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The political war over Hurricane Helene is heating up. Elon Musk is accusing FEMA of blocking his attempts to deliver Starlinks to areas affected by the disaster. Right-wing Twitter/X is full of talk about various incidents in which purportedly people coming to the area to try to help and/or deliver supplies are being turned away by FEMA. Also full of talk about FEMA using money to support illegal immigrants. Some people are pushing theories that FEMA is deliberately withholding help.
How credible is any of this?
My guess is that FEMA is a typical semi-competent government agency that makes many blunders. It might be bad at coordinating with random people who want to help but are not government employees and it might thus institutionally prefer to just block off the area and try to handle everything without random people's assistance. This policy then causes the various incidents that are being talked about.
I doubt that FEMA is deliberately withholding aid, if for no other reason than that I do not see how withholding aid would benefit the Democrats politically.
What do you make of it?
I can't speak to the state of actual relief efforts, but there does seem to be a bit of an effort to manufacture this as a mirror image to Bush's Katrina response, which dragged on Republicans for a long time: see Kanye's infamous "George Bush doesn't care about Black people" line.
Which is funny to me because in hindsight it's less clear that it was purely the Bush administration's doing. Much can be said about the (blue!) city and state leadership not taking the imminent storm seriously even as the National Weather Service issued extremely dire warnings, but Mike Brown's leadership of FEMA wasn't exactly a "heckuva job" either.
At least that's how I see it under the "politics is unprincipled conflict" lens. I suspect there are real challenges to providing useful aid with so many roads inaccessible (as there were in 2005), and I doubt anyone is actually slow-walking aid, even if they are trying to play political football ("FEMA is running out of funds" "that's because you spent it all on migrants"). Personally, I don't know much more to do than pray, although I'm open to suggestions.
Now adays, any time there is a disaster in the United States, you should assume that there is a Russian social media effort to try and inflame and twist it. Sometimes a disaster doesn't even have to actually occur, and they'll just fake-news one. This is just one of the things they do, independent of any truth to any criticsm.
This is underselling the culpability of the democratic city and state leadership. There wasn't merely a 'not taking the imminent storm threat seriously', but actively delaying and hindering federal support responses including by not actually asking for various types of assistance from the federal and other states until days later, instigating a posse comitatus policy freeze disrupting federal military assistance, and of course the police not merely abandoning duty roles but partaking in the looting.
When the local police are joined in on the looting and a state senator is diverting national guard assets to get material from his personal home, there's not terribly much an organization like FEMA can do.
The steelman is that airspace is dangerous if uncontrolled, and so in a disaster a government doesn't want to be competing with airspace. This is especially true when rescue agencies would be further diverted if they had to rerout resources to help someone who got themselves into a mess- like, say, by crashing aircraft into a town.
On the other hand, this administration is the heir to the one that repeatedly targeted religious medical charities if they didn't support abortion-enabling policies. There is an established vein of 'our way or not at all' in some parts of the US government.
I have no insight into this specific circumstance, but 'stop getting in our way as you try to help' is a real, and sometimes even valid, thing.
On the other hand, it’s a very very useful tool to hide incompetence and grift. Everything the government doesn’t want people talking about seems to be “Russian Trolls” and it’s become a sort of go to excuse for why people are saying things the government doesn’t want to hear on social media. Sure, sometimes it’s trolls, but by this point, enough ultimately true stories were officially dismissed as misinformation until they were shown to actually have happened that I no longer find the “Russian Trolls” story to be a sensible hypothesis. In fact, I’m trying to think of a story told in the past 2-3 years where it’s actually traced back to a real Russian whether working for the government or not.
I’m mostly with the steelman here. People who don’t know what they’re doing wandering about a disaster area are more likely to create situations where they need rescue than to do substantial good — unless they have enough knowledge to know what they’re doing. A bunch of rednecks coming in and sawing through things or chopping down trees or whatever might well injure people or need rescue themselves. Disaster areas tend to be dangerous and the dangers aren’t always obvious. Taking your John boat over downed power lines is pretty dangerous. So the government probably is turning people away because they don’t want to rescue the redneck brigades who have no experience rescuing people.
Are you even dismissing the right hypothesis?
No, seriously. I think you mis-read what was claimed, and projected previous / other experiences onto it. The hypothesis is not that 'the coverage is the result of Russian trolls.' The hypothesis is 'no matter what happens, there will be Russian trolls trying to make it worse.' Whether the Russian trolls succeed in significantly shaping the conversation, or originated the talking points, or are fallaciously conflated with legitimate grievance is irrelevant to a characterization of their (a) existence and (b) attempts.
If you want to dismiss that, sure, but you haven't actually provided a grounds of disputing either supporting point. Which do you find non-sensible- that Russian troll farms like the Internet Research Agency exist?
