Ask HN: How to combat propaganda?
Fellow HN reader. I recently talked to a Russian friend living in the West who is married to a Ukrainian.
My friend told me he couldn't talk to his relatives back home anymore. He is sending them videos and images from the war in Ukraine, and nothing won't change their minds and conviction that Ukraine needs to be liberated from the Nazis.
Now I wonder: Is there any clever way to combat Propaganda in such a situation? How can you establish at least doubt in the other person's mind?
EDIT: I didn’t want to discuss what’s right or wrong. I am interested to learn about effective ways / processes to combat propaganda.
54 comments
[ 0.25 ms ] story [ 142 ms ] threadI wonder if Russia is at that point, or rather, if many Russian citizens are at that point.
It includes things such as Ukraine's police departments providing operational support to Nazi groups, and the groups' history of arming themselves with heavy weapons including missiles. [1] [2] [3] [4]
Ukraine has a long history of directly supporting these groups. Implying either the Nazi groups don't exist or that they're not intertwined with government is opportunistic historical revisionism.
The West not only ignores the problem, but directly supports the Nazi groups through weapons shipments, propaganda lines and protection from censorship. [5] [6]
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-cohen-ukraine-commentary-...
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/15/world/europe/italy-neo-na...
[3] https://www.bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-europe/2019/09/04/the...
[4] https://www.thedailybeast.com/ukraines-anti-russia-azov-batt...
[5] https://theintercept.com/2022/02/24/ukraine-facebook-azov-ba...
[6] https://twitter.com/nexta_tv/status/1501171543371665408
> When Russian President Vladimir Putin’s seizure of Crimea four years ago first exposed the decrepit condition of Ukraine’s armed forces, right-wing militias such as Azov and Right Sector stepped into the breach, fending off the Russian-backed separatists while Ukraine’s regular military regrouped. Though, as a result, many Ukrainians continue to regard the militias with gratitude and admiration, the more extreme among these groups promote an intolerant and illiberal ideology that will endanger Ukraine in the long term.
Right wing militias in the context of constant ongoing military pressure from Russia and the forceful seizure of Crimea, also by Russia.
As far as the public discussion (at least in Germany) went so far, the first media response to the "denazification" speech was more or less "wtf is that guy talking about?". There was no talk at all about any right-wing groups in Ukraine at all. After some time, at least existence of Azov had to be tacitly acknowledged, but only that so far.
That's not exactly trust-building.
Good luck with that. They are mostly powerful rich people with an agenda, and they're a lot better than us at being nasty.
As for the victims, it's not going to work. The pandemic revealed us how deep some people are detached from reality.
There still are people dying of Covid who spend their very last breath yelling at doctors and nurses, refusing treatment and calling it a hoax although it is evidently killing them. An ex friend of mine had both his unvaccinated parents hospitalized for symptomatic Covid and lost another unvaccinated relative; still he's a very active anti vaxxer. I'm becoming extremely racist against these people; I know it's not right and if there was a god she would punish me, but I can't consider them on the same level of other humans; if learning from mistakes is the basis behind intelligence, they're clearly far far behind everyone else.
We can only experience very little of the world directly. For most of our knowledge, we have to rely on intermediaries which tell us about the world. If some of those intermediaries offer contradictory information or offer information that contradict with your own experiences or discredit other intermediaries then things get problematic and you have to pick side about which intermediaries to trust.
I think psychologically, this is a hard problem to solve.
BTW, you probably shouldn't admit that you're nasty and "racist" whilst also claiming to be more intelligent than other people who made different decisions to you. It's a nonsensical claim: refusing shots is not a race, and black Americans refuse shots at a much higher rate than whites do anyway. Hating anti-vaxxers is just ordinary hatred, pure and simple. You don't need to abuse unrelated words for it.
"Every medicine has its own risks and contraindications, whoever tells the opposite is lying"
Correct. Yet here's Bill Gates' GAVI saying "Vaccines are safe. Here's why" and of course there are hundreds of thousands more cases where people are told things like that by trusted authorities:
https://www.gavi.org/vaccineswork/covid-19-vaccines-are-safe...
This is standard - either claim the issue is black/white, or claim that whilst vaccines might have bad side effects in theory, in practice they basically never do (which is not the case). This is deceptive misinformation, but it's not being spread by randoms on the internet, it's being spread by governments and health authorities.
