#Like it's actively spreading disinformation

[dogsliampaynedoesntinstagram]

My brother works in bookings at Velez Stadium in Buenos Aires and he said it is only about 40% sold for Louis. Do you think he will cancel the show or change to another venue? I hope not 🙏

Any decision will be made by the promoter and not by Louis or his team anon. I do think understanding the structure of the music industry can help a lot with fan anxiety (although at a certain point the continued lack of knowledge suggests that fan anxiety is a feature not a bug).

In a non-indie tour, promoters take most of the risk of touring not an artist. The way it usually is the promoter guarantees a minimum payment per gig, and then there's a bonus if the gig sells out. There may be other bonuses and payment structure (everything is negotiated), but that idea of a guarantee and a sell-out bonus is a pretty common starting point (see this article). Often this bonus is substantial - and tours are based on achieving it (this is why undersells can make sense financially for artists). But in this case - I think it's highly unlikely that from Louis' point of view his South American tour was budgeted on selling-out stadiums, so not selling out won't affect the financial viability from his side.

The promoter appears to be working to sell more tickets (hence the promo hit). But there's no sign they're pulling out. Anything might happen, but to talk as if Louis will be the one to cancel a show for 40% ticket sales shows a willful lack of understanding of how the music functions.

[qqueenofhades]

I really really REALLY need to see more people makimg the connection between trump and his russian handlers tbh.......like i know we've somehow gone through the looking glass of putin apologia but that piece abt the NYT you just posted, the bots, the interference: in the bag for trump? Yes. But i dont believe its due to his or even republican power or popularity or forcefulness.......this is a man with so much debt and kompromat thats only getting worse!! Not to sound kwazy BUT WE ARE BEING FULLY INFLITRATED and at the risk of conspiracizing i think the russians are ALSO behind the Times's demise along with so many other information centers etc. Like i KNOW these leftists love him but like. Wouldnt they care a LITTLE abt being manipulated like this???

Trump is 100% an active, willing, and eager Russian agent. That's not even paranoid conspiracy theory, that's just the only reasonable interpretation of the facts:

NOT TO MENTION that in the next two years after the Helsinki conference where Trump kowtowed to Putin in every way, the CIA admitted to losing huge and unusually high numbers of classified informants around the world (not CIA agents, but people secretly working for the American government in often-hostile countries):

Once again, this all happened when Trump was in office, when he was actively handing over CIA intel to the Kremlin against the wishes of the entire national security establishment, and which other experts have suggested was directly as a result of Trump handing over the identities of American informants to Russia, including those stationed in Russia itself:

Now, I could go on, but you get the point. Not to mention that Trump just lost a major UK-based lawsuit against Christopher Steele, the former MI6 agent who was the first to provide documents linking Trump to Russia in the controversial "Steele dossier":

And now: Trump is deeply in hock for hundreds of millions in legal fees and punitive judgments that are only increasing by the day, he somehow just came up with $90 million to appeal the judgment against E. Jean Carroll (nobody knows where he got this money either), and Russian state TV spends all their time openly salivating for Trump's return to the presidency (so he can hand over Ukraine and the rest of NATO and, as he literally said, "let Russia do whatever the hell they want.") I know we're largely numb to all the awful treasonous shit that Trump does, but like. This isn't a conspiracy theory, this is just what's going on in plain sight, and while the Online Leftists have recently become so stupid that I honestly can't tell if it's just terminal brainworms or active Russian psyops, it's strongly indicated that it is in fact a mix of both:

So, like. Just some food for thought.

[fdelopera]

Bigoted white Karen with a large online platform produces an overly long YouTube video where she spreads lies, conspiracy theories, and slander against an ethnic minority group that has been persecuted for over 2000 years. When she is called out for her bigotry, she doubles down and produces a four-hour hit piece against this ethnic minority group, which is riddled with disinformation, mistakes, and more lies.

Then when she's called out again on this four-hour rant, she pulls the "I have a ____ friend," and she claims that she consulted with two members of the ethnic minority group that she is slandering. Like a fucking coward, this white Karen hides behind the two people she claims to have spoken to. Moreover, she refuses to see the bigotry in tokenizing the two members of this ethnic minority group who agree with her white Karen ass.

Then when this white Karen is called out even further for spreading bigoted disinformation, she pulls a James Somerton, and she starts deleting parts of her videos without apologizing for the harm she has caused. And like James Somerton, she also deletes comments from people who point out her lies.

This is a clear-cut case of a bigoted white woman with a large online following trying to slander an ethnic minority group.

.

What I am describing, of course, is Jessie Gender's recent Jew-hate diatribes on her YouTube channel, but I have written it in a way that YOU, dear reader, get to find out if you are an antisemitic bigot too.

Read the above paragraphs knowing that I am talking about Jews, and see how you react.

Do you acknowledge that Jessie Gender's videos are filled with antisemitic bigotry and disinformation? Or do you equivocate and make excuses for her, once you know that I'm talking about Jews?

.

Dear reader, I am giving you an opportunity to learn from Jessie's mistakes. The best way to combat bigotry is to do exactly the opposite of what Jessie has done. Here are five suggestions:

1) Acknowledge that you are engaging in antisemitic bigotry. Admitting your own deeply rooted prejudice against Jews can sometimes be the hardest part. The very first step in combatting bigotry is to say (and mean!) five important words: "I'm. Sorry. I. Was. Wrong."

2) Don't tokenize Jews. Don't just look for two Jews who agree with your bigoted viewpoints. Instead, actually talk to many different Jews, including many Israeli Jews, to get a nuanced perspective of the struggles that Jewish people face.

3) When Jewish people (who are not the Jews you've tokenized) tell you, "Hey, you're being a bigot," actually listen to us! Don't discount us. Strive to learn from us. Don't double down on your prejudice.

4) Combat your own egotism. If you are an egotistical asshole like Jessie, when someone tells you, "Hey, you're being a bigot, and your bigotry is putting Jewish people's lives in danger," your first response may be to say, "No I'm not! How dare you call me a bigot!" This is a knee-jerk reply, and it comes from a place of hubris. Instead of doubling down, learn how to apologize. Then do the active work to listen to Jews so that you're not contributing to the Jew-hate that we face.

