It’s a well known phenomenon that if you give people a small, concrete thing that they have agency over, i.e. recycling their cans, even though that thing is next to useless in terms of systemic change, they will be less likely to support broad based, effective system legislation.
The bad actors pretend to be “environmental” in order to muddy the waters, sap support for actual change, and paint the entirety of the movement as ridiculous by funding outspoken lunatics.
It’s straight out of Putin’s playbook. [0]
Putin funds “anti-Putin” organizations, but only ones that are absurd and implausibly idealistic. Those likely to offend other Russians.
Ya, frankly, the effectiveness of propaganda scares me, deeply. How do I know what I know, with any certainty, if I'm so easily manipulated.
The exploitation of our cognitive "loopholes" is the best case against Freedom Speeches™. Paraphrasing: We're not rationale, so countering falsehoods with truthiness simply cannot work.
The only legal mitigation I can think of is authenticate (optionally) speech. Just like the authenticity facets of the replication crisis. Meaning show your data, cite your sources, sign your works. And then maybe over time our culture learns to discount anything unsourced and unsigned.
I'm shocked, shocked by your suggestion that bad actors would conduct disinformation campaigns to discredit and neutralize inconvenient truths.