Very directly- what do you think the Russians use the Internet Research Agency for? Not how influential it is, not whether it's fair to tar Americans with guilt by association. What do you think the Russian IRA does, and why?
What does 'traced back' even mean in this context? If you mean 'originated with,' one of the more famous was the Colombian Chemicals Plant Hoax in 2014, and more recently the 2021 the pre-Ukraine War propaganda justification/narrative blitz, which included claims of genocide of Russian-speakers to justify Russian intervention.
But if 'traced back' means 'shaped / signal boosted,' which is the claimed level involvement here, then by definition any Russian social media coverage of any topic counts, especially since you said 'for the government or not.' Unless you intend to argue that the Russians don't use social media...?
Except that every time I’ve seen the claim made, it’s not really backed up by any evidence of trolling. It’s just a go-to excuse for the reports in question and circulated on social media. This isn’t remotely a good faith attempt at explaining what’s going on, but an easy off the cuff statement of “yeah don’t pay attention to this.” And I think at this point, the propaganda claims that Russia is causing or amplifying these stories by far outstrips what Russia itself is actually doing.
Yes, troll farms exist, I’m not disputing that Russia, China, and pretty much every other country with internet access has some sort of troll farm. But if they aren’t capable of getting results and getting good results, then it kinda doesn’t matter. And given that it’s possible for us to track them, we know where the trolling is coming from, stuff like this is probably fairly trivial to block.
And to be clear my grounds for dismissal are pretty simple. First, this is the go-to story every single time a social media story contradicts or embarrasses the cathedral. It never happens that Russian Trolls are pushing the narrative of Project 2025, or calling Trump a danger to democracy, or calling Republicans fascists. That is never considered trolling. But when the story is something embarrassing to the establishment, that’s the trolls. Kinda interesting how one set of stories is always pushed by, started by, faked by, or amplified by Russia, and the other side absolutely never is.
Secondly, we never seem to find out which Russian troll account starts or amplifies these stories. Can you name any troll accounts outed by the regime? Have they given any evidence beyond “trust us bro” for any such claims that a story has been deliberately seeded or amplified by a known Russian troll account? And this seems fairly telling. There’s almost never evidence presented to show these trolls did all the things they’re accused of. They are invisible and leave no evidence behind every time.
The Russian IRA does cyberwarfare, that much is obvious. To the degree it exists, it’s there to do various forms of cyber warfare in support of Russian military operations. And it’s not like I don’t think they’re occasionally effective. Honestly they might be as good as the ones in the CIA group we have. But again, if you’re going to issue a blanket statement that every anti-cathedral story on social media is based on something Russians are pushing, it’s simply not credible unless and until it’s shown to actually have been done by Russia.
To blame Russian trolls for every negative viral story is a conspiracy theory.
Cool, but who here that you're replying to is doing that?
You lead off with this,
And if you're looking for examples of Russian efforts because you literally have never head any, sure these can be provided. Here is a 140 page academic review of Russian propaganda in the context of the start of the Ukraine war. Here is a 2014 (and thus pre-2016 craziness) on the Internet Research Agency, one of the original notable troll farms. Here is coverage of an IRA-linked accounts conducting an Ebola and cop-shooting hoax in Atlanta, GA. Here is a study of when IRA accounts were engaging in pre-COVID vaccine debates. Here is IRA posters involved in inflamatory British rhetoric. Here are times they helped organize protests by Americans on differing parts of the spectrum, including BLM.
Heck- and you'd probably agree with the thesis of this one- here is a Foreign Affairs article including a recount of the Doppelganger project which cloned entire news sites to introduce fake news in what people believed would be real webistes.
One of the benefits of the IRA when it was around was that it didn't constantly change all of its accounts regularly, allowing for pattern-matching. This has gotten rarer with evolutions in bot-technologies and such, but you can still find examples if you look.
But then you go to this
Which is assigning a motive to me I do not have, and a mischaracterization of many opinions I do have.
To which I and others would say... yes! If / when Russian troll accounts are linked to these such things, they can absolutely be called supported by Russian trolls! It's Russian trolls if they're involved in trying to arrange Black Lives Matter protests. If Russia trolls are linked to supporting a cause it is considered Russian trolling. There is no claim to the Russsian troll style that there is any allegiance to a specific cause.
....but this is where I feel bad for you, because this is the opposite of positions already provided to you in this overall thread. The people claiming Russian trolls only support one side are not the people you are actually arguing against, shoving other peoples arguments into theirs is dishonest.
As such, I'm going to skip to this-
And be frank: it doesn't matter to the argument you responded to if Russian stroll accounts start or amplify these stories.
There are cases of Russian trolls starting stories. There are cases of Russian trolls amplifying stories. Neither is meaningfully different when it comes to whether it is a bit of an effort to manufacture a narrative. Signal boosting and initiation are both ways to try and manipulate narratives.
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