Belta (the state news agency) was using YouTube for propaganda for almost a year since the protests in 2020 in Belarus. Videos of "confessions" by beaten protestors were very common. I'm not sure how much the government spends on ads but you can hardly watch anything on YouTube without stumbling into a propaganda video.
People aren't outraged at a minimum wage worker though, they are outraged at a billion dollar corporation that insists on making those minimum wage workers the only official contact point.
The ad shows the journalist Roman Protasevich "confessing" that he is being treated well and he has no complaints. However, he looks beaten and scared.
They are also showing parts of the video, outside of the ad, where he "confesses" to organizing mass riots[1]. I'm guessing that's the bit he was beaten into submission for.
Google monetising tortured people, yet another reason why I find them to be a truly evil company and why the “I work in ads at google and I’m not a bad person” people are deluded, in my opinion.
I believe Google is just an ad business unexpectely found itself to be a media company figuring what standards to adhere. IMO their try to be unbiased is a bit awkward.
That's no excuse. If they weren't chasing giant growth, then they could have dealt with the issues as they arose, but instead they're largely turning a blind eye. I've seen so many advertisements served by them that were downright trash (as I've said before in other HN threads... I've seen adverts for: outright scams, malware, gambling, mobile games with extremely exploitative monetisation, porn, incest porn games) and they are tirelessly working to take away any privacy I might have to keep showing me this shit. Then they claim that at their scale they can't do anything about it (or downright ignore it) yet they're the ones who chose to become that big, in an effort to chase profits.
They chose profits over people, that makes them evil and makes people who work for them, knowingly making it worse in order to collect a higher paycheck, also evil.
It's a bit like being a spy: get caught and you're disavowed.
Now, what I for one would love to see is an extraction of Julian Assange. He's a far more important journalist, who's been held in captivity far longer, and whose mental and physical deterioration as a result of the abuse he's endured has been far greater. He's the Griffith of the journalistic world.
Who wouldn't love hearing that a crack Russian special forces unit dropped into London, hit the Belmarsh hard, incapacitated the prison guards, and sprang Assange? Then vanished from London under cover of night, nursed Assange back to health in Russia, and Assange eventually returns to journalism after a decade of suppression, assuming his mind can be pieced back together, while living as a free refugee, enjoying life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in the former USSR?
I think we're all owed a happy ending at this point. It's been an ugly decade.
While Lukashenko may not, some of those dictators have the effective power to assassinate Western leaders in retaliation. I'm really not sure we want to open that can of worms.
It'll also blow right up in our face in terms of the desired effect. In many cases, I figure doing that would actually boost support for the regime. Many dictators are ruling right now on nationalist sentiment -- "I may be a thug but I am strong and I keep our nation safe from the Americans [or whoever]". Bumping them off will not exactly dispel that myth. If they survive, or if power transfers stably to their second-hand-man or woman, they can now portray themselves and their nation as besieged by hostile foreign powers which will stoop as low as assassination to manipulate the nation's destiny for their ulterior objectives. (The best propaganda, after all, is the truth.)
A more effective solution is to sponsor a resistance movement (whether militant or peaceful) and this has been done so often that it's been systematized in both military and civil terms by various imperial powers, but with (imho) increasingly mediocre outcomes and increasing risk of blowback.
He's Belarusian citizen. Why do you want to rescue him? There are thousands of people in a similar situation all over the world. What about sending a team to UK to rescue Assange?
Citizenship does not imply loyalty to a government. I live in the UK and would fully support anyone rescuing Assange and everyone else in a similar situation, as long as they do it carefully and don't start a war.
I don't get these "confession" videos. Not only is it usually obvious that they are coerced, either by the person's demeanour or obvious signs of violence. They are such a trope of dictatorships it wouldn't even be possible to broadcast the most truthful of any such confession video without looking suspicious. Indeed the very act of humiliating your enemies in public is incompatible with the idea of democracy.
