America’s B.S. Detectors Finally Getting An Upgrade

Can a person acquire an immunity to propaganda? I’ve been wondering.

It was Julia Ioffe who got me started. She wrote last week of the dwindling effectiveness of the Russian disinformation industry.

She reports that the bot-farms that caused all the mischief in 2016 are now a shadow of their former selves. Ever since their founder and leader, Evgeny Prigozhin, was blown out of the sky last year, they’ve come under the control of Putin’s office, which means poor performance is now institutionalized.

This can be seen in the messaging being disseminated by these so-called influence campaigns, which is almost comically inept. The content is focused exclusively on undermining support for Ukraine, a subject that couldn’t be less relevant to most Americans. Anyone who actually cares about Ukraine will just laugh at the fumbling English and feeble logic of the posts they’re seeing.

But what really got me thinking was Ioffe’s assertion that these campaigns are old news. Nobody is surprised by them anymore. Entire industries have sprung up to fight them off. Disinformation is now front and center as a global issue, and both governments and companies are fully engaged in countering it.

But more than that, everyday people have grown attuned to it, and they’re learning to separate the signal from the noise. Ioffe writes:

read more