Dougan is a former deputy sheriff from Florida who gained political asylum in Moscow in 2016, and is allegedly a disinformation purveyor supported by the Kremlin. His phony media outlets have been cited in news articles or social media posts thousands of times, and both the US Treasury and Washington Postallege connections between Dougan, the Moscow-based Center for Geopolitical Expertise (CGE), and the Main Directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation (GRU).

Florida man.

Fascinating stuff.

As a thought experiment it would be interesting to send this info through time to the US leadership in the 70s or 80s (let alone 50s). I wonder what they would think about the current direction of their country.

That being said there is a silver lining to all of this. For the rest of us (who support humanism, believe in democracy, believe in a just, fair and compassionate society) this is a good signal that the American model (in it’s current form on a medium/long term basis) is coming to a dead end from a political, social (and even economic) perspective.

This sort of degenerate behaviour (supporting your direct adversary and the spread of fake news under the auspices of “freedom of speech” or “economic freedom [for oligarchs that enable fake news]” will have a caustic effect on American society. One would have to be a complete idiot to think that America (or your own country) is somehow immune to the realities of human societies.

I have always supported the US in a pragmatic manner, but it is time to admit that American society lacks the capability to implement meaningful political and criminal/judicial reform to address the challenges outlined by the article.

I pray to god (and I am an atheist) that I am wrong, US becoming an authoritarian/nihilist mafia state is not good for global democracy. But that doesn’t mean one should engage in delusions about the capability American society to address it’s current challenges. The country is simply too well off and American society (including sane Americans) is too risk averse to make scary, difficult choices to protect their own freedoms.

P.S. I am not American, but I’ve lived there, travelled extensively and I have very good American friends (both far right leaning and centre right).

" the pro-Putin posters known as CopyCop, aka Storm-1516, use self-hosted, uncensored LLMs based on Meta’s Llama 3 open-source models to generate at least some of these fictional news stories" - the Article

So what? This quote is written in a way that makes it seem like that is the problem and the solution is that we need censored LLM’s hosted by massive corps (who definitely have our best interest at heart) using closed-source models and that’s how we end up with Real News™

The issue is that we’d surrounded by morons who never learned critical thinking. To be fair, we all have our own blind spots. How about instead of trying to top-down legislate truth, we focus on teaching research skills, vetting processes, and learn to better identify and label misinformation and common misinformation sources.

Maybe in 2025 all news articles should be voluntarily citing public and detailed source material so that people can better substantiate what is real?

The enemy of my enemy is not my friend.

Drop a Switchblade on that Dougan guy. Problem solved, problem staying solved.