As someone who lives in the EU and has the same kind of relatives, what I find frustrating is how little actual engagement with the Russian narratives there is from official sides. There is presented "evidence" for US influence in Ukraine long before the war, like the Victoria Nuland video, yet there seems to be no attempts at debunking those arguments, short of a catch-all labeling of all of it as disinformation (which, I can testify from personal experience, does absolutely nothing to dissuade people who already believe it).
The Selinskyji/Trump spat felt like an extreme version of this, where Selinskyji essentially argued with the Western/Ukrainian narrative of the war and Trump argued with the Russian narrative.
The strategy of "ignore the Russian narrative and hope not many people will latch on to it" evidently failed, so I think if we want to have a hope of solving this conflict and countering Trump (and maybe get back the parts of the population that follow the narrative), we at least have to engage with it and provide counterarguments.
Twitter community notes are popular and pretty effective at calling out misleading information that has gone viral (organically or inorganically). I think writing off facts and arguments is premature.
Is that sort of stuff actually effective against propaganda though?
I'd assume that by the time a disclaimer is written up, submitted, and accepted according to whatever the criteria is, the original un-disclaimered message has been received and digested by its target audience.
There are a few things working in favor of community notes there
1. Viral tweets have a longer-than-average time window between the time they start to go viral and the time the median viewer sees them, so a community note can get there before the median viewer.
2. Users who interacted with a tweet before it got a community note will get a notification when the community note is added.
3. Community note writers can leave a note on a piece of media. If a tweet with a video gets a community note, and that note is about the video rather than about the tweet, that note will show on all other tweets that show that video.
Source: this excellent interview with the Community Notes team (https://asteriskmag.com/issues/08/the-making-of-community-no...), in the section that starts with "Asterisk: Another thing I wanted to talk about is speed". Really that whole interview is great, highlights how deliberate and thoughtful the Community Notes team was regarding everything about the feature. Which is, I think, why community notes have succeeded where a lot of previous fact-checking attempts have failed.
Plus, the propaganda also strongly paints fact checking as a mere ploy by other_team to try to cheat and win. So even if the community notes get to them, they will chalk it up to "liberals trying to hide the real truth."
Well, in "real politics" terms, the Russian narrative becomes "we stole this fair and square - we conquered this much territory, it has historically been ours, so you should make a treaty giving us this and we're done" whereas the Ukraine's narrative is basically "Russia holding that territory is unjust and fundamentally violates the democratic aspirations of the people there, so we need X many years of war and X thousand dead to regain that land".
Which is to say Ukrainian narrative is hard to embrace unless someone is already energized by a need for justice to nations, which might not be certain segment of America.
As someone who lives in the EU and has the same kind of relatives, what I find frustrating is how little actual engagement with the Russian narratives there is from official sides. There is presented "evidence" for US influence in Ukraine long before the war, like the Victoria Nuland video, yet there seems to be no attempts at debunking those arguments, short of a catch-all labeling of all of it as disinformation (which, I can testify from personal experience, does absolutely nothing to dissuade people who already believe it).
The Selinskyji/Trump spat felt like an extreme version of this, where Selinskyji essentially argued with the Western/Ukrainian narrative of the war and Trump argued with the Russian narrative.
The strategy of "ignore the Russian narrative and hope not many people will latch on to it" evidently failed, so I think if we want to have a hope of solving this conflict and countering Trump (and maybe get back the parts of the population that follow the narrative), we at least have to engage with it and provide counterarguments.