MintPress News has reposted content from Russian state media outlets RT and Sputnik,[26][27] and is listed as a “partner” of PeaceData, a Russian fake news site run by the Internet Research Agency.[28][29][30] A report from New Knowledge includes MintPress News as part of the “Russian web of disinformation,”[31][32] and the site has published fake authors attributed to the GRU, the Russian military intelligence agency.[33] MintPress News defended Russia’s invasion of Crimea, claiming Ukraine’s post-revolution government was “illegitimate”.[34]
On August 29, 2013, an unverified MintPress article attributed to Dale Gavlak and Yahya Ababneh said that Syrian rebels and local residents in Ghouta, Syria alleged that rebels were responsible for the chemical weapons attack on August 21.[14]
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On September 20, the Brown Moses Blog published a statement from Gavlak saying that “despite my repeated requests, made directly and through legal counsel, they have not been willing to issue a retraction stating that I was not the author. Yahya Ababneh is the sole reporter and author of the Mint Press News piece.”[37][38] Gavlak also said the report had not been verified.[16][39]
Gavlak also told the New York Times that “There was no fact finding or reporting by me for the piece. I did not travel to Syria, so I cannot corroborate [Ababneh’s] account” and that Muhawesh refused to remove her name from the byline because “this is an existential issue for MintPress and an issue of credibility as this will appear as though we are lying.”[37]
MintPress added an editor’s note at the top of the article stating Ababneh was the sole reporter on the ground in Syria, while Gavlak assisted in researching and writing the article. It said that Gavlak was a MintPress News correspondent who had freelanced for the Associated Press (AP) in Jordan for a decade. A note at the bottom of the story says: “Some information in this article could not be independently verified. Mint Press News will continue to provide further information and updates.”[40] The Russian Foreign Ministry cited the article in future statements.[41][42]
In 2023, Randi Lucile Nord, a MintPress News staff writer,[60][59] admitted to spray-painting a swastika and the word “Azov” (in reference to the Azov Brigade) on a synagogue in Royal Oak, Michigan, in order to undermine United States support to Ukraine during the Russian invasion of Ukraine.[61]
This I think goes to show how the mainstream obsession with “tankies” as an ideological group is no different than the people screaming about “libertarians” in the 2010s
The majority of these people that are visible online are likely just literal teenagers trying to deep dive into concepts they have no foundational understanding of and glomming onto whatever sounds the best to their 14 year old, completely externally enforced, worldview.
Now, also just like the libertarians of the 2010, there are like five specific people who hold inconceivable sociopolitical and economic power who ARE in fact attempting to force reforms through governments, undemocratically, to achieve these undeniably horrific outcomes because it does in fact suit their personal ideological aims.
Those people have been privately or publicly working cooperatively with Russian information warfare (or just are GRU) in order to boost the perceived popularity of their agendas.
What you’re describing, the people saying “I hate putin, but Ukraine should lay over and give up” are probably the exact targets of this effort.
Those are liberals you’re talking to. Those are the people who read all the tankie stuff and read all the nazi propaganda on twitter and came to the manufactured “centrist” conclusion that Ukraine just doesn’t really matter and the real loss is the fact that fighting continues.
It’s why donald trump, every single time he mentions it, says
It’s a deliberate attempt to frame Russia as an equal in terms of tragedy. There is no tragedy for Russia outside of the fact they’ve sent a quarter of their working age population into a meat grinder for a dying psychopaths dreams of a greater Russia under his control. Ukraine is fighting a war to maintain their sovereignty.
There’s like 500 tankies online while donald trump is in the Oval Office repeating literal Kremlin talking points to the president of Ukraine and I have to get on here and read about how insufferable it is that anon said something defensive of china. Be so for real right now.
Pointing out this stuff like this post does, showing how information warfare gets injected into discourse and hidden as real journalism, is the exact thing that causes this discordant worldview to stop holding weight. The more exposure this gets the less likely people will just take some report and form an opinion completely unaware that opinion is the manufactured outcome of the organization publishing that report. (For example climate deniers using oil lobby reports of climate change being “unsettled science” to defend their position that the climate data you’re showing them doesn’t prove anything)
These people online are not the enemy, they are the only people willing to fight with you against the forces that control every aspect of our lives. This is lemmy for Christ’s sake. The faster we all realize that and move past the sticking points of which genocidal empire deserves more support than criticism the sooner we can be rid of the brokers who sowed all these conflicting viewpoints in the first place.
