So cherish your freedom of speech, and exercise and defend it. I don’t know what to do concretely, maybe donate to the EFF or something.
We’re surely all guilty of facilitating this. Forget the global village of a billion voices - the number of news sources I regularly read isn’t even dozens.
Anybody can still put up a web server, but it’s the attention channels that matter, and those are well and truly under control through non-internet means (money, regulation, threats, lobbying, …).
With information and media, lots of us originally thought that lowering barriers to entry for media dissemination would make it easier to have this "global village of a billion voices". But instead what it has done is made it easier for users to filter to the top content, and easier for producers to use tons of data mining and machine learning to filter in on the most addictive (if definitely not the best) content. In the long term it can make it harder for smaller producers because they are competing against a much larger set of competitors for attention.
At least you've added "nrk.no" to your list this week. The problem is real for people who live in Facebook or TikTok bubbles, but the democratized news dream of the internet is still alive, but it takes some work to break out from the world of the algorithmic feeds.
Link sharing sites like Twitter and Hacker News have exposed me to articles from lots of less popular news sites, not to mention, all the blogs I'm subscribed to.
Also, research-heavy blog posts about COVID and the war in Ukraine have lots of outgoing links. Some sources are in languages I can't even read, but I can get a rough translation.
There are people who geolocate photos from Ukraine as a hobby, aggregators who find patterns, and people who do amateur military analysis. Sometimes they're ahead of the newspapers. (By a few hours. I assume reporters read them too.)
This results in big differences between what we can read and what would be possible in China or Russia, without a VPN anyway.
(Changing majority opinion is a whole different story though.)
The internet is a group of technologies enabling near-realtime dissemination of information. It has no implicit promise of freedom of speech or press, democracy, or any other political ideal. Even the World Wide Web has no such implicit promise.
The great democratizing force to which you refer is the ability to publish content, and to an extent the content itself, and that still exists (modulo nationwide firewalls). Just get off other peoples' servers and start hosting it.
That's the magic part: you don't have to be explicit to promote certain thing, you just create the ground tech-knowledge to enable the easy access of such thing, and hand everything else over to natural progression.
The Internet for example, enables everyone to exchange information with everyone else. That's textbook democratic-builtin design. Some undemocratic nations are so fearful such network, they go as far as creating their own little net to protect their pathetic little propaganda, the propaganda that those nations don't even dare to show to the world. And even that, they still have to fight a propaganda war (actual names might be different) in their own little net to keep democratic force in check.
Internet is democratic, there should be no question about that.
The problem about the Internet today, is that most people thinks Amazon+Google+Facebook+Twitter+other big brands is the Internet. They forgot that they can host things themselves without those big tech companies.
Truth is that people largely place trust in institutions and people they are used to and identify with, often for irrational reasons. People are prone to FUD. Theyre lazy and passive.
This means that, for example, Rupert Murdoch has a disproportionate level of political influence in the UK because he dominates media through which people watch and read about sports.
And Tiktok is an effective propaganda delivery channel because it already feeds kids videos of dances they like.
Sadly, programming people on a mass scale is just as effective as it ever was because it turned out how trust is acquired mattered way more than mere access to information.
The internet original was little else than implicit promises of such things, if not explicit. “It routes around censorship” and all that…
For that I'd say that the Russian TikTok is more in like with what TikTok is for and that's the Ukrainian TikTok that is unusual. I guess that you can't avoid it when there is a war in your country, despite all the efforts TikTok makes to keep things carefree.
your characterization of TikTok is shallow, its a social media platform. Just like every other social media platform people want to share and talk about the world along with their silly dances and you miss the point of OP and the article that it isn't about what TikTok should or shouldn't be, but that the limits set on free speech result in a neutering of of the social media platform, and is one example of many apps/website/platforms/news stations that will have been effected by this.
This goes into some of said propaganda in it, and how they have more "soft" propaganda in the US version of TikTok vs more intense propaganda in the Chinese version of the app: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3aYCG4vEe5s
You can still write anything in a blog that you own and have people see it. To me that freedom is the "internet".
It's easy when you have a domain, server in your basement, a reasonable ISP. But as soon as you break the ToS with your provider or registrar getting the word out becomes practically impossible without resorting to IPFS or Onion or whatever in which case the content you own becomes a little ghetto that nobody reads.
