#russian propaganda debunking

[michael-stadnik]

How russian state-TV lies, to downplay the destruction they caused by destroying the Khakovka dam.

[hellyeahheroes]

Why Do We Call the War in Ukraine Unprovoked? Debunking Russian Claims by Kings and Generals

[communist-ojou-sama]

Like, this may come as a shock to people like Tumblr liberals who are totally stuck in the Western anglophone neoliberal ideology echo-chamber but like, outside of the west, out there where the majority of the worlds people live, Kwame Nkrumah's thought is taken more seriously than Milton Friedman's. So why will left liberals engage with Friedman's thought, even if only to debunk it, but not engage at all with Nkrumah's writings on neocolonialism, and just write it off?

There's a common charge leveled by supposedly "open-minded" liberals toward anti-imperialists, that we just 'blindly' support any force that's contravailing US the US on a regional or global scale, but how am I supposed to take this seriously as anything but projection?

We anti-imperialists often make specific, verifiable claims about happenings in global geopol, such as that the so-called "Free Syrian Army" consisted mostly of salafi jihadists allowed into Syria through their northern border with Turkey, and that it doesn't make sense that a civil war could simply Materialize in a country like Syria which right before the war started had one of the lowest ratios of guns to people in the world, or that the Maidan coup regime that swept into power in Kiev in 2014 was heavily infiltrated with fascists, and would not have been able to consolidate power without the instrumentalisation of fascist gangs and paramilitary organizations.

The liberal response to these specific claims, then, is to point to reports from corporate media with every incentive to lie, themselves doing no independent investigation but instead parroting verbatim the word of the State Department as fact, and dismissing all independent media investigations out of hand with no further thought.

In a situation such as this, can that response really be considered "open-minded"? It seems that time and time again intellectual rigor is reserved for discussions of technocratic tinkering within the west's iron curtain, and not the lives of people outside of it.

There's plenty of brain-juice to be expended on justifying why the US economy is actually in good shape and the people saying they're struggling more than before are just stupid, but when it comes to considering why African heads of state choose the China Development Bank over the IMF as an economic partner or Russia over the NATO states as security partners, these leaders of millions are dismissively written off as histrionically anti-Western, paranoid, and too mentally weak to see through Russian and Chinese propaganda. Is it this really a 'rational' way to look at the world?

Personally, I think not.

[everything-changed-me]

I dont think anything related to politics and current state of the world has ever enraged and disgusted me more than seeing pro-palestine/marxists/communists/leftist supporters be this extremely hypocritical and evil when it comes to Ukraine. Not only that entire breakout of russian invasion of Ukraine was followed by "what about Palestine/Syria/Afghanistan/Iraq" comments on every video/photo of a destroyed Ukrainian home but also even after more than 2 years of russian invasion and what experts call most brutal war since WW2, this same group of people is constantly minimizing and relativizing tragedy and injustice to Ukraine by lowering number of civilian casualities, holding dearly onto chunks of russian propaganda that have already been debunked countless times, taking announcements of Ukrainian officials out of context or simply excusing oppression of Ukrainians by something unrelated (like supposed support of Ukraine for Israel???). All that while screaming about "double standards" or "Western hypocrisy". Why are Ukrainians who support Israel called out more frequently and harshly than Palestinians who support Russia? What makes Palestine, Congo, Sudan, Syria etc more deserving of sympathy and support than Ukraine? Why are Azovstal defenders called nazis while Hamas is praised as freedom fighters? Why is russian oppression of Ukrainians and erasion of Ukrainian identity that lasted for centuries overlooked? I seriously dont understand psychology behind such reasoning.

[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.”

[ohsalome]

In the aftermath of Prigozhin’s media empire collapse, former employees spoke out about the dark tactics employed, including hiring individuals to portray “victims of Ukrainian Armed Forces” in staged reports that underpinned Russia’s fake pretext for the full-scale invasion of Ukraine — its Big Lie about alleged “genocide in Donbas.”

