I think that's veering deep into conspiracy theory territory. I know it's been normalized in the past few year but Russia isn't actually to blame for everything wrong in every country. Do they take advantage of the anti nuclear sentiment since they sell gas? Yes. But is there some massive russian psyops campaign to push that narrative? No. Russian intelligence services can't be incompetent as what happened in the UK seems to indicate and yet also be super sneaky all powerful, election/narrative/social media controlling masterminds at the same time.
They jumped on electronic warfare as a new type of weapon.
It costs practically nothing to get a huge effect if successful.
If I was a country with limited resources compared to the US , electronic warfare is getting massive funding because of the bang for the buck. There is no conspiracy theory, just common sense.
why is it that even in the face of evidence, people still give Russia so much benefit of the doubt? Putin has been playing chess since the early 2000s and is it so far fetched to think creating a dependence on its energy resources is definitely in his playbook at achieving its goal of attaining power and influence in the region?
I mean my god, have you not been paying attention to the migrant crisis, the funneling of Rosneft incentives to far-right political parties in Western Europe? It's all just a conspiracy to suggest these are successfully weakening the EU?
What? I'm not saying russia didn't pay off far right parties or whatever. The comment i was replying to was talking about anti nuclear sentiment. Changing public opinion to that extant would require a much much more involved process than just bribing a few officials.
It's not giving russia the benefit of the doubt, I'm just very doubtful that russian intelligence services are so competent while being much less well funded and having a lot less material reach than their american counterparts. Yet, it would be ludicrous to just assume that even the CIA could have the means to manipulate the public opinion so much that you'd get such a widespread anti nuclear sentiment in big country like germany, right? All of that without getting detected.
As of October 2019, around 15,000 Facebook pages with a majority US audience were being run out of Kosovo and Macedonia, known bad actors during the 2016 election.
Collectively, those troll-farm pages—which the report treats as a single page for comparison purposes—reached 140 million US users monthly and 360 million global users weekly. Walmart’s page reached the second-largest US audience at 100 million.
The troll farm pages also combined to form:
- the largest Christian American page on Facebook, 20 times larger than the next largest—reaching 75 million US users monthly, 95% of whom had never followed any of the pages.
- the largest African-American page on Facebook, three times larger than the next largest—reaching 30 million US users monthly, 85% of whom had never followed any of the pages.
- the second-largest Native American page on Facebook, reaching 400,000 users monthly, 90% of whom had never followed any of the pages.
- the fifth-largest women’s page on Facebook, reaching 60 million US users monthly, 90% of whom had never followed any of the pages.
Anti-nuclear sentiment long preceded social media and has far more to do with visceral images coming from traditional media sources around events like Cherynobyl, 3 Mile Island, Fukushima, etc.
It makes no sense to blame anti-nuclear sentiment on Russia. The evidence just isn't there, they happen to heavily benefit from it but the anti-nuclear sentiment but are not the primary cause.
Didn't most of those kosovar/macedonian operated fake news farms turn out to be just random private citizens from those countries taking advantage of the situation instead of a massive Russian-run operation? If russia actually ran tons of pages and controlled the narrative we would've known by now using the same tools used to unmask the balkan troll farms. I'm sure some were intelligence operations but do we have proof that those really had any big influence on public discourse?
Unless you are saying that russia could do the same in the future, which I agree is possible but we would still ultimately end up knowning about it. The anti nuclear movement in europe is pretty grassroots and the fact is that we don't have any proof of substantial russian influence on that subject even if everyone is much more on the lookout (as your links indicate)
What are the odds that enough of them would spontaneously self organize in an unexpectedly coordinated attack, randomly located within the same region, in a long term persistent manner... just for fun?