So long as people are willing to care for one another and stand up against injustice they are not my enemy. Learn to identify and counteract the actual bad actors with information so that anyone who mistakenly comes across their viewpoint is immediately greeted by a counterpoint from a real person with a conscience.
There are networks that exist exclusively to push Russian and zionist viewpoints and defend them online as if they are “common sense.” It is our job to have the knowledge and courage to shout down incorrect and malicious interpretations of the world and bring forward a more nuanced and complete understanding of history and modern politics.
Attempting to exclude them entirely just offers the inexperienced a closed system to be inculcated with those beliefs without pushback. That’s why we got where we are in the first place. It’s good when Russian bots get outed in a public forum, it shows everyone there exactly what the shit looks like so they recognize it on the next Facebook post their uncle sends them. Fostering critical thought and media literacy is step one to dismantling this prison we all currently exist within.
(I’m not arguing with anything you said, your comment just gave me this train of thought and I don’t think it would make sense out of context as its own comment)
I 100% agree with this. I was actually confused for a long time by how people on Lemmy.ml are so universal about using the same types of bad thought patterns and arguments… they came across as genuine, individual people, not like some of the propaganda accounts that all employ the same lazy dishonest methods because they are literally just reading from the same handbook. But certain ways of looking at things and flaws in their critical thinking, all the .ml people just happen to share (or it happens to be really common for users there). It was really odd and I couldn’t understand it.
I have reached a tentative conclusion that maybe they just tend to be young or be really unfamiliar with reading critically or being rigorous about judging an argument… and that is why they are still comfortable on .ml. I think it is self-selecting. They wouldn’t be there if they weren’t taken in by certain types of failed logic, because that is the logic that is enforced from above over there.
I’m still not 100% sure but it kind of seems to me like that is what is going on.
Completely agree with this also. I don’t think deleting or blocking this stuff is the answer, because that will always be a temporary solution. I think vigorously pushing back on it is the answer for exactly the reason that you said.
Lies in public discourse isn’t anywhere near a new problem, and humans do have methods to deal with it. It just takes time and it takes a sensible community where some of the tools that can give traction to the truth can get some leverage.
Yeah. Even Trump voters, I don’t really think are “the enemy.” Self defense is fine, they can be deadly dangerous in the short run. But in the long run they are more than anything victims of that same powerful machine, and the way to save ourselves will be to save them from it, too, so we can all survive together.
I was worried I might have gone too far off topic with my rant so I actually really appreciate the honest reply. I’m glad I wasn’t off base.
I just feel like the more nefarious thing to do is to silo people with bad ideas so they can reinforce each other out of sight of people who could reasonably talk them out of their spiral. Like you said, Im sure the .ml people are self selecting but there’s also an aspect of being defederated or ostracized for simply having an .ml username that makes them unable to get a reasoned debate out of people who claim to want a marketplace of ideas.
If they were truly so ideologically captured that they would kill you for saying Stalin was a bad leader they probably wouldn’t be on here defending it. They’d be doing whatever psychotic militant commune shit the patriot front is doing.
We all seem to agree that patriot front is worse than whatever .ml is doing but the fact that .ml is publicly available to be scrutinized, and there are entire pages dedicated to going in their comms explicitly to get banned for bad faith, means the size of the outrage is not commensurate with its output. Idk who on .ml is plotting a communist coup but unless that’s what they’re doing I see no reason to be planning on imprisoning anyone who defends china.
There’s real, material right wing threats in our country that have real power. Why are we on lemmy yelling at the weird kids table for playing their card game none of us care about? Like you said, even republicans who voted for this are just as much victims of propaganda as the best of us. We’d be better off pointing people towards the actual cause of our problems instead of trying to blame a fringe group for holding us back.
I’m saying we need everyone, and we can bicker about how much state intervention is too much once we no longer have to worry about concentration camps being filled with dissenters.
Thanks again for really putting thought into your reply and understanding where I’m coming from. Every time I mention .ml I’m worried that someone somewhere is gonna tag me and have me brigaded for “defending” them. I don’t care what they’re doing. I know its not nearly as destructive as what republicans have been doing and I don’t see anyone on lemmy posting trophies of the republicans they’ve caught detaining someone illegally. Let’s focus our energy on the real threats while we still have enough bodies to choke up the combine. I fear we are losing daylight fast.