• kolmaskommentoija@sopuli.xyz
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    4 days ago

    Alright, I do not think I can get any better responses to deconstruct as an example, so I will do it to this exhange.

    • First attempt is pretty direct insulting, in attempt to get me angry. This is a good way to bait people into writing long explanations, on why what they said is wrong, so they can exhaust you more quickly, and start spouting more of their propaganda in return, which you are more inclined to answer enraged. Making you hurl insults at them also makes you easily look like a jerk too, to someone else reading, which might make them less likely to put any weight to what you say.
      Also notice the immediate derailing, with the tactics straight from my list, which I pointed out in the answer.
    • As I called out the attempt instead of taking the bait, and gave them a little info about my thoughts, they tried to grab onto it, and find another thing to make me write angry rant. In this case they made the mistake of assuming I was from the USA, and tried to use the democrats-support-genocide fight, since it easily causes fighting in lemmy. Sometimes they will dig through your comment history, in attempt to find stuff to use against you.
    • I offered them a bit more information - my nationality, in this case - so they immediately grabbed onto it, and went to dig something, they could use to both again to piss me off, and make me/my home country seem bad, to make what I say sound less appealing.
      Because they used such a weak thing (you can read it in that article even: the swastika-symbol was used by the Finnish air force, before nazis started to use it), it makes me believe they are just either someone trolling, or one of the useful idiots. Someone from Russia would known better examples to use, like accusing me of “russophobia”, or talking about the side who won our civil war being fasciscts. They could also have accused my country for supporting Israel, because our right wing government is making weapons deals with them, which is a pretty low hanging fruit - which they seem to not have known.
      Trying to draw a link between you and nazis is a common one to use. In some other country’s case they might have tried to use the European colonizing, or some military operations your country has going on. Finland is a bit more difficult on that part, since we only benefitted from the colonizing indirectly, and we are not known to meddle around that much.

    The point of all of this is: do not take the bait. Do not engage, and if you do, do not give them things to use, just point out the propaganda. I am going against that here, since I had a purpose in mind, so this was a bit of a special case. Usually I would have just blocked them.

    Now, if anyone does not trust what I say, and thinks I am a propagandist too - that is probably just a good thing, you should likely not trust internet strangers. Go read from multiple sources, like the ones linked up there, and form your own opinions. If you encounter someone filling the criteria I wrote, do not believe what is being said without doing the same, check several sources on the subject. Media literacy is extremely important right now, but that is a different subject, I will not tackle more than that here.

      • kolmaskommentoija@sopuli.xyz
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        3 days ago

        Thank you for your help! Explaining how this works, is easier with a practical example. Interacting with me like this, also helps to boost the visibility, allowing more people to potentially see this, and learn how to avoid falling for the propaganda, and wasting their time with it.