Foreword
Ukraine: It's been called the biggest Information Operation (IO) of all time, using up to 40,000 people. George Eliason's been trying to stay on top of it. Brave reporters like Alina Lipp, Eva Bartlett, Patrick Lancaster, and Graham Phillips have been doing their best to contribute. But the poor people caught in the IO in the West simply don't have a chance. All they see is a spaced-out comedian with designer stubble on the cover of a fashion magazine.
Before we get into that, let's look briefly at what's been happening on the ground over there.
Kherson/Izyum
You should have a translating browser for this. Something based on Chromium is OK, but try to avoid Google’s own.
Readovka's Big Sitrep 10 Sept https://readovka.news/news/111402
“Today was probably one of the most difficult days for Russians during the entire special operation.”
Krasny Liman under Russian control https://readovka.news/news/111382
“Commander Kirill Imashev came to Krasny Liman and made sure the city was under Russian control. Roadblocks have been set up along the entire road, and there are ambulances on site, which indicates ongoing battles for the locality, but not in the city itself.”
Yampol in Izyum continues to defend https://readovka.news/news/111376
“According to a Readovka source at the scene, contrary to the bravura statements of Ukrainian channels, the village of Yampol remains under our banners and successfully holds the defence. An attempt by the enemy to storm the fortifications near the city limits was stopped, and the militants were driven back by the confident actions of the Russian troops.”
A few too flowery words there, but the assessment is probably correct.
Fighting in Izyum continues unabated https://readovka.news/news/111156
“Despite a number of problems, the Russian Armed Forces continue to defend territories and stabilise the front line.”
So the Pentagon planned a counterattack, and Zelensky pushed, but it's uncertain if anything substantial's really happened. Outsiders are divided. Some think it's Russia being clever again, others think they screwed up (but only a bit). It's hard to think Russia screwed up, but facts, as few as they are, are facts.
Whatever it is, it's not good - not yet, at any rate.
And now back to our regularly scheduled evening fare.
The Bot Armies
This was picked up for RT by Slobodan Kolomoets who also writes for the Zimbabwe Herald. We'll have reason to return to the Herald in a moment. First is his coverage of an amazing report from the University of Adelaide. Below is the archive of the original page which perhaps makes it easier for you to follow along.
Here's the study Kolomoets is looking at. 4 MB to download.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2208.07038.pdf
Quoting liberally from the Kolomoets piece:
“Of 5.2 million tweets on the social media network from February 23 to March 8, between 60 to 80% were shared by fake accounts. What's more, 90% of those posts were pro-Ukraine.”
“In particular, these accounts pushed the hashtags #IStandWithUkraine, #IStandWithZelenskyy, and #ISupportUkraine, and myths like the 'Ghost of Kiev', a fictional Ukrainian fighter pilot who is farcically alleged to have taken down 40 Russian jets within hours of the military operation commencing.”
The researchers recorded “significant flows” of information from Ukrainian bots to non-bot accounts. (That's where the “influence” comes into play.)
“It is almost inevitable that the level of pro-Kiev sentiment expressed by users - troll and organic alike - will have increased even further beyond the 90% recorded during this timeframe.”
Numerous commentators have drawn attention to the weaponisation of Twitter, Facebook, et al in support of the Western proxy war in Ukraine.
One need only spend a few minutes scrolling major social media networks to identify a profusion of anonymous, recently registered users pumping out pro-Ukraine, pro-NATO, and pro-war propaganda, and attacking anyone critical of ascendant Western narratives. It is, in the words of Caitlin Johnstone, “the most aggressively trolled war of all time”.
“Unsurprisingly though, the Western media - which remains overwhelmingly committed to not publishing any negative information about Ukraine whatsoever - has universally ignored the bombshell findings of this academic paper.”
Because it's all about propaganda, it's all about bamboozling the taxpaying citizenry.
“The hesitancy of corporate news outlets to report on matters that do not reflect positively on Kiev is nonetheless somewhat understandable, as on the vanishingly rare occasions this has happened, the backlash has been savage.”
Amnesty & CBS
On August 4, for example, Amnesty International published a report on Ukrainian troops basing forces and weaponry in residential areas, including schools and hospitals, which both endangers civilians and constitutes a war crime. Three days later, CBS broadcast a documentary showing that just 30% of the vast Western arm shipments to Kiev actually reach the frontline, the rest disappearing or being sold on the black market.
Such was the incendiary response to these reports on social media, Amnesty was successfully bullied into apologizing for any “anger and distress” its disclosures caused – CBS went one further and pulled its documentary from the web.
North Atlantic Fellas
“The University of Adelaide paper also raises obvious questions about the true nature of something called NAFO – the ‘North Atlantic Fellas Organisation’ – which was a leading force in the online counter-blast against Amnesty and CBS.”
“NAFO has a history of harassing pro-Russian voices and mass reporting accounts until they are temporarily or permanently suspended. Many prominent officials have praised the group, and it has received positive profiles in The Economist, Politico, and the Washington Post.”
As is so often the case, dubious tactics and conduct of which Russia is widely accused cease to be villainous when it's Western countries and their allies doing it. One might reasonably ask whether the entire mainstream media controversy over Kremlin bots on social media was just a smokescreen for far larger and more effective operations much closer to home.
Indeed. The serious discussion's been mostly at The Saker, Bernhard of Moon of Alabama, Readovka, Michael Hudson, Pepe Escobar, Larry Johnson, and Andrei Martyanov.
But let's now look at the report in question. The link again:
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2208.07038.pdf
The report was compiled by Bridget Smart, Joshua Watt, Sara Benedetti, Lewis Mitchell, and Matthew Roughan, all of the University of Adelaide.
