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.
No. Shit. It’s infuriating.
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.
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the US media environment is very entertainment-focused?
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the US education system leaves things to be desired?
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the US population spends a high amount of time in social media echo chambers?
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do Republicans spend more of online time in bot-infested places?
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do they have lower bot recognition and fact checking skills?
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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.
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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.
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]
Many of the people responding to the poll may not have ever encountered the claims they were asked about.
However, they do offer a “not sure” option, which can be taken if a person knows they’re not informed.
Has anyone ever looked at the education level of population voting for different parties? (I don’t know how to query statistics in an educated way)
Generally, studies have shown that the more educated a person gets the more they lean left. People at the PhD level tend to be far more liberal than people with only a high school degree.
I expected that. But, is there specific statistics? Numbers? Graph? Pie Chart?
I Googled “political orientation and educational level,” and the first link was this
It is highly detailed, with lots of graphs and charts, and eventually comes to the same conclusion that I posted in my previous comment.
There are plenty of other links that confirm it as well.
Thank you. I completely agree with you, and this study. I was trying to find a “dumbed down” version.
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.
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.
The “Russian Hoax” is a hoax.
HitlerPig’s ties to Putin and Russia are well-documented, all the way back to his first visit to Soviet Moscow in 1987, BEFORE the fall of the Iron Curtain, when the Soviets were shocked at how easily he could be manipulated with the most insincere flattery, and he was given the code-name designation Krasnov.
Within six months of his first visit, he was taking out his first full page ads spouting Soviet talking points.
By any objective measure, HitlerPig is the most prolific Traitor in American history, worse than all other American traitors COMBINED.
on reddit i pointed out in political subs so many times that alot of the posters were russian trolls positng russian back news to bait people. cant you people see its obvious. around the time of the gaza invasion, i reported a couple people in the pics sub for israeli propaganda, because they were posting the " attacks against palestine" as a way to frame bidenw as the sole cause of the conflict and hes doing nothing, i reminded them that both parties have always supported in great numbers, and its only currently being inflammed because BIBI was worried a new D was going to condemn or stop the financial support to israel.
Yeah, the Russian trolls pretending to be “liberals” and constantly attacking only the Democrats for some weird reason are all over the place. And then there are the people stupid enough to fall for this nonsense, too…I know a few IRL, and man, they are so very tiresome.
Usually they have all kinds of excuses and absurd purity tests that no politician that is actually running would pass, and then they proudly do shit like stay home or throw their vote away on Jill Stein or whatever. They act like they won something by doing this, too.
But when it comes to the trolls and useful idiots, I’ve seen some places that seem to have been overrun with them. The comments on Boing Boing, once upon a time, used to be a pretty fun place. Some years go by and I come back later and try to engage in reasonable conversation and the little clique of self-reinforcing posters/ moderators that took over that place were having none of it. It was all maximalist identity politics and Oppression Olympics to the point of cartoonish levels, and constant ripping on the Democratic Party and “shitlibs”. Any deviation, most especially if you made one of the anointed look bad? Deleted, almost immediately. Didn’t matter how thoughtful.
Anyway, the comment section there seemed to be designed to create reactionaries. Anyone on the fence that happens to wander into some spectacle like that is bound to come away with some impressions about what liberals are like, and it’s not going to look good.
They have since taken their comments behind a paywall, go figure. I hope that little clique is happy with policing any all minute deviations from what they believe is the One True Way to think. I doubt anyone is going to pay for that kind of treatment for long, so… shrug?
those idiots thought by showing pics of people getting injured was a NEW phenomenon under biden, it has been happening for decades, lol. and almost no party got any flak for supporting israeli genocide, they decided to put it on the news to hurt bidens chances, it was purely that.
It threw off everybody’s bullshit calibration when the FBI announced in 2020 that the Hunter Biden laptop scandal, which included implications of Joe Biden taking foreign bribe money, was “Russian Disinformation”.
They also ordered (technically only “asked nicely”) Facebook and Twitter to engage in censorship campaigns based on this.
Later, after helping Biden win the election, they admitted that the laptop was real and not a Russian psyop as publicly claimed. Internal text messages revealed even later prove that while the FBI may have thought the laptop was not real at first, they did not believe it was a Russian plant, in other words, they lied.
So stuff like that might be why Republicans tend to believe “Russian Misinformation”.
There was no real scandal here and it was definitely pushed by Russian disinformation.
There was truth to the story though. A laptop was stolen from a private citizen and used as a political talking point. Also, Hunter greatly benefited from his father’s position.
^ Found the “twitter files” fan. lol
I’m gonna need a source for those claims.
Russia
Fucking pathetic.
It was alarming the first time around. It isn’t now. This country is filled with blissfully stupid people.
KGB handbook describes this in great detail. Amplify and boost the loudest, worst voices on both sides of every political and social issue, so that people hate each other and everyone thinks the worst of each other, thus embracing the worst image the other side has of each other.
Further, by making literally every issue, no matter how small, into a contentious debate where you can’t tell what’s real or not, the average voter or citizen just starts to tune it all out.
Why do you think the general public is abandoning science and basic liberal democracy? Why do you think people suddenly seem to not care about basic empathy or rights for fellow citizens?
They’ve all tuned out, they don’t care anymore because everything is too stupid, too nonsensical, too contentious, so the alternative is to buy whatever the leadership says, keep your head down, and get back to work. Welcome to the end of the cold war. Victory to Russia.
anti-vaxxers was also pushed by russia too, it made sense since russias own people refused to take the machine, because it worked too well.
While it’s definitely the KGB’s handbook, I think they got a little help from Al-Qaida with 9/11. They deserve some of the credit as well for helping steer America this way. Victory to Russia. Victory to Al-Qaida.
foundation of geopolitics.
It probably sounds so familiar to fox viewers
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
What civil war propaganda? Where can I read more about this?
For example, the confederate supporters say the war wasn’t about slavery, but rather about states rights. Now, you ask, states rights to what? And then they don’t have an answer somehow.
Bingpot
“The civil war wasn’t about slavery, it was about states rights”
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.
Surprised Pikachu face
Cool story… But what about american disinformation? I guess it doesn’t exist… jfc.
This article doesn’t deny American disinformation. Nor does it imply there is no American disinformation. What’s your point?
They’re being sarcastic
