Britain is becoming a soft target for Russian and other state propaganda because the UK is not prepared to educate people on how to deal with information warfare, according to a former White House adviser and security expert.
Fiona Hill told a parliamentary committee that she feared the UK had become “extraordinarily vulnerable” to online manipulation feeding into the electoral system because there was a lack of discussion about civil defence.
“I think part of the problem is also on the societal level: that the UK increasingly looks like a soft target rather than a hard target, because modern war, as we all know, is fought with so many different methods now, including propaganda,” Hill said.
She contrasted the UK with Sweden, which has an idea of “psychological defence”. It is about “training people to think about how you deal with all kinds of information warfare, so people can recognise when they’re being manipulated”.
The concept dates back to the cold war, but after a hiatus Sweden set up a psychological defence agency in 2022, which tries to work with the public and highlight online disinformation.
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“Becoming”?
I think a certain referendum in 2016 demonstrated that we’ve already fallen for it hook, line and sinker.
Wasn’t London flooded with Oligarchs by the early 2000s?
Putin was probably working on it since then, when he was still just a KGB spook.
Exactly. How much of an expert is someone who thinks it’s just now beginning to happen a little bit?
If you look at the yougov voting intention poll by age it becomes very obvious that predominantly young, online-informed people are actually voting Green, Lib Dem, Labour etc.
If you look at the elderly boomers, age 50-65 and 65+ then its all Reform and the Conservatives.
If you further look at where people get their information based on age, on which there are many reports including by yougov, you’ll see that boomers get it much more from TV, tabloids, radio etc. At first i was confused at the radio bit but It makes sense - they own cars and listen to radio while in them.
The call is coming from inside the house. This is a transparent call to internet censorship to stop left-wing discourse about the Epstein alliance and their wars in the middle east that the establishment finds unpalatable and drive the young to believe in right-wing lies. Kremlin’s own rolling internet blackouts in Russia won’t be far behind this initiative for the UK and the think of the children types on here will fall for it hook line and sinker, probably support it as Lemmy goes away even.
Unfortunately it is, the amount of people I meet in daily life who will unquestioningly believe any old nonsense online, but will instantly question medical experts, harming themselves and others in the process. I had an uncle die during lockdown because he believed all the conspiracies online, and therefore did not get the COVID vaccine, and subsequently died of COVID.
And its not just online, the traditional media is increasingly untrustworthy too, Ofcom has absolutely failed to tackle everything from GBNews to the increasingly obvious mask off reform support coming out of the BBC etc.
Oh I agree fed up of seeing farages face on TV ‘for balance’ when reform only has a few seats, lib Dems have loads more seats and there barely on TV
Talk about closing the stable door after the horse has bolted.
Sounds like propaganda that will be used as an excuse to introduce more internet censorship tbh.
Yeah, there is no Russian propaganda. I mean, why would the Kremlin do that, right? /s
Pedophiles exist too, that doesn’t mean they’re not used as an excuse for censorship and control of the internet.
The Kremlin did Brexit imo
Yes, I wouldn’t say the Kremlin ‘did’ it, but they heavily influenced it and spread propaganda imo.
Well yeah I’m not crazy lol, I just think that but for Russian hybrid warfare the UK would still be EU.
Who else gains from a UK outwith the EU?
The USA? China? Individual moneyed interests? Disaster capitalists’ sons ?
I think it’s fair to say there were many sources of dis/mis information and pinning it squarely on Russia is disingenuous. They very very likely contributed, but they’re not the only outside power to meddle. Nevermind the internal greedy self interested campaigns.
Given my prior comment wouldn’t it be disingenuous to say I’m pinning it squarely?
The Kremlin did Brexit imo
I read it as pretty clearly placing it on Russia’s shoulders alone.
Lol Nigel and his pals have had support since forever. The NF and the london race riots weren’t all that long ago. Boomers didn’t vanish since then.
internet authenticity not censorship
We used to get taught about media trustworthiness, bias and intent as part of history lessons at school in the 1990s.
They’d show you a contemporary report from one side of an event, one from another point of view, then one which was written 100 years later for example, then look at why each side would have motivation to lie and what they’d potentially gain, and on behalf of who etc.
Michael Gove got rid of all of that type of learning, to be replaced by “People should repeat a list of things that the teacher says”, which was the system used beforehand “in the olden days”.
Anyway, I’m pretty sure that doesn’t help us.
It also doesn’t help that one of our political parties, with a lot of Russian money thrown at it, has its own propaganda channel (Gammon Bell-end News), not to mention the almost unanimous support it receives from most TV news programmes, newspapers and right-wing social media.
I had those exact kinds of lessons in GCSE history in 2014. It didnt matter, when i spoke to my classmates years later about it as working adults reminiscing they looked at me bewildered that i remembered something like that, they didn’t seem to recall whatsoever anything specific they learned at school, even though i was the one who was awful at school and had way worse grades.
That’s one of the things that I’m most concerned about. Very rarely do I talk to someone who says they remember much from school. I don’t know why, because I smoked a lot of weed in high school and was a bad student, but I still remember what we learned (generally, things like which books we read in lit, what periods of history and events we covered, what topics we studied in biology, etc., not that I remember every day or lesson).
Yeah, my very former classmates seem bewildered when I mention books we read for GCSE Literature. My grades weren’t good at all compared to said former classmates.
Its kind of shocking, do they just memorize stuff like robots for a few months then flush that memory?
I could never do that, if i learned something, I likely still at least remember learning it, snd if i didn’t then i still remember not understanding it.
I can’t hunker down and just memorize or somehow learn something without actually processing it and learning it proper, doesn’t matter how important, but then again I was later diagnosed with ADHD.
And I bet they think you’re the idiom!
I’m definitely an idiom (probably “odd duck,” but I’m open to other suggestions).
And I’m even more definitely an idiot, because even though I saw the joke, my first reaction upon reading your comment was thinking of fun idioms to describe myself.
The US and Britain have BEEN outstanding successes for Russia’s psyops propaganda. Brexit and Trump are Putin’s wildest wet dream.
Well, it worked in the US.