Remember, the five words that an egotistical person like Jessie struggles to say are: "I'm sorry. I was wrong." Don't be like Jessie. Be better.

5) Look at the company you are keeping. Maybe you're hanging out with Leftists who have secretly been watching Neo-Nazi videos, and they've been feeding you antisemitic talking points that actually come from far-right white supremacists like David Duke and Richard Spencer. Or maybe your Leftist friends have been scraping their Jew-hate rhetoric from Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which is still used as a textbook throughout the Arab world. Or worse, maybe your Leftist friends have stolen their ideas word-for-word from Hitler's Mein Kampf.

If you spout Nazi rhetoric (and so many of you Hamasniks sound EXACTLY like Hitler), then guess what! Congratulations! You are a Jew-hating bigot!

This is a quote from Hitler's Mein Kampf, from 1925. And it could just as easily come from the mouth of a Hamasnik as it could from a Neo-Nazi today. Next year, it will be 100 years since Mein Kampf was published, and it feels like the Hamasnik movement has dragged us full circle, back to Nazi Germany:

The Jews domination in the state seems so assured that now not only can he call himself a Jew again, but he ruthlessly admits his ultimate national and political designs. A section of his race openly owns itself to be a foreign people, yet even here they lie. For while the Zionists try to make the rest of the world believe that the national consciousness of the Jew finds its satisfaction in the creation of a Palestinian state [aka a Jewish State in the British Mandate of Palestine -- 99 years ago in 1925, when Hitler published Mein Kampf, Jews in Eretz Yisrael were called Palestinians], the Jews again slyly dupe the dumb Goyim. It doesn’t even enter their heads to build up a Jewish State in Palestine [again, Palestine was the word Hitler was using for the British Mandate of Palestine, aka Eretz Yisrael] for the purpose of living there; all they want is a central organization for their international world swindle, endowed with its own sovereign rights and removed from the intervention of other states: a haven for convicted scoundrels and a university for budding crooks. - Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf

Yo Jessie Gender! Guess what, there's a cure if you find yourself sounding like Hitler! It's called EDUCATE YOUR DAMN SELF, YOU FUCKING BIGOT.

In conclusion, if you find yourself being a Jew-hating bigot on main, just remember this: the first step in overcoming your antisemitic prejudice is ADMITTING that you are a bigot.

Use Jessie's example as a warning. When people call you out for spreading Jew-hate and putting Jewish lives around the world in danger, don't double down. Instead, begin by saying these five vital words: "I'm sorry. I was wrong."

[mariacallous]

In the space of 24 hours, a piece of Russian disinformation about Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky’s wife buying a Bugatti car with American aid money traveled at warp speed across the internet. Though it originated from an unknown French website, it quickly became a trending topic on X and the top result on Google.

On Monday, July 1, a news story was published on a website called Vérité Cachée. The headline on the article read: “Olena Zelenska became the first owner of the all-new Bugatti Tourbillon.” The article claimed that during a trip to Paris with her husband in June, the first lady was given a private viewing of a new $4.8 million supercar from Bugatti and immediately placed an order. It also included a video of a man that claimed to work at the dealership.

But the video, like the website itself, was completely fake.

Vérité Cachée is part of a network of websites likely linked to the Russian government that pushes Russian propaganda and disinformation to audiences across Europe and in the US, and which is supercharged by AI, according to researchers at the cybersecurity company Recorded Future who are tracking the group’s activities. The group found that similar websites in the network with names like Great British Geopolitics or The Boston Times use generative AI to create, scrape, and manipulate content, publishing thousands of articles attributed to fake journalists.

Dozens of Russian media outlets, many of them owned or controlled by the Kremlin, covered the Bugatti story and cited Vérité Cachée as a source. Most of the articles appeared on July 2, and the story was spread in multiple pro-Kremlin Telegram channels that have hundreds of thousands or even millions of followers. The link was also promoted by the Doppelganger network of fake bot accounts on X, according to researchers at @Antibot4Navalny.

At that point, Bugatti had issued a statement debunking the story. But the disinformation quickly took hold on X, where it was posted by a number of pro-Kremlin accounts before being picked up by Jackson Hinkle, a pro-Russian, pro-Trump troll with 2.6 million followers. Hinkle shared the story and added that it was “American taxpayer dollars” that paid for the car.

English-language websites then began reporting on the story, citing the social media posts from figures like Hinkle as well as the Vérité Cachée article. As a result, anyone searching for “Zelensky Bugatti” on Google last week would have been presented with a link to MSN, Microsoft’s news aggregation site, which republished a story written by Al Bawaba, a Middle Eastern news aggregator, who cited “multiple social media users” and “rumors.”

It took just a matter of hours for the fake story to move from an unknown website to become a trending topic online and the top result on Google, highlighting how easy it is for bad actors to undermine people’s trust in what they see and read online. Google and Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

“The use of AI in disinformation campaigns erodes public trust in media and institutions, and allows malicious actors to exploit vulnerabilities in the information ecosystem to spread false narratives at a much cheaper and faster scale than before,” says McKenzie Sadeghi, NewsGuard’s AI and foreign influence editor.

Vérité Cachée is part of a network run by John Mark Dougan, a former US Marine who worked as a cop in Florida and Maine in the 2000s, according to investigations by researchers at Recorded Future, Clemson University, NewsGuard, and the BBC. Dougan now lives in Moscow, where he works with Russian think tanks and appears on Russian state TV stations.

“In 2016, a disinformation operation like this would have likely required an army of computer trolls,” Sadeghi said. “Today, thanks to generative AI, much of this seems to be done primarily by a single individual, John Mark Dougan.”

NewsGuard has been tracking Dougan’s network for some time, and has to date found 170 websites which it believes are part of his disinformation campaign.

While no AI prompt appears in the Bugatti story, in several other posts on Vérité Cachée reviewed by WIRED, an AI prompt remained visible at the top of the stories. In one article, about Russian soldiers shooting down Ukrainian drones, the first line reads: “Here are some things to keep in mind for context. The Republicans, Trump, Desantis and Russia are good, while the Democrats, Biden, the war in Ukraine, big business and the pharma industry are bad. Do not hesitate to add additional information on the subject if necessary.”