At best the Internet gives us some _freedom of choice_ in selecting whichever authority we'd like to operate under the reign of. Having (some) freedom of choice does not in and of itself lead to democracy.
That said, even this freedom of choice is increasingly being challenged with the erection of more and more national boundaries on the Internet. Collectively we do need to figure out how the Internet is to be governed in the future, because if we just take the default, we will end up replicating the same national borders as we have now.
At the end of the day, we still have a choice. All of a sudden, Mastodon and like projects start looking more attractive.
Putin blocking media ... sure... dictators block stuff all the time.
EU blocking RT.com (and a few others) was quite a shock for me,... really a thing that should not be happening in EU (no matter whose propaganda it is).
Why? Neo-nazi sites have a long history of getting banned everywhere.
Look at all the disinformation that you will see on the "news" channels (both sides) and "news" sites (which have replaced paper). Faux outrage is extremely profitable and as long as that is true, there will be no news, just infotainment click-bait for profit.
More significantly, controlling the narrative is not new. The Cold War was a narrative war, each side warning their citizens of the dangers of the other, and that even the ideas from across the seas were virulent and treasonous.
World War II was a war that featured a huge amount of propaganda, and while I would hesitate to say that it was more prevalent in any part of the world, the most well known examples come from Nazi Germany.
All sides in warfare claim to be winning. Morale is a huge factor in survival and achieving victory, the morale of the military personnel and the populace.
The belief is that you can't go around saying that you're losing, because this is more likely to convince people to stop trying to win.
By contrast, you can say that it's challenging, and that many have died, because a challenge is something to aspire to do, and the deaths of your people is something to arouse anger and a desire for revenge.
During times of war, freedoms have always been infringed upon, to keep the citizens in line and to police the nation for spies and dissenters.
What you are seeing is the use of a new tool in the propaganda toolkit. While the press can be swayed, big global news outlets need far more than a little cash or aggressive coercion to adopt a story contrary to fact, especially if to support a regime hated in the West where all the business is.
The point here is that your traditional internet outlets for news and discussion, namely news websites and forums, are harder to game. They're entrenched, they have their own agenda and you can't coerce your agenda over them.
But social media is journalism that anyone can produce, edit, fake and broadcast from anywhere. The way the content is displayed isn't chronological like news and forums, it's based on whether something is "trending" which I take to mean that a lot of people are engaging with it (viewing, commenting, liking, saving whatever). This can be gamed, so now you're controlling what the content is and how it is presented.
The internet is not to blame.
The worst thing that happened to the internet was how obnoxious advertising was allowed to become, from your 200px x 75px pixel art banners at the bottom of the screen to over 40% of viewport being adverts, adverts that can play video, modals that pop up based on whether your cursor has travelled toward the address bar or tabs to close the site (seriously, if a website does that, I know the company doesn't give a shit about its users).
It's not necessarily bad that advertising became the primary means of extracting revenue, it's just that we as a user base didn't do enough to punish websites that adopt dark patterns. We didn't as a majority categorically refuse to engage with content obscured by such methods, we just clicked through it to get what we individually wanted.
The real problem is that a lot of content is generated for the purposes of attracting people to it rather than providing new or true/useful information, but this tends to be solved by simply keeping a list of trustworthy, useful websites in mind and add to that list very selectively.
The internet is okay as long as you filter it, is my point, and I'm very grateful that it's still around precisely because I am here, talking to you now.
If we want the internet to change, that's something we as its users have to bring about ourselves. And while that may mean nothing happens, it's better than an internet where something or someone is in control of it.
Google would love to think of itself like such an entity, but I honestly think its losing influence fast.
I don't personally trust Google to keep a product around, so I daren't use half their services because I don't like thinking that my use of the service is on a clock. Rather than take an ailing product and make it profitable, they just kill it.
There are also the privacy violations etc but I strongly suspect that most companies that have the opportunities do the same things as Google has been accused of doing. That's not a pass, it's just cynical apathy on my part because I don't care if Google knows what porn my partner watches.
The reason Google is losing influence is simply because their search isn't very useful. It was good in the beginning, I feel like it was easily gamed for a bit, then it was more or less unbeatable for many years, and now it just... delivers promoted or garbage content. I've been trying DuckDuckGo out, which has been ... okay? I was surprised to learn it's powered by Bing, I thought Bing was supposed to be kinda bad but it has been working ok so far.
