: once unleashed, it takes on a life of its own, heedless of any underlying reality. By that yardstick, the Arizona recount is a great propaganda campaign.

Americans have never been exposed to Russian-style disinformation tactics, at least not coming from a major political party and deployed on a national scale. We are thus dangerously vulnerable to them. What can we do? There are no quick or simple answers; developing immunity requires everything from more sophisticated journalism and better-designed social media platforms to teaching media literacy, and much more.

But here is where to start: Do what Stephen Richer did. Insist loudly, unwaveringly and bravely on calling out lies, even at the cost of partisan solidarity.

Once it became clear that the #StopTheSteal campaign was escalating instead of dying out, Richer went public with a no-holds-barred denunciation of what Trump and his enablers were up to. “Just stop indulging this,” he told CNN. “Stop giving space for lies.”

At his side were all five of the Maricopa County supervisors — four of whom are Republicans. Calling the recount a sham, a con, and a “spectacle that is harming all of us,” they declared they “stand united together to defend the Constitution and the republic in our opposition to the Big Lie. We ask everyone to join us in standing for truth.” They also wrote a blistering 14-page letter shredding the alt-audit in detail.

Propaganda attacks succeed when critical points of resistance collapse; they stumble when trusted voices expose lies for what they are. Individuals and small groups may not be able to shut down a propaganda campaign or neutralize all its effects, but they can strip away its facade of legitimacy and act as an anchor against runaway fabulism. That was why the Soviet Union struggled so mightily to silence Andrei Sakharov and other dissident voices, and why those voices ultimately brought down the evil empire.

And it is why Rep. Liz Cheney made a difference when she chose truthfulness over her job in the Republican congressional leadership. The day she was booted, she read her colleagues John 8:32: “You shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free.” She could not end #StopTheSteal, but she could, and did, dent its credibility and embarrass Republicans whose equivocation and silence abetted the Big Lie.

In the same way, Richer and his colleagues in Arizona laid down a marker. They risked their political standing and even their personal safety (Richer has needed security protection) to expose their own party’s propaganda and shame those who spread it.

The deployment of Russian-style information warfare has allowed Trump and his authoritarian cult to usurp the Republican Party. And they are not finished. Now that they have succeeded with mass disinformation, it will be a fixture of American politics for years to come.

Countermeasures begin, though do not end, with personal integrity: standing up for facts and staying reality-based, whatever the short-term political costs. Think of it as epistemic patriotism, and pray for more of it, especially from Republicans.

***

The author, Jonathan Rauch, is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and the author of “The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth.”

https://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/ny-oped-arizona-dreaming-20210522-uyd6ivuv75hd5gof2geyd5adtu-story.html

#weaponized disinformation #US politics #information warfare #trump coup #fascism in america #orwellian #jonathan rauch

[tomorrowusa]

[T]he "sedition caucus" is not the only culpable party. For four years, Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and the rest of the Republican Party have looked the other way as Trump degraded the US presidency. Following Trump’s impeachment last year by the House of Representatives, Republican Senators voted to acquit him, and then initially lent credence to his false claims of election fraud. Even today, as the mob approached the Capitol, McConnell continued to spread the lie that it was the Democrats who undermined American democracy first. Similarly, Senator Susan Collins of Maine has for years expressed “concern” about Trump’s behavior, but offered no resistance as he waged war on American institutions throughout his one and only term.   These spineless politicians will live in infamy, but so, too, will every Fox News journalist (and the broadcaster’s owner, Rupert Murdoch) who has parroted Trump’s lies. So, too, will the leaders of the social-media platforms – particularly Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg – that have served as fire hoses of disinformation and lies.

Prof. Nina L. Khrushcheva, great-granddaughter of Nikita Khrushchev and now Professor of International Affairs at The New School in New York. From an op-ed at Project Syndicate also preserved at Internet Archive. Prof. Khrushcheva grew up in the old Soviet Union and has been a keen observer of US politics since she attended Princeton.

Trump’s attitude has not changed appreciably in the past four years. Yet all but a tiny number of Republicans refused to speak out about him until recently. The same goes for Fox News where being a Trump apologist was usually a prerequisite for getting a high-profile position. And Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg has even had secret dinners with Trump to try to appease him.