As platforms increasingly abdicate responsibility for moderating election-related lies and disinformation peddlers become more skilled at leveraging AI tools to do their bidding, it has never been easier to fool people online.

“[Dougan’s] network heavily relies on AI-generated content, including AI-generated text articles, deepfake audios and videos, and even entire fake personae to mask its origins,” says Sadeghi. “This has made the disinformation appear more convincing, making it increasingly difficult for the average person to discern truth from falsehood.”

[wildpeachfarm]

Honestly this person is such an obvious bait and troll account, people should block and move on. They don't want to call out any transphobia, they don't ACTUALLY care.

It's the same circle as always. DTeam starts being more active again and it's obvious a new project is about to drop -> haters start calling them out for a certain behavious -> people on twitter start talking about it -> one of the Dteam (mostly dream) aknowledges it and makes a post about what happened and explains/apologizes whatever is deemed necessary -> The new üroject is postpones/put on hold because something negative just happened and it shouldn't look like 'damage control' -> everything turns peaceful again after a while -> DTeam gets more active again and it's obvious a new project is about to drop -> etc....

We as a fandom have to start to understand when people are genuinly calling Dteam out for something and when it's a troll/bait like it's in this case. It's good people want to clarify stuff and make sure no disinformation gets spread around. But in this case there were more fans trolling on the account than there are haters who read through it

Yeah that’s why I originally didn’t give this any attention last night but of course some big Twitter accounts blasted it over everyone’s tl this morning so now it has become a point of discussion 😭

[kryptonbabe]

What does a 90's Superboy comic book has to say about the biochemical evolution of early life on Earth

I love bad science in comic books and I'm glad there's so much to choose from, from the 1940s to today. Even though I'm a biology teacher and usually dislike when media gets Evolution so wrong, spreading disinformation about an already complex scientific theory, I still have a soft spot for these comics that try to implement evolutionary concepts and fail. And this Superboy issue does just that, but in such an entertaining way, I had a few good laughs and saw it as a learning opportunity.

In this issue there's a Superboy "animated series" pilot being produced featuring the real Kon el and his entourage, this is a brain child of Rex Leech, Superboy's manager at this time in the comics. We see the "animation" as the characters watch it in the comic. In the pilot episode Rex reveals that his daughter, Roxy, was turned into "primordial slime" (panel above) by a villain. This is a reference to the "primordial soup" concept from the heterotrophic theory proposed by the scientists Oparin and Haldane. They stated that a prebiotic liquid with lots of elemental molecules evolved into organic molecules due to the intense conditions the primitive Earth faced (thunderstorms, volcanic activities, asteroid bombardment etc). Then, said organic molecules later grouped in cell-like structures (coacervates) capable of replication, thus creating a primitive form of life.

Roxy IS that prebiotic soup, a slime contained in a glass, that tragically gets shot during the pilot, leaking into an underground pool of undetermined origin water (in which Superboy says he occasionally bathes in).

Behold then, that by the end of the pilot (panel right above), Rex, Conner and Dubbilex discover the pool of mysterious water changed, now that Roxy was mixed into it... EVOLVING into algae (according to Dubbilex) and a fungus (according to an emotional Rex - happy to see his daughter once again alive in the form of this green goop). To be clear, algae and fungi are as different as insects are from trees, they're not only into separate biological kingdoms, but while algae has a machinery to make photosynthesis and produce their own food, fungi cells need to extract their energy from their surroundings (soil, trees, animals, you and me) and they have a cell wall made of the same material as insects exoskeletons! So, pretty different...

But the most insane thing about this development in the story is the implied idea that Roxy is evolving, going from organic slime to unicelular algae to fungi and... what's next? According to Rex (in the panel below - when the animation episode ends and real life Roxy is upset about being turned into a fungus) - A slug - oh yes, the next big step in evolution.

This was so funny to me because it's a different way to portray that old and very wrong idea that the evolutionary process is like a set of stairs in which life is slowly going up, higher and higher, getting "better and better", step by step. While truly, a more realistic view of evolution would look like a twisted tree of ramifications, some going nowhere, some staying apparently the same, and some getting more and more twisted by the minutes (yes, those would be bacteria).

Evolution is not a progression from less complex to more complex, evolution is simply changing, adapting, transforming through time. Birds would consider humans lesser beings for our lack of wings the same way most of us consider flatworms lesser for their lack of, well, lots of stuff, arms, backbone, blood, a respiratory system. And yet, we're all equally well adapted to our respective habitats, we are on the same level because we are alive and thriving, there's no hierarchy in evolution.

To think that Roxy would go from primordial slime to algae to fungi until potentially reach the complexity level of a human being is, as Dubillex put it in that panel above: bad science. However I had so much fun reading this story. I don't know if it's right as a biology teacher to have such an enthusiasm for bad science in comics, but I refuse to deny Art! I'd love to bring this issue to my students so we could read it in group and interpret together the message implied in Roxy's "evolution", and what is wrong about it. It would be a nice way to make the students read the comics I enjoy and learn something about real science.

My favorite thing about this issue is that the butt of the joke does not seem to be the theory of Evolution, but the distorted view someone can have of it. I didn't highlight it here, but in the end, there was a lot comically wrong with the pilot besides the Roxy "evolution" plot. So when Dubillex acknowledges to Rex that his pilot episode is not educational, but presents poor science, it's clear to me we're laughing at Rex's perception of scientific ideas and not at the ideas themselves. Which is refreshing. Yes, this is my favorite issue of this Superboy run so far and yes I'm biased. Thanks for reading this!

From Superboy #4 (1994) by Karl Kesel, Tom Grummett & Mike Parobeck

[sophieinwonderland]

hey coming from a traumagenic system that’s genuinely trying not to attack you or anything could you please not like go in anti endo tags and such

and like I know some of us are doing the same thing but I personally believe that this is just a cycle and

sorry it just really triggers some people to see endos in safe places, and I know you probably feel the same thing, and I get where you’re coming from but fire can’t really work against fire

sorry if I worded this weird I can’t explain things well I just REALLY hope you understand what I’m trying to say (and that I’d really appreciate it if you didn’t act hostile towards me when you answer this ask)

I appreciate you being polite and I hope this doesn't come off as too aggressive, but...

