Czech analyst compares disinformation purveyors to the untrustworthy sellers of overpriced cookware
“Whenever there is a crisis, a new crisis, something unfamiliar, what is it that people so frequently fear? They fear the unknown, they fear what they have never experienced,” Roman Máca of the Institute for Politics and Society in the Czech Republic said recently in an interview for ROMEA TV.
“That creates room for these different disinformers to hook them through that fear,” the analyst said. He studies disinformation because he hates “rip-off artists”, like the door-to-door sellers of overpriced cookware who used to be so ubiquitous.
Máca said he believes the behavior of disinformers runs exactly along the same lines as that of such salespeople. “They manage to feed disinformation to their group because the people in that group will never comprehend that what is happening now is the consequence of a logical sequence of events,” he explained.
“When those who are at the level of professional science, who have studied for 20 years, make a claim about what is happening, these people just see them as elites who are detached from reality. Because so many consumers of disinformation believe conspiracy theories, they believe those scientists are being paid to say what they say by ‘big pharma’, the Illuminati, Soros, Bill Gates and so on,” the analyst said of the thought process among those who follow disinformers and then share their allegations as if they were correct, proven facts.
“The disinformers who cash in on this so-called ‘independent journalism’ are like the con artists who used to fool customers into buying their pots,” the analyst told ROMEA TV. He also recalled a debate he saw recently on television in which the Vice-Dean of a Faculty of Medicine spoke about his experience with the treatment of COVID-19.
“He described what he sees every day in his department. His opponent in the debate was an electrician who explained to this associate professor, this clinic head, this Vice-Dean of the Faculty of Medicine that what he sees every day in his own department is not true and that it’s all a fraud,” said Máca.
Among the purveyors of disinformation, the subject of COVID-19 has been replaced by that of the aggression being committed by Russia in Ukraine. Some of those who charge guillible people money for this “independent” activity of theirs have “switched” to this topic.
“It is remarkable that these pro-Russian activists claim to just be expressing their ‘free opinion’. This ‘free opinion’ of theirs, which does its best to insinuate how people should view the matter, coincides quite frequently with what those in Moscow proclaim, and when the message from Moscow changes, so do these ‘free opinions’,” the analyst explained.
“It is exactly these ‘opinions’ that have been commissioned somewhere in the east and paid for with money from somewhere in the east,” Máca told ROMEA TV. The interview also discussed who the current “stars” of the Czech disinformation scene are, how media consumers can verify whether their allegations are correct, and how much Czech society has progressed when it comes to combating disinformation in general.
