100%! It’s definitely a great thing given the current circumstances.

That’s kind of mixed news. Seized Russian assets were supposed to fund Ukrainian reconstruction. It’s sort of robbing future-Ukraine to pay present day-Ukraine. Overall though, still way better than no weapons, obviously.

I’ve never seen anything about her in particular. I think this ProPublica investigation is the most in-depth reporting on the relationship between cartels and her political party. They basically allege that cartels paid millions to buy Mexico’s ‘hugs, not bullets’ policy.

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They were always Nazis. The more mainstream-seeming “alt-right” guys were just suit Nazis. They feel more comfortable coming out in the open now, even if it’s still a bit draped in “doing it for lulz” deniability. I’m skeptical that they’re fully aware that it’ll hurt their legitimacy. They’re dug in like ticks in their echo chamber, are constantly goading each into being more openly extreme, and celebrate the push back there.

Hopefully this instructional video answers your questions:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgGb9tSOKbs

Do your parents need to know why you need to go to the doctor? Can’t you say it’s for some other, less embarrassing reason? Not that you need to feel embarrassed but I don’t think your parents will be harmed by the white lie. And it doesn’t really change the outcome for you, right?

A good place to start might be a book like ‘Autocracy, Inc.’ by Anne Applebaum. Unrelated to this but her book on the Holodomor, ‘Red Famine,’ is amazing too. She’s an expert on modern authoritarianism. The book’s about autocrats in general but deals a lot with disinformation and propaganda. It’ll give you a pretty high level view of who those people are, what their goals are, and how disinformation fits into their strategies. A big part of recognizing disinfo is being able to evaluate whose interests a piece of (dis)info might serve.

You’ll find a lot of books about Russian disinformation because Russia has been the most active, the most ambitious, and the most successful at weaponizing propaganda. I’d look for books written by academics but who are writing for a popular audience. ‘Active Measures’ by Thomas Rid is an example. That book in particular goes into the origin of disinformation in the Soviet Union (the term was actually coined by Stalin) and how it carried over into modern Russia. Russia’s a good starting point too because everyone else has copied them like crazy – although they’re now openly collaborating, Republicans are stealing from this playbook.

Bellingcat is good resource to get into the anatomy of disinformation networks and operations. They’re the gold standard in open source investigations and have uncovered some insane shit – disinfo networks, Russia downing MH17, a network of Russian illegals (like in ‘The Americans’). Reports like this one are extremely detailed and get into the nuts and bolts of how propaganda networks are structured and how information passes through them. Their ability to track down spies using the Russian equivalent of door dash is internet MacGyver shit too.

Caroline Orr Bueno is a disinformation researcher whose newsletter Weaponized Spaces also dives pretty deep into disinformation networks, often tracing it back to a single point of origin. She links to a lot of great resources and is super accessible. She’s also awesome. I assume she’s moved on to bsky but she used to be on Mastodon and would answer any questions you had about her work. Good person!

“Hey guys can you help me disconnect from the fire hose of human joy to appease all the grumps around me?”

We can’t and we won’t.

How would you define “dry texter”? How would a dry texter reply to those messages?

Are you sure it’s appearance? You might sneeze with an accent.

Yes.

I won’t subscribe, post, or comment in ml.

Scaled takes smaller communities into account and bumps their posts up so they don’t get buried by posts from larger communities with more engagement.

Edit: here are the descriptions:

Active (default): Calculates a rank based on the score and time of the latest comment, with decay over time.
Hot: Like active, but uses time when the post was published.
Scaled: Like hot, but gives a boost to less active communities

https://join-lemmy.org/docs/users/03-votes-and-ranking.html

Scaled was a game-changer for me.

I use scaled on web. Voyager can remember your sorts for different communities. I typically to use new for smaller communities and scaled for larger ones and the home feed.

The mechanism is impeachment. It’s broken because of polarization.

lol no. But nice try. I applaud the attempt!

I think banning individual social media services is not the solution. The solution is to create meaningful laws that hold any company, Chinese or American, accountable for data privacy and misinformation/election interference violations.

You, in a nutshell. You’re saying that they shouldn’t address specific threats. Why not both?

No, you’re conflating privacy and espionage.

I’m not moving the goal posts. The order for China to divest is about espionage. The ban stemming from their refusal to divest is about espionage. Your privacy law doesn’t solve this problem because it’s not a privacy problem, it’s an espionage problem.

To take your murder example, it’s like saying ‘I don’t see why everyone’s so worked up about China coming here and shooting people. People get shot here every day and the army doesn’t get involved!’ Despite sharing some details, domestic gun violence and war are different. You’re focusing on the trees and missing the forest.

🙂 perfect is the enemy of good

I’m not opposed to your proposed law. I’d support the hell out of it. It would solve other important problems, even if it wouldn’t solve this one. But saying that a country can’t do anything about espionage unless they pass that law is unrealistic.

You’re conflating privacy and espionage. The reason basically every country in the world has laws about foreign ownership of media and telecommunications infrastructure is not because of privacy concerns – it’s because of the potential for espionage. That fanciful law with no chance of passing in the US (even if it should!) would reduce but not eliminate the problem. It’s illegal for China to operate weird little secret police stations in foreign countries to threaten, intimidate, and control the Chinese diaspora, but that hasn’t stopped them from doing it. Having them control powerful monitoring and tracking tools doesn’t make it harder. They are very capable of surreptitiously doing shit they shouldn’t.

Yes, which doesn’t solve the problem because the problem is in China. The Chinese government can demand any information that ByteDance possesses. Under Chinese law, they are bound to comply and bound to deny that they were even asked under threat of extremely harsh punishment.