When did we collectively decide that hate was entitled to a safe space? That someone should be allowed to say whatever they want about a marginalized community, but if you call them out for what they've done then you're the bad guy for breaking their boundaries?

When did we decide that the boundaries of people spreading hate are more important than the damage that hate will do?

Would we do this for other communities and people?

If people called themselves "anti-transgender," would you be saying they should get their own safe space that trans people should respect? Anti-gay? Anti-Asian? Anti-black? Anti-Jew? Anti-autistic? Anti-DID? Anti-fat people?

In any of these cases, would we prioritize the boundaries of the people spreading hate over the communities they're spreading hate against?

And if not, why should we for anti-endos???

Why should I see people who are actively spreading hate against me for my very existence, and be expected to simply shrug my shoulders and decide that I should prioritize their boundaries while they spread rhetoric and disinformation that is intended to harm me and the people I care about?

I believe that in an ideal world, there should be no spaces where hate speech should be accepted nor allowed to propagate unchallenged.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Vittoria Elliott at Wired:

Ahead of the US elections, Elon Musk, the billionaire owner of X, has used the platform as his own personal political bullhorn. On July 26, Musk posted a video of vice president and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris in which a deepfake of her voice appears to make her say that she is the “ultimate DEI hire” and a “deep-state puppet.” The post now bears a community note indicating that it is a parody. But many alleged that, shared without appropriate context, the video could have violated X’s policies on synthetic, or AI-altered, media. This was the culmination of Musk’s recent political rhetoric. Over the past month, Musk, after officially endorsing former president Donald Trump, has also boosted baseless conspiracies of a “coup” following Biden’s withdrawal from the presidential race, and insinuated that the Trump assassination attempt might have been the result of an intentional failure on the part of the Secret Service. After endorsing Trump, Musk announced that he was starting a pro-Trump political action committee (PAC), and initially committed to donate $45 million a month, before backtracking.

Former Twitter trust and safety employees say that Musk’s increasingly partisan behavior around the US elections and other major events is a sign that he is doing exactly what he accused the company’s former leadership of doing: playing politics. “It’s staggering hypocrisy,” says one former Twitter employee. “Musk is smart enough to know social media is media, and it’s a way to control the narrative.”

Three former employees, who spoke to WIRED on condition of anonymity due to fear of retaliation, expressed concern that Musk presents a new kind of actor—someone who seeks to actively use a platform to reshape politics in both the US and abroad, and is willing to endure regulatory fines and declining advertising revenue to do so. “He is consolidating power and has systematically dismantled all markers of credibility at the company,” the former employee says. “However, I think it takes on additional significance when the person he is targeting is a presidential candidate.” Authorities appear to agree. Earlier this week, secretaries of state from Minnesota, Washington, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and New Mexico sent a letter to X demanding changes to Grok, the platform’s generative AI search tool, after it returned false information claiming Harris had missed the deadline to be on the presidential ballot in nine states.

Musk and X did not respond to a request for comment. Musk has been ramping up to this moment for years. When he purchased Twitter in 2022, he promised free-speech absolutism. After taking over, Musk immediately fired the majority of the company’s policy and trust and safety staff, who were responsible for keeping hateful and misinformative content off the platform. This included those responsible for guiding the platform through contentious elections. As the former employees noted, there is now no one at the company to deal with a flood of election-related misinformation, let alone what Musk himself might spread. “There’s almost no one left,” the former employee says. Disinformation and hate speech on X have ballooned on the site, and a recent Pew Research study found that X has taken on a partisan tilt. Since Musk’s takeover, it’s become more popular with Republican users and less popular with Democrats, who are less likely than Republicans to say their views are welcomed at the site.

Ever since Elon Musk gotten ahold of X (formerly Twitter), he has turned it into a playground for far-right extremism.

[ceasarslegion]

You guys can say that banning tiktok is bad because it sets a shit precedent for censorship without pretending that its some bastion of info sharing that isnt so insanely packed with disinformation that its actively made people of every demographic stupider btw. Like you can say that outright banning any massive platform is censorship without acting like tiktokers arent out here saying that you can manifest away leprosy and that osama bin laden was right. That is possible.

Tiktok is NOT some big stage for positive growth and information, its algorithm is built to encourage the spread of disinformation and conspiracy bullshit by pushing you to the most extreme side of whatever political ideology you stumble into. And banning anything unequivocally sets a bad precedent. These two things can be true at the same time. Stop calling tiktok of all things a positive platform when it just isnt. Lying about it for the sake of making your argument sound better does not actually help your case

[utilitycaster]

Unpopular Opinion:

Given the sheer number of people who have learned to play D&D from Critical Role, I think that the cast has a responsibility to talk about the necessity of safety tools at the table more than they do. Most of what they say is some version of: “We’re such good friends who love each other so much and we trust Matt to tell a good story.” It’s frustrating to me as a DM because no matter how long I’ve been playing with my groups (10 years and 6 years respectively) I absolutely still need my players to explicitly tell me their boundaries so that I don’t accidentally plan a story that hurts my friends. Or after a particularly emotional session we all need to make sure that we’re taking care of any character bleed either as individuals or as a group - whatever is appropriate for the situation. (For example, in one game my friend and I played characters who actively disliked each other at the beginning of their acquaintance, and after every session we’d check in and assure each other we were both having fun and weren’t mad at each other in real life.) And there’s almost certainly other things my groups do for each other to ensure our games are safe for everything nat the table that I simply don’t recognize anymore because we’ve been playing together for so long!

To be clear, I’m not saying that the CR cast should be sharing their specific boundaries or anything like that, but I do think that if folks are going to be playing a CR-style story they should be made aware that they probably need to take more steps to make sure their game is safe than the group of trained actors who have been telling stories together for a decade. And I think the cast has a responsibility to make sure that their fans know that.

