It is silly to compare Voice of America (an excellent journalistic institution with a great reputation), to the Washington Post (overall pretty good), to Russia Times (literal state propaganda).
Lol lmao
Also that’s a laughable and total misunderstanding of Voice of America’s history, mission, and goals. It has a reputation basically everywhere as being as close to objective and reliable reporting as you can get outside the BBC.
I'm speechless
Most propagandized people in the world.
That they can look at the BRITISH BROADCASTING CORPORATION and fail to recognize it for what it is says so much about Westian thinking.
Also just, like, the well-documented history of having a rightwing bias while Tories complain about it having a leftwing bias and pressure it further to the right.
It has a reputation basically everywhere as being as close to objective and reliable reporting as you can get
100 quid this dipshit's a yankee lmao
VOA is funded by the US Agency for Global Media. It’s literally the official propaganda arm of the US government. It’s completely delusional to think that VOA (or RFA, RFE, etc.) is “independent journalism” in any way shape or form.
Not "funded by" the US Agency for Global Media but is literally a division of the US Agency. VOA is literally headquartered out of a federal building in Washington DC. Unlike public broadcasters, it isn't a situation of a non-profit that "receives public money", "has public charter", or even "NGO that receives grant money" but that it is literally a federal agency with the mission of influencing foreign audiences to advance US geopolitical interests.
You’re right, and maybe it was a bad choice of words on my part.
They could call it The US Deptartment for Propaganda & Foreign Manipulation and these people would still would still argue the point. They're not even engaging with reality, just a my team good rationale that they've internalised and gets more absurd by necessity the more it's exposed to contrary evidence. They're the secular, liberal version of the evangelicals for whom their entire identity is standing on a street corner wearing a sandwich board that says 'Jesus is Returning'.
yea VOA/RFA was (in)famous for spreading anti-communist propaganda in the USSR.
Show
You've got to love people who drop links to mediabiasfactcheck as if it helps their argument.
Ignoring this shit or laughing from afar doesn't do anything to change it
We did, and that was absolutely more effective at moving people left. So effective they threw us out, so now we're here.
Having spaces like this is good for a number of reasons, but the only productive use of all this posting energy is trying to get other people on our side (because without that we won't get anything we want). At some point you have to meet people where they are if you want to bring them around.
If you want to be productive, touch grass. Talk to a neighbor. Posting at people isn’t praxis and federating with shitheads isn’t creating some pipeline to leftism. Make a lemmy account if your raison d’post is to convert liberals
The amount of people converted per poster on CTH and GZD is probably way, way higher than the people converted per American from IRL educating
The internet is by far the most effective form to deliver propaganda. You should embrace it
Nobody got tricked into hating DPRK, China or Russia from a person ranting about them IRL. It's all the propaganda from the news, media, social media, etc. delivered primarily on the internet and television
I garun-fucking-tee 90% of this website was radicalized online.
I definitely was.
quick edit: also isn't that the alt/far right strategy? And it's been working decently well for them. 4chan in general, those weird "feminist owned" videos on youtube, etc.
Do you think anyone changes their mind based on what they read online?
I'll agree there are better uses of your time, of course, but if you must post (and we wouldn't be here otherwise), try to channel it into a useful direction.
Your definition of useful is not the same as mine. I sincerely hope you do convert people, I just have less tolerance for federation with the type of lib who is so deluded by superiority that they think VoA is “unbiased” “news “
Do you think the average person that you're talking to irl is going to be any better though?
It's the exact same audience
He has a point. I usually have a lot more luck talking with people IRL and exposing them to new ideas. Online is always much more hostile and defensive, in the real world where you can actually get to know people without doxing them or doxing yourself you can appeal to their specific situation. Or the other end, obviously as socialists we should not waste our time going to car salesmen and executives and talking to them about Marx when we know their class interest lies in the opposite direction. Online, your posts are reaching lots of people, sure, but the internet in 2023 is explicitly designed to distract you with new posts/ideas/products as quickly as your attention span allows so nothing sticks.
Maybe the Hegelian conclusion to this is that the correct approach to organizing in the 21st century is to synthesize online agitprop with real life building of worker power. You can't really organize a union or a strike online, but with a broad enough movement you can make it more likely for IRL organizing to be successful by politicizing the working class.
I've come to the same conclusion as you. Online for spreading information and teaching and real life for action
It's even difficult to do stuff like show evidence or sources for your arguments irl too
You use evidence and sources? I just hammer the dialectics over their heads and make appeals to emotion.
Does that work? I've tried both methods and tbh both haven't worked for me lmao
Well I mostly talk with people who are already pretty disillusioned with the world around us, and I offer them an alternative way to think in terms of class struggle and building worker power to get everyone's needs met. I might use a lot of general arguments about how capitalism requires unemployment to maintain its reserve army of labor, or point out how the system needs to waste a lot of commodities over time to maintain prices at a high level, that sort of thing. But in terms of hard facts I usually just point out to the political and economic situation we live in (small island colony of the US) and give them a way to think about it that makes a lot more sense than "well they create jobs so it's good that Americans are building all their factories in our tax haven, actually".
