Disinformation or more accurately, lying, is Russian doctrine. Everything that they say seems to be a lie and designed to delay appropriate action.
All sides are doing it in every war, be wary what you trust
Of course. That's been true since the dawn of humanity.
Russia has a certain flavor of lying that I don't see elsewhere. They make claims that are so utterly ridiculous that everyone knows it is complete bullshit. It's like some weird gaslighting / dominance thing. Lavrov and Putin are pros at this.
Purely by coincidence, you see a similar technique employed by one of the two major US presidential candidates. Only his approach is to repeat the ridiculous lie enough times that some people believe it.
Hitler described "große Lüge" in Mein Kampf in 1925.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_lie
Putin and Trump are both of course great admirers of this technique.
I like the bluntness of the name. BIG LIE
at this point I'm not even sure you'd have to try to disguise it. I think that Trump could admit that the whole stolen election thing was a lie and that people have ingrained it so deeply into who they feel themselves to be that they'd still believe it and still have the same sense of moral outrage that the election was "stolen".
Yeah, they would go down fighting, saying someone "got to" Trump and threatened him into saying it was a lie
Sure, but for Russia it's the actual doctrine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_military_deception
lying, is Russian doctrine
Its true. The entire Russian language is just a series of elaborate lies with grammar and syntax. It is impossible to say three consecutive true statements in a Slavic tongue.
Uncovering these rings, publicizing them, and shutting them down needs to be a top priority. I think a lot, if not most, of the bad decisions made by voters stem from these kind of bad actors. We've let it go on for long enough.
Not only voters, also politicians. Everyone can be influenced, even those in power :)
You'd have thought publicising them would involve not only saying they exist, but also educating people about what the misinformation is. As far as I can tell from a quick scan, the article doesn't talk about the message the proganda is pushing. I'm just as clueless as before about what I should believe and what I shouldn't.
Are the public just meant to know when they're being lied to?
Wait?!! RUSSIA?!?!?
Misinformation campaign?!?!
Surely some mistake?!?!
That would be SO unlike them!!!
DISinformation. The difference is that misinformation might or might not be intentional, whereas disinformation is organised intentional misinformation with specific goals in mind.
Not that I blame you for getting it wrong, mind you, since most media outlets consistently do.
I'm expecting a really nasty autumn this year. A big chunk of Russia's campaign against Europe is held up by Ukraine and they badly need a stooge US president again.
Musk also opened Twitter's doors wide for state-sponsored manipulation and agitation campaigns. All protections are offline and the teams are gone, under the guise of free speech.
To add: Twitter under Musk also complies with all government censorship requests since Musk took over. News on Twitter has been hugely influential in the past in protests in authoritarian states, but that's clearly a thing of the past now.
Full compliance with government censorship was 83% in may last year, up from the 50% it was before Musk.
And partial + full compliance was at 98.8%, up from 92% before Musk. And the remaining 1.2% were not denied, just status unknown, so it's basically 100%.
I wonder what the current numbers are and how the full/partial takedowns are geographically distributed. It wouldn't surprise me one bit if partial compliance was limited to some western countries and it's full compliance everywhere else.
Elon Musk, the self declared "free speech absolutist", what a shithead.
Anyone else getting tired of Russia's bullshit?
If you're in a country that shares a border with Russia, or are Canadian or British and understand the end goal of this, you've been sick of it for a while.
Europe certainly is. I should note that while most of their campaigns happen over on Twitter & Facebook that if federated social media ever took off in a big way it would happen there too and it might actually be harder to control if it did.
Well yes and obviously. Russia is a bad actor and obviously wants to sow division & doubt over the war in Ukraine, to sow division in general, and to slander political enemies. They have a special interest in interfering with US and European politics.
They're not the only bad actor of course. If you see memes & misinfo trend about immigration, Ukraine, drugs, vaccines, climate change, abortion, gas & oil, politics, NATO, EVs, MAGA, Palestine / Israel, dissidents etc. then invariably there is a bad actor driving that crap. They'll use their clusters of bots on Twitter to amplify the info until it gets picked up by useful idiots looking to retweet around.
If you see memes & misinfo trend about immigration, Ukraine, drugs, vaccines, climate change, abortion, gas & oil, politics, NATO, EVs, MAGA, Palestine / Israel, dissidents etc. then invariably there is a bad actor driving that crap.
The thing is, there's a lot of stuff in those topics you list that we need to have social discourse about and there are legitimate differences of opinion on. I don't think you can write everyone that is against what somebody/government deems as "approved fact" as a bad actor. I'm sure I would disagree with you on a number of those topics and would argue them in good faith. This is what makes it all so hard.
Rightwing idiots are already drooling to swallow up everything they say.
Russian propaganda is big on the left, too.
I too also uncovered this, but it was quite some time ago now
Without paywall. (Initially posted the same link, but then I noticed their comment. Leaving mine up since theirs doesn't explicitly say what the link is)
Reason number %large_number% + 1 why support for Ukraine cannot falter. Russia cannot win its offensive there and continue to spread its poison across the world.
Honestly Portal Kombat is a great name.
It's a great pun, but I hate how good an English pun it is, especially for the operation. It suggests that these guys aren't hacks, and have enough language and culture skills to blend in. The recent "warm water ports" gaffe comes to mind.
Also, intelligence agencies don't use cute code names for things like this since it makes it easier to work out the operation scope or intent. To me, this also says that the operation is "at arm's length" and the name was coined by non-government folks. Think: information age mercenaries.
No shit .
Why even fund uncovering these. Just build your systems with this as a consideration. If it's not Russia it will be someone else.
How do you defend against something without first uncovering it and seeing how it works?
Out of curiosity can anyone point out to me some of this russian disinformation? There's so much western propaganda around that i really can't find any
Right now, France is gripped by a large labor revolt in the agricultural sector being driven by the state's effort to increase agricultural imports from North Africa and Eastern Europe while reducing state price-supports for down-year crops. This threatens to lead to large scale real estate consolidation and foreign real estate purchase. Nationalists, agricultural owner-operators, and farmers exposed to rising interest rates (basically all of them) don't like this very much.
However, claiming the heartland farmers of rural France are angry at Macron for selling out the agg sector to financial interests in Brussels and Zurich isn't going to be too popular as we approach the 2024 EU Parliamentary elections. So we're getting an earful about how all these local yokels are hoodwinked by anti-EU Russian Propaganda.
If you're not in favor of truckloads of exported Ukranian agricultural salvage ending up competing with fresh French produce on store shelves, then you're a secret spy for Putin and a traitor.
Turn of FOX News. If you can stand it.
I really prefer the Israeli and the USA disinformation campaigns /s
Fucking neoliberals... decades of neoliberal economic policy, imperialism and media conglomeration allowed this fertile ground in the first place.
finally?!
So we are doing the Russian thing again? An easy scapegoat to blame for everything. Western propaganda like this is more dangerous to society than fictional the Boogeyman
Yes, we're doing this Russia thing again, because, like last time (though it's never truly stopped) we are confronted with evidence of a wide-reaching disinformation campaign. Yes, it's an easy scapegoat because Russia is actually the one at fault here. Crazy, right?
Try to make sure not to make yourself look like a complete idiot the next time you sit down to write a comment.
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