Russia was definitely watching the results of the EU election.
French President Emmanuel Macron’s shock decision to call a parliamentary election following his party’s crushing defeat in the EU polls, as well as the success of the far right in countries across the Continent, made headline news.
With Macron recently spearheading an initiative to deploy Western forces to Ukraine, it is perhaps unsurprising that the tone was gleeful.
The thing we as a planet need to recognize is that Russia is waging a propaganda war against everyone, and it’s currently winning.
Here in the US, I’m afraid we’ve never been particularly good at it. They are. We’re frankly outmatched in this new information warfare arena.
In a hot war we could ruin them, we’re good at those. This stuff, not so much. It runs counter to our broader culture where everyone is entitled to their own opinion.
edit: One thing we could perhaps do is hire some top tier marketing firms. Instead of applying a warfighting perspective to it, look at it as business competition and from a market capture perspective.
Hurl weaponized capitalism at them. Military industrial complex has nothing on a good marketing agency.
Simple mechanisms for flagging/reviewing misinformation would be helpful but we’ve gone in the completely opposite direction with Musk’s shittified twitter and every platform being scared to provide a dislike count so sll the scummiest shit just floats to the top with zero indication of controversy
It would be helpful but it would only be a band-aid on the sucking chest wound of economic issues. There’s also the very real problem of who gets to declare something as “misinformation”. There’s absolutely no way I would entrust our Government with that power and I trust the private companies running Media and Social Media outlets even less.
If anything, I think Musk’s takeover of twitter has thankfully removed a lot of the power that the platform had. People don’t trust it anymore, and they never should have.
I like your suggestion. Use the psychological products of Western capitalism and the free market to counter the toxicity of the Russian state. I think it would work very well if we get the implementation right. Because right now Russia’s most effective enemy is themselves (more specifically: their self-loathing, self-sabotaging mindset).
What that may mean in practice?
Always a good time to remember the old joke:
<<An agent of the CIA and an agent of the KGB are together at a bar, chatting after taking what’s probably too much alcohol given their occupations.
The CIA agent tells the Russian: “You know, I must admit that you guys are really good at propaganda. The way you paint capitalism is great. People swallow it everywhere!”
The KGB agent replies: “Thank you, thank you, we put a lot of work into it, but American propaganda is something else. It is so good that you guys think you don’t have propaganda!”
And the CIA agent says: “But we have no propaganda.”>>
Uuuh can you explain to my friend?
The KGB agent admits that they’re propagandists, but the US propaganda runs so deep that the CIA agent isn’t even aware that they do have propaganda.
The Russian and Chinese propaganda machines are making headway for two very clear reasons:
The first one is nearly brain dead simple to resolve. Tighten controls on immigration. Like it or not that seems to be what many voters want and the continuing refusal to be responsive to that makes politicians out of step with their constituents. Are these Representative Democracies or not?
The second is more nuanced but also relatively straightforward; stop outsourcing Blue Collar / Manufacturing work to low labor cost places like China. In fact the whole trends needs to reverse and those jobs needs to brought back!
That’s it. Those two things explain the rising support for the “Far Right” in both the Europe and the United States. The person pulling the lever for a Right-Oid candidate isn’t doing it because they love Russia or Putin, they are doing it because they want meaningful employment that allows them to be at least somewhat comfortable.
It started in the second world war and it never stopped, other nations just forgot about it