I’ve been watching situations unfold in Ukraine and Venezuela lately with some interest from an anarchist perspective and I’ve been trying to get an idea of what is truly going on, but I find out that lately it’s been almost impossible to get a perspective of what is going on that is not extremely biased towards US-interests.
As the internet and social media has started significantly eroding established news sources for information dissemination, so has propaganda and misinformation tactics evolved to take better advantage of these new media, and the results are painfully obvious in places like reddit, where popular subreddits like /r/worldnews are dominated by specific perspectives.
Fortunately sources like /r/anarchism or individual blogs I follow are impervious to this blatant manipulation so I am able to discover articles like the following:
Now, I’m not saying that the authors of those pieces might not have their own biases, but it seems to me that they provide a more complete view of the situation rather than simply supporting one specific perspective.
At the moment I believe crowd-sourced information is severely compromised. People who want to get an idea of what is going on are better served following trusted sources explicitly, or using smaller and more focused social media (e.g. /r/anarchism or indymedia) which cannot as easily be dominated by special interests and astroturfers, since the nature of their subscribers defeats positive feedback on misinformation.