Following the unsuccessful mutiny of the Wagner Private Military Company, its financier Evgeny Prigozhin had closed down his media empire, including the infamous troll factory. This included Prigozhin’s media holding “Patriot” and such media outlets as RIA FAN, Politics Today, Economics Today, Nevskiye Novosti, and Narodniye Novosti.

Employees of the Prigozhin media were long unable to disclose the state of affairs in the editorial offices, as they were all forced to sign non-disclosure agreements. However, now, they speak. Russian media website Bumaga interviewed several former employees of “Patriot,” who revealed unknown details about its operation and propaganda tactics.

Notably, one RIA FAN journalist who worked with military coverage from Donbas told that the source files of the interview often contained off-screen instructions for the heroes of the reports, who were hired people coached by an off-camera operator who offered advice on how to say their pre-memorized lines more realistically (and with more propaganda effect):

“Most of the people who were portrayed in such stories as ‘victims’ of the Armed Forces of Ukraine were stand-ins, hired individuals. These characters repeated pre-memorized lines to themselves, trying to ‘squeeze out a tear.’ They were also instructed off-camera by the operator to speak ‘slower’ or to ‘repeat this moment again’,” told the former employee of RIA FAN.

This admission is crucial, as it offers more proof of how Russia fabricated its 9-year-long propaganda narrative about the Ukrainian “Nazis” deliberately attacking the “people of Donbas.”

Other famous debunked examples of this narrative included a story that state TV channel Pervyi Kanal ran on 12 July 2014, showing an “interview” with a woman who claimed to have witnessed the crucifixion of a three-year child by Ukrainian nationalists. However, bloggers and journalists from Ukraine and Russia could quickly prove that the woman was an actor and the story was a hoax.

Another well-known debunked “Donbas genocide” propaganda case happened in April 2015. The Russian TV channel NTV claimed that a ten-year-old girl had been killed by Ukrainian government forces in eastern Ukraine, echoing the disinformation story about the crucified boy from the year before. A BBC reporter working on the ground in the conflict managed to prove that also this story was a hoax. (For more examples of Russian propaganda that demonizes Ukrainians, check out our article A guide to Russian propaganda. Part 1: Propaganda prepares Russia for war).

Since Russia first invaded Ukraine in 2014 and occupied part of eastern Ukraine’s Donbas, Russian propaganda has meticulously demonized Ukraine and the Ukrainian Army. One of the grand narratives of its propaganda claimed that the Ukrainian forces attempting to liberate their lands from the Russian invaders were actually “punishing” the Ukrainians in occupied Donbas for their alleged “choice” to be with Russia, which is how Russia called its fake “referenda” that led to the creation of two puppet republics, the Luhansk and Donetsk “People’s Republics.” The revelation from Prigozhin’s media empire’s employees reveals how this narrative was forged, one fake report played by actors after the other.

The final result was the creation of Russia’s Big Lie, the alleged “Donbas genocide,” which Putin used to launch an invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022.

Bumaga’s material revealed other fascinating details about the operations of Prigozhin’s media empire.

Former “Patriot” employees revealed the security checks and the workplace atmosphere to Bumaga anonymously. According to a former employee, each media was allocated a floor, and smaller editorials sat together.

“They did not check me on a polygraph, but I heard stories from newcomers. They were taken to a room where security service specialists worked with them and asked questions,” said the source.

These questions, asked during a “lie detector” test, intended to weed out any drug addicts or Russian opposition sympathizers, especially fans of Alexei Navalny, another source told Bumaga.

Moreover, the media empire had extensive surveillance measures in place. An anonymous source disclosed that they “followed electronic passes, cameras, and all records from computer screens were broadcast to the security service.” When Patriot was just opened, a special department existed in the holding that was engaged in custom materials about the opposition.