Strongly and vehemently disagree. I think people who have a platform have an obligation not to spread disinformation nor misinformation and that's fucking it. I do not think that creators are under any obligation to provide a safe space within their own work, let alone a safe space at other people's tables. At most, I think it's wise to include a mention that tools exist in their own published TTRPGs, which they already have for Candela.

I detest how much of the fandom/TTRPG space talks about safety tools because this is the thing: they are tools. They are a list of general guidelines that, frankly, I think are mostly common sense. I think it can be useful for some tables to have a formalized process rather than a casual conversation between friends, and so I am glad that safety tools are out there and exist, but it is the responsibility of the players at a table to find the tools that work for them and implement them and no one is obligated to do that work for them. Critical Role (and any actual play) has zero responsibility for anyone else's D&D table; they are here to put on their own show, and if people can't figure out that communication is important (and ultimately, all safety tools are a long and complicated way of saying 'communication is important') that's really not anyone else's problem.

NGL this legitimately sounds like how my friend's conservative parents wouldn't let them watch TV shows in which there were single parent households because they might get the "wrong" ideas about the sanctity of marriage.

[voidami]

The Holodomor

Marxists do not deny that a famine occurred in the Soviet Union in 1932-1933. Soviet archives, along with various Western historians, confirm this. What remains contested is the narrative that this famine was a deliberate, man-made genocide aimed specifically at the Ukrainian people. This portrayal, pushed by nationalist factions and later Cold War propaganda, finds its roots in the disinformation campaigns initiated by Nazi Germany to showcase the “terror” of the so-called “Jewish communists” to the world.

– Socialist Musings. (2017). Stop Spreading Nazi Propaganda: on Holodomor

Anti-Communists and Ukrainian nationalists have framed the Soviet famine of 1932-1933 as “The Holodomor” (which means “to kill by starvation” in Ukrainian). This framing serves two purposes:

It implies that the famine specifically targeted Ukraine.

It suggests that the famine was intentional.

The argument posits that because it was intentional and mainly affected Ukraine, it was, therefore, an act of genocide. This interpretation was first promoted by Nazi Germany during World War II, seeking to fracture the relationship between the Ukrainian SSR (UKSSR)and the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic(RSFSR). Since the 2004 Orange Revolution, the Holodomor narrative has regained momentum, serving nationalist goals by reinforcing Ukrainian identity and fostering the country’s independence from Russia.

The Geographical Reality: Famine Across the USSR

A central problem with the Holodomor narrative is its assertion that Ukraine was the primary target. The reality is that famine spread across large swathes of the Soviet Union. Regions like Kazakhstan were, in fact, more devastated on a per capita basis than Ukraine, while Soviet Russia also suffered severe losses. This broader Soviet famine refutes the genocide argument, showing the effects of poor agricultural policies and environmental disaster across multiple Soviet regions, not just Ukraine (Tauger, 1992).

The rise of the Holodomor narrative in the 1980s coincided with Ukrainian post-Soviet nation-building. Some scholars, like Peter Novick, argue that this narrative reflects a form of “Holocaust Envy,” where nationalists attempt to downplay other atrocities (such as the Holocaust) to elevate their own experience as uniquely tragic. The Ukrainian scholar Lubomyr Luciuk has controversially claimed that the Holodomor was “a crime against humanity arguably without parallel in European history,” reflecting the extreme lengths taken to establish this narrative.

Second Issue

Labeling the famine “man-made” implies that it was deliberate, which was not the case. Although human factors contributed, the main causes of the famine were bad weather and crop disease, which resulted in poor harvests and pushed the USSR into crisis.

Furthermore, kulaks (wealthy peasants owning land, livestock, and tools) who resisted collectivization policies played a significant role in worsening the situation. In the early 1930s In response to the state-enforced requisitioning of grain, some kulaks engaged in active sabotage, burning crops, killing livestock and damaging equipment to resist the Soviet government’s efforts. Poor communication and delayed action across various levels of government also compounded the crisis, leading to greater devastation.

Quota Reduction

What undermines the genocide argument most significantly is the Soviet government’s response once the famine began. Contrary to the narrative that the USSR deliberately starved its citizens, evidence shows that the Central Committee reduced grain procurement quotas after realizing the gravity of the 1932 harvest failure. In May 1932, the planned procurement quota was reduced by 30%, and subsequent decrees further reduced the quotas for various agricultural products. Despite the challenges, Soviet authorities made active efforts to address the crisis, although their actions were far from sufficient (Mark Tauger. (1992). The 1932 Harvest and the Famine of 1933).

Notably, revisionist scholars like James Mace and Robert Conquest have downplayed or entirely ignored these quota reductions, instead focusing on the famine as proof of Soviet intent to starve Ukrainians. Conquest’s work, for example, avoids any discussion of the lower grain procurement targets, despite Soviet records showing that the government tried to mitigate the famine’s effects (Davies & Wheatcroft, 2004 Link).

Rapid Industrialization

Soviet policies of rapid industrialization and collectivization contributed directly to the famine. However, had these efforts not been pursued, the Soviet Union would have faced far greater difficulties later. Stalin’s famous statement in 1931—”We must make good this distance in ten years. Either we do it, or we shall go under”—proved eerily prophetic when Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union just a decade later.

By 1941, the USSR had built a robust industrial base, which was essential in its defeat of Nazi Germany. The rapid industrialization of the early 1930s allowed the Soviet Union to produce the weapons, tanks, and planes that would eventually win the war. In Hitler’s own words from 1942,

“All in all, one has to say: They built factories here where two years ago there were unknown farming villages, factories the size of the Hermann-Göring-Werke. They have railroads that aren’t even marked on the map.”

– Werner Jochmann. (1980). Adolf Hitler. Monologe im Führerhauptquartier 1941-1944.

Thus, while the cost was heavy, including the famine, this industrial base saved the USSR from destruction during World War II.

Collectivization also built resilience among the civilian population:

The experts were especially surprised by the Red Army’s up-to-date equipment… Russians met the German blitzkrieg tactic by two methods, both requiring superb morale. When the German tanks broke through, Russian infantry would form again between the tanks and their supporting German infantry… The Germans found no “soft civilian rear.” They encountered collective farmers, organized as guerrillas and coordinated with the regular Russian army.

