cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/490647
“[Russian] information operations are underway […] to gradually demoralise the public debate so that Russian narratives can be disseminated. These are part of an information war to stop the flow of material aid to a struggling Ukraine,” warned the Czech National Centre for Combating Organised Crime (NCOZ) in a report.
“The Kremlin’s efforts to diminish public trust in institutions and the state is not new, but the increase in the intensity of influence operations is a threat,” the Czech Strategic Communications Coordinator Otakar Foltýn said in reaction to the NCOZ report.
According to the NCOZ, Russian activities are aimed at influencing the population of Western European countries while increasing the threat of sabotage against critical and transport infrastructure, with local residents and criminal networks are becoming more involved in various activities.
These include gathering information, identifying targets, putting pressure on specific individuals, such as those from the exiled diaspora, and even direct attacks on infrastructure and public places.
“This issue has been persistent for several years, with Russian and Chinese influence attempting to infiltrate Czech society,” Jurečka said. “We must cultivate a society that can critically think, resist disinformation, and not succumb to fear,” Jurečka added.
… And when you want to create yet another centralized power which will certainly communicate the right information, you’ll get just a third source of the same, wasting thoughts, money, energy and blood on something which is not an improvement, instead of whatever else you could do.
It’s funny, when you say you’re ancap and explain the ideology in a few sentences, people hate your guts or say it’s stupid or that you are a useful idiot.
When you explain the same slowly over the years using current events as illustration, people either agree with you and have nothing to say, or what they say makes sense ; there’s a person in my family who is ex-military, nostalgic over USSR, has kinda Marxist views on the world which he uses to support a kinda fascist ideology, and all my libertarian things considered a channel of degeneracy at some point, yet in the last ~5 years we have no disagreements over how specific things work.
This leads me to a simple thought that maybe social media as “a huge forum” is inherently harmful. Even when we discuss the same things with the same people regularly over years, we may not notice that and not have any progress in mutual understanding.
Insularity allows us to have deeper exchange of ideas with the same people naturally, instead of taking your place in the ranks of blues and greens verbally pummeling each other, you are talking as an individual to another person which is an individual.