politics

The headline should read "Republicans believe misinformation to an alarming degree"?

Sure the numbers aren't great for independents and democrats... but it isn't >50% bad, which clearly points to Republican ideology as brain worms.

Not only Americans. This is a global problem...

Enough to elect a Russian agent, twice

Americans Also Believe American Disinformation ‘To Alarming Degree'

Actually Americans tend to easily believe a lot of nonsense .... and have a harder time grasping reality.

An alarming amount of Americans still believe civil war disinformation and propaganda. They ain't got the critical thinking skills to deal with 250 year old shit, they sure as hell can't think past new shit

It was alarming the first time around. It isn't now. This country is filled with blissfully stupid people.

So much of what is being flagged as "Russian disinformation" is being parroted (if not straight up propagated) by western news media, western social media, and western talking heads.

At what point does a Mercer-funded, MAGA-coded, Texas based, English language broadcast constitute American Media? Is this a "just one drop" rule, where any positive (or insufficiently negative) news item or talking point or image marks the entire operation as "Russian"? Are guys like Tim Pool and Alex Jones still Americans? Or are they Russian? Is Tucker Carlson, the son of a CIA director and a midwestern cattle-country heiress, a Presidential speechwriter and US cable news pundit and avowed Cold Warrior, a Russian? Is CNN Russian? Is Exxon Russian?

Well, an alarming number of Americans believe that Trump should be president. And that America is the best country in the world, and that compassion is communism.

This tells more about how gullible Americans are, and not much about the skills of unchecked Russian propaganda.

Fucking pathetic.

It probably sounds so familiar to fox viewers

Their methodology involves asking people a bunch of questions and then if they don’t get 100% correct they’re counted as believing misinformation. Putting aside the unreliability of online polls, that’s a pretty misleading way of framing it, if you ask me.

If you asked people 10 questions about just about anything, you’d probably find a substantial number of people who don’t get every one right. In fact, they did do this under the heading, “Disinformation Nation: Americans Widely Believe False Claims on a Range of Topics.” That’s probably why they found that, “Respondents identifying as Democrats were about as likely (82 percent) to believe at least one of the 10 false claims as those identifying as Republicans (81 percent).”

Many of the people responding to the poll may not have ever encountered the claims they were asked about. If you are first encountering a claim in that context, you pretty much just have to guess whether you think it’s true based on vibes. And you can easily set up misleading vibes, like, “Conservative initiative Project 2025 proposes cutting or eliminating Social Security” which is false because it’s not explicitly stated, but it does explicitly state a whole bunch of other horrible shit, so like, if you get got by that one it doesn’t really show that you believe in an inaccurate picture of the world, just that you got tripped up by details. But that claim dings you for “believing misinformation” just as much as " COVID-19 vaccines killed 15 million people worldwide."

So like it doesn’t really tell us very much about how far reaching disinformation really is, the results are more of a reflection of their methodology.

[Reposted from the last time this study was posted]

If any population needs help with media literacy, it's Murcans and Canucks.

So many people are repeating Putin's narratives that even anti-cons are believing them.

uneducated country that wants to be even more uneducated. runs its platform based on robbing the country blind whilst using the dumbest of the population as a shield by rage baiting them into protecting them against the opposition.

the world is going to be unrecognizable in 20 years. I'm convinced its going to end up with multiple state collapses and nuclear wars.

*read and analyze content critically

No. Shit. It's infuriating.

thanks to the right wing media lying to American people for decades this has become a reality

Speaking of disinformation, here's the underlying article: https://www.newsguardrealitycheck.com/p/one-third-of-americans-believe-russian-disinformation-yougov-survey-finds. In case you want to skip Forbes.

Gullibility appears to cut across party lines, with respondents identifying as Democrats just as likely as Republicans to believe at least one of the 10 false claims.

Republicans were, though, more likely to believe Russian disinformation claims than their Democratic counterparts, with 57.6% falling for at least one Russian disinformation claim, compared with just 17.9% of Democrats and 29.5% of people who didn't identify with one particular party.

I looked at the 10 false claims used for the test. Most of them were ridiculously easy to dismiss as false. The only one I had difficulty with was identifying whether social security cuts were part of "Project 2025" agenda, due to the agenda being very extensive (the source says 922 pages) and me not living in a country that it's about. Thus I'd have answered "not sure". I'd have also answered "not sure" about the birth place of some terrorist.

If people stumble on these, people are really poorly informed or unable / unwilling to inform themselves.

Some guesses.

• the US media environment is very entertainment-focused?

• the US education system leaves things to be desired?

• the US population spends a high amount of time in social media echo chambers?

• do Republicans spend more of online time in bot-infested places?

• do they have lower bot recognition and fact checking skills?

• are they drinking the kool-aid because their great leader drank it, so it seems legit?

In general, propaganda works. That's why people pay for it. When you have a delicate equilibrium and you can push it past the tipping point with little effort, that's the most economical way of disabling an opponent. :( Using force would require a spending a trillion, but using disinformation, you can get outcomes with a tiny amount.

Russia is spending significant amounts on promulgating misinformation in the U.S. Last year, for example, the U.S. Department of Justice indicted two people for funneling nearly $10 million through a Tennessee-based content creation company to publish misinformation about Ukraine.

Many of the supposed "leaders" are spouting Russian disinfo - Hegseth the other day was crying about the media talking about the "Russian hoax", meaning, reporting on donvict's sus ties to Putin and Russia in his first term.

Cool story... But what about american disinformation? I guess it doesn't exist... jfc.

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