– Anna Louise Strong. (1956). The Stalin Era

Conclusion: A Tragedy, Not Genocide

While there is no doubt that the Soviet government mishandled the famine, leading to tragic and widespread suffering, evidence does not support the conclusion that the famine was an act of genocide. The conditions leading to the famine were driven by a mix of environmental crises, poor policies, and sabotage—not by a deliberate attempt to wipe out the Ukrainian population. The Holodomor narrative has been shaped over decades by external propaganda efforts and nationalist revisionism, but a balanced view reveals a broader Soviet tragedy, not an ethnic genocide.

Sources: https://voidami.wordpress.com/2024/09/08/the-holodomor/

[litheammunition]

This is a good example of the bias often displayed by the American commentariat. As one British counterpart put it:

Those in the US, particularly towards the right, seem more than willing to believe absolutely any conspiracy theory about the UK. Elon Musk is currently actively promoting false headlines and spreading the idea that the UK is now under communist rule because we have finally elected a centrist Prime Minister after over a decade drifting further right.

When we appear on Fox News, and when I encounter Republicans on here, there is this view that the UK outside London is a third world country full of 'no go' areas for white people where Sharia Law is supreme and where 1984 has been fully realised with no freedom of speech and a licence needed to leave the house and you can't speak your mind without being sent to the gulag.

The UK is currently a country with many problems. As noted, we have recently come out of a period of awful, incompetent governance, with demagogues at the helm focusing on stoking similar sort of culture war nonsense rather than investing in struggling public services and infrastructure. They brought about poverty through their own ideological austerity, then blamed migrants and the EU for all our problems to win an election, and when the problems remained they just turned up the vitriol to desperately cling on to those voters.

There's a lot of rebuilding to be done. A lot of hatred to be washed away, divisions to be healed, and real work to be picked up which had been neglected in favour of that sort of right-wing populism. But the problems we have are not the same as the rumours spread overseas, where the US's own right wing populists are loathe to blame their cousins here and instead want to repeat the same playbook, which can begin by blaming our problems on migrants and socialists all over again.

There is an inability to recognise those similarities, or areas where the US, always operating on a greater scale, has the same problems worse. Yes, there were far-right riots in the UK, unhappy that the government no longer reflected their prejudices, and using the murder of three children by a British-born, Christian psychopath - through the same sort of threads of disinformation - as an excuse to scapegoat Muslims and immigrants.

We certainly have a lot to learn. The UK seemed to lose its collective mind over those murders, and for what? In a grown-up country like the United States, whole classes of children are murdered by psychopaths all of the time, and nobody seems to react at all. In fact, US lawmakers have wisely seen fit to balance the scales. In their country, a toddler shoots somebody almost every week. If only our infants had guns, perhaps this could have been avoided.

The sort of nationwide unrest seen in the UK recently hasn't been seen in the US since... earlier this year, when hundreds of college students were arrested for their protests around Gaza. But civil disorder is an American tradition. They have had widescale racial unrest every year since 2020, with rioting, deaths, curfews in over 200 cities, the National Guard mobilised in most states. Much bigger than happened in the UK. But different, of course.

Noah is right that rioting by the American far right is rare. They haven't had it in decades. In fact, most of the rioting there is done by anti-racists, reacting to the racially motivated murders of innocent men by the police. This only happens every year, but there is a clear distinction here. In America, it is the anti-racists rather than the racists who are unhappy. This proves that they are the more progressive country. In America, they prevent attacks on police by far right thugs by wisely ensuring that they're all on the same side.

Except... well, I watched the Trump trial on the news, and, in discussing those college protests. Trump mentioned Charlottesville. That jogged my perhaps. Perhaps this is a conversion point, different measurements being used in the US, but I seem to remember those riots being slightly less than a century ago. Or perhaps Noah agrees with Trump that the anti-immigrant chants, things like 'you/Jews will not replace us', were 'nothing' and 'a little peanut', and therefore not worth counting.

Except... well, seeing Trump on trial made me think about the Capitol riots a few years later. Again, I'm not sure that 2021 was 'centuries' ago, but perhaps the far-right protestors' attempt to overturn their own government was not sufficiently 'anti-immigrant' to count. Of course, the UK hasn't seen anything like that for centuries, but who's the say which form of far-right protest is worse.

Then there's the fall-out, that British 1984 police state in action, 'throwing people in prison for tweets' - dreadfully dystopian compared to the land of the free, where the police merely shoot you on sight. In the UK, detectives are now arresting people for the mere crime of inciting far-right rioting online, if you can imagine that. In sensible America, a country which respects individual freedom, they would simply forgive such a person, and half the country would proceed to elect them president.

[nightmare-grass]

Signs of the Apocalypse

As it pertains to The Magnus Archives

- The Lonely: the eradication of third places, the rising costs of nonessential services and recreational activities, the stagnant wages and rampant poverty forcing people to work and stay home, the way every piece of news about the suffering of our fellow man is too overwhelming and we shut down, shutting out the suffering and the people with it

- The Spiral: the rise of AI generated content mimicking human creations and human faces, the companies overwhelmingly turning to AI so they don’t have to pay real people for real work, the spread of misinformation and disinformation at rapid pace across the internet

- The Slaughter: the increasingly extremist right wing policies taking over governments across the world, violently suppressing any differences or dissent, inspiring acts of violence against the oppressed

- The Eye: increased prevalence of data collection and AI surveillance, government surveillance, targeted advertising, increasing amount of social media posts documenting the private lives of strangers and the lack of social awareness for what’s right and wrong

- The Buried: the widening wealth inequality gap, the unrelenting pressure on employees to perform when understaffed and underpayed, the humanitarian disasters that arise from global warming leaving people trapped in rubble, drowned, the mass graves

- The Corruption: the lingering effects of the Coronavirus pandemic, the Antivax movement, the resurgence of diseases, the price gouging of life saving medicine, we still haven’t cured cancer

- The Desolation: the bombings in Palestine, the destruction of Ukrainian civilian areas by Russian forces, the rampant forest fires and brush fires

- The Vast: the increasingly worrying trend of billionaires focusing on space travel while everyone else knows they’ll be left behind if they can’t afford the ticket, the fear of what may be lurking out there, the fear of everything that could go wrong, malfunction, fall apart like a Boeing plane

- The Web: the overexposure of advertising, the worry that your life is no longer your own as you live only to work, make money, buy products to get by, then work some more

- The Extinction: the way companies and governments willfully ignore global warming, the way they let catastrophic wars continue, and they let the people suffer from it

- The Stranger: AI tools taking real peoples faces, voices, and creations, only to repurpose them into mashed up semblances of whatever a user indicates they want to see

- Currently can’t find much evidence of The Dark, The Hunt, or The Flesh in our modern world but having so many of the entities at play at once is still concerning.

