war, propaganda, long
Sadly, it looks like russian propaganda achieves its goal even among seemingly nice people on fedi.
Mind you, the goal of russian propaganda is not to make russia look good.
Instead, the major goal is to muddy waters enough so that people will think even of the simplest most obvious things that they are so complicated that we'll never know the truth (even if we know it already). As happened with MH-17 for example, where russian propaganda spun up a dozen of different contradicting conspiracy theories, not to make people over the world believe one of them, but to make them feel like they'll never learn which of the theories (including what actually happened: which is that it was shot down by a russian missile) is true.
And another goal is to make people focus on deficiencies of russian adversaries, to publish as many lies (some of them even with the grain of truth) dehumanizing their adversaries, painting them as nazis. Because then it does not matter that russia itself is a copycat of nazi germany. Then it's not a russian aggression against a peaceful country; then it's two nazis fighting, while ordinary people suffer. So you have to be above the fight, or apart from it, and not take sides, and either try to draw far-reaching conclusions about russian adversaries indeed being nazis even from the tiniest things completely distorted by russian propaganda, or just avoid thinking of this war altogether.
Ultimately, some people will just say "we'll never know the truth" or "we'll never know who is right and who is wrong", or "they both are wrong".
While some others will boost bullshit invented by propaganda, like "these soldiers are instead nazis, look, in this post they call muslims from Chechnya orcs because of their external appearance" (ukrainians call all russian invaders orcs because of their actions, and in that post some soldiers just happened to mention thugs sent by Kadyrov, and of course russian propaganda noticed and made a big deal of this) or "eurovision supports nazis because look, these performers from ukraine did a nazi salute" (because they waved at a crowd but of course russian propaganda noticed that from a certain shooting angle it may look somewhat similar to a nazi salute and made a big deal of this and nobody cares anymore that there were other shooting angles as well), or "because look, these performers declared their support for azov nazi militia" (they said "save azovstal" and azovstal is the name of a place where a lot of civilian people who fled russian shelling of mariupol are being further shelled by russia for the past two months, and "azov militia" is not even a thing since like 2015, but of course russian propaganda cut off the last part of the word and made a big deal of it).
"These are just two nazis fighting each other, I do not support either side, I feel for the ordinary people who suffer but in the same breath criticize these very same ordinary people when they dare to express support for one of the sides and criticize those who platformed them" is a very convenient position. And extremely convenient for russia, because it helps to reproduce itself.
war, propaganda, long
@IngaLovinde I think that an ethical thing to do is to list these seemingly nice people.
Mastodon server of https://doma.dev.