Consider the following:
1. The stat you quoted is meaningless (and almost certainly wrong but we'll get to that in a second). To understand the costs/benefits you have to understand the absolute risk of injury or death from vaccines vs the absolute risk of injury or death from COVID. Authorities never present such stats because the true absolute risk of COVID death or even hospitalization for most age groups is so low that it'd just cause people to wonder why they'd bother taking a vaccine at all.
2. Even if they do present such comparisons, vaccine injuries are being systematically ignored or misclassified by the medical system so there's no way to do an accurate comparison anyway.
As such nobody can truly make an informed decision on this topic.
Now the 95% stat is almost certainly wrong anyway. I don't mean you're quoting it wrong, I mean it's not being calculated correctly. For quite some time, observers outside the health system have been pointing out that there are methodological errors in the way vaccine efficacy stats are being calculated, all of which significantly inflate the apparent effectiveness.
The problem comes from two places:
1. The vaccines have an immunosuppressive effect. From the start, sceptics like Berenson noticed that there were non-seasonal COVID waves happening that appeared to always line up perfectly with the start of vaccine rollout. Some speculated that this was due to people gathering together in vaccination centers, others that the vaccines themselves were temporarily suppressing the immune system. Seems like the latter explanation was more correct. As part of the Pfizer document releases just a few days ago, a document came out that showed the vaccines do in fact reduce immune system operation due to lymphocyte migration and that Pfizer knew this after the stage 1 trials.
So vaccine programmes actually make people more susceptible to COVID, temporarily. This was also confirmed by data accidentally released by the Albertan health authority that showed this in action:
https://dailydose19.substack.com/p/government-of-alberta-can...
That's clearly a major issue if you repeatedly vaccinate people during a pandemic. However this effect is hidden by a statistical trick - they only count someone has vaccinated starting from two weeks after their second dose. Until that point every infection or death counts as unvaccinated, even though that isn't true.
So what happens if you give someone an immunosuppressant and then allocate all the resulting infections to the "did not take" bucket? You make it look like the vaccines are far more effective than they really are.
2. Second problem; the claims vaccines are highly effective against infection (which is strongly related to hospitalization stats given how they're derived) are broken by two sub-problems:
2a. Some countries like the USA and Germany count people as unvaccinated if they couldn'...
https://thehill.com/policy/defense/380483-congress-bans-arms...
Obama was well aware of it and had 100% hands off approach to arming Ukraine. The process of arming Ukraine started with Trump and continued with Biden when the US government realized they can sell their weapons without hurting any of their lives (the exact same as arming Mujaheddin to fight the Russians)
The real reason the US didn't arm Ukraine was that it didn't want to provoke Putin into escalating the conflict: https://www.latimes.com/world/europe/la-fg-ukraine-russia-we...
https://www.latrobe.edu.au/news/articles/2022/opinion/russia...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sparta_Battalion
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wagner_Group
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Zhoga
https://www.dw.com/en/why-are-german-neo-nazis-training-in-r...
I think you will find the stuff about Biological Weapons Labs is a load of nonsense too.
Someone must be open to this in the first place. You can't change a closed mind, and there are many reasons why a mind might be closed. They kind of have to arrive at their doubt on their own, at least in my personal non-expert opinion. The most you can do is express your opinion in a relatively non judgmental way (because if you're too harsh they won't return to you later to discuss) and be available if they want to discuss.
Note that even Jeremy Corbyn was a target of heavy propaganda by the media and especially reddit since he is anti-war.
Anyone anti-war in the western media is quickly character assassinated. There is a reason why someone who is a real people person and how is really best suited to be president: bernie sanders lost against a rambling senile dude.
TLDR: it's impossible to have an anti-war mindset or politician in the west. The propaganda will quickly destroy them.
If you're "anti-war" to the extent of saying "we shouldn't supply Ukraine with arms", or even worse, "Ukraine should just surrender", I think that most people rightly find those positions to be abhorrent. That looks far too much like Neville Chamberlain's politics (and morals) for most of our taste.
And if you're "anti-war" in the sense of "this is all NATO's fault; Russia was right to invade", you get cancelled very quickly, because you have become indistinguishable from a Russian propagandist, and we know that there are plenty of Russian propagandists trying to influence the west's cultural mindset.