So, what gives? Is it supposed to demonstrate the regime's ability to break you? Do these dictatorships just suck at PR as much as they suck at other aspects of governing?
Some people may be fooled, but more importantly, if you are an ally of the regime it helps you to an alternative story (fairy tale) that you can claim to believe in, and then pressure others to act on the premisse that the fairy tale is true.
Precisely. It becomes a talking point, whether for true believers in support of the current Belarussian regime or its allies, or useful idiots; one of the challenges of an open society is how to move without becoming hopelessly bogged down in bad-faith argumentation: "skeptical environmentalists", pro-tobacco fake science, or the latest push from apparently Russian-based PR agencies to pay influencers for an astroturf campaign against vaccination.
The point is to flex their power while still maintaining a veneer of deniability. Everyone knows what's going on, but their supporters will still use it as a pretext to argue that nothing is wrong.
It's the same reason Israel claims that every building they level in Gaza is a military target.
It's the same reason cops in the US cite noncompliance as a justification for violence.
It's the same reason Republicans allege voter fraud when they make laws to suppress millions of votes.
Authoritarians will never, ever, ever admit "we're dictators" or "this is about power". They will always have an excuse for it.
"It's the same reason cops in the US cite noncompliance as a justification for violence."
That's a misunderstanding, if you act like a buffoon the police are required to treat you as one. There not dictators, just blue collar workers doing there jobs.
It is supposed to induce terror and thus compliance in population.
>incompatible with the idea of democracy
So is Belarusian regime.
>suck at PR
Do concentration camp administration suck at PR? Beating random prisoners to death for no reason is quite efficient way of keeping people under control.
But if Lukashenka gets torn to bloody pieces by the crowd - then yes, he did suck at PR indeed.
The hypocrisy of it is the entire point. It's a demonstration of power. Combined with the rhetoric what it clearly communicates is "play the farce or we'll do this to you too."
They don't suck at PR, they are doing exact what they want and it is extremely effective. You simply are coming into it with the wrong frame, one based on viewing it in the detached and abstract hypothetical, vs the embodied view of someone who is in that society and has everything to lose.
Everyone ultimately knows the Big Lie is false. The PR is showing that the truth does not matter vs the power of the regime.
One of the most chilling examples of this is the footage from when Saddam took absolute power. He paraded out a "confessor" that showed signs of torture in front of the legislature. The confessor started reading a list of names of sitting members of the legislature. As he continued, the entire congress became panic'd. Many of them began screaming hyperbolic pledges of loyalty to Saddam, prostrating in the aisles, etc.
Once the list of names was done, roughly half the legislature was named. Saddam took everyone outside, distributed firearms, and made the half that was not named execute the half that was. He did that to make the survivors complicit in his new dictatorship. The message was: if I go down, you go with me now.
That's what this sort of stuff is about. Not some armchair platonic musing about whether it's hypocritical vs the ideals of democracy.
It seems like the years of power created some kind reality distortion field around him so that he don't see all the futility of his attempts to look good. There is no escape from "dictator vs.freedom fighter" narrative. The dictator is always bad nevermind the net effect of his years in power. The freedom fighter is always good and no insinuations about him beign paid by foreing agencies or turning his country into war or just chaos would change that.
It's also used to break people. It reduces a person's self worth when he confesses to something he didn't do. It makes him feel like he let people down.
Well you can try to reach a human being at Google and see how frustratingly impossible that is.
Even Amazon has live chat any time I need it. Google has no real competitor, so doesn't have to provide customer service at all. It's more fuel for the "break up big tech" meetings that I hope come soon.
Readit News
Dead Comment
I do agree that people get overly outraged when it's likely an honest mistake by a minimum wage worker.
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Close up of his forehead: https://archive.is/bYKJt/0961300a066abefe7e7cea32db259ef162c...
[1]https://archive.is/bYKJt
They chose profits over people, that makes them evil and makes people who work for them, knowingly making it worse in order to collect a higher paycheck, also evil.
