Oh, getting a bit mad, huh? Where were you born and raised?

A whole essay shifting your goalposts. You said I’m making up Russians pretending to be Americans. I give you a every clear example, and you just kick off a tantrum about how “European propaganda” this and that. Clearly setting sort of teams here. And implying I’m on one (European) and by implication that you’re on another.

I’m really not up to writing an essay where I answer all your whataboutism and shitty implications.

If you’re pretending like “European propaganda” exists, that there’s some hegemonic culture which unites all the countries and thus all their intelligence apparatuses as well and they share coordinated disinformation campaigns equal to those of Russia? Get fucked, you know how ridiculous of a notion that is. Europe isn’t a hegemony, unlike Russia, which is absolutely infamous for its disinformation campaigns, all over the world. Objectively.

As social media gained prominence in the 2010s, Russia began to use platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and YouTube to spread disinformation. Russian web brigades and bots, typically operated by Russia’s Internet Research Agency (IRA), were commonly used to disseminate disinformation throughout these social media channels.[24] In late 2017 Facebook estimated that as many as 126 million of its users had seen content from Russian disinformation campaigns on its platform.[25] Twitter stated that it had found 36,000 Russian bots spreading tweets related to the 2016 United States elections.[26] Russia has used social media to destabilize former Soviet states such as Ukraine and Western nations such as France and Spain.[27] It has been suggested that since 2019, Russian-sponsored troll accounts and bots have formed and taken over prominent left-wing and right-wing subreddits on Reddit, such as the antiwar, greenandpleasant, and aboringdystopia subreddits, “suggest[ing] a Russian-led attempt to antagonize and influence Americans online, which is still ongoing.”[28] Canadian subreddits have also been directly targeted by Russia. [29]

Social media companies have moved to limit Russian disinformation on their platforms. In October 2019, Facebook moved to take down accounts connected to Yevgeny Prigozhin used to interfere with African political affairs.[30] Cameron Hudson, a senior fellow of the Africa Center at the Atlantic Council at the time, said Russia’s aim is to make its presence felt in the same way it did during the Cold War, but with a much smaller investment using disinformation campaigns.[30] In 2020, the United States State Department identified several “proxy sites” used by Russian state actors “to create and amplify false narratives”. These sites include the Strategic Culture Foundation, New Eastern Outlook, Crimea-based news agency NewsFront, and SouthFront, a website targeted at “military enthusiasts, veterans, and conspiracy theorists”.[31] Russian influence operations, such as the Pravda network, have increasingly spread content that serves as training data for large language models in order to influence the output produced

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_disinformation

And on that, I agree with you 100%, but this specific article doesn’t do that. It’s implicit, I agree with you, but how do you suggest combating that? I think the solution has to be using every news article post as a platform to denounce that military intervention and promote critical thought, rather than decrying the mere existence of those posts and suggesting that people will be too stupid to discern the truth if they’re faced with propaganda. (Which is, of course, accurate lmao, but it’s also a self-fulfilling prophecy. If people are never taught how to think critically and presented with opportunities to do so, they will remain stupid forever.)

Also in my opinion, Americans oppose military action in Iran for financial reasons, which always takes precedence over moral concerns. So, in this case, both fortunately and unfortunately, Americans will not be motivated to support military action because of another government’s brutality against student protestors imo. It’s a tired old talking point out of the War-on-Terror and Hasbara playbooks, but even older people barely buy that shit anymore - and even if they do, they’re probably more concerned with why every trip to the grocery store is $250.