If you have a thoughtful, considered reason to hold one of the positions I labeled problematic, you can probably express it on HN. You'll get argued with, you may get yelled at and downvoted, but you probably won't get banned. In the wider culture... no guarantees.
End the suffering, agree to what Russia wants, get NATO out and end the war. Zelenksy is a master actor and he played the role well. It's time he stopped crying on global platform 24x7 and drag the rest of the world into his war.
There's a line from the Bible: "those who through fear of death were subject to slavery all their lives". This isn't exactly the way the Bible meant that phrase, but... If your position is that preserving life is the most important thing, and I can credibly threaten to kill you, then you become my slave. You'll do whatever I tell you, to try to save your life. That's a horrible way to live. It's even more horrible when the one doing the threatening is a sociopath.
I think some things are worse than death. "Live free or die" isn't just a propaganda slogan. A free life is far better than a life as someone's slave.
Kowtowing to the corrupt state is to condemn one’s children and grandchildren to suffer through insecurity, cruelty, retribution, and poverty. The action you promote might reduce your own risk of personal injury, but only by transferring it to future generations. It is selfish, short-sighted, and destructive to progress.
But at least you admit cowardice drives your decision-making. It is not, by the way, something you should claim with pride.
You are thoroughly mistaken if you think Ukraine is any better than Russia. In the Panama papers, Ukraine exceeds Russia and in terms of far right wing violence Ukraine far exceeds Russia.
Source: https://www.statista.com/chart/25906/politicians-pandora-pap... Ukraine has twice as many politicians in panama papers as Russia.
This war is not black and white. There are millions of shades of gray in between regardless of the constant nauseating fellatio of everything Ukrainian by the western media.
One is a democracy improving itself, the other is a goddamn dictatorship. Don’t be stupid.
This is pretty much the official position of NATO and the Western governments. It might be a controversial position in the sense of "we're not doing enough", but I don't see who would cancel anyone for that.
> And if you're "anti-war" in the sense of "this is all NATO's fault; Russia was right to invade", you get cancelled very quickly, because you have become indistinguishable from a Russian propagandist, and we know that there are plenty of Russian propagandists trying to influence the west's cultural mindset.
I hope there'll eventually be room for a position along "We should investigate whether the West's methods actually match their values - but Russia still lost all legitimacy the moment they attacked a sovereign nation".
I do believe there is a lot of hypocrisy in the current rethoric and in the rebuttals of russian claims. Of course the USA has a sphere of influence - it's commonly called "the West". And we (as in "the West") seem to have our fair share of propaganda outlets as well, such as Radio Free Europe or the National Endowment for Democracy. I'd like if this stuff was discussed more openly. (For my own sanity as well. My knowledge here is also not more than some bits and pieces and discussions with relatives. I'd absolutely be interested in arguments from both sides)
What also worries me is that the term "misinformation" and "propaganda" now seems to be assigned solely based on where a claim comes from, without needing to present any arguments that actually contradict the claim. I can't see how that squares with the values of free speech and press freedom. I wonder if the Snowden leaks would also be labelled "misinformation" if they were released in today's climate.
(To be clear - we're still better than Russia in that regard. At least, you only get cancelled for that stuff here and not jailed for 15 years. But I still think it's a worrying development)
Sure, I can agree with that. No need to wait - I can agree today.
The interesting thing about this claim is the question of whether this is also propaganda.
There have been an enormous number of high profile claims of Russian propaganda or interference in western affairs in the past decade, as far as I'm aware they always ended up collapsing, though sometimes people aren't aware of that.
Hunter Biden's laptop story was claimed to be Russian propaganda and the New York Post's Twitter account was frozen for it. Nobody could even reshare it or link to it privately. The rest of the media united in claiming it was Russian propaganda. Now, years later the NYT admits that the contents are authenticated.
For years people claimed Trump's election was due to Russian propaganda and electoral interference. A massive investigation followed, in which it turned out the primary evidence for this was made up.
Then they tried the same tactic with Brexit. Nobody ever found any proof for this; the idea was absurd on its face and was quickly abandoned outside of only the most loony Remainer establishments.
Then there were the claims of Russian hacking of electrical grids. Wrong. Russian servers being pinged by Trump's campaigns. Wrong. Dozens of other claims about Russian propaganda that I'd have to look up, but I know they've been made, always wrong.
