I can relate to that very much. Your former friend sounds exactly like one of my friends with whom I am trying to not end friendship and be as empathetic and helpful as I can be.
while at the same time those same sources get used easily for their own arguments
100% this!
Telegram channels and Substack seem to be super popular for this sort of propaganda. I also did a technical analysis of many of the websites shared in these channels and found:
- they use very heavy trackers
- keylogging for webpages is common
- they all use privacy shields for `whois` info
- third party cookies
You can find some of these if you want to take a look in https://github.com/Langer81/Summer-REU-Research