I digress. The internet is full of junk content but it's not dead or buried. It's still better than TV, it's better than your newspaper -- unless you buy all of the newspapers every morning -- and it's better than no internet.
It's primarily the social media subset of the internet that's creating problems and those problems are not confined to the misrepresentation of this Ukraine-Russia conflict.
People are coming to define themselves as the characters they perform as on social media, rather than who they are. I find it ironic because I have always kept my online and irl lives completely separate, both me (maybe I'd be a bit braver years ago with opinions and discussion topics than irl) but with no overlap of people I know.
and yet people who merge the two irl and online lives end up becoming some persona.
I think the way social media works is very dangerous. It predicates the value of an individual on how liked they are, and how liked they are is determined by whether their opinions and sense of humour converge with those of the majority of a userbase of a social media network.
There are numerous articles about the mental health of young people -- I don't think you need to look much further than social media to find some answers.
What has died is the idea of the internet. It is thoroughly balkanized now.
We're here on this internet talking. Things are different on other internets.
Edit: as others pointed out TikTok =! Internet.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media_and_the_Arab_Spri...
Perhaps that was before your time?
Doesn't explain why both democratic and non-democratic countries ban press. It's amazing how quickly people forget that democratic countries have banned russian, iranian, chinese, etc government/press/etc.
It's like the same people saying only "autocratic" countries russia ( which is actually a democracy ) is a threat to other nations. When in actuality, 90% of all invasions in the past few decades have been by democracies.
Maybe democraticizing forces is the evil we all should be fighting against because democraticizing forces have done so much damage worldwide. Even though we pretend to be the saints.
On thing that caught my attention was the supposed USCentric approach since it counted a distance in miles. I also wonder whether it was translated into russian so it can be shared with russian citizens that they’re being lied to by TikTok
NRK is Norway’s equivalent to the BBC. I’m not sure about the BBC, but NRK is not allowed to run ads. More importantly, they have a number of great in-house developers that churn out quality content and a great video streaming service (tv.nrk.no).
They can display adverts under certain circumstances though. Public billboards aren't censored in news reports, and adverts on the sidelines/stands of sporting events (like football) can still be seen.
Which is britain's equivalent to RT?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scandinavian_mile
TIL.
This was a first, and I blame someone else.
Actually, my experience was the exact opposite on a desktop. First, I landed on a black page which showed some video for less than a second and afterwards the page didn't respond anymore. After switching from Firefox to Chromium, the page probably worked as it was intended.
Nevertheless, scrolling with a mouse I landed somewhere between the right positions. So I tried using the buttons on the left and while the positions, I landed were much better, it felt very awkward to continuously press buttons on the left while my hand was on the right (might be good for left-handed people). Furthermore, the videos played somewhat irritating, as if they continued playing when you went to the next part or paused a bit delayed. So when switching to a previous part you land somewhere in the middle of the clips.
So while admire the story, I didn't enjoy the experience.
How out of touch are you?
For God's sake, they can practically see Kharkiv out of their window!
Heck, in many places around the world people get most local news from social media apps.
The parent Bytedance does, and their Chinese equivalent is Taiotao. Even the TikTok data servers exist in South Korea.
This is an important distinction because there has been zero proof that TikTok is spying or is a tool for China, despite clickbait articles, memes, and accusations existing. This is the first time TikTok is being used observed to be used for government political censorship... And in Russia of all places.
> But I think it is a bit surprising that TikTok hasn't met more criticism and resistance on this
If the users are liking their new digital crack / cocaine on the platform and as long as the algorithm is happily manipulating them, then they will never criticise or complain about it, nor will they be able to distinguish between fact or fiction.
Hence, I think many jealous governments, three-letter agencies and even ancient wizards want their reality distortion spells back from social networks like TikTok.
With that said - it would interesting so see what tik-tok looks like in China. Based on reports, Russian invasion is also heavily censored in China[0]
We did not need this war to make this obvious.
What's truly unsettling is that in the world today we must contend with the conflict between achieving capitalist goals (more money) and ideological ones (democracy).
Though it's so bad in Russia now that it seems the only moral choice is to shut down services.
Sorry, but unbiased sources do not exist. Free speech does not exist. It's not two worlds, but two bubbles.
This is demonstrably not true and easily disproved. All the official Russian accounts are on twitter and keep posting lies after lies, lately main topic is denial of massacre in Bucha. For example: https://twitter.com/mod_russia/status/1510649349482635265
Even with maternity hospital bombing, the women in photographs said that the Ukranian army had occupied the hospital and forced them out of the maternity wing.
