• 9point6@lemmy.world
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      14 days ago

      Primary sources tend to disagree

      Here’s a study from 2019 about it that backs up my assertion that more is conservative https://academic.oup.com/joc/article/69/2/168/5425470

      And of that propaganda being created, that conservative inclined people are most likely to fall for it: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/20563051231220330

      There seem to be plenty of other papers that more or less reach those same conclusions with a good number of citations, but I can’t find anything really at all on Google Scholar concluding the opposite with a quick search, let alone something also credible.

      The closest some papers come is saying that they try groups all over the political spectrum, as their goal is disunity ultimately, but they seemingly don’t really have any kind of continued success with misinforming those groups anywhere near as effectively. They more or less all end up concluding that most of the propaganda targets conservatives, because they’re the ones that fall for it.

      • JollyG@lemmy.world
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        14 days ago

        I think one of the problems with citing that first study as evidence Russian disinfo is targeted at conservatives more than liberals is that it only studied one case, and Russian disinformation campaigns tailor their disinfo to different demographics, often through brute force/trial and error. So it is quite possible that the particular case they studied happens to be tailored to (or more successfully resonated with) conservatives, while another specific case would have resonated with liberals more thus resulting in more liberal exposure by their metrics.

    • DomeGuy@lemmy.world
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      14 days ago

      Your article doesn’t seem to mention Russia once.

      Rumors and smears are part of free speech. To the extent that right-wing trolls and their audience are actual voters, it’s essentially just a coarse form of ordinary political speech.

      The extent to which a foreign government acting coverly is either creating or artificially boosting such content is scandalous.

      • troed@fedia.io
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        14 days ago

        Your article doesn’t seem to mention Russia once.

        Feel free to read any other article that does, if you somehow have managed to avoid learning about russian influence campaigns over the last decade.

        • DomeGuy@lemmy.world
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          14 days ago

          You presented it as proof that Russia is supporting misinformation on the left. To be that, it has to both include all three parts of the claim – that there is disinformation on the left, that Russia is covertly supporting disinformation, and that some of the disinformation on the left was supported by Russia.

          If your wife sleeps around, and I engage in casual sex, it does not necessarily follow that I slept with your wife.


          A common suspicion in America is that Vladimir Putin believes that Trump as POTUS is good for Russia, and that Putin interferes with US politics with a specific goal of helping Trump.

          If you have some reporting that directly links Russia to left-wing disinformation I’d love to read it. But the BBC article I read after following your link didn’t have any such link.