Republicans were, though, more likely to believe Russian disinformation claims than their Democratic counterparts, with 57.6% falling for at least one Russian disinformation claim, compared with just 17.9% of Democrats and 29.5% of people who didn’t identify with one particular party.
Cool story… But what about american disinformation? I guess it doesn’t exist… jfc.
Their methodology involves asking people a bunch of questions and then if they don’t get 100% correct they’re counted as believing misinformation. Putting aside the unreliability of online polls, that’s a pretty misleading way of framing it, if you ask me.
If you asked people 10 questions about just about anything, you’d probably find a substantial number of people who don’t get every one right. In fact, they did do this under the heading, “Disinformation Nation: Americans Widely Believe False Claims on a Range of Topics.” That’s probably why they found that, “Respondents identifying as Democrats were about as likely (82 percent) to believe at least one of the 10 false claims as those identifying as Republicans (81 percent).”
Many of the people responding to the poll may not have ever encountered the claims they were asked about. If you are first encountering a claim in that context, you pretty much just have to guess whether you think it’s true based on vibes. And you can easily set up misleading vibes, like, “Conservative initiative Project 2025 proposes cutting or eliminating Social Security” which is false because it’s not explicitly stated, but it does explicitly state a whole bunch of other horrible shit, so like, if you get got by that one it doesn’t really show that you believe in an inaccurate picture of the world, just that you got tripped up by details. But that claim dings you for “believing misinformation” just as much as " COVID-19 vaccines killed 15 million people worldwide."
So like it doesn’t really tell us very much about how far reaching disinformation really is, the results are more of a reflection of their methodology.
[Reposted from the last time this study was posted]
Many of the people responding to the poll may not have ever encountered the claims they were asked about.
However, they do offer a “not sure” option, which can be taken if a person knows they’re not informed.
The headline should read “Republicans believe misinformation to an alarming degree”?
Sure the numbers aren’t great for independents and Democrats… but it isn’t >50% bad, which clearly points to Republican ideology as brain worms.
Exactly. That’s why I highlighted that portion.
~60% vs ~20% is a staggering difference. This really shows the much bigger problem of how conservatives gain power. They use the large masses of unintelligent, manipulative gullible people to get votes, and enrich themselves.
This is not freedom. This is not democracy. It’s psychopaths, controlling and keeping people stupid, so they can stay in power and wealth.
Our system is so fucked.
Anyone who has ever talked to a Republican knows this. Whenever you point out half the bullshit coming out of their mouth has been debunked, they just spout some bullshit about the MSM and source being “biased”. Friend, reality is biased against your 🤡 ass.
The funny thing is the electoral college was created to protect us from this, but it’s kinda the whole reason we’re where we are.
Uh, no. The electoral college was created because the slavers wanted representation for their slaves without giving them the vote.
Edit: Source
I do think that is giving liberals and the left too much credit.
A lot of the infighting from among the left during the past election felt pretty artificial, to be perfectly honest, and most of the “Genocide Joe/Holocaust Harris” types seemed to just evaporate after the election ended. Maybe just because there was nothing really left to say after all was said and done, but I just find it hard to believe much of that discourse was in good faith. I’m surprised to read a number as low as 18%, but almost 1 in 5 still isn’t nothing.
the absolute rage and betrayal felt by a non-trivial number of diverse, dem leaning coalition members was not artificial in the least and needed no outside aggitation to make it one of thousands of dem self-inflicted papercuts that bled the soul out of dem support.
my family has consistently voted against the fascist monster, but the dems have helped hand the country over to them for decades. the republicans made the monster, but the dems failed to bar the door and seal the windows. neo-liberalism (even by the most gentle definition) is imploding globally in a spectacular way.
the dems were always center right, thier plan was to always grift from the shadows of what the gop is doing blatantly, thats why they have the same donors.
The very real push to vote for Trump or not vote at all due to Biden’s botched (to say the least) handling of Palestine was not in good faith, though, and I saw that type of rhetoric everywhere.
it was artificial, early on in the gaza genocide, the protests were taced right back to putin, it was so blatant that a “muslim, claimed they arnt supporting biden anymore”, the only influence muslim has was in michigan, and not the whole voting population.
and then it came out some of the protest were also funded by the likes of seinfelds WIFE.
That and all the bad faith arguments about “the Republicans did something terrible; this is all the Democrats’ fault”.
