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Why is The New York Times so afraid of Zohran Mamdani?
(www.middleeasteye.net)
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this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2025
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Fediverse vs Disinformation
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Pointing out, debunking, and spreading awareness about state- and company-sponsored astroturfing on Lemmy and elsewhere. This includes social media manipulation, propaganda, and disinformation campaigns, among others.
Propaganda and disinformation are a big problem on the internet, and the Fediverse is no exception.
What's the difference between misinformation and disinformation? The inadvertent spread of false information is misinformation. Disinformation is the intentional spread of falsehoods.
By equipping yourself with knowledge of current disinformation campaigns by state actors, corporations and their cheerleaders, you will be better able to identify, report and (hopefully) remove content matching known disinformation campaigns.
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I mentioned Zohran to my aging mother (who lives in a suburb, and cannot vote in NYC elections). She was like, "You didn't vote for him did you? He's a communist"
We decided not to go into details right then, but it's wild what a deep, emotional, response the idea of "communism" evokes. I don't know what she even thinks it is.
You know those experiments Pavlov did with dogs that made them salivate to the sound of a bell (because they associated the sound with food)? Boomers essentially had that but the trigger is the word communism and the response is aversion / disgust.
They didn't have the internet back then so mainstream media could essentially control mainstream thought.
She thinks it's the enemy.
That type of response has nothing to do with politics or even reality, it's just "us vs. them". People attribute everything they think is evil to "them".
(It's not just communism hate. Because anyone who knows what it is, know that he isn't one.)
That reminds me of the woman who declared that she couldn't vote for Barack Obama because he was a Muslim and an atheist.
People were more or less helping each other back in the 50's after the war. The money boys got worried about that and Joseph McCarthy, along with Donald Trump's mentor, Roy Cohn, started a communist witch hunt which eventually got out of hand. The communist stigma remained.