But how are their propaganda farms going to be able to pretend they are in your country now?
Maybe they don’t actually have all those propaganda farms that the dems were crying about, did that thought cross your mind?
They exist. Inform yourself on the Internet Research Agency, one of Russia’s state sponsored troll farms. A handful of their activities are well documented in factual records. ‘Dems’ weren’t crying about it, every rational person who doesn’t want foreign interference and disinformation flooding our spaces is concerned about it. This should not be a partisan issue whatsoever.
Yeah, I don’t even really have a problem with RT, as long as it’s labeled so that people understand that it’s the Russian state speaking. But a lot of forums rely more-or-less on the idea that people are more-or-less good faith actors. Very large scale efforts to have people pretend to be someone else and make non-good-faith arguments is something that I think that a lot of our forums can’t today handle well.
Arguably, that’s a technical problem that needs to be fixed in some way.
Before it was widely reported, Twitter’s geocoding feature showed a ton of Russian-based accounts posing as “Americans” and only discussing politics. Would love to see lemmy be more transparent about accounts posting here too, tbh.
In all honesty, I would expect at least an organized troll farm to use VPNs ending outside Russia.
Random people in Russia might just act directly, but it’s a red flag that’s easy to pretty-inexpensively eliminate.
googles
It sounds like at least the Internet Research Agency troll farm used VPNs.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-43093390
According to court documents, the IRA took several measures to hide its tracks, duping the technology companies who were unaware, or unable, to stop what was filtering through their systems.
The key - and obvious - move was to hide the fact that these posts were coming from Russia. For that, the IRA is said to have used several Virtual Private Networks - VPNs - to route their operations through computers in the US. The operatives allegedly used stolen identities to set up PayPal accounts using real American names.
