The same disinformation campaigns that epitomize the divisions in US society – beliefs in voter fraud, vaccine conspiracies, and racist conspiracies about migrants, George Soros and Black Lives Matter, to name a few – are a source of strength for autocracies like Russia, where the lack of a consensus on which groups and views are real and which are manufactured by the state strengthens the hand of Putin and his clutch of oligarchs.
In a new Harvard Berkman Center paper, Common-Knowledge Attacks on Democracy, political scientist Henry Farrell (previously and security expert Bruce Schneier (previously) team up to explore this subject by using information security techniques, and come to a very plausible-seeming explanation and a set of policy recommendations to address the issue.
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Please take your time over this. The author is someone I trust to say it as it is.
Trust can, of course, be misplaced but over time I have not found this to be true of Cory Doctorow.
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