Trump did not suddenly “go rogue”. He has been a rogue since he launched his 2016 candidacy -- and everybody knows it whether they admit it in public or not. Trump’s anti-Constutional and un-American actions since the election would not have been possible without this large supporting cast.

#spineless #republicans #donald trump #fox news #social media #facebook

[agape-philo-sophia]

➝ Weaponizing Narratives - Psychological Warfare

We live during a time where there is a weaponization of narratives, and no one is immune to this type of false information targeting. To weaponize a narrative is to gain control over how people think, what they believe to be true, and to control their perception in the process of delivering them disinformation that is designed to weaken them and weaken their defenses. Why do the Controllers want you weakened? Reflect on that. What really weakens you emotionally and mentally, and your ability to discern the truth and make informed decisions for yourself that empower and support your spiritual strength, that which is needed to actualize your purpose in the world? The number one weakening tactic used by those leaders controlled by Thothian hijack that generate Propaganda is to get you to believe a lie as a truth. If you believe lies you are being told your perception, your beliefs and your behaviors will be fully controlled, your spiritual guidance will be distorted, you’ll think north is south and south is east, and this keeps you lost in the sea of confusion. Lies confuse your inner compass, you will not know what direction you are traveling. That is what it means to weaponize narratives, believing in lies weakens people, you cannot know what direction you are travelling if your Spiritual Guidance System is messed up and you are moving in the wrong direction and are not aware that you need course correction. This is an important part of Psychological Warfare, and mostly it is designed to confuse people into webs of disinformation and then get people to spread the disinformation as facts or made into a belief system. For a moment let us break that down. Weaponizing Narratives is how intelligentsia works to undermine a community of people, in which the attackers want to derail the truth and to spin people off into false and made up narratives that are pure deceptions, manipulations and Gaslighting tactics. Then they put unscrupulous people on the payroll to spread disinformation stories, spread it all over the internet, and get gullible and unaware people in the group or movement to believe it and spread these deceptions in their own communities, so more of the public believe that the deception narrative it is a real and true fact, when it is really a made up lie designed to derail the group of people that believe it. Weaponized narratives are targeted attacks made against a group of people, and this extends to nations and countries, where the attacking group seeks to undermine an opponent’s civilization, identity, and superimpose and subvert their will – in the global arena this is commonly used and purposely designed to destroy a person’s culture and way of life. By generating confusion, complexity, and political and social schisms that generate polarization and conflict in many groups of people usually people that identify with some kind of a classification system, black white male female gay transgender, etc., it confounds the response on the part of those who are trying to defend themselves from the pubic onslaught of negatively or Propaganda. Everyone knows in controlling narratives that the truth does not matter, its only what people believe to be true so they say anything that they think they can get the population to believe in so to control the narratives in 3D reality. Sadly this happens in the new age, leaders tell the audience what they want to hear in so thy can gain a following, because no one really wants to face Unpleasant Truths. It is really challenging to tell the truth in this environment of deception and lies, this is why so many people just follow the easier path and tell people what they want to hear. Today, thanks to the Internet and social media, the manipulation of our perception of the world is taking place on previously unimaginable scales of time, space and intentionality. That, precisely, is the source of one of the greatest vulnerabilities we as individuals and as a society must learn to deal with. Today, many actors are exploiting these vulnerabilities. The situation is complicated by the increasingly rapid evolution of technology for producing and disseminating information. The core element of the weaponization of narratives is the manipulators correct assessment of their intended audiences’ cognitive vulnerability—the premise that the audience they are targeting is already predisposed to accept because it appeals to existing fears or anxieties that remain in the human subconscious. So they look to manipulate subconscious fears in those groups as much as possible to control people. If you have no idea about your subconscious programs and fears you can become like a puppet in their hands. For many of us that are awake