Two former employees of the Patriot holding, in a conversation with Bumaga, claimed that everyone at the “troll factory” knew that the goal of Evgeny Prigozhin’s media was to create informational noise to “clog the agenda.”

“Information noise was generated along with the implementation of Prigozhin’s interests. While some [journalists] distracted people with the problems of other countries, with these reports from Africa and so on, with our local celebrities and reviews of dumb movies, others, on the front lines, were brainwashing people with materials from the ‘Special Operation Zone‘,” a former journalist of RIA FAN told, referring to Russia’s codename for its invasion of Ukraine, where Prigozhin’s Wagner PMC played a key role.

Now, the former employees of Prigozhin’s once-famed “troll factory,” who sowed disinformation in Russia and abroad, are left without a job. Luckily for them, prominent Russian media managers are stepping in to give them decent work in top Russian outlets:

“Dmitry Sherikh, the head of the St. Petersburg branch of the Russian Union of Journalists, has volunteered to help the employees of the ‘Troll Factory’ find jobs: ‘The Russian Union of Journalists will, whenever possible, appeal to the heads of other media outlets to help find employment for our dismissed colleagues, as well as provide other information support.’ The chief editor of ‘Moskovsky Komsomolets in Petersburg,’ Timofey Shabarshin, who is also the former head of ‘Nevsky News’ (up until 2021), also agreed to welcome the colleagues. Vladimir Yagudaev [an SMM manager from Prigozhin’s media empire who talked with Bumaga – Ed.] does not know if the Union of Journalists helped his former colleagues, but he notes: ‘Certain chief editors have begun to hire the most interesting employees into St. Petersburg publications. However, this is a limited contingent.'”

Located near St. Petersburg, Prigozhin’s troll factory, also known as Internet Research Agency (IRA), was one of the more-studied elements of the Russian propaganda machine. To achieve its goals, the troll factory employed fake accounts registered on major social networks, online media sites, and video hosting services. It expanded threefold in 2018. The troll factory’s employees were given messages they should push in social media and online debates in what a US indictment called “activities as a strategic communications campaign with an emphasis on target group awareness.”

[the-garbanzo-annex-jr]

by Seth Mandel

Christiane Amanpour had a problem, and in mid-February CNN talker decided to confront her network’s leadership about it. Her frustration boiled down to the fact that CNN was carefully running its Gaza coverage through its Jerusalem bureau’s fact checkers, which has always included Arab staff based outside of Israel as well. The stakes were too high, and the famous Hamas censorship and propaganda networks too powerful, for CNN to do what many newspapers were doing: run with copy straight from Hamas to print.

The results had thus far been undeniable: CNN anchors like Jake Tapper, Bianna Golodryga, and Abby Phillip were turning in thoughtful, deeply considered segments while holding politicians’ feet to the fire. Because of the plain facts of the war, Hamas’s depraved modus operandi was exposed for all to see. That’s when Amanpour went to management to demand a change.

Well, it’s pretty clear Amanpour’s strongarming worked. Here she is this week leading a sloppy segment playing up an already-debunked piece of Hamas propaganda. Anyone can get fooled by a video, of course—but that was the point of the fact checkers so reviled by Amanpour. This particular hoax was easy to spot: The “mass grave” in Khan Younis—to which Amanpour devotes a “difficult to watch” segment—was dug by Palestinians. After watching the story get notice from other journalists and even members of Congress, it became clear what this was: a real, live, actual disinformation campaign.

Perfect timing, then, for the return of Nina Jankowicz. Jankowicz, you’ll remember, was briefly put at the helm of a Biden administration censorship project dressed up as a “disinformation” board. It immediately became clear that this was the worst idea on the planet: Jankowicz had actually been fooled by disinformation campaigns and even arguably joined one—the attempt by national-security officials to declare Hunter Biden’s very real laptop a Russian trick. As Robby Soave points out, this particular story has had debilitating consequences for free speech and for the institutional legitimacy of national-security and intelligence officials: “Not only were so many so-called experts dead wrong about the Russian connection, they pursued all the wrong policies as a result. Vast efforts to pressure social media platforms to censor questionable content were what followed. Crackdowns by the FBI, DHS, and other law enforcement agencies on election-related information paved the way for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to crack down on coronavirus-related misinformation. This isn’t an insignificant or trivial issue that Jankowicz just happened to get wrong. It was emblematic of an entire approach to dealing with disputed facts—an approach pioneered by academics working in tandem with government agencies and directed at speech on social media.”