Sorta, but not to let the Democrats off the hook either, with their uncanny ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
Chuck Schumer and his conspirators can never be forgiven for agreeing to pass the Trump budget that is now funding his agenda.
Schumer’s entire argument that they should play along until Trump’s approval rating hits some arbitrarily low number is infuriating, and reeks of the sort of calculated politicking where the only priority is to do whatever it takes to stay in power, rather than to do the right thing. Hope that bites him and the others who voted with him in the ass.
Sure, but the vast, vast majority of the blame should be on the Republicans and their supporters. There were also a ton of people who kept acting like the Republicans didn’t control the House during 2023-2024.
I agree that Schumer’s political approach and public rationale is awful, but not voting for the budget would’ve given the Trump admin free reign to do worse on top of blaming the Democrats for it and convincing their supporters. A government shutdown would’ve given the executive branch more power to manipulate funding, including to things they can’t touch without legal challenges otherwise. I’d rather people be able to go after them in the courts, even if they’re doing awful stuff that takes longer to reverse.
This is why those senators broke with the party, because a no vote would’ve been performative and made the situation worse. The yes votes are mostly in states where deprogrammable independents are a meaningful part of the electorate for 2026.
A lot of the infighting from among the left during the past election felt pretty artificial, to be perfectly honest, and most of the “Genocide Joe/Holocaust Harris” types seemed to just evaporate after the election ended.
They didn’t go anywhere, I am one of those people, I will happily refer to Joe Biden as “Genocide Joe” for the rest of my life because of what he did in opening the door to the Palestinian Genocide. I also will keep labelling Trump, and Bush and Cheney and the whole lot of them as war criminals and in particular Trump is also even more in support of the Palestinian Genocide than Biden (which isn’t a surprise to leftists that centrists think it is? Stop strawmanning the left).
Shame on you for letting the lazy narrative in your head that feels satisfying to pin on leftists become something you actually believe without evidence.
Hasan Piker making a speech to Pro-Palestinian anti-Genocide protestors from two weeks ago.
Sure, I am sure there are Russian bots exploiting the centrist inability to understand how cataclysmic the Palestinian Genocide is for the U.S. and the world, but the centrist position of y’all just casually asking whether most of the anti-genocide voices during the run-up to the election weren’t genuine is bullshit.
Do you understand how pathetic and divorced from your humanity it makes you look? This isn’t a sports game where you pick teams based on what colors you like or where you are from, this is about being against genocide… of anybody anywhere.
Edit Downvote me and don’t bother responding you coward who can’t face up to the genocide being directly facilitated and endorsed by the U.S.
You seem well reasoned. I would not complain about downvoting though as it looks bad.
Downvoted for the pure fact you whined about people downvoting you.
We are talking about a genocide and you want to focus on tone policing me?
sorry, some of the redditors still kept their attitude while going to lemmy
Edit Downvote me and don’t bother responding you coward who can’t face up to the genocide being directly facilitated and endorsed by the U.S.
I didn’t downvote you, for what that’s worth, so I hope that’s not directed at me. But shame on me regardless I guess.
Im sorry, that is intended for the silent down voters then, my point still stands tho.
Many of the supposed “leaders” are spouting Russian disinfo - Hegseth the other day was crying about the media talking about the “Russian hoax”, meaning, reporting on donvict’s sus ties to Putin and Russia in his first term.
on reddit i pointed out in political subs so many times that alot of the posters were russian trolls positng russian back news to bait people. cant you people see its obvious. around the time of the gaza invasion, i reported a couple people in the pics sub for israeli propaganda, because they were posting the " attacks against palestine" as a way to frame bidenw as the sole cause of the conflict and hes doing nothing, i reminded them that both parties have always supported in great numbers, and its only currently being inflammed because BIBI was worried a new D was going to condemn or stop the financial support to israel.
Yeah, the Russian trolls pretending to be “liberals” and constantly attacking only the Democrats for some weird reason are all over the place. And then there are the people stupid enough to fall for this nonsense, too…I know a few IRL, and man, they are so very tiresome.
Usually they have all kinds of excuses and absurd purity tests that no politician that is actually running would pass, and then they proudly do shit like stay home or throw their vote away on Jill Stein or whatever. They act like they won something by doing this, too.