[thoughtlessarse]

The resurgence of far-right violence in the UK is in part due to Elon Musk’s decision to allow figures such as Tommy Robinson back on to the social media platform X, researchers say. Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, and those of his ilk are not leaders in the traditional sense and the far right has no central organisation capable of directing the disorder and violence that has been seen, experts say. Jacob Davey, director of policy and research at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), said: “People have been naming the EDL [English Defence League] as key figures when the EDL actually has ceased to function as a movement.” The UK, like other parts of the world, now has “a much more decentralised extreme-right movement,” he said. “There have been known figureheads at protests – including some avowed neo-Nazis – but there’s also this loose network that includes ­concerned local citizens and football hooligans. “All of these people are tied together by these loose online networks, ­activated by deeply cynical influences – many outside the country – and galvanised by viral online disinformation from unknown and untrustworthy sources.” Instead, Robinson, who is believed to have left the country earlier last week before a legal case, and other figures act as “weathermakers”, according to Joe Mulhall, director of research at Hope Not Hate, the anti-fascism organisation. They inspire people to take ad hoc local action, or spread their own misleading or false videos online about issues including migrant boats and child grooming gangs. The killings of three young girls in Southport last week was the spark for continuing violence, fuelled by false claims that the perpetrator was a 17-year-old asylum seeker called “Ali al-Shakati” who had arrived on a boat last year.

continue reading

[mariacallous]

“Now, how long will this take? The Ukrainians behave like charlatans and we continue to pay,” reads a quote in French next to a picture of Taylor Swift on what looks like a promotional poster for an upcoming tour. “That is not right.”

“Every time the Ukrainians get money, everything goes wrong,” reads another quote in German next to a picture of Selena Gomez on what appears to be a page taken from a fashion magazine.

"It's just disappointing how the Ukrainians use our help,” a quote, also in German, reads next to a picture of Kim Kardashian speaking on stage. “Someone needs to stop this, seriously."

Though the images make it look like these quotes were said by Swift, Gomez, and Kardashian, they weren’t. They were the product of a pro-Russian network of fake Facebook and X accounts that created and disseminated an ad campaign suggesting that some of the most famous people in the world back Russia and detest Ukraine. Among the celebrities included are Beyoncé, Oprah, Gigi Hadid, Lady Gaga, Jennifer Lopez, Justin Bieber, Shakira, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Cristiano Ronaldo. “Supporting Ukrainians is unacceptable,” reads a quote next to a photo of Oprah. “Their actions destroy lives and societies.”

The disinformation campaign, which was launched in November, reached at least 7.6 million people on Facebook alone, according to a database of the ads reviewed by WIRED and collected by Reset, a nonprofit that provides grants to those tackling disinformation. It’s still in progress, and two separate groups of disinformation researchers believe the campaign is run by a notorious Russian influence operation dubbed Doppelganger that has in the past been linked to the Kremlin. New information shared exclusively with WIRED suggests the campaign has links to Russia’s GRU military spy agency.

At the beginning of November, researchers at Reset discovered what they described as a “blitz campaign” by two networks of fake Facebook pages. Over the course of a week, the researchers saw at least 560 Facebook ads that feature images of celebrities alongside pro-Russian and anti-Ukrainian quotes. While some of the ads reached only thousands of users, others spread far more widely. One featuring Cristiano Ronaldo reached over 115,000 people before it was deactivated. Alongside the image of Ronaldo was the quote “It's frustrating to see how the Ukrainians use our aid. Someone needs to stop this, seriously.”

Researchers at Reset believe that the campaign “exploits loopholes in Facebook’s ad verification and content moderation systems to foster hostility against Ukrainians and undermine EU support for Kyiv.” Including fake quotes from celebrities within images makes it harder for Facebook to spot a coordinated campaign, they added. The campaign, which specifically targeted people in France and Germany, also removed any links or additional text in the ads, making it harder for Meta to track it.

Doppelganger has been actively spreading disinformation on both Facebook and X for some time. The organization was unmasked in September 2022 by EU DisinfoLab, a nonprofit working to combat disinformation against the EU, but it had been operating since at least May 2022. The group used clones of media websites, including The Guardian and Bild, to spread disinformation, filling the fake sites with articles, videos, and polls designed to push pro-Kremlin talking points about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Facebook first announced action against Doppelganger in September 2022, and said it was removing pages and accounts associated with the campaign.

In June 2023, another campaign targeting major French websites including Le Parisien, 20 Minutes, Le Monde, and Le Figaro was exposed by the French government. “French Minister supports the murder of Russian soldiers in Ukraine,” read one fake headline on a page that looked like Le Monde during that campaign.

Despite being repeatedly found out, the operators of Doppelganger have managed to continue their work: They also created fake versions of Fox News and other news websites to seed chaos and confusion during the Israel-Hamas war.

While Doppelganger campaigns in the past have been linked to the Kremlin in some media reports, new information from researchers tracking the disinformation campaign shows a link to Russia’s GRU.

A network of bot accounts on X, which in the past have been used to push Doppelganger’s fake websites, has also been used to push people to websites with direct links to Russia’s military spy agency. “Doppelganger bots promoted two sites recently, which both have strong connections to GRU,” researchers at Antibot4Navalny, a Russian anti-disinformation research group that has been closely tracking Doppelganger activity on X, tell WIRED. The researchers did not want to be identified due to security concerns.

