Flatworm7591

President Donald Trump is wasting no time in carrying out his goal of throttling the free press. Over the first two weeks of Trump’s presidency, his appointees have wielded federal regulatory authority to punish outlets the president dislikes — and American media moguls are responding with submission.

Trump has turned standard conservative attacks on journalists into one of the hallmarks of his political agenda.

He takes as his model Hungary’s autocrat Viktor Orban, who has “effectively dismantled the news media in his country” as “a central pillar of Orban’s broader project to remake his country as an ‘illiberal democracy,’” as New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger noted in an extraordinary warning last year.

During his first term in office, Trump repeatedly tried to leverage state power against his despised “fake news,” and together with his Project 2025 allies has developed a playbook to attack, defund, and delegitimize news outlets in his second.

Major media companies began signaling before Trump took office that they were willing to play ball with his administration in order to preserve their business interests. But since Inauguration Day, as Trump’s appointees have begun showing their intentions, executives at several news outlets have gone into full retreat.

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Ahead of the German federal elections later this month, pro-Kremlin outlets employ the usual manipulative narratives including tropes like ‘Germany is facing economic and social ruin’, ‘Germans are desperate for change’ and ‘only parties that promise such change will do well’.

The messaging is, as always, simple. Built around elements which would resonate with some people, but embellished with falsities and based on the same few key narratives the Kremlin has peddled for years: Elites vs People, Lost Sovereignty, Threatened Values, Imminent Collapse.

Incidentally, the Kremlin’s information manipulation operation sought to employ much of the same playbook ahead of the European elections in June 2024.

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As undersea infrastructure in the Baltic gets cut, the Kremlin’s disinformation machine churns out cut-and-paste denials and deflections.

Several incidents over the last few years have highlighted the EU’s exposure to hybrid attacks against its critical infrastructure. What often looks like sabotage and disruption has sparked growing concern for the EU. And to muddy the waters even further, the Kremlin’s disinformation quickly follows hot on the heels of these incidents.

From the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 by Russian forces in July 2014 to the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines in September 2022 the Kremlin’s disinformation playbook relies on a mix of denial, deflection, and fabrication to obscure the truth.

Moscow most recently exhibited its manipulation playbook when two critical fibre-optic cables in the Baltic Sea were cut last November. A similar incident occurred late in December 2024, when a submarine power cable connecting Estonia and Finland suffered a failure.

As investigations into the two episodes proceed, Russian disinformation actors have seized the opportunity to spin the incidents to suit their broader external and internal agenda.

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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/36828107

ID: WookieeMark @EvilGenXer posted:

"OK so look, Capitalism is right wing.

Period.

If you are pro-capitalism, you are Right Wing.

There is no pro-capitalist Left. That's a polite fiction in the US that no one can afford any longer as the ecosystem is actually collapsing around us."

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