Then Russia invaded Ukraine, claiming it needs to be de-Nazified. Immediately described as Russian propaganda, until people start remembering about the unquestionably neo-Nazis battalions that have been fighting as an official part of the Ukrainian military for years and that, uh, this is actually true. The Russian soldiers actually are fighting Nazis. That doesn't mean the invasion was right! It does raise interesting historical/moral questions though, given the mention of Chamberlain. Would the Allies have been morally right to invade Germany and take out the Nazis before they invaded anywhere else? Or were the Allies correct to wait for them to make the first strike? I don't know and the question only just occurred to me to ask, but it seems relevant here.
Now in fairness you made a weaker claim above, about "Russian propagandists" trying to "influence the cultural mindset", a claim worded sufficiently vaguely that it could mean almost anything. But this impression of pervasive Russian propaganda has come from somewhere. If not the endless run of false claims about the prevalence of Russian propaganda then from where?
The Chinese government thinks they can lie however they want to its people and to the outside world, because there are language and internet barriers.
For example, they claimed to be neutral regarding the ongoing war, but they are spreading pro-war misinformation via state owned media, and teaching pro-war ideologies at school.
People now are trying to translate their lies through the big translation movement To expose their evil doings . https://twitter.com/tgtm_official
And it worked, they winded down the pro-war education plan, at least publicly.
The Chinese government wants to be able to take over Taiwan some day, so they can't send a signal that Russia is doing the wrong thing in Ukraine.
It's some progress that the people are trying to stop the pro-war plans.
But i guess stopping the extreme COVID lockdown strategy is out of reach.
how can a consumer of counter-propaganda be certain that the Truth expressed in said counter-propaganda is Genuine, when the same techniques as the ones that the opposing viewpoint is using are being deployed to propagate it?
surely, if you are certain that your viewpoint is the Genuine Truth, then it will not need to be propagated through propaganda?
And, as sad as it is, I'm afraid the answer is a solid "No." on every level of analysis.
This is a strategy many foreigners have to adopt when living abroad, specially if they live in a country where nation states aren't fully aligned in propaganda matters.
Chinese people have to do this while living in most of the world outside China. Indians and Middle easterns have to do the same for most of the world. Americans have to do it in most of the world, including in Europe, specially if their politics isn't fully aligned with Hollywood liberalism.
There is very little likelyhood that he is totally onboard with US propaganda despite having most friends/family in Russia/Ukraine and himself living in the West. I mean he's exposed to conflicting state propaganda before for sure and knows all states use propaganda for their own benefits. He probably knows how to handle it without causing conflicts in personal relationships so he will say whatever needs to be said to keep the people in their bubble.
Once you do notice how propaganda works on you yourself, you can start to track little movements of deviation from it. But this looks and feels a lot more like questioning your own beliefs than it does like trying to persuade others of the truth.
Words of wisdom
First of all, you need to listen, with your mouth closed, while the other person explains their position--without being forced to defend it. You can ask probing questions, of course (They think that Ukraine needs to be liberated from the Nazis? Have them elaborate about the Nazi problem.), but avoid becoming adversarial or contrarian. Investigate their beliefs, trace them down to their foundations, and then undermine said foundations. The belief that "Ukraine needs to be liberated from the Nazis" may be based on some article claiming that Zelenski is a Nazi.
Once you understand the foundations of a belief, you're in business. If you're objectively correct, you should be able to provide incontrovertible evidence that you are correct. If your evidence is not acceptable (because, for example, it comes from a source the other guy doesn't trust), then find other proof. If you can't, ask yourself what that means.
After you've undermined one of these foundations, (perhaps, by proving that Zelenski is very unlikely to be a Nazi) remind the other party that their belief that "Ukraine needs to be liberated from the Nazis" was based on this fact, and ask if they still believe it. They will, of course, and they'll present some new justification.
Rinse and repeat.
It goes without saying that this process almost never plays out. It requires that both parties be interested in having the conversation, both parties participate in good faith, and both parties are committed to Truth more than to their on cognitive comfort.
After all, how many hours of your life would you spend in conversation with a Russian relative who wanted to convince you that your worldview is based on lies?
