Crisis Actors and "Viral" Lies
I was listening to a podcast about Russian disinformation during the Ukraine invasion, and the story was about a fashion blogger who had "supposedly" been in a maternity hospital when the Russians attacked it. There was the usual discussion of how the photos were staged, the Ukrainians did it to themselves, all those people were "crisis actors" (more later), and that particular blogger had been paid to look like she had been injured, and even that she was paid to dress up as some random second woman. This is not about the RUssian invasion - this is about how so many people just refused to believe that the event happend at all, and in some weird way it was like the blogger herself was one of the strongest piece of evidence that this didn't happen. My suspicion is that the cognitive dissonance comes from a feeling like "this sort of thing doesn't happen to rich people, and she is rich, so obviously it didn't happen". And frankly, if this could h...