this post was submitted on 08 Apr 2024
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My hope is that the FBI asked them to shut this down on NSA's behalf, so threat actors feel more comfortable as they aren't being watched, studied, and analyzed by every OSINT collective in existence.
My fear is that they know what happened the previous 2 elections and this year will be the worst yet, and they don't want their users knowing how badly they got duped and feeling bad/dumb enough to leave the platform. Also advertising $$.
Dark money from other countries is a good boogeyman, but it's basically irrelevant. Biden and Trump are going to spend between 2 and 3 billion on the election collectively. The hundreds of thousands or millions a foreign government may spend is a rounding error.
It has nothing to do with money spent. One is active hatefully divisive propaganda infesting the minds of the country on a total scale. We have multiple US Senators and Congresspeople saying the eclipse and earthquakes are a sign from God ffs. Have you been on reddit in the last few months? If not, I urge you to take a peek. Even in small hobbyist subreddits now every other post is pure hate or FUD, and every other comment is someone taunting people to fight them with divisive and very obvious left/right comments, much worse than the typical "lol seems like a typical lib/cuckservative." It comes in waves, which I assume is reddit finding and banning them, making them rotate accounts and continue the karma generating process so they can post and comment in karma limit subs (the idiotic questions.)
I call this the cooties theory of ideas. If it were true, then why are billions of dollars spend on propaganda every year? Do they just like wasting money? Were Edward Bernays and Walter Lippmann just cranks? Does Russian meme technology have a secret sauce?
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why are billions of dollars spend on propaganda every year
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Its the devil you know vs. the devil you don't. One is trying, at least in some part, to quell fears and stabilize the nation and economy. The other is actively creating division and fear at every turn. Or course project mockingbird, any Hollywood movies or shows featuring the military, etc.
I guess you could call it secret sauce. A department of the military for offensive informational warfare, with lots of training, tooling, time and resources. I'm sure we do the same thing but there's a reason our adversaries have heavily censored internet access and they can't freely go onto YouTube or Google and search for topics of interest, or use reddit or Facebook openly without a VPN. They know what their capabilities can do to cripple a nation from the inside and make everyone hate each other and the government. There's no way they'd let us do the same to them, but there is going to be a major revolt when the US decides to do it here.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
training, tooling, time and resources
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Russia/etc. can always make up by lower-cost bot-activity.