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Comment by Cryptonic | Hacker News Reader

There is a difference between free speech and lying to the masses with carefully constructed fake evidence or based on reputation.

Stuff like Russia Today or troll/disinformation armies and bots at work are not amusing. It has nothing to do with free speech, it's just dangerous for democracy, freedom and our children.

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Moreover, speech rights granted to local individuals, and those same rights granted to foreign government-controlled media, aren't in the same ballpark.

Why are we allowing the mouthpiece of an adversarial authoritarian country to propagandize our population and sow division in our society? We need to put a stop it.

Whenever I read something from Chinese or Russian government spokespeople it always sounds so comically tone deaf. There's no need to censor them.

Not everyone is as critical-thinking as you. I've catched myself many times thinking that someone is right just to change my opinion entirely after hearing counerarguments, but I agree with you that it looks like authoritarian governments are typically not able to employ really creative and critical thinking people as their propagandists.

Whenever I read something from Christian spokespeople it always sounds so comically tone deaf.

But hey I live in a country where 55% of the population are self declared atheists. We all live in a bubble.

Same. There's no need to censor Christians either.

RT is different than one of the cringe individual spokespeople on Twitter. RT are stoking the internal culture wars and there are a lot of people who watch RT in earnest.

Amusement is probably the most defensive psychological posture one can take in the face of propaganda and authoritarian displays of might. It challenges the believability of these messages and the facades required to uphold them.

Without such a challenge, these messages would be taken seriously to some extent, which works to create an illusion of threats where they don’t exist… which is what the propaganda is here to do.

They pretend to amuse us, we pretend to be amused

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_political_jokes

RT could be considered useful to some as you can use it as a noisy barometer for russian sentiment. When you operate at a level where geopolitics are a concern to your activities, such an input could be useful. Elon parroting russian talking points is another matter, but he went a step further and talked to Putin directly.

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