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0 pointsethbr12y ago0 comments

I thought of this as why authoritarian regimes are so so bad at propaganda -- they have no experience in interacting with a normal, sometimes adversarial media landscape.

At home, they say the sky is red, everyone says "Yes" or gets a visit from the secret police.

So they do the same thing elsewhere, and there's criticism, memes, humor, apologism, etc... all the features of a more open information space with diverse opinions.

But they have little basis for how to interact with that, because they didn't need any of the nuanced soft power skills at home.

And so you get Russia endlessly repeating 'Everything is proceeding as planned in the special military operation' and China saying the Philippines "deliberately stirred up trouble" by navigating and claiming Philippine UNCLOS-EEZ waters in the Spratlys.

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0dayz2y ago

Propaganda works really well in distraught countries with no hopes or dreams and that has historical qualms with certain nations.

Such as in Africa where Chinese and Russian propaganda along side homegrown Propaganda is actually pretty convincing for the citizens there.

throw0101a2y ago

> At home, they say the sky is red, everyone says "Yes" or gets a visit from the secret police.

That is the old(er) (outdated?) view of propaganda. The/A new view is to generally not necessarily care about about any particular message:

> We characterize the contemporary Russian model for propaganda as “the firehose of falsehood” because of two of its distinctive features: high numbers of channels and messages and a shameless willingness to disseminate partial truths or outright fictions. In the words of one observer, “[N]ew Russian propaganda entertains, confuses and overwhelms the audience.”

* https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PE198.html

* https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/1/16/20991816/i...

(Of course you can do both.)

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