[darkmaga-retard]

Hillary Clinton took to radicalized faux journalist Rachel Maddow’s show one day after the second Trump assassination attempt to encourage violence against the former president. “The press needs to create a consistent narrative about how dangerous Trump is,” Clinton told Maddow. The Democrats are blatantly encouraging violence and dividing our nation.

Clinton took her statements a step further by suggesting that American citizens should be jailed for exercising their First Amendment right of free speech if their words happen to sympathize with Donald Trump. The Steele Dossier and Russian collusion hoaxes carefully crafted by Clinton have been long disproven, yet Clinton is relentless in attempting to revive that narrative. “There were Russians engaged in direct election interference and boosting Trump back in 2016, but I also think there are Americans who are engaged in this kind of propaganda, and whether they should be civilly or criminally charged would be something that would be a better deterrent,” Clinton said.

The only propaganda is the hate Clinton, and the Neocons are perpetually feeding the left-wing media to confuse the public. Harris also believes that those spreading “misinformation,” or anything that goes against the leftist agenda, should be silenced and punished. Not only do they hate Donald Trump, but these people vehemently hate his supporters.

The rhetoric promoted by the left is causing danger, not only to Trump but toward half of the population who holds conservative views. The Trump-Vance campaign released a newsletter earlier in the week listing over 50 examples of Democrats inciting violence and encouraging assassination attempts. Their narrative insists that MAGA Republicans are the largest threat to our democracy. Donald Trump is the Adolf Hitler of our generation and must be stopped before he destroys civilization. “It’s time to put Trump in a bullseye,” President Joe Biden blatantly said.

We even saw familiar long-debunked lies brought up during the Harris and Trump debate from the Nazi “very fine people” fable to the “bloodbath” debacle. The fraudulent journalists at ABC should have asked Kamala Harris if her party would be willing to quell the violence by behaving in a civil manner ahead of November. The media is encouraging and promoting a real “bloodbath” and tearing this nation apart.

[aristotels]

The fact that Hillary Clinton is still with us, writing think pieces and touring TV studios doing genocidal propaganda to keep mass killing civilians in Gaza is so incredibly repugnant, which she justifies by repeating debunked atrocity propaganda about Hamas masss raping women. The same Hillary Clinton who said to women and girls saying Biden’s physical behavior made them uncomfortable to “get over it”, the same Hillary Clinton who refuse to believe the women who accuse her husband of rape and sexual assault (just like the vast majority of Dems voters and liberal “feminists”) and rejects Bill Clinton-Brett Kavanaugh comparisons, the same Hillary Clinton who was slammed by child rape victim, Kathy Shelton, saying that she cannot forgive her for defending her rapist in court and how Clinton has yet to express sympathy for the plight she went through as a victim.

hillary is one of my absolutely most hated politicians lmfao. and people still have gal to say "its non-voters fault she didnt win!!!" like good that she didnt, the girl was willing to enter a new war w russia in 2016, i legit couldnt handle seeing all those memes and discourse back then. why should i prioritize yankee comfort over my own safety and safety of my fellow slavs. and unlike w ukraine, she was willing to start an actual USA-rus war, not "just" a proxy one.

she is a cunt, she is a vile and horrible person, and the fact anyone on this site could support her is wild to me.