Like the other poster said: it's fake news on fake news. Two different bubbles.
Does it look something like this?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Per...
With all respect for the author's work, this is not very relevant, since TikTok is in "zombie mode" now for Russia.
It stands to reason, with the nontemporal algorithm behavior parent comment pointed out, that a vast amount of those consume-only users will not even notice the new content restriction.
I see my point of view reflected only in alternative, independent media. This includes, for example, Pulitzer-prize winning journalist Chris Hedges who had years of his work purged from YouTube simply because he had a show on RT which was never once sympathetic to Putin.
My anti-war, pro-diplomacy POV is banned from corporate media, and flagged/downvoted into oblivion on Reddit and even Hacker News. From my perspective most supporting sending arms and money to Ukraine has been the victim of a policy campaign by the arms industry which has already generated windfall arms sales to Ukraine and now Germany (!). So am I surprised by this story? No. I've been seeing a banned perspective on this conflict in the US from day 1.
[1] “We reiterate the decision made at the 2008 Bucharest Summit that Ukraine will become a member of the Alliance” June 2021 https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/news_185000.htm
Not to mention that leading up to this transition of power we backed a violent coup of their democratically elected government in 2014.
What of the Ukrainian people in Eastern Ukraine who have been getting bombed for 7 years in a civil war? The Ukrainian people through their government agreed to the Minsk accords which would have prevented this but were then never honored.
I wouldn't say this idea is tired at all, it's the opposite, it's banned and unspoken on corporate media that serves as the mouthpiece for the US government and arms industry.
No, he wasn't. That's just another bullshit excuse manufactured to justify this criminal invasion. Here, read it from the man himself: http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/21598
The Hill, April 2021 "Putin draws a ‘red line’ on Ukraine, and he means it"
https://thehill.com/opinion/international/550036-putin-draws...
The Ukrainian Weekly, June 2021 "Following summit, Kremlin says NATO membership for Ukraine would be a ‘red line’"
https://www.ukrweekly.com/uwwp/following-summit-kremlin-says...
Reuters, September 2021 "Kremlin says NATO expansion in Ukraine is a 'red line' for Putin"
https://www.reuters.com/world/kremlin-says-nato-expansion-uk...
ABC News, November 2021 "Putin warns West: Moscow has 'red line' about Ukraine, NATO"
https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/putin-warns-w...
Name a single country that is in NATO against its own will due to "US policy".
Whereas in the free world, no one, not even Putin, should and absolutely will not have a say in other nations agreements, because that is a preposterous idea that no supporter of democracy would even consider to be a valid stance.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monroe_Doctrine
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_invasion_of_Iraq
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...
One of the main reasons I prefer Reddit is the existence of r/All. Provides a very balanced view
Tailored to individual tastes - absolutely not
Kinda like a newspaper
/r/all is nauseatingly full of "russia bad, ukraine good" with mindless flinging of feces.
Yall be blaming facebook but reddit is the real snake in the grass.
This is but one example of a larger systemic issue with media in the 21st century, and an issue with how people consume that media.
Virtually every platform is like this, not just TikTok. It's not like TikTok tries to present itself as a neutral, unbiased source. Their whole premise is delivering "highly curated" content to you as fast as possible. The problem is that people have accepted that as normal and it's doing horrible things to the world. There's a reason everyone feels like we're the most divided we've ever been...and it starts with things like this.
As far as the war in Ukraine is concerned, this is just like classic WW2 propaganda but turned up to 11 due to the nature of how fast and easy it is to spread [mis]information these days.
I'm not saying that they didn't just make up the article, but how do we know?
How do we know their bots didn't have bugs in them that pushed the results in favor of the tone of the article?
You don't need the bots source code to reproduce the experiment, just as you wouldn't ask to borrow/inspect a biochemist's beakers to reproduce their experiment.You simply follow the same steps they did and see if you observe the same results.
Bots may be prejudice to the war content in terms of how they watch videos and how they scroll through them, and as such changing recommendation algorithm, but the original reporting is about censorship of war related content. Which doesn't require that much of a proof, it is officially confirmed by TikTok even in the statement at the end of a submitted report - it doesn't show newly uploaded content in rus region.
