Great episode. Anne Applebaum is on my "do not miss" guest list.
As a contractor, I worked on a tech project (unclass) to visually track the spread of disinfo campaigns. The "ukrainian biolab" and "Zelensky is a Nazi" campaigns were what we used for proof of concept. By tracking specific metadata and when things appeared in news sources, we could watch a timeline of the disinfo starting in Russia and moving to China, Africa, and then to Europe and US primarily via Social Media and right-wing news outlets. It was fascinating to see.
Fascinating, yes, but also horrific because of how once it hits the US social media feedback loop it gets amplified exponentially. I was thinking that one of the brakes on this would be local, I'll call it "classic" media, mainly the local paper. But the collapse of such media leaves very little else out there to counter the barrage. We are in trouble...
Great episode. Anne Applebaum is on my "do not miss" guest list.
As a contractor, I worked on a tech project (unclass) to visually track the spread of disinfo campaigns. The "ukrainian biolab" and "Zelensky is a Nazi" campaigns were what we used for proof of concept. By tracking specific metadata and when things appeared in news sources, we could watch a timeline of the disinfo starting in Russia and moving to China, Africa, and then to Europe and US primarily via Social Media and right-wing news outlets. It was fascinating to see.
Fascinating, yes, but also horrific because of how once it hits the US social media feedback loop it gets amplified exponentially. I was thinking that one of the brakes on this would be local, I'll call it "classic" media, mainly the local paper. But the collapse of such media leaves very little else out there to counter the barrage. We are in trouble...