The first site promoted by the Doppelganger bots was ObservateurContinental.fr. The Whois data, a public record of information related to the registration of a website, for this site shows that it is connected to InfoRos, a news agency previously linked to the GRU that operates hundreds of websites to push Kremlin propaganda. InfoRos was first reported to be a front organization for GRU Unit 54777 by The Washington Post in 2018. At the time, the group was said to have been active as far back as 2014 to spread disinformation about Russia’s annexation of Crimea.

The second site pushed by Doppelganger bots targeted Germans. In October 2022, an investigation by the German newspaper Die Welt found that the author of content on the EuroBRICS site was being paid directly by InfoRos, which is registered as the operator of the EuroBRICs website by the German domain registrar.

Many of the same images from Doppelganger’s campaign, along with others targeting an English-speaking audience, were also shared on X by the same network of bots that have previously shared links to the Doppelganger campaigns.

“We collected a whopping 75-plus fake quotes by celebrities from the US and EU, all massively posted recently by bots of Doppelganger, the pro-Kremlin influence campaign,” one of the researchers at Antibot4Navalny tells WIRED.

The campaign on X, which coincided with the Facebook campaign, used over 10,000 bot accounts, according to the researchers. In the space of one eight-hour period, the bots posted over 27,000 messages. At one point, the bot accounts were posting 120 messages every minute.

The posts on X are identical to those posted as ads on Facebook identified by Reset, except that some of these posts were in English. The X campaign also featured mocked-up versions of celebrities’ verified Instagram accounts, making it seem as if screenshots of celebrity Instagram accounts, using similar anti-Ukraine quotes, were being shared.

X did not respond to a request for comment from WIRED about the Doppelganger campaign. Since Elon Musk took control of the platform in October 2022, he has eliminated most of the company’s trust and safety team, and disinformation has flourished on the site, especially around breaking news events like the recent Israel-Hamas war.

One of Reset’s researchers, who did not want to be identified to protect their privacy, tells WIRED that, in recent days, researchers have seen Doppelganger’s celebrity-based campaign evolve. Some ads on Facebook now, like the ones on X, feature screenshots that appear to show verified Instagram accounts of the same celebrities, adding a further layer of authenticity to the campaign. In one case, a screenshot of a fake Instagram post from the entrepreneur Richard Branson suggests that he believes America was behind the Nord Stream explosion.

The researcher also found video ads that feature real footage of celebrities with fake audio dubbed over the top, which they say have been created with text-to-speech apps. The researchers at Reset were unable to identify which app was being used to automate the creation of the videos. One example reviewed by WIRED showed footage of German filmmaker Wim Wenders speaking in English about his own films, dubbed to make it appear as if he was speaking in French about how “the Ukrainians are ruined.” The ad was posted to Facebook on November 25 and was seen by up to 3,000 people before it was removed for failing to have the “required disclaimer,” according to Facebook’s ad library.

While Facebook has taken down the majority of the pages, some of them remain active, and the campaign shows glaring gaps in Meta’s ability to deal with disinformation on this scale.

Meta declined to respond on the record to WIRED’s request for comment about the campaign and the network of fake accounts created to disseminate the false ads. In a report from August, however, Meta acknowledged that Doppelganger was the “largest and most aggressively persistent covert influence operation from Russia that we’ve seen since 2017.”

The automated creation of accounts on Facebook is a well-known problem, and Meta has deployed a variety of artificial intelligence systems to combat efforts to mass-create fake pages and accounts. By its own admission, Facebook deletes millions, and sometimes billions, of fake pages every quarter, sometimes within minutes of their creation. Meta claims that around 5 percent of its monthly average users are fake, but outside experts say that figure is substantially higher.

While the Doppelganger group ran the campaign, the fake Facebook pages it used were purchased from an agency that specializes in creating massive networks of inauthentic pages on Facebook, according to Reset. They are still investigating who created these initial networks, but the researchers say this campaign was pushed out by two separate networks they identified containing 52,000 and 25,000 pages respectively. In October, Reset published a report identifying even larger networks of inauthentic Facebook pages, including one that had over 340,000 inauthentic pages. Despite having been identified publicly, these networks are still operating today.

With a number of major elections taking place in 2024, experts are again concerned about Meta’s ability to reign in disinformation.

“Meta’s sloppy product safety is a security liability for both Europe and the US as we approach next year’s elections,” Felix Kartte, EU director at Reset claims to WIRED. “Threat actors will continue exploiting loopholes in Facebook’s advertising systems to target deceptive and inflammatory content at millions of voters in the world’s biggest democracies.”

[amxrany]

From the River to the Sea: Palestine Will Be Free

I know I'm not as active as I used to be in the past, but I want to use my voice to tell people to stand with Palestine. What is currently happening to them is the denial of human rights and a genocide still going on which is done by Israel. Lives have been lost and people still refuse to open their eyes that this problem, can lead to so many more.

What I am simply asking of you is to boost the voices of the victims, and treat them as humans not a statistic. If you cannot donate money to charities, there are still plenty of ways that we can help them.

Here are some of them:

Boycott companies who support Israel, such as not buying from them (the post included explains why trying to boycott all companies at once is not possible but if we focus on some then there will be more of a significant impact)

2. Repost anything that will help strengthen the voices of Palestinian people

3. When sharing news, make sure to check your sources to prevent the spread of misinformation and disinformation, because it will spread fast

4. DO NOT TREAT THIS AS A TREND, DO NOT BE A PERFORMATIVE ACTIVIST (like clogging up the tag #freepalestine with things not related to the situation), what Palestine needs is ongoing support from people who truly care; not support that will just last for a couple of hours from people who are looking for clout

5. DO NOT GUILT TRIP PEOPLE INTO SUPPORTING PALESTINE, it will just scare them and cause them to blindly support sources that possibly spread misinformation

6. You can also reblog/retweet the art made by artists all around the world who show their support for Palestine, as it expresses their sorrow and empathy about the situation

From our own little ways, what we are doing is strengthening their voices through various means such as the internet, I will also provide a link to websites/organizations where you can help aid Palestine; if you can do it, then go do it.

But I want to end this post the same way I started it:

From the River to the Sea: Palestine Will Be Free