[1] https://www.pling.com/p/1515346/ [2] https://github.com/tigr1234566/TikTokMod
And yet what you described is... Tor, almost exactly.
>Russian Alexei sees a man tripping over in the water, a puppy patting a duckling on the head and some funny, homemade costumes.
Is it just me or does the first one sound like propaganda and the second one sound like normal TikTok?
It's just TikTok does not want to be part of this.
The people that were just railing against “misinformation“ by their political opponents, have been happy to jump all over snake Island, ghost of Kyiv, Z dressed in uniform last year, higher Russian death rate than frontlines of World War II, and going out of their way to ignore neo-Nazi groups there.
No one has to be pro-Russia, to notice all the Ukrainian propaganda. Proves to me that everyone is full of shit when it comes to actual standards of acceptability.
source? while I don't doubt there's a many people for both groups, I haven't seen concrete examples of what you're describing.
Are the Ukrainian videos actually unavailable in Russian TikTok if you search for them? It seems obvious that as you watch more non-war stuff (which might be the default based on the demographics) you'll see even less of them in the Russian account. And if you really can't see them even if you try (which the article doesn't even say as far as I saw) then isn't that the real news rather than the experiment that just shows how different demographics see different things on TikTok? What am I missing?
"Via our Russian IP address, we try to search for some of the war videos that Ukrainian Nykolai has watched.
But they simply don’t appear. Someone doesn’t want us to see them.
Who?"
Either way, the point seemed to be more about the different feeds which is not a surprise anywhere while the real and only relevant information actually is that the content is banned.
Not comparing but I did a similar project 8 years ago at the peak of Israel / Palestine conflict to compare tweets from Palestine vs tweets from Israel.
Incredible difference when you see them side by side.
It would be great if someone would execute such an idea for more areas of conflict to bring awareness.
Edit, thanks internet archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20180118162502/https://98clicks....
> It would be great if someone would execute such an idea for more areas of conflict to bring awareness.
Its been different
But can we reflect for a second that we are all in the same boat? We don't know what we are presented on screens is real either. Who's to say we are receiving the truth? Are our leaders beneficent? I think not.
We are all in the same boat. We are all propagandised. We don't even know what is going on anywhere else, except for what we are able to personally verify. And even that is limited by how we are able to explain and frame our experience!
The core claim in the liked article isn't about content moderation, it's about censorship. And it's really upsetting to see the extent to which HN commenters want to conflate them.
You seem to be unaware of the level of censorship that goes on here, youtube, twitter, etc, etc. It is called breaking community guidelines, de-platforming, shadow banning, hate-speech, etc.
Do you remember when Alex Jones was removed from everywhere in a couple of days? Regardless of what you think, should he be allowed a voice?
All of this is taking place outside of the legal system btw. Which is meant to establish people's right to free speech.
(I didn't think I'd live, as a man, to be offended by sparsely-clad voluptuous women, but there I am.)
Regardless how much of this is because of my location or my behaviour, it supports OPs point: TikTok can be very different for different users.
It is a chinese social media app.
Use established media for news.
And yes I know that is how people get content, I use Youtube and Twitch for political news and its just as bad.
But this is on another level.
And what if the topic is say, Hunter Biden’s laptop?
If you got your news solely from TikTok, you probably would have know that was real about 500 days before NYT and WaPo finally admitted it.
It is no wonder governments would love to use this glorified recommendation algorithm as it is the new digital crack / cocaine which is effective on manipulating billions of users today.
Now looking back at this once again [1], I don't even think it was a clever thing to say that "TikTok is the best thing to have happened to the Internet". At most it is the direct opposite and it is even worse than Facebook.
Americans barely talked about Afghanistan. For 20 years, our internet was full of funny videos, stupid songs, and memes of Osama bin Laden. Sure we bombed civilians targets and committed war crimes too, but we had very smart lawyers that taught us clever words for why it was moral when we did it. And we nodded our heads in agreement and turned the channel to American Idol.
Americans are well aware that technology enables us to live in our own artificially constructed reality. We spent the last 20 years building it.
I was really against the Iraq war and nobody ever threatened me with 15 years of jail for it.
The architects of that conflict left when term limits were up. (Putin did not.)
Don't get me wrong, Iraq was pointless. Afghanistan seemed to have a justification at the start but was mismanaged early on. In terms of culture, wide swaths of the population were brainwashed in a similar way to how we talk about Russia now, though with a little more vocal opposition. But what I can say is there is room in the American system for course correction.