Of course if you can back it up with more facts and online sources that's a bonus but it can backfire, IDK if this is too anti-intellectual to say but I've always found that if you're talking with laymen it can be more of a hindrance than anything else because for each source you may find that indicates that capitalism is obsolete, there's a billion Cato Institute, Heritage Foundation, or some other billionaire/NED funded outlet that says the opposite and it looks just as convincing. So I find it easier to rely on lived experiences. Which is why it never works to talk with people that have had life handed to them with a silver spoon, because those people will always be inclined to conclude that this system works and poverty is just a result of poor choices on the part of the individual.
Idk it's probably just me being really bad at explaining things and talking about complex subjects well but I literally cannot even convince my friends that are on minimum wage/in debt/on food stamps that unions are good, with logical or emotional appeal
I find the response is usually too defeatist and broken
Still gonna keep hacking away though of course
Oh yeah defeatism is a super common response. There is no way to logic them out of the defeatism, this is why revolutionary movements didn't just have theoretical and logical messaging in their propaganda but also other things to keep people from falling into defeatism. It can help to really hammer that message of "a better world is possible" into their heads, or offer the prospect of building worker power as a responsibility that workers in our moment in history have to the generations of the future, so they may live in a better world. Then you just need to convince them that every little bit counts, and unions are the most important part of our current moment in history for establishing political power as workers.
Absolutely. My parents would always watch 1 or 2 news stations on cable and I was liberal who thought George Bush was stupid but tried his best. Nobody in my town or school was publicly to the left of Obama. Online arguments and online research radicalized me further left than Bernie. His first loss made me realize the tankies were right
Having a dedicated community with even the slightest level of coordination, or just a common focus, is way more effective at swaying others than individual accounts doing their thing on a site that will regularly ban them.
And plenty of people on here do still post on reddit, which is good.
I don't post on reddit; I don't have the time to wade through that shit. If you don't want to wade through Lemmy stuff after federation, just keep the sort to only Hexbear.
We were like the second or third most active sub in posting volume after the NBA sub with like 10 million members.
Like, yeah, it's just a reddit sub, but I don't think there was anything quite like it in the Anglosphere.
Terminology from the old sub even became widespread online like "chud"
um according to the hecking epic narwhal media fairness list, its not propanganda
Liberals I can understand, but when the whole Uyghur thing started, I read an article from https://freedomnews.org.uk/ and one of their sources was RFA. It's an Anarchist newsite lol
I don't think its secretarian to call out a specific subset of anarchists. There definitely are anarchists who parrot CIA propaganda like they are actually getting paid. Its fine to criticize that.
The western left is such a fucking joke. Every time I read something like this, I sympathize more with third worldists.
i seriously doubt the admin team there are anywhere near devoted to MLism if they run their site like apathetic libsThe most openly ML ones are the dev maintainers of the project who spend much more time developing than moderating. I can't blame them. Hell, at the height of the reddit exodus, they even set up barriers to joining lemmy.ml so users would sign up on other instances.
Someone in that comments section is from an instance hosted at (I shit you not) lib.lgbt
Lmao so lemmy.ml is just completely and irreversibly cooked. That comment section is worse than fucking Reddit.
The comment section there sucks ass, but it's neither completely nor irreversibly cooked.
Nothing is stopping us now. It will just be slightly more convenient.
That's the problem when a huge portion of the people who joined Lemmy from Reddit are extremely liberal, wonky nerds. When they're in Reddit they generally get crowded out by the slightly or overtly fashy nerds so they can't hit you with the "Uhhh sorry sweety but Snopes gave that Russian propaganda 3 pinnocchios" without getting made fun of for how lame they are. Then we don't have the objectively correct and sexy nerds from Hexbear over there to tell them to shut up either, so they roam free. Sad!
Being optimistic, I think its new function is as a recruiting ground.
Ultimately you have to enforce some kind of political line in terms of website moderation or else liberals will browbeat and concern troll until there's no leftism left.
The US government called VOA propaganda in its own archives.
306.2 Records of the International Information Administration (Department of State) 1945-53
History: Office of the Coordinator of Information established as an independent agency by Presidential order, July 11, 1941, to collect and analyze information bearing upon national security. Foreign Information Service established within OCOI to oversee shortwave propaganda broadcasts (Voice of America, VOA)
From: https://www.archives.gov/research/guide-fed-records/groups/306.html
You can't use the truth against people who aren't interested in the truth, just as you can't persuade someone to abandon an insincere belief.
Liberals are still milking this Wagner mutiny shit, holy shit.
Is it just to distract from the fact that Ukraine's pathetic counteroffensive failed?
