Some Thoughts on Misinformation and Propaganda

[unspeakablehorror]

I think it is undoubtedly true that the Russian government tries to influence the internal affairs of other countries.  This is certainly bad, but what really rubs me the wrong way about the way people use the Russian psyop thing is that it becomes this deeply ethnocentric thing where people:

* conflate Russians with the Russian government and its apparatuses.

* start using it as a witch hunt device of "anyone who expresses political ideas I don't agree with is a Russian psy-op".

* work hand-in-hand with minimizing the political problems caused by internal actors and reducing them to being "all Russia's fault".  This thus redirects blame to this external target to promote a sanitized image of the given country.

So it becomes like this ouroboros of misinformation being repurposed to spread a completely different strain of misinformation.  I just really think this is a case where multiple things can be true simultaneously, and that the real victims of Russia's foreign policy right now are Ukrainians, not people from the US or western Europe.