p.s. btw biden was the same and this wouldve been easy for anyone to see if they pulled their heads out of their ass. i was going insane when the conflict was stewing and both ukrainian and russian officials were trying to negotiate peace while biden was coming out every day with "i have information russia will start war tomorrow at 00:00" and such bullshit (and it didnt fucking happen, not a single time, until it did, not without his help). in hindsight it was easy to see hes a genocidal maniac but it was also easy to see it from the first moment

[olena]

The firehose of falsehood, also known as firehosing, is a propaganda technique in which a large number of messages are broadcast rapidly, repetitively, and continuously over multiple channels (such as news and social media) without regard for truth or consistency. An outgrowth of Soviet propaganda techniques, the firehose of falsehood is a contemporary model for Russian propaganda under Russian President Vladimir Putin.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firehose_of_falsehood

(fuck that guy 🇺🇦🖕)

+

A big lie (German: große Lüge) is a gross distortion or misrepresentation of the truth primarily used as a political propaganda technique.

The German expression was first used by Adolf Hitler in his book Mein Kampf (1925) to describe how people could be induced to believe so colossal a lie because they would not believe that someone "could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously". Hitler claimed that the technique had been used by Jews to blame Germany's loss in World War I on German general Erich Ludendorff, who was a prominent nationalist political leader in the Weimar Republic.

According to historian Jeffrey Herf, the Nazis used the idea of the original big lie to turn sentiment against Jews and justify the Holocaust. Herf maintains that Nazi Germany's chief propagandist Joseph Goebbels and the Nazi Party actually used the big lie technique that they described – and that they used it to turn long-standing antisemitism in Europe into mass murder.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_lie

+

Brandolini's law, also known as the bullshit asymmetry principle, is an internet adage coined in 2013 by Alberto Brandolini, an Italian programmer, that emphasizes the effort of debunking misinformation, in comparison to the relative ease of creating it in the first place. The law states:

The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.

The rise of easy popularization of ideas through the internet has greatly increased the relevant examples, but the asymmetry principle itself has long been recognized.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law

+

The Gish gallop is a rhetorical technique in which a person in a debate attempts to overwhelm an opponent by abandoning formal debating principles, providing an excessive number of arguments with no regard for the accuracy or strength of those arguments and that are impossible to address adequately in the time allotted to the opponent. Gish galloping prioritizes the quantity of the galloper's arguments at the expense of their quality.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop

+

The Overton window is the range of policies politically acceptable to the mainstream population at a given time. It is also known as the window of discourse.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window

[grayheartart]

Democrat Lies: Media Shrugs and Stays Silent After Perpetuating "Russia Disinformation" Hoax for Years.

..."In 2020, CBS News’ Lesley Stahl literally laughed mockingly at then-President Donald Trump when he raised the Hunter Biden laptop and what it revealed about the Bidens."... ..."former Chief of Staff at the CIA and Department of Defense Jeremy Bash, who told MSNBC that the laptop “looked like Russian intelligence” and “walked like Russian intelligence.” He dismissed the relevance of the laptop before the election by declaring that “this effort by Rudy Giuliani and the New York Post and Steve Bannon to cook up supposed dirt on Joe Biden looks like a classic, Russian playbook disinformation campaign.” Bash, like others behind the conspiracy theory, was later given an intelligence position by Biden."... ..."CNN’s Alex Marquardt told viewers, “We do know it is a very active Russian campaign.”...

..."the Washington Post has continued to suggest that this reporting was accurate. One of the leading purveyors of this false story was the Post’s Philip Bump, who slammed the New York Post for its now proven Hunter Biden laptop story."...

..."In 2021, when media organizations were finally admitting that the laptop was authentic, Bump was still declaring that it was a “conspiracy theory.” Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, Bump continued to suggest that “the laptop was seeded by Russian intelligence.”... ..."Former CIA Director John Brennan, one of the 50 who signed the letter, also claimed that the laptop bore “the hallmarks of Russian disinformation.”... ..."James Clapper, a former director of National Intelligence and CNN analyst, said the laptop was “classic, textbook Soviet, Russian tradecraft at work.”... ..."Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, D-Ill., who told the media not to join Giuliani as a “vehicle for Russian disinformation.”... ..."Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., former chair of the House Intelligence Committee, insisted that the laptop was clearly “Kremlin propaganda.”... ..."This long-debunked claim was even recently repeated in Congress by Rep. Dan Goldman, D-N.Y., who claimed that the laptop could not be authenticated even though it was just authenticated and introduced in a federal prosecution."...