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It's a bit like being a spy: get caught and you're disavowed.
Now, what I for one would love to see is an extraction of Julian Assange. He's a far more important journalist, who's been held in captivity far longer, and whose mental and physical deterioration as a result of the abuse he's endured has been far greater. He's the Griffith of the journalistic world.
Who wouldn't love hearing that a crack Russian special forces unit dropped into London, hit the Belmarsh hard, incapacitated the prison guards, and sprang Assange? Then vanished from London under cover of night, nursed Assange back to health in Russia, and Assange eventually returns to journalism after a decade of suppression, assuming his mind can be pieced back together, while living as a free refugee, enjoying life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in the former USSR?
I think we're all owed a happy ending at this point. It's been an ugly decade.
Geopolitics is much more a game of Go than Call of Duty.
It'll also blow right up in our face in terms of the desired effect. In many cases, I figure doing that would actually boost support for the regime. Many dictators are ruling right now on nationalist sentiment -- "I may be a thug but I am strong and I keep our nation safe from the Americans [or whoever]". Bumping them off will not exactly dispel that myth. If they survive, or if power transfers stably to their second-hand-man or woman, they can now portray themselves and their nation as besieged by hostile foreign powers which will stoop as low as assassination to manipulate the nation's destiny for their ulterior objectives. (The best propaganda, after all, is the truth.)
A more effective solution is to sponsor a resistance movement (whether militant or peaceful) and this has been done so often that it's been systematized in both military and civil terms by various imperial powers, but with (imho) increasingly mediocre outcomes and increasing risk of blowback.
It also sends a very strong message to Putin that the US may not want to send
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So, what gives? Is it supposed to demonstrate the regime's ability to break you? Do these dictatorships just suck at PR as much as they suck at other aspects of governing?
It's the same reason Israel claims that every building they level in Gaza is a military target.
It's the same reason cops in the US cite noncompliance as a justification for violence.
It's the same reason Republicans allege voter fraud when they make laws to suppress millions of votes.
Authoritarians will never, ever, ever admit "we're dictators" or "this is about power". They will always have an excuse for it.
Want to cite that counterclaim? Which innocent building was razed?
That's a misunderstanding, if you act like a buffoon the police are required to treat you as one. There not dictators, just blue collar workers doing there jobs.
>incompatible with the idea of democracy
So is Belarusian regime.
>suck at PR
Do concentration camp administration suck at PR? Beating random prisoners to death for no reason is quite efficient way of keeping people under control.
But if Lukashenka gets torn to bloody pieces by the crowd - then yes, he did suck at PR indeed.
They don't suck at PR, they are doing exact what they want and it is extremely effective. You simply are coming into it with the wrong frame, one based on viewing it in the detached and abstract hypothetical, vs the embodied view of someone who is in that society and has everything to lose.
Everyone ultimately knows the Big Lie is false. The PR is showing that the truth does not matter vs the power of the regime.
One of the most chilling examples of this is the footage from when Saddam took absolute power. He paraded out a "confessor" that showed signs of torture in front of the legislature. The confessor started reading a list of names of sitting members of the legislature. As he continued, the entire congress became panic'd. Many of them began screaming hyperbolic pledges of loyalty to Saddam, prostrating in the aisles, etc.
Once the list of names was done, roughly half the legislature was named. Saddam took everyone outside, distributed firearms, and made the half that was not named execute the half that was. He did that to make the survivors complicit in his new dictatorship. The message was: if I go down, you go with me now.
That's what this sort of stuff is about. Not some armchair platonic musing about whether it's hypocritical vs the ideals of democracy.
1984 did it first.
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I wished I was joking.
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FTFY
But it seems like it could be true, too. I'm just wondering how to verify.
Even Amazon has live chat any time I need it. Google has no real competitor, so doesn't have to provide customer service at all. It's more fuel for the "break up big tech" meetings that I hope come soon.