But when it comes to the trolls and useful idiots, I’ve seen some places that seem to have been overrun with them. The comments on Boing Boing, once upon a time, used to be a pretty fun place. Some years go by and I come back later and try to engage in reasonable conversation and the little clique of self-reinforcing posters/ moderators that took over that place were having none of it. It was all maximalist identity politics and Oppression Olympics to the point of cartoonish levels, and constant ripping on the Democratic Party and “shitlibs”. Any deviation, most especially if you made one of the anointed look bad? Deleted, almost immediately. Didn’t matter how thoughtful.
Anyway, the comment section there seemed to be designed to create reactionaries. Anyone on the fence that happens to wander into some spectacle like that is bound to come away with some impressions about what liberals are like, and it’s not going to look good.
They have since taken their comments behind a paywall, go figure. I hope that little clique is happy with policing any all minute deviations from what they believe is the One True Way to think. I doubt anyone is going to pay for that kind of treatment for long, so… shrug?
those idiots thought by showing pics of people getting injured was a NEW phenomenon under biden, it has been happening for decades, lol. and almost no party got any flak for supporting israeli genocide, they decided to put it on the news to hurt bidens chances, it was purely that.
Well, an alarming number of Americans believe that Trump should be president. And that America is the best country in the world, and that compassion is communism.
This tells more about how gullible Americans are, and not much about the skills of unchecked Russian propaganda.
Not only Americans. This is a global problem…
But it’s amplified in countries with undemocratic election systems, like first past the post. You just need a plurality of morons to fuck it up for everybody else.
True. But even in a state with a good election system the right wing nuts are on the rise.
An alarming amount of Americans still believe civil war disinformation and propaganda. They ain’t got the critical thinking skills to deal with 250 year old shit, they sure as hell can’t think past new shit
What civil war propaganda? Where can I read more about this?
Edit: States rights, ofc. I was thinking there might be something more obscure and specific because I hadn’t heard of most of the falsehoods in the article before.
For example, the confederate supporters say the war wasn’t about slavery, but rather about states rights. Now, you ask, states rights to what? And then they don’t have an answer somehow.
It threw off everybody’s bullshit calibration when the FBI announced in 2020 that the Hunter Biden laptop scandal, which included implications of Joe Biden taking foreign bribe money, was “Russian Disinformation”.
They also ordered (technically only “asked nicely”) Facebook and Twitter to engage in censorship campaigns based on this.
Later, after helping Biden win the election, they admitted that the laptop was real and not a Russian psyop as publicly claimed. Internal text messages revealed even later prove that while the FBI may have thought the laptop was not real at first, they did not believe it was a Russian plant, in other words, they lied.
So stuff like that might be why Republicans tend to believe “Russian Misinformation”.
There was no real scandal here and it was definitely pushed by Russian disinformation.
There was truth to the story though. A laptop was stolen from a private citizen and used as a political talking point. Also, Hunter greatly benefited from his father’s position.
I’m gonna need a source for those claims.
Russia
^ Found the “twitter files” fan. lol
Americans Also Believe American Disinformation ‘To Alarming Degree’
Actually Americans tend to easily believe a lot of nonsense … and have a harder time grasping reality.
But in the US the lunatics run the asylum.
“When you’re born into this world, you’re given a ticket to the freak show. If you’re born in America you get a front row seat.”
― George Carlin
it’s like our education & welfare systems have been intentionally defunded for decades to keep us in line with our ruling classes’ desires and make us buy into silly groupthink ideas like american exceptionalism; but, of course, that’s the not true since that can only happen in oligarchies like russia or china and, also, could never happen to us, the greatest country that the world has ever seen. /s
And are history as a nation is very white-washed, and even still it makes places like Florida have hurt feelings enough that they create laws to remove even the tiny bits of truth we actually still taught. You can’t talk about black history, that is reverse discrimination! You can’t talk about treating everyone fairly, that’s the work of Satan’s DEI program!
Using the rules/laws to further their racist/fascist views by talking in code and carefully crafted arguments that sounds “fair” to people with no critical thinking.
It’s not so much that education has suddenly been defunded (for white people maybe). It’s more that “education” has always been about privilege and indoctrination. It has always been directly opposed to “critical thinking”.
While true, American stupidity is not unique. Every nation has shown that they have tons of idiots willing to believe whatever the Internet tells them
Speaking of disinformation, here’s the underlying article: https://www.newsguardrealitycheck.com/p/one-third-of-americans-believe-russian-disinformation-yougov-survey-finds. In case you want to skip Forbes.