“Our dataset consists of 5,203,764 tweets, retweets, quote tweets and replies posted to Twitter between February 23rd and March 8th 2022, containing the tags #(I)StandWithPutin, #(I)StandWithRussia, #(I)SupportRussia, #(I)StandWithUkraine, #(I)StandWithZelenskyy, and #(I)SupportUkraine.”
“In all time series figures, we present five significant events that provide context for our findings.”
When the conflict begins (24th February 2022)
When the fighting in Mariupol begins (26th February 2022)
When Russia captures Kherson (2nd March 2022)
When Russia captures the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant (4th March 2022)
When Ukrainian authorities first attempt to evacuate Mariupol (8th March 2022)
These guys are “technical”:
“We employ time-series analysis techniques to understand how bot-like activity impacts the wider group of participants, by measuring linguistic content, sentiment, and their lagged effect on future discussions. We use the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) and Valence Aware Dictionary for Sentiment Reasoning, dictionary-based models to measure the linguistic features and sentiment of our dataset.”
“To measure bot activity, we classify a random sample of 26.5% of accounts which posted at least one English language tweet in the dataset using Botometer.”
Botometer!
Detection of Novel Social Bots by Ensembles of Specialized Classifiers
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3340531.3412698
The Association of Computing Machinery is perhaps the oldest and certainly the most egregious and revered organisation of its kind in the world.
https://everipedia.org/wiki/lang_en/Association_for_Computing_Machinery
The ACM paper contains a brief MP4 which explains how the Botometer works. It's almost exactly ten minutes long and it's narrated by contributor Mohsen Sayyadi. The paper is from October 2020. (The masthead says “Indiana University”.) (He can be a bit difficult to listen to.)
Slobodan Kolomoets
29 July 2022 How Washington lobbyists created a long proxy military conflict in Ukraine
https://www.herald.co.zw/how-washington-lobbyists-created-a-long-proxy-military-conflict-in-ukraine/
Delves deeper into who's waging the information war and to whose detriment.
“The Ukraine is always good and Russia is always bad narrative did not create itself.”
Ridgely Walsh? Heard of them?
'On July 11, Washington DC-based public affairs consultancy Ridgely Walsh registered as a foreign agent on behalf of Ukrainian interests with the US Justice Department.
In the process, they amassed over 10,000 contacts with lawmakers, think tanks, and journalists.'
This is a staggering figure when one considers that the Saudi lobby - one of the largest and most influential in the US - had just 2,834 interactions with these elements in the same timeframe.
Lobbying activity on behalf of Kiev over 2022 will inevitably dwarf even that vast total. Now, the number of registered pro-Ukrainian agents in Washington stands at an unprecedented 24, with six being compelled to register in June alone.
“This phenomenon cannot be attributed to generosity of spirit, or altruism.”
“It is likely many more firms are effectively representing Ukrainian interests than are officially recognised under FARA. Ridgely Walsh only registered in July, after Vox documented its work chaperoning two Ukrainian pilots around Washington, meeting with journalists, senators and representatives, and defence and state department representatives.”
VELCH
“After an unexplained seven-month gap in her CV, in May 2014, Velch joined the Centre for United Actions, a Washington DC-based NGO ‘working for the benefit of Ukrainian citizens’, founded by Ukrainian politician and former KGB asset Oleg Ribachuk in 2009.”
Consortium's Parry
Writing in February 2014, veteran journalist Bob Parry noted that the NED had over the previous year funded 65 projects in Ukraine totalling over $20 million, amounting to a shadow political structure of media and activist groups that could be deployed to stir up unrest when the Ukrainian government did not act as desired.
Bombshell
“In reality, as a February 2014 Washington Post op-ed exposed in forensic detail, polling data showed less than 20 percent of protesters were motivated by 'violations of democracy or the threat of dictatorship’, only 40-45 percent of Ukrainians were in favour of European Union integration, soon-to-be deposed President Viktor Yanukovich remained 'the most popular political figure in the country’, and no survey conducted by that time had ever indicated majority support for the uprising.“
“Much of the public opposition to the government overthrow stemmed from the 'anti-Russian rhetoric and the iconography of western Ukrainian nationalism’, which was widespread among demonstrators, 'not [playing] well among the Ukrainian majority.”
“In all, 50 percent of Ukraine's population resided in regions that 'strongly identified with Russia' and had done so for over two centuries - 'nearly all' of them were alienated by anti-Russian rhetoric and symbols.”
But that doesn't stop Victoria Nuland.
“A one-sided and utterly distorted view of events in Ukraine persists to this day, courtesy of Ridgely Walsh and its peers. With vanishingly rare exceptions, established news outlets have presented the conflict as a David and Goliath battle between unalloyed good and evil, and have unquestioningly reported extremely dubious official claims emanating from Washington and London about Ukraine’s endless heroism and triumphs on the battlefield.”
“In fact, the vast majority of Western media coverage of the conflict has amounted to simply regurgitating Ukrainian statements, without any attempt at fact checking.”
And there you have it. We've been warning about this for over half a year.
Now suck on this one for a while.
“In fact, the vast majority of Western media coverage of the conflict has amounted to simply regurgitating Ukrainian statements, without any attempt at fact checking.”
Afterword
You've probably heard about Zelensky's courageous “counter-offensive”. Clarity about what's going on: none yet. But it is known that the Pentagon formulated Zelensky's plan.
It's also known that Russia and the allies were aware of the plan.
What remains is to see what happens to Zelensky's victims - they're losing one thousand lives per day with no possibility of changing the inevitable outcome.
Remember that Russia started this with 1/9 of what's normally required for such an operation.