#Russian disinformation

[charyou-tree]

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Screenshot of a reddit thread, with one top-level comment and one reply. The top-level comment by user SuspicousBananas asks

"I don’t understand what Putin thinks he is going to get out of taking Ukraine? At this point I don’t think he can ever recoup the losses he’s incurred during the war, so what is the point in continuing?"

The reply, by user TriageOrDie answers

"He's personally trapped. 

He can't withdraw form the situation without something of a victory or he will be disposed of by other aspiring dictators when the Russian population wakes up the fact that their young men died in ditches for literally nothing. 

The continuation of this conflict does nought to improve Russia's geopolitical standing. 

Resources are being drained. Billions are being spent. Manpower is dwindling. 

Putin wanted to cut Ukraine in half, secure a land bridge between Russia and crimea. Gain access to more black sea ports and the natural gas reserves that sit just off shore. To secure the noble gasses manufacturing in eastern Ukraine and finally to create more of a buffer in the event of an all out conflict with the west. 

All of this is in ruin, so the only reason this is continuing is because Putin is scared for his personal safety. 

It will continue until the US election, Russia is hoping for a Trump victory. Which is at present Putin's only hope to end major western support for the conflict. So they can sign a hasty peace deal, carve off done provinces from Ukraine and go back to lick their wounds. Only this outcome can save Putin now. 

Not only does Putin know this, but so do the rest of the highly influential oligarchs, politicians and generals. 

If another democratic Whitehouse is secured, expect things to change rapidly within Russia and on the ground in Ukraine. 

Between now and the election, expect increasingly erratic behaviour both from within this conflict and around the world. 

Russia will be sponsoring destabilising acts that may increase the likelihood of a republican presidency. 

The further ahead Kamala pulls, the more reckless you can expect them to be. 

Big things are coming. "

[lets-steal-an-archive]

The FBI declined to comment on the operation, but along with agencies the bureau has issued two other warnings in recent days about Russia-linked influence networks.

On Friday, three US agencies including the FBI, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency stated that a viral video that "falsely depicted individuals claiming to be from Haiti" voting was made by "Russian influence actors".

Last week intelligence agencies said a video purporting to show a poll worker destroying mail-in ballots marked for Donald Trump in Pennsylvania was "manufactured and amplified" by Russians.

[allthecanadianpolitics]

A large majority of Canadians have been exposed to Russian false narratives about the war in Ukraine — and people who support the Conservative Party are more susceptible to believing Kremlin disinformation, according to a new report. A survey from DisinfoWatch, part of the MacDonald-Laurier Institute think tank, found that 71 per cent of Canadians polled have heard at least one Russian false narrative and that a substantial portion “believe them to be true or are unsure of their falsehood.” It also found “Conservative supporters, who report the highest exposure levels to Kremlin narratives, are also more likely to believe in them compared to their Liberal and NDP counterparts.” The high percentage of Canadians being exposed to the narratives means “Russian disinformation is, in fact, reaching into Canadian homes,” DisinfoWatch director and co-author of the report Marcus Kolga told Global News. He said the primary purpose “is to erode Canadian support and trust in the government of Ukraine, to slow down the aid we’re sending to Ukraine and to stop the supply of weapons, whether it’s Canada or any of our NATO allies.”

Continue Reading

Tagging: @newsfromstolenland

[ezrasf]

A false claim that Vice President Kamala Harris was involved in a June 2011 hit-and-run incident that left a 13-year-old girl paralyzed was created by a Russian troll farm, according to a report released Tuesday by Microsoft.

...

Researchers at Microsoft said a newer Kremlin-aligned group, Storm-1679, also published videos aimed at discrediting Harris, including one that depicted a fake New York City billboard with false claims about Harris' policies.  Russia continues to use cyber groups to "amplify their messages through media websites and social channels geared to spread divisive political content, staged videos, and AI-enhanced propaganda," Microsoft said. The campaigns follow a pattern of targeting the Democratic candidate within 90 days of a presidential election, according to Microsoft's observations from three consecutive elections.

Buckle up, I have a feeling they are just getting started.

[chrysocomae]

Prof Synder summarizes russian propaganda tactics in a nutshell

[tomorrowusa]

Jordan Klepper is doing a special next week on how the Party of Reagan became the Party of Putin.

He spoke about it with CNN's Abby Phillip.

Here is what Ronald Reagan was saying about the Evil Empire in 1981 when Vladimir V. Putin was an officer in the Soviet secret police there.

Change a few words and it could sound like Reagan is describing today's MAGA Republican Party.

