GEC looks like a legit project, and I like how their news releases are multilingual. Thank you for sharing that.

I note that the US Foreign Malign Influence Center is also at work in this space, and authored the alert yesterday that I think is motivating this particular news item.

I think funding these governmental agencies, incentivizing inter-agency communication, and modernizing & centralizing the communication of their findings is something America needs badly, as well as the country I live in.

It’s a bit crazy that the only way to look at & share the FMIC alert is via a direct link to a pdf. In order to find it, you have to already know what you’re looking for. Give 20 millennials a job with a mandate to find a way to organize and disseminate this information, and things would be so much better. Right now, a person has to be a sleuth to put these pieces together, and that’s not right.

Anyway, I’m not taking issue with what you posted, I’m just soapboxing. An effective response to the issue of foreign disinformation campaigns seems relatively straightforward to me. The only thing missing is the political will.

Well done. I just discovered the Media Bias Fact Check - so, thank you for that!

Keep doing what you’re doing. Assembling this information and making it easy to access is critically important.

We desperately need improved lines of communication between the state and the public regarding foreign disinformation. Like, a free newspaper that comes out every Monday with confirmed examples of foreign propaganda from the previous week. And official social media accounts that give up-to-date information. Surely it’s in the public interest to establish offices that rapidly assemble and distribute this kind of information. Finding out, ‘oh hey, that protest way back in 2022 was organized as part of a foreign interference campaign’, it’s just too late. This sort of information needs to be centralized, summarized, and rapidly disseminated.

It’s not enough for the state to simply say ‘be cautious’. Citizens need to know what to be cautious of. A general message that you shouldn’t trust anything you see on social media, that’s actually a benefit to the propagandists creating chaos in information spaces.

I just don’t see how the problem of disinformation gets addressed without intelligence agencies getting more modern and engaged in their approach to communication with the public.

‘Killed her 14 month old dog for misbehaving’ is the clicky headline. But the subtext is, this person might be the republican running mate, and her story is presented as a parable about how killing is ‘a job that needs to be done’. It’s not crazy to put those pieces together and be anxious about the direction they point in.

I can see where you’re coming from. You’re right that her story is divisive. I think that’s the objective. It’s an engineered, populist, fascist move to present the story in the way that she does. No one in the public eye writes that kind of thing in a book and expects it to fly under the radar.

You’re also right that there’s a strong rural/urban ideological division. Best way to fix that I think is to talk to each other more, IRL, and try to honestly understand the perspectives of others, especially if they’re different from our own. My 2¢.

Wouldn’t checkering itself, even in the abstract, need to reference two discernible colours or shades, and so, wavelengths of light, and so, some extension along a z axis, and position in time? Is it possible even for an abstract checkered pattern to be defined in any less than 3 dimensions + time?

By a doctor, I very much want to be seen strictly as the biological organism that they have spent their life studying. The fact that there are very few doctors, and every person born on this earth will be a patient, means that a standard for unvarnished and concise language is morally praiseworthy in terms of its service of the greater good.

I guess my feeling is, there’s no good reason to get offended by the standard of language that the medical system operates in. There is an ocean of ill people who need help, and we’re not all special, in that sense.

A doctor who is led into a cognitive trap by seeing “diabetic” on a chart, is a bad doctor. I’m not sure small refinements of language are the remedy for that doctor’s deficits.

I don’t begrudge anyone for believing that Covid-19 came from a leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. History shows that governments will make every effort to avoid standing up and telling their citizens a difficult truth. The lab leak theory is a fruit of rampant dishonesty in government. It’s directly the fault of the government that conspiracy theories like this exist, and it’s hypocritical for governments to bemoan those theories and the people who believe them.