Every single Democrat in this post lied to your face for years about a laptop that belongs to a child raping, crack addict. The only reason they did this is to help Biden and his family from facing the consequences of their actions. Democrats happily lied to the general public and perpetuated a "Russian Disinformation" hoax for years to save face for Biden, a dementia riddled old man and garbage father.

[pretordh]

Transgender woman Sarah Ashton-Cirillo has become one of the spokespeople for the Defense Forces. In the Z-channels, there was fierce hate, but the MO believes that this is beneficial.

The journalist and former progressive political activist has been defending Ukraine since March 2022. She serves as a junior sergeant in the TRO of the Armed Forces of Ukraine and is a combat medic. She is injured," Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Malyar writes about the American woman.

Sarah runs her project "Russia hates the truth" and informs English speakers: she objectively covers the events of the Russian-Ukrainian war, debunks fakes and propaganda.

[sucrecube9]

Hey i hate sharing links from instagram reels cus it's annoying, but I thought this one was real important. They have a booklet about debunking zionist propaganda in a bunch of languages like english, arabic, french, and some others. Here's the reel talking about it:

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Shift Accounting LLC (@shiftaccountingllc)

And here's a direct link to where you can download the pdf:

[warsofasoiaf]

American generals wouldn't like what they see. They realize that Sergey Surovikin is competent and has enough authority to impose his views on Vladimir Putin, even when those come with political cost. This would mean that Vladimir Putin wouldn't let matters of personal prestige to get in way of operations anymore. With an effective and free... [1-6]

General to act against them, they know his predecessors' mistakes won't get repeated. The campaign to destroy Ukrainian infrastructures is rapidly progressing with 40% of Ukrainian energy system getting destroyed or neutralized within a month. Vladimir Putin initially wanted to spare Ukraine and its people to focus on Kiev's oppressive government and its neo-nazi units... [2-6]

While Sergey Surovikin has imposed a war of annihilation, which will impose the true cost on the population of its blindly support for Kiev. Yesterday, Mark Milley suddenly appeared to talk of peace and the impossibility for both sides to win on the ground - These statements are intended to save time. Despite CIA's intense propaganda, Kiev is... [3-6]

Axed on the ground. For one Russian soldier lost, Kiev sacrifices seven. Currently, Kiev has eight hundred thousand soldiers on the front and couldn't hope to mobilize more. With such a rate of destruction of troops, this would become impossible to replace experienced officers and soldiers. The average quality of forces is inexorably declining, weakening the front... [4-6]

And opening the way to increasingly bloody offensives. Also, millions of Ukrainians have already fled. With the destruction of the energy system, many more millions will follow. Without a break, Kievan forces will face a severe crisis in the front and in the rear with the likelihood of significant ground losses. The peace talks mentioned by American officials... [5-6]

Are based on this reality and aim to temporize for replenishing Kiev's reserves. Washington's goal is to exhaust Moscow but what happens is its own pawn's exhaustion. Other countries will soon have to be thrown into the conflict against Moscow in a more frontal way, as the president of France implied in yesterday's speech. [6-6]

Look here everyone, this is unrefined cope, nearly fresh from the fields. The Kherson retreat has probably prompted a strategic release even of unprocessed cope. But you know what, I feel like being nice today, so let's debunk these points, one by one.

"They realize that Sergey Surovikin is competent."