So fast forward about 40 years and this is what some people are wearing to Trump rallies.

Anti-vax nut Aaron Rogers, in that clip at the top, praised Putin for the way he "talked about the history of his country". Rogers apparently doesn't know the difference between history and disinformation. Rogers wants people to think he's really bright but he demonstrates again what a brainless dupe of Putin he really is.

The US Embassy in Kyiv published this funny but historically accurate meme which people should keep in mind when Putin claims that Russia is historically the mother (or whatever) of Ukraine.

[princessnastyaromanov]

The boiling point of water is 99° Celsius

[calicojack1718]

Comment on This: The Lack of Reporting on the Effects of Republican Anti-Democratic Electioneering on Harris' Loss

Reading time: 2 minutes We are all reeling after the election and the analysis is already in hyperdrive, but I haven't seen anyone discussing the effects Republican anti-democratic voting laws and Russian disinformation. Have you?

Harris lost. The Old FART won… again. I can almost accept that, but what I can’t accept is the way it’s being reported and discussed. Setting aside the notion of treating Trump as just another garden-variety politician, why haven’t we seen more analysis of the hamstringing that Democratic voters have endured and how it contributed to Harris’s loss? The circular firing squad is ready, aimed, and…

[odinsblog]

The Republican impeachment push against President Joe Biden has always rested on the thinnest of evidentiary ice, but with one of their key informants facing criminal charges for lying to federal investigators, the charade is now on the verge of falling apart.

On Wednesday, the House Oversight Committee — one of the three Republican-controlled committees overseeing the Biden impeachment inquiry — held a hearing in an attempt to salvage the effort.

Democrats brought in Lev Parnas, a former Rudy Giuliani crony who was a key figure in the Ukraine scandal that led to Trump’s first impeachment. During his testimony, Parnas declared that he had found “zero evidence of the Bidens’ corruption in Ukraine” and that “no credible source has ever provided proof of criminal activity […] no respectable Ukrainian official has ever said that the Biden’s did anything illegal.”

“The only information ever pushed on the Biden’s in Ukraine has come from one source, and one source only: Russia and Russian agents,” Parnas said. “The impeachment proceedings that bring us here now are predicated on false information spread by the Kremlin.”

(continue reading)

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

March 29, 2024

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

MAR 30, 2024

On Wednesday the nonprofit, nonpartisan Institute for the Study of War published a long essay explaining that Russia’s only strategy for success in Ukraine is to win the disinformation war in which it is engaged. While the piece by Nataliya Bugayova and Frederick W. Kagan, with Katryna Stepanenko, focused on Russia’s war against Ukraine, the point it makes about Russia’s information operation against Western countries applies more widely.

The authors note that the countries allied behind Ukraine dwarf Russia, with relative gross domestic products of $63 trillion and $1.9 trillion, respectively, while those countries allied with Russia are not mobilizing to help Russian president Vladimir Putin. Russia cannot defeat Ukraine or the West, they write, if the West mobilizes its resources.

This means that the strategy that matters most for the Kremlin is not the military strategy, but rather the spread of disinformation that causes the West to back away and allow Russia to win. That disinformation operation echoes the Russian practice of getting a population to believe in a false reality so that voters will cast their ballots for the party of oligarchs. In this case, in addition to seeding the idea that Ukraine cannot win and that the Russian invasion was justified, the Kremlin is exploiting divisions already roiling U.S. politics. 

It is, for example, playing on the American opposition to sending our troops to fight “forever” wars, a dislike ingrained in the population since the Vietnam War. But the U.S. is not fighting in Ukraine. Ukrainians are asking only for money and matériel, and their war is not a proxy war—they are fighting for their own reasons—although their victory could well prevent U.S. engagement elsewhere in the future. The Kremlin is also playing on the idea that aid to Ukraine is too expensive as the U.S. faces large budget deficits, but the U.S. contribution to Ukraine’s war effort in 2023 was less than 0.5% of the defense budget. 

Russian propaganda is also changing key Western concepts of war, suggesting, for example, that Ukrainian surrender will bring peace when, in fact, the end of fighting will simply take away Ukrainians’ ability to protect themselves against Russian violence. The authors note that Russia is using Americans’ regard for peace, life, American interests, freedom of debate, and responsible foreign relations against the U.S.

The authors’ argument parallels that of political observers in the U.S. and elsewhere: Russian actors have amplified the power of a relatively small, aggressive country by leveraging disinformation. 

