Not that that needs adding to, but I can't help myself ...

The methods mentioned in TFA are not entirely useless, and can be helpful.

"Self nudging" includes in part the mechanisms I'd described as automated cheap rejection. The main difference is that my emphasis is on developing such tools in a shared and collective manner rather than relying on individuals to discover, develop, and deploy them on their own. A similar concept from the perspective of diet is that it's far easier to resist temptation by not buying junk food in the first place than to attempt to ignore the bowl of crisps on the table or the bag of biscuits in the larder.

The "lateral reading" methods in particular are well considered for those who are looking to debunk or blunt effects of propaganda, and I've long practiced many of those myself. (See e.g., <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37376101> <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36878773> <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24919644> <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25556856>.) These are useful for debunking teams or organisation, but scale poorly when it's expected that the entire population adopt these, no matter how useful that would otherwise be.

"Don't feed the trolls", or as one early-aughts formulation put it, a denial of attention attack, can also be useful. I generally limit my direct engagement with disinformation, or try to make that as short and direct as possible (e.g., link directly to refuting evidence). What I'll often do on HN or elsewhere is "be the discussion I'd like to see", and post a take on a topic that I'd like to see emphasized, whether that supports or rebuts a source article. Where an argument seems reasonably novel I'll occasionally try to draw out specifics, I'm most interested in where those come from, and find often that the person posting either doesn't know or won't admit this.[1]

Curiously, the "provide an alternative narrative" bears some semblance to the "firehose of falsehood" propaganda method. The foundations and goals differ, but both seek to dilute a particular countermessage.

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Notes:

1. These often trace to political or politicised tropes. Common examples include:

- The mischaracterisation of Adam Smith's "invisible hand" description, which traces to Jacob Viner at the University of Chicago, and is much debunked, particularly well by the late Gavin Kennedy of Adam Smith's Lost Legacy.

- The "monopoly on violence" mischaracterisation of Max Weber's definition of government, "the claim to the legitimate use on physical force", where both claim and legitimate use are key. The more common misformulation traces to Robert Nozick and Murray Rothbard, in the 1970s and 1960s respectively.

- "Rugged individualism" which traces to a political speech in February 1928 by American president Herbert Hoover: <https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=rugged%20indiv...> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rugged_individualism>

- "Free market of ideas" which actually seems to have derived from free-market ideological propaganda and propagandists, does not have roots in J.S. Mill, and on examination has little foundation in the actual formulation and dissemination of ideas. See Jill Gordon's "John Stuart Mill and the 'Marketplace of Ideas'" (1997) <https://philpapers.org/rec/GORJSM> and Stanley Ingber, "The Marketplace of Ideas: A legitimizing myth" <https://scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article...> (PDF) particularly.

A recent instance of broad hand-wavey claims resulting in no citations offered despite multiple responses on the thread: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37386379>. Sometimes simply stating that the emperor is naked is the best one can do.