How KGB disinformation campaigns work - still - only faster now with the internet/social media

[CousinIT]

The damn video isn't embeddable here but you can watch at the link.

NOW with the internet and digital communications and social media, IMAGINE how much more damage The Devil's (Trumps) Russian friends have done.

https://www.nytimes.com/video/opinion/100000006210828/russia-disinformation-fake-news.html

We reveal how one of the biggest fake news stories ever concocted — the 1984 AIDS-is-a-biological-weapon hoax — went viral in the pre-Internet era. Meet the KGB cons who invented it, and the “truth squad” that quashed it. For a bit.

[Igel]

1. Back in the '70s I was learning Russian.

Not out of any love for the USSR's political system, but because I'd read that the WWII war effort was hobbled by a lack of people competent in German and Japanese who could pass background checks, partly out of an animus against German following WWI and partly out of simple lack of study of Japanese. So Russian seemed like a language to study if I was going to study a language.

By '79 I was hearing Soviet propaganda from Izvestiya and Pravda. But also at the kitchen table from my mother, who had joined a leftist political party in the US. I'd read something in March po-russki, and in April I'd hear the same rot spewed across the dinner table from my mother, culled from the rag she read as "more accurate than the US news."

Disinformation is old. Those suitably disinformed are always gnostically adamant in the superiority of their knowledge so-called.