The European Union will hold parliamentary elections in June, and on Wednesday the Czech government sanctioned a news site called Voice of Europe, saying it was part of a pro-Russian propaganda operation. It also sanctioned the man running the site, Artyom Marchevsky, as well as Putin ally Viktor Medvedchuk, a Ukrainian oligarch, saying Medvedchuk was running a “Russian influence operation” through Voice of Europe.

The far right has been rising in Europe, and Nicholas Vinocur, Pieter Haeck, and Eddy Wax of Politico noted that “Voice of Europe’s YouTube page throws up a parade of EU lawmakers, many of them belonging to far-right, Euroskeptic parties, who line up to bash the Green Deal, predict the Union’s imminent collapse, or attack Ukraine.”

Belgian security services were in on the investigation, and on Thursday, Belgian prime minister Alexander De Croo added that Russian operatives had paid European Union lawmakers to parrot Russian propaganda. Intelligence sources told Czech media that Voice of Europe paid politicians from Belgium, France, Germany, Hungary, the Netherlands, and Poland to influence the upcoming E.U. elections. Germany’s Der Spiegel newspaper said the money was paid in cash or cryptocurrency. 

Czech prime minister Petr Fiala wrote on social media: “We have uncovered a pro-Russian network that was developing an operation to spread Russian influence and undermine security across Europe.” "This shows how great the risk of foreign influence is," Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte told journalists. "It's a threat to our democracy, to our free elections, to our freedom of speech, to everything."

There are reasons to think the same disinformation process is underway in the United States. Not only do MAGA Republicans, including House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), parrot Russian talking points about Ukraine, but Russian disinformation has also been a key part of the House Republicans’ attempt to impeach President Joe Biden. 

Republicans spent months touting Alexander Smirnov’s allegation that Biden had accepted foreign bribes, with Representative James Comer (R-KY) and Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) calling his evidence “verifiable” and “valuable.” In February the Department of Justice indicted Smirnov for creating a false record, days before revealing that he was in close contact with “Russian intelligence agencies” and was “actively peddling new lies that could impact U.S. elections.”  

On March 19, former Rudy Giuliani associate Lev Parnas testified about the investigation into Biden’s alleged corruption before the House Oversight Committee at the request of the Democrats. Parnas was part of the attempt to create dirt on Biden before the 2020 election, and he explained how the process worked.  

“The only information ever pushed about the Bidens and Ukraine has come from Russia and Russian agents,” Parnas said, and was part of “a much larger plan for Russia to crush Ukraine by infiltrating the United States.” Politicians and right-wing media figures, including then-representative Devin Nunes (R-CA), Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI), The Hill reporter John Solomon, Fox News Channel personality Sean Hannity, and other FNC hosts, knew the narrative was false, Parnas said, even as they echoed it. He suggested that they were permitting “Russia to use our government for malicious purposes, and to reward selfish people with ill-gotten gains.” 

The attempt to create a false reality—whether by foreign operatives or homegrown ones—seems increasingly obvious in perceptions of the 2024 election. There has been much chatter, for example, about polls showing Trump ahead of Biden. But the 2022 polls were badly skewed rightward by partisan actors, and Democrat Marilyn Lands’s overwhelming victory over her Republican opponent in an Alabama House election this week suggests those errors have not yet been fully addressed.

Real measures of political enthusiasm appear to favor Biden and the Democrats. On Wednesday, Molly Cook Escobar, Albert Sun, and Shane Goldmacher of the New York Times reported that since leaving office, Trump has spent more than $100 million on legal fees alone. He is badly in need of money, and his reordering of the funding priorities of the Republican National Committee to put himself first means that the party is badly in need of money, too.

Donors’ awareness that their cash will go to Trump before funding other Republican candidates might well slow fundraising. Certainly, small-donor contributions to Trump have dropped off significantly: Brian Schwartz of CNBC reported last week that “[i]n 2023, Trump’s reelection campaign raised 62.5% less money from small-dollar donors than it did in 2019, the year before the last presidential election.”  

Billionaires Liz and Dick Uihlein have recently said they will back Trump, and Alexandra Ulmer of Reuters reported on Tuesday that other billionaires had pooled the money to back Trump’s then–$454 million appeal bond before an appeals court reduced it. But Ulmer also noted that there might be a limit to such gifts, as they “could draw scrutiny from election regulators or federal prosecutors if the benefactors were to give Trump amounts exceeding campaign contribution limits. While the payment would not be a direct donation to Trump's campaign, federal laws broadly define political contributions as ‘anything of value’ provided to a campaign.”

