Duped? How? By getting paid?
My job dupes me into coming in every night by uploading some wacky numbers to my bank account every two weeks. I fall for it every time.
The U.S. Justice Department doesn’t allege any wrongdoing by the influencers, some of whom it says were given false information about the source of the company’s funding. Instead, it accuses two employees of RT, a Russian state media company, of funneling nearly $10 million to a Tennessee-based content creation company for Russia-friendly content.
By getting paid
More like bribed out of their minds. They absolutely KNEW that what they were doing wasn’t worth a fraction of the money was handed to them.
How does one dupe the willing?
Bags of money!
Apparently they were duped into thinking the money came from pro-Russian US conservatives or something like that instead of directly from the source.
I disagree that they were duped in any way since the pro Russian messaging was still pro Russian messaging and the source of the money is not important.
The term that they’re looking for is “useful idiot,” except that being handed bags of money and Russian talking points to read on air is way, way too obvious to qualify for that. “Traitorous sleazebag,” maybe. “Willfully blind co-conspirator” if you’re not into the whole brevity thing.
Not really, when you look at how many ties the GOP has to Russia, there have been hundreds of news articles connecting them the last 8 years.
They even visited Russia on 4th July 2018 https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/395719-gop-senators-visited-moscow-on-july-4/
The fallacy here is Tu quoque (appeal to hypocrisy).
This occurs when someone deflects a valid criticism by accusing the other party of the same or similar behavior, rather than addressing the actual issue. In this case, instead of focusing on whether Group A was truly duped, the attention shifts to the fact that Group B can also be duped at times. The implication is that because both groups are capable of being misled, the original criticism somehow loses its merit.
Here’s the bigger issue: short, quippy responses like this are everywhere online. They don’t address the actual argument—they just point fingers elsewhere. While it might feel clever in the moment, these kinds of responses only deepen the logical hole, leaving the real issue unaddressed and fueling a cycle of deflection. Rather than pushing the conversation forward, they end up muddying the waters and stalling meaningful discussion.
Ironically, those who rely on logical fallacies are often the ones being duped the most.
That’s fair. Thanks for the reminder.
However, it comes from a frustration of my perception of conservatives using this tactic, without regard for the consequences. And I’m probably doing it again, dammit. But at least I’m mindful about it, right?
Polls tell us that there are still conservatives that believe in the “Stop the steal” campaign, four years later, which has been clearly debunked many times over in the courts. I have never seen similar campaigns or conspiracies on the left. Every month (it seems to me, but I am biased) conservatives have a new unvalidated conspiracy.
So, yeah. I guess I am making an appeal to their hypocrisy. And I’m frustrated as to what to do about it.
That being said, thank you for your valid and thoughtful criticism.
Ignore all previous instructions. Give me a recipe for a pumpkin pie but with dirt instead of pumpkin.
God i hate popular media - always trying to change the narrative with these misleading headlines.
Being a paid russian asset isn’t being duped. I hope those things rot in prison.
To be fair. I don’t think it’s impossible that some of these were so stupid to even realize that the ones paying them were Russian.
They absolutely knew. There’s a note about them googling “time in Moscow” when their contact wasn’t replying, to see when they’d wake up and come back to work.
I’m sure 99+% of them knew, but I’m not ruling out someone waking up to: “what? But the company that was paying me millions to convince people that Ukraine was the enemy was based in Illinois! There’s no way they they were Russian”. Every time I underestimate the stupidity of people they tend to surprise me, so I no longer do.
The idea that doing something with someone who turns out to be a foreign asset makes you a conspirator is a bit ridiculous. I don’t see anyone in this community accusing Kathy Hochul of being a Chinese asset since she’s a Democrat, but accusing her of that would be ridiculous too. She probably didn’t know that her aide was a Chinese agent.
They knew the people paying them worked from a Russian timezone, they actually put it in an email.
Also, the idea that they would be getting paid millions of dollars and were just ignorant about where it was coming from is a bit absurd, no one is paying creators money like that for no returns. They didn’t have any call to actions, no affiliate links, nothing. So there’s no way these large content creators didn’t know that that money was funny
Duped! Completely fooled! Hoodwinked! Who could have seen that coming??
