2 upvotes, 2 direct replies (showing 2)
View submission: Just Putin this out there
It's not that deep
Comment by MrIosity at 01/06/2017 at 19:28 UTC*
2 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Spend just one hour dredging around on Cyrillic message and image boards, and you'll quickly realize that the MO of Russian propaganda isn't to prop up specific narratives, but to prop up the propaganda itself, to keep it effective. They do this by **totally saturating** spheres of the internet and media with propaganda, and a lot of it is totally nonsensical, benign, absurd, and meaningless.
It seems absolutely crazy, but that is quite literately their intention. They try to inoculate people with reasonable doubts to condition them for messaging. And this extends well beyond propaganda. The Kremlin has admitting to channeling funds into all sorts of political groups in Russia, from far-right fascist hate groups to anti-Putin human-rights advocacy groups. Superficially, it seems counter-intuitive for the Kremlin to do this, but it promotes cynicism in the public, and delegitimizes political opposition by making them subject to public suspicion. The same is true of internet propaganda, and the most visible example of such are those memes you see everywhere of Putin shirtless, riding bears, or riding missiles. Seems totally nonsensical and absurd that the Kremlin would waste its time producing this crap, but then again, *why would anybody*? The answer is very simple; **to blur the lines between where their propaganda begins and ends**.
This isn't as obvious on the english-sphere internet, because it only bleeds into it sporadically outside of their usual channels (sputnik, RT), but you have to spend some time using the Russian language internet and reading through Russian media aggregates to fully appreciate it. This is the kind of propaganda that Putin critics in Russia constantly bemoan about. When people like Kasparov say that the Russian media is a Kremlin circus, this is what they're talking about.
Comment by freren at 01/06/2017 at 18:27 UTC
1 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Nobody knows