Meanwhile, the fundraising of Biden and the Democrats is breaking records. Last night, in New York City, former presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama joined Biden onstage with television personality Stephen Colbert, along with event host Mindy Kaling and musical guests Queen Latifah, Lizzo, and Ben Platt. The 5,000-person event raised an eye-popping amount—more than $25 million—and the campaign noted that, unlike donations to Trump, every dollar raised would go to the campaign.

In his remarks, Biden said that the grassroots nature of the Democrats’ support showed in the number of people who have contributed so far to his campaign: 1.5 million in all, including 550,000 “brand-new contributors in the last couple of weeks.” Ninety-seven percent of the donations have been less than $200. 

Tonight, Adrienne Watson, the spokesperson for the National Security Council, the president’s primary forum for national security and foreign policy, pointed to Russia’s devastating recent attacks on Ukraine’s energy grid and called again for Speaker Johnson to bring up the bipartisan national security supplemental bill providing aid to Ukraine that the Senate passed in February. She warned: “Ukraine’s need is urgent, and we cannot afford any further delays.”

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[porterdavis]

Be careful believing anything you read

[charyou-tree]

So, you know how internet transphobes, neonazis, and other far-right weirdos have been pitching a shit fit claiming that Algerian Olympic boxer Imane Khelif was ostensibly trans/intersex/a man somehow?

So, that may have been a part of yet another russian disinformation campaign. Remember, her opponent in the match that turned into a bigoted news mess was Italian. Italy was buying the majority of the natural gas that they needed to generate power and heat homes from russia prior to the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, when they as a part of a wider European embargo on russian petrochemicals switched to having a majority of their natural gas imported from Algeria. Which just so happens to be where a certain Olympic boxer is from. Sure would be a shame if there was an international diplomatic incident between those countries, ruining that trade arrangement...

Turns out that the originators of many of the transphobic rumors have ties to the kremlin.

[rigaudon]

see, tumblr, this is why we don't believe everything we hear online.

[uboat53]

Well, it's campaign season and the Russian disinformation campaign is heating up. I guess it's time to get to know the people spreading it?

[meteorologistaustenlonek]

Jessikka Aro, a journalist who spent years researching the activities of pro-Russia internet trolls, wanted fact-checkers to know this: If you look for Russian influence in your region, you will find it

[iamanathemadevice]

The Russian Disinformation Attack and the Disappearing Rabbit Trick

Lawyer and author Teri Kanefield writes in this blogpost

“The more I think about it,” Heather Cox Richardson said this week, “the more it seems the main story of the past decade has been Russian disinformation to undermine U.S. democracy.” This was a notable comment because Richardson follows all the major political stories from the perspective of a political historian, and she has been doing so for years. I think we should talk about the story and why we are not talking about it more. Last week, I wrote about the ideological and political connection between the Republicans and Putin’s Russia. If you missed it, start there because seeing the ideological connection between the Republicans and the Russians provides context for the Russian disinformation attack in 2016 and the response of von Clownstick’s campaign.

She describes the start of the campaign in 2016, how it continues today and how Trump managed to deflect from what was going on by making th Mueller report all about him:

Early in the investigation, von Clownstick (and others) made the story all about von Clownstick: Would he be indicted? Would he be exonerated? von Clownstick framed the question around the word “collusion” which was masterful. On May 11, 2017, in an interview with Lester Holt, von Clownstick said there was “no collusion between me and my campaign and the Russians.” His mantra became: “NO COLLUSION!” von Clownstick knew exactly what his campaign had done. He knew when they got information, what information they received, and he knew, for example, that they declined meetings and cut off Carter Page. He knew that what he had actually done (benefit from Russian crimes instead of calling the FBI) would draw negative criticism. He knew that. His lawyers are not that stupid. So he cleverly framed the issue as: Did von Clownstick collude with the Russians?

When Mueller declined to charge Trump (for reasons nothing to do with whether Russia had helped his campaign, which was proven fact), Trump made the rabbit disappear:

When von Clownstick made himself the central character of the story, the story stopped being about the Russian attack on our election. Notice the reciprocity: The Russians helped von Clownstick get elected. von Clownstick then helped the Russians by changing the subject and getting everyone speculating about whether Mueller would find “collusion.” The Russian cyber attack was forgotten by von Clownstick’s critics, who were enraged (and remain enraged) that Mueller did not criminally indict von Clownstick. In fact, in some left-wing circles, if you mention Mueller you will find they are still seething with anger. (If you respond to this blog post with anger about the fact that Mueller didn’t indict von Clownstick, you’re both proving my point and missing my point.)

It's a long blog post, with lots of supporting evidence, and you need to read it because it will make clear what was and is going on in America