The belief that "Ukraine needs to be liberated from the Nazis" comes from the fact that whilst Zelensky himself may not himself be a Nazi, he employs people who definitely are Nazis in his military and relies on them apparently quite heavily. Apparently he doesn't have a problem with this. This has been true for many years, i.e. the Ukrainian government has been sending Nazis to kill the "pro Russian separatists" in the east (whoever they truly are or who supports them doesn't matter much for whether this claim is true or not).
So if you try and stop a Russian person believing the Ukrainian government is allied with Nazis you'll probably fail, because the claim is true on its face. The better angle is probably to go with arguments like these?
a. Is it ever morally right to start a pre-emptive war against a potential future adversary? Here you'll probably get something about the Iraq wars and it may be required to admit the US was at fault here, if you want to take that angle, or at least not morally superior.
b. Are the fighters in the Russian military of the same level of threat as the original Nazis, just because they wear the same symbols etc? Or is this comparison overblown, for domestic propaganda purposes?
c. Is this Putin's real motivation or just a handy excuse to do what he wanted to do anyway?
If my ‘opponent’ responded in the way you suggested, I’d be in good shape. I would observe that employing a single militia of people with abhorrent views hardly makes Ukraine at large in need of liberation. Since there is an implied expectation that Ukraine should spurn the help of these Nazis, I would ask whether, when the US found itself at war with the Nazis, it had a moral obligation to spurn the aid of the Soviets, who themselves had quite an evil record on matters of human rights. And, of course, I would ask to be educated on the nature of these Nazi militias. Are they members of a party? Is the militia exclusively made up of Nazis? What proportion of the armed forces are they? I’d be interested to learn more, because an officially Nazi institution is quite difference than an institution which has a few known skinheads in its membership, and the difference seems material.
My guess is they would then respond by observing that it's not a single group, there is at minimum Azov, Svoboda, and Right Sector, probably more. Azov has rather notoriously been officially integrated into the Ukrainian military so it's unclear if it even makes sense to talk about it as if it were an entirely separate group now. And they would argue that if you indeed thought it was only a single militia then it'd be you under the influence of propaganda, not them, so this would probably backfire.
Now, does this justify 'liberation'. That's indeed a more fruitful ground for discussion. Highlighting the USA/Soviet alliance is maybe a good tactic, albeit it may backfire (perhaps this Russian hated the Soviet Union, a lot did). And it takes you down the more philosophical road, which I recommend, because the actual details of Ukraine are so messy that debating it may not result in the clean outcome you seek.
"I would ask to be educated on the nature of these Nazi militias. Are they members of a party? Is the militia exclusively made up of Nazis? What proportion of the armed forces are they?"
I'm not an expert, have just read a few articles about this (pre 2020). But to answer your questions:
1. Yes, it's called Svoboda. Also, after the 2014 revolution/coup/whatever it was, many were directly appointed to the government by the new president.
"After the coup, the neo-Nazis were awarded for their effectiveness. When "Yats" took power with US support, he appointed neo-Nazis to 4 ministries in his govt. Andriy Parubiy, a founder of Svoboda, and a commandant of the 2014 coup’s "self-defense forces," became the national security chief. Right Sektor and the Azov Battalion were incorporated into the National Guard of the military. Poroshenko, who succeeded Yatsenyuk, praised them as "great warriors" and dispatched them to fight the ethnic Russians and separatists in the Donbas in eastern Ukraine."
https://www.antiwar.com/blog/2022/03/27/msm-cover-up-of-neo-...
2. Militias like Azov are entirely Nazi, it seems, but are an integrated component of the wider Ukrainian military, which is not. Though I suppose we may wonder how non-Nazi they really are if they fight alongside them.
3. This I'm not sure about. A relatively small overall part of the military but their most effective and motivated fighters by far, seems to be the general consensus.
The core beliefs themselves tend to be set during adolescence, and the will of the individual to hold onto them or let them go involves a confluence of factors since they are often absorbed into identity. While you can present the puzzle, you can't stop people from gripping onto what they have as tightly as possible and sacrificing the rest of their life to do so. It's a strategy that appeals mostly towards development of elite thinking, rather than trying to sway the masses(who will continually look for easy beliefs to latch onto).
For more on the topic of esoteric writing I suggest Arthur Melzer's "Philosophy Between the Lines".