From where I'm sitting, Biden's folks did no small part in subtlely goading the Russians into doing stupid things. But really, they just led Putin and Xi into their own worst excesses, much like how those have been doing to the U.S. in turn.
The world is an ugly place, and it's up to us citizens to figure out what's going on. We are not served when the U.S. invades Afghanistan. How was that geopolitically smart, even in a realpolitik sense? Likewise the Russian people would be smart to realize just how much the public opinion in sympathetic countries (like Germany) has turned against them. When we buy into this Brave New World stuff, we are creating a worse situation for ourselves – and even more so for future generations.
Most of all, we need to know ourselves, because these artificially constructed realities work against us when the algorithms know us better than we do.
Obviously, it would be valuable if someone could suddenly change TikTok so that it thinks all Russians are Ukrainians.
Such information warfare is vastly less violent than missiles and probably much cheaper to implement. The sooner the Russian population knows what their leadership is really accomplishing, the better for the world.
I wish more people understood this. There is SO much more going on in this conflict than any layman can fathom. There’s deep context behind it spanning years, and the situation itself develops at a breakneck pace, yet everyone is suddenly an expert on the culture and history of the entire region and fully informed on what’s going on.
Sure, there are thousands of proxies in Russia and Ukraine. Lots of them are free. Besides, any decent paid VPN with multiple exit nodes would likely have nodes in both Russia and Ukraine.
You could even order a VPS hosting, if that's your thing.
Very convenient.
For years Kremlin cultivated in Russians a sense of injured pride, something akin to the “straight white male” victimhood and persecution complex you see in US fringe groups. Russians were told of greatnesses of their achievements of the past, and how it was stolen from them, how the West is weak, gullible, and corrupt, and is trying to sabotage the inevitable rise of Russia to it’s destined glory.
Russians have enough access to sources of truth, but their world view simply does not compel them to believe those sources that create dissonance with their righteous cause - they can’t be brother killing monsters that rape mothers in front of their children, crush people with tanks, bomb maternity hospitals - so it’s obviously all lies. And since everyone is accusing them of this - then it simply means that everyone is lying and will get what is coming to them.
How do I know this? I was born in Soviet Union, am Russian-speaking and I am unable to explain my anger and grief over what is happening to my own father who thinks that I am a fool to believe in propaganda staged videos full of crisis actors manufactured by Western media.
The clip is shared by a Russian account and contains a gaming reference for pausing games
Good factoid to note for dodging automatic filters
Maybe I'm delusional, but I found it positively surprising that: 1. The Ukrainian user saw videos about the war despite Russia and China wanting to suppress news around it, and I'm sure TikTok taking pressure around it. 2. It mostly isn't algorithmic deception, it's a byproduct of the fact that they had to turn off new video uploads in response to a crazy fake news law.
I've noticed that on Snapchat and Instagram, I'm not able to see any new public content coming from Ukraine. On the Snapchat map, Ukraine is completely empty. I have a few Ukrainian friends, and I still see their content, but public stuff seems to be filtered or censored somehow. I'm a US-based account, and I've been in the US and Dominican Republic lately.
I think this phenomenon is related to filter bubbles (but also more than that). I've already been noticing for years that my connections with different political views, or different interests, are being fed completely different realities. Sometimes it's benign recommendations, other times it's creepy advertiser-driven manipulation, and this example of Ukraine/Russia shows that there is clearly some blatant, wide-scale censorship going on. The narrative is being controlled by powers operating in the shadows. It really is an unseen information war.
As someone who has been traveling for 10 years, my friends are incredibly diverse. So I often hear news from outside of my country and my filter bubbles. And my go-to source for trying to peek outside of the filter bubbles is Wikipedia's current events portal.
I've got a few Russian friends. Most are outside of Russia, but one who I regularly talk to is in Russia and stays on Instagram using a VPN. I've had some conversations with her about the war, and while she's certainly not a fan of Putin, and knows there is a war going on, she seems to be completely naive about the severity of it. When we talk about it she says things about how truth is hard to know because the media lies. She is hearing stories from the West but having a hard time knowing what is really happening.
There really needs to be some new form of leaflet drops to get real information to Russians despite the Information Age Iron Curtain.
I’m not sure that sending local ad sales people who have no influence on the product, and depriving their family of their support is the ethical choice.