and aware, this can appear like dark portal puppets, when you are awake people around you can be used to attack you quite viciously, and this is a casualty on the earth, as many people are not aware, and thus their physical vessel is used to hurl energetic weaponry or other methods to attack you. Many of us as awakened Starseeds have the experience when a person just hates your guts for no apparent reason, and decides they are going to defame your character for their amusement, and spread a bunch of lies about you. A fast-moving information deluge, saturating people with a lot of data coming in all directions is the ideal battleground for this kind of psychological warfare. A fire-hose of narrative attacks coming from every direction gives the targeted person, population or an organized community of people little time to process and evaluate the information as truthful because its being flooded into the community in several directions. Let’s say a narrative for attacking a group or person arises, and it is being saturated on social media platforms, and no one really knows if the information or accusation is true or false. This media saturation is cognitively disorienting and confusing, especially if the targeted opponents barely realize that an organized attack of character assignation or disinformation is actually what’s hitting them. Opportunities are then created for gaslighting and emotional manipulation of the community, which when under attack in this way, undermine the person being targeted for finding a way to respond or resist the accusations or information being saturated into the community via people that spread the disinformation by jumping on the bandwagon. This can destroy organizations, movements, and even a person’s reputation, it can get people arguing in circular debates over things that never even happened in the first place. Essentially what this means is we have to use common sense, Critical Thinking and see if the information passes our b.s meter, and if we stop long enough to get quiet and then deeply feel into the information, many times we can get many intuitive impressions about it that helps us discern if this is a weaponized narrative or manipulation-deception signature. Weaponizing Narratives are used to destroy communities and trust between people, it is to create conflict, controversy and divide and conquer scenarios which break apart the organization or community goals for unity and working together for a common purpose. Weaponized narratives can also be half truths or lies that furnish the illusion of some emotional certainty at the cost of rational understanding and critical thinking. The emotionally satisfying decision to accept a weaponized narrative is to believe and to have faith in partial truths or lies prevents the opening of intelligent debates and discussion. Thus, it inoculates cultures, institutions, and individuals against counterarguments and inconvenient facts. If we don’t want to look at the truth because its unpleasant, we let people get away with murder because its more convenient to us. Then we are complicit with feeding the monster, we’re helping to co-create the ego monsters in the New age, Ascension and Disclosure movement. Therefore the Truth can be overwhelmed with constantly repeated statements that represent falsehoods, soon the truth has been replaced with lies, and no one even notices. Keep this in mind as we continue to understand infiltration and hijack of the general narrative, because as I’ve just explained, this is the major component of the Psychological Warfare used to weaponize the new age, Ascension and Disclosure community. It is up to us to actually see and understand how they are accomplishing this infiltration so that we can refuse to be controlled by it. As conscious and spiritual people, we should make a commitment to truth, truth telling, and not fall into deception narratives by jumping on the bandwagon of consensus and controlled opposition. Be the person that sees it as it is happening, and refuse to participate with it. Many times weaponized narratives are being directed by paid for online trolls that are designed to be set up for ensnaring groups in circular debates. They do not want to find any resolution to the problem topic that is outside of their own end result agendas, in which they are spinning the narrative in the direction they want the public themselves to self enforce. An argument that goes nowhere. Though a person believes he or she is arguing a point, the argument does not progress because the individual has an fixed and immovable belief that is considered to be a fact and this is the core point of the argument, which in their belief system, is actually not debatable. The Negative Ego tends to exert Mental Rigidity which fixates on polarizing belief systems on right and wrong, black and white, Splitting behaviors that compartmentalize thinking into Circular Reasoning and Linear Thinking. ➝ THESIS — ANTI-THESIS — SYN-THESIS : PROBLEM — REACTION — SOLUTION ➝ ORDO AB CHAO ➝ ORDER OUT OF CHAOS Continue Reading here : https://www.minds.com/newsfeed/1089599441408761856?referrer=MindCom

