this post was submitted on 31 Jul 2025
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Fediverse vs Disinformation

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Pointing out, debunking, and spreading awareness about state- and company-sponsored astroturfing on Lemmy and elsewhere. This includes social media manipulation, propaganda, and disinformation campaigns, among others.

Propaganda and disinformation are a big problem on the internet, and the Fediverse is no exception.

What's the difference between misinformation and disinformation? The inadvertent spread of false information is misinformation. Disinformation is the intentional spread of falsehoods.

By equipping yourself with knowledge of current disinformation campaigns by state actors, corporations and their cheerleaders, you will be better able to identify, report and (hopefully) remove content matching known disinformation campaigns.


Community rules

Same as instance rules, plus:

  1. No disinformation
  2. Posts must be relevant to the topic of astroturfing, propaganda and/or disinformation

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[–] Novocirab@feddit.org 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

Reminds me of this, though:

Education is Ignorance Noam Chomsky Excerpted from Class Warfare, 1995, pp. 19-23, 27-31

… Sam Bowles and Herb Gintis, two economists, in their work on the American educational system some years back… pointed out that the educational system is divided into fragments. The part that’s directed toward working people and the general population is indeed designed to impose obedience. But the education for elites can’t quite do that. It has to allow creativity and independence. Otherwise they won’t be able to do their job of making money. You find the same thing in the press. That’s why I read the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times and Business Week. They just have to tell the truth. That’s a contradiction in the mainstream press, too. Take, say, the New York Times or the Washington Post. They have dual functions and they’re contradictory. One function is to subdue the great beast. But another function is to let their audience, which is an elite audience, gain a tolerably realistic picture of what’s going on in the world. Otherwise, they won’t be able to satisfy their own needs. That’s a contradiction that runs right through the educational system as well. It’s totally independent of another factor, namely just professional integrity, which a lot of people have: honesty, no matter what the external constraints are. That leads to various complexities. If you really look at the details of how the newspapers work, you find these contradictions and problems playing themselves out in complicated ways….

https://chomsky.info/warfare02/

WSJ changed a lot since then?

[–] sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

So for starters, I agree with Chomsky broadly here, he isn't wrong that... its good to keep up on what a class or segment of people read if you want to know how their brains work, how they think, what they often do not even realize they hold as unchallengeable beliefs... and that when you're in a cultural (?) space for corpos, you get to see what they're actually worried about, vs what they project outward to a more general, mass audience.

To specifically answer your question:

No, it hasn't changed that much.

WSJ, FT, The Economist...

yeah, they're all generally in that same boat, I am just telling you as a former corpo, former executive level data analyst, that most of what is in those is basically just the bougie version of a gossip rag, lifestyle pieces.

A bougie lifestyle piece just is the latest 'enlightened' perspective to have on monetary nterest rate policy or whatever.

Its like Patrick Bateman.

Most of them don't really care, beyond perfecting the brand that is their own corporate persona.

The people that actually know what they are talking about may yes, read these occasionally, semi-regularly, just to generally keep abreast of things, but the really powerful data and announcements are in industry journals, and most of the time, the really important conversations and missives are not publicly available.

If you have access to or know how to read those, you have a 90% chancd of knowing what the FT, WSJ, and Economist are going to be talking about in 6 weeks to 6 months.

[–] Novocirab@feddit.org 2 points 16 hours ago

That's very interesting, thanks