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Why shouldn't the bar be that low for the way flailingace is using it?
Even selectively signal-boosting true-but-non-representative things can have an effect of misleading an audience. This very thread is based on someone taking something that has happened (an accusation of pushback against people wanting to help) in a way that generates outrage (FEMA is deliberately witholding help, partisan motivation?) that plausibly wouldn't exist with other potentially relevant context (the government has an interest in managing airspace, which appears to be the form of pushback being alluded to).
Nothing in it is false, but it's not information structured for building objective understanding either. It is an oppositional / antagonist information presentation, and one that- if done deliberately- can be information to promote discord rather than discourse.
flailingace's position, as I understand it, isn't that it's disinformation on the basis of truth / not truth, or 'their own' narrative, but the intended result of why the information is being presented.
Okay, I don't even disagree with you, but how does this relate to flailaingace's position?
This is a counter-argument of relative effectiveness, of relative harm done, but flailingace wasn't making an argument of relative harm / culpability / etc. Flailingace is making a point that russia will attempt to promote discord, to a person who has dismissed russian trolls as a reasonable hypothesis, to another post that also does not rest on relative effectiveness.
Remember that this branch of the conversation itself started over someone saying they felt there was a bit of an effort to manufacture an issue. Not that the issue was entirely manufactured, or that the dominant cause or concerns were manufactured.
You can personally set the bar wherever you want. But in that case, I'm struggling to understand why people say this like it's some kind of surprise. What am I supposed to be made to think or feel upon hearing that?
Well put it this way then. Anyone who would want to hold Russia or anyone else for that matter guilty of disinformation and not the media complex in the west which IMO is far worse by comparison, has a very hard sell to convince me of some kind of moral indictment, because anyone who wouldn't also hang the whole of CNN, Fox, MSNBC, CBS and everyone else from lampposts outside their headquarters for also being guilty of disinformation, is just being a partisan hack.
And RussiaToday can also make similar claims in some of their reports as well as far as exposing disinformation. So what? Are people calling for them to be restored to YouTube now on grounds of their occasional fairness?
Meaning what? If they're doing it for a good cause or something they agree with then its okay then?
That yourself and others should think on what you are feeling, and why, before you act upon what you are feeling, in case someone is trying to deceptively manipulate your feelings to cause you to act in their interests rather than yours.
That the lesson may be unnecessary to you personally does not mean the lesson is not needed for other people. Some people may not recognize that they are being targetted for manipulation. Others may dismiss the existence of relevant actors to focus on other grievances.
Noted, but where do you get the belief that flailingace or myself wouldn't agree that those aren't also disinformation actors?
Granted, I don't believe in hanging disinformation actors in general, so I suppose I fail that purity test if that's the standard you want to make.
So you should consider what, how, and why RT chooses to cover what it covering in the way it does before taking what it says as substantially true, the same as you should have bounded skepticism of any source...
...but also that you should recognize that RT, and countless actors like it, will continue to try and execute their motives in any given case, regardless of how much traction they have in general...
...so that if you start getting a suspicion that your intake of social media on something feels like it's being manipulated to try and encourage an impression, you're not being crazy, you are having a reasonable grounds of wanting to think more critically before you decide how to feel.
And, by extension, so are other people.
Yes, and why would you think there aren't any? The topic has died away from public awareness with time and distance, but there were and still are people who would agree that banning RT from youtube was bad on various grounds.
One of the general reasons for maximal free speech stances is that even malefactors can bring up good points and challenge/compel better actors to clean themselves up in ways they wouldn't if the 'better' people could exclude them from the public stage, and that it's easier to hone the counter-arguments / strengthen your own when you can openly engage them.
Even completely unfair media actors have their defenders on why they should be allowed to have a public position. For example, North Korea is one of the extreme examples of 'bad media actor,' but it's youtube presence was (and, to a lesser degree, still is) a resource for researchers trying to understand.
And this doesn't even touch on grounds of national interest, ideology, or various forms of strategy. Russia took a decent black eye in the early Ukraine War when several hosts who had previously been taking the party line that the warnings of invasion were an American russophobic hoax publicly quit / were fired in objection. It was a self-harm / 'even their own propagandists couldn't support it' that could not have discredited the pro-Russian factions in various western governments had RT been restricted from that sort of public awareness earlier.
Less 'okay' and more of 'categorical difference in actor intent.'
Let's stick to 'just' true things, as in someone who never tells a direct falsehood.
If someone says true things because they value truth as an abstract concept in and of itself, we call them a truth-seeker and can recognize their errors may be out of ignorance but not deliberate distortion of context.
If someone says true things because they dislike deception even when it would benefit them, we call them honest, and can take them at their word. Their word may be limited, and unllike the truth seeker they may not be interested in actively establishing context and understanding, but they can be trusted within the bounds of that.
If someone would say true things but only selectively and with the intent to ruin others relationships, we would call them a manipulator, and recognize that they deserve extra scrutiny. Because their intent is what determines what they say and why, it behooves an audience to consider if there is additional context, missing information, or other truths that simply aren't being provided before believing what the manipulator tries to lead us to feel.
And this is before outright lies and other forms of dishonesty are included. A truth-seeker may have a motivated interest in what they focus on and find, an honest person may selectively try to avoid being questioned in certain ways to let a misunderstanding continue, but a manipulator who doesn't limit themselves to just truths can do even more to meet their interest.
Intent matters, and as such recognizing who's intent for what is a relevant piece of meta-context. 'Disinformation' may be an abused term, but 'Russian disinformation' is as good enough term as any other for characterizing a system intent by a coherent actor for information that is ambivalent about truth/accuracy but which is systemically proferred to try and shape public discourse in ways hoped to be systemically detrimental to the national target. This is a categorically different intent of, say, 'Partisan disinformation'- which wants what is bad for the opposition but good for the party- or 'ideological disinformation'- which wants what is good for cause and willing to tear down the obstacles.
You may feel the impact is grossly overestimated- and not only would I agree, but there was a very recent article last week pointing out a Russian incentive to overestimate their own impact which has interesting implications for if western leaders are accurately reflecting western intelligence accurately reporting on Russian self-assessments that are themselves incorrect for reasons of self-interested motivated reasoning- but again, what you are responding to isn't about 'relative' impact.
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