I've always wondered why should foreign governments be allowed to fund or start news companies inside another country (it's an entirely different thing if an established foreign news company state or privately owned tries to enter the news market in said country)? It just doesn't to me seem to have many free speech benefits and instead allows for mudding the waters of bad faith abuse of free speech.
The whole point of all of this investigation is the fact it officially wasnt foreign government. They would have to register (FARA) and publicity acknowledge the connection, instead money was pumped thru Turkish shell companies with transfers coming in with funny titles like "payment for iphone shipment".
There is no such thing as a news media outlet. It's all speech. Replace "news companies" with novelists and decide if you still agree with your statement.
Unfortunately, we don't have a really good definition of "news company". These idiots were just bloggers. They happened to have a corporation behind them, but they could just as easily be individual idiots.
We used to have some restrictions on broadcast media like radio and TV, on the grounds that they used limited public airwaves.
But now any jackass can have a blog. And if you try to restrict every blogger, you catch up an awful lot of people.
We do have sanctions against Russia, and they in particular shouldn't have been allowed to do this. But evading sanctions isn't too hard. That's how these idiots are pretending that they didn't know that the money was coming from Russia.
What I really want to happen is for Americans to stop being so gullible about the really obvious propaganda. This stuff isn't subtle. The lies are blatant. Maybe we'd have a real difficulties if they were at least trying to be clever about it, but I honestly don't know how to fix the problem of a near-majority of people buying just-plain-horsepuckey.
Oh sure I'm very aware of the fact that the destruction of any form of gatekeeping is causing this appear a lot more than what it did in the past.
I suppose it's frustrating knowing that we got really outdated tools to handle this and the only current alternative (so far) is flat-out censorship/controlling the web.
>What I really want to happen is for Americans to stop being so gullible about the really obvious propaganda. This stuff isn't subtle. The lies are blatant. Maybe we'd have a real difficulties if they were at least trying to be clever about it, but I honestly don't know how to fix the problem of a near-majority of people buying just-plain-horsepuckey.
I think this is something that is true in Europe too, you can see this stark difference in how the eastern European block (Poland, Baltic countries, etc.) has for years been ahead of the game when it comes to Russian propaganda, and those that haven't have either historical ties to it (Slovakia) or is just cynical (Hungary).
Compare this to Western countries and everyone still believes in holding hands and singing kumbaya like it's the 90s and the USSR just fell.
I mean your statement has 0 actual arguments for why I "align" with everyone in "North Korean".
The water is not meant to be or remain muddy, as that would mean no one can use it, it's meant to accessible to everybody but everyone has to agree on some basic rules to NOT muddy it.
As muddying the water would imply that it's either unusable due to impracticality or because you're uncertain if you can bath in it, so if anything your phrase align more with "North Korean".
And in this case it's not even a matter of speech but of funding.