[leanpick]

Opinion | Putin No Longer Seems Like a Master of Disinformation

Opinion | Putin No Longer Seems Like a Master of Disinformation

In a 2016 paper, Christopher Paul and Miriam Matthews, both at RAND, described Russia’s model of digital propaganda as a “fire hose of falsehoods.” The operation, which Russia has been developing since at least its 2008 incursion into Georgia, is “high-volume and multichannel” — propagandistic memes, videos, social media posts and other content is produced in huge quantities and distributed…

View On WordPress

[myweddingsandevents]

The destructive effect of disinformation and the "Fire Hose of Lies" | Nick Carmody JD, MS Psych on Patreon

https://www.patreon.com/posts/33876951

[hoagie97-blog]

My Answers to HW5case, Q2

Answer:

How would you suggest going about combating the Russian “Fire-hose of Falsehood”? I believe the most ethical way to combat the approach is similar to the approach that Paul( the social scientist). I believe that getting the right information out first and informing people would definitely be easier said than done, and I believe that censoring the false information is an unethical approach, although it could potentially be considered a utilitarian ethical method. 

Out of all the characteristics of the propaganda model, which do you find to be the least ethical? I believe that out of all of the characteristics of the propaganda model, the least ethical would have to be the fact that there is not any truth or “commitment to objective reality” and that it is being spread in such a fast rate on top of this. 

Why do you think the Russian propaganda machine is working? I believe the machine is working so well now because of how readily available news is to the populous nowadays, and the wide variety of media devices available as a platform for spreading misinformation. 

Why do you think the Russian propaganda machine is spreading disinformation? I believe the reason that the propaganda is spreading is to stir misinformation and create ignorance from true events, in a sort of distraction. Not to get all conspiracy crazy about Russians, but it is a logical explanation behind the purpose of spreading misinformation.

How do dangerous do you think that the propaganda machine can be? I think the spread of misinformation can be very dangerous, and it can easily stir people up and create division, and hysteria. I think it can also be harmful to truthful information, in such a way that the truth can be categorized as false information just as easily. 

Three Standard Questions: 

If deontological ethics were applied to the case, in a scenario where we censored misinformation in effort to prevent it from spreading, it could be seen as ethical to prevent the spread of propaganda by censoring it. This would be a morally wrong solution to create a morally good resolution.

If we applied utilitarian ethics to the case, I believe that it would be a similar outcome as using a deontological ethical strategy.”The ends justify the means” therefore preventing propaganda and false information from spreading would be an ethical solution with these theories.

If we used virtue ethics to prevent the spreading of misinformation, I believe that it would be a similar solution as the one that I mentioned in the answers above. It would be unethical to censor misinformation, due to the fact that it is information, and should be available to anyone. An ethical solution with this theory would be to attempt to combat misinformation by spreading factual information at a faster and wider rate.

[hoagie97-blog]

My Answers to HW5case, Q1

Answer:

The source of my case is https://www.rand.org/blog/2016/12/beyond-the-headlines-rands-christopher-paul-discusses.html

Eight important facts are:

The Russian “Fire hose of Falsehood” propaganda has been “pumped” to the west supporting Russian agendas in both the Ukraine and Syria, and also “attempting to influence the recent U.S presidential election” according to a senior social scientist at RAND who was quoted in the article.

According to the scientist previously stated in the article, the new propaganda model contains the following characteristics: “High volume” using a multitude of media, rapid and continuous spreading “around the clock”. Falsehood in reports with little to no truth, doctored photos and staged events, and no commitment to consistency, only to distract and “obfuscate”.

The article states that the excessive use of disinformation is also used against western countries as well, mentioning that there are reports of interference in the recent U.S presidential campaign.  

Paul (the senior social scientist at RAND) suggests that the quantity of information could sometimes “equate to believability” and how this could be an objective of the propaganda model.

Paul states how “Once you hear something and accept it, it’s really hard to change your mind” and explains how the disinformation pipeline usually streams information first.

He states how the Russians “were playing a long game focused more on sowing confusion, distrust, division, and discontent among adversaries than on any immediate economic gain for Russia” the article also explains how if sources of information are widely treated with skepticism, the few that are truthful can be discounted as well.

The article touches on how the U.S could counter the propaganda, and how it is tricky to determine what should be done, especially since censorship would violate American values, even when it is a wide spread of misinformation.

Paul states that we shouldn't try to “fight the firehose of falsehood with a squirtgun of truth” but instead “Try to put raincoats on those who will be hit with the firehose.” Suggesting to fight against false information by advancing with good information.

Five questions to ask about the case are:

How would you suggest going about combating the Russian “Firehose of Falsehood”?

Out of all the characteristics of the propaganda model, which do you find to be the least ethical?

Why do you think the Russian propaganda machine is working?

Why do you think the Russian propaganda machine is spreading disinformation?

How do dangerous do you think that the propaganda machine can be?