That's debatable. The quotes about his competence have always stressed that he is considered competent by the standards of the Russian army. Before his appointment as supreme commander, he was primarily in charge of the Southern Grouping of Forces, which while it succeeded in taking Kherson, completely failed in its attack toward Mykolaiv and repeatedly left its air fleet vulnerable to bombardment on the ground. Kherson has been abandoned by the Russian Army, the defense of which fell primarily on Surovikin's command.

Moreover, his military career and overall strategy (mass bombing of civilian infrastructure) isn't really going to help him well. Terror bombing has so far been unable to generate calls for surrender within Ukraine. Russia is running low of precision-guided munitions and doesn't have the industrial base or components to make more at scale. Russia made significant strategic errors in overwhelmingly using Iskander and Kalibr missiles in an attempt to demonstrate their strike capability to Western observers in an attempt to prove their legitimacy. Without these, precision strikes to starve Ukrainian armies of their supplies simply will not be very effective - unguided munitions are going to wear out artillery tubes and Russian ALCM's like the Killjoy are simply too prone to failure and too inaccurate to do the job.

"40% of Ukrainian energy system getting destroyed or neutralized within a month"

This is an incorrect interpretation of the estimates, which I've found here. The actual report says that 35-40% have suffered damage or destruction, not destruction or neutralization.

"Vladimir Putin initially wanted to spare Ukraine and its people to focus on Kiev's oppressive government and its neo-nazi units..."

This is a common refrain among apologists for Russia's war. It's a transparent lie, an attempt to tie this war to the Great Patriotic War and the Soviet fight against the Nazis.

The supposed "oppression" of the Ukrainian government, either in Crimea or the Donbas, is laughably easy to disprove. The "Crimean protest" to join Russia as they were an ethnically Russian province was wholly manufactured by Russia only after they invaded, as evidenced by tapes with Glazyev, Putin's advisor, discussing it. Even as late as 2014, Crimea, the most ethnically Russian province in Ukraine, did not have majority support for uniting Ukraine and Russia into a single state, either through annexation or the Union State model that exists in Belarus. Since this sentiment didn't exist naturally, Russia used irregular forces (the "Little Green Men") to create a fictitious organic separatist movement. As early as April 2014, Putin admitted that there were Russian military operatives in Ukraine. These irregulars, however, were unable to stop the plundered and ineffective Ukrainian army from attacking their positions, and so in August the Russians had sent in regular army forces to compel Kyiv to sue for peace (the Minsk Accords). So rather than this "shelling of ethnic Russians in the Donbas," this was a response to a deniable asset war initiated by Russia.

The far-right in Ukraine has actually suffered significantly in terms of popularity from its high-water mark in 2012, where far-right parties had ~10.4% representation in government. In 2014 that number had fallen to 6%, and then to 2% in 2019. So in terms of handling "Neo-Nazi" units, it seemed that Ukraine was actually doing just fine on its own marginalizing and eliminating the influence of the far-right in Ukraine. This is in stark contrast to Russia, which has significant far-right representation in the military such as the Russian Imperial Legion which openly espouses white supremacist and ethnic cleansing rhetoric, along with complaints from ethnic minorities in Russia who suffer from political repression and disproportionately make up members of the "mobiks" to spare ethnic Russians from dying on the front lines, just ask the Crimean Tatars or Dagestanis. The deputy chief of Wagner, Utkin, actually has for-real Nazi eagle tattoos on his collar. It's unsurprising, then, that Russia has turned to "de-Satanizing" Ukraine, these are clumsy, random ad hominem attacks to justify naked imperial aggression.

"While Sergey Surovikin has imposed a war of annihilation"

It's already been a war of annihilation - Mariupol suffered extensive damages and casualties, there have been numerous categorical atrocities such as those in Bucha. Russian military doctrine is cavalier with civilian casualties to begin with, in part due to terror being a weapon of military doctrine and in part due to poor accuracy of weapons systems due to shoddy design, and this has been evidently true since the Syrian campaign.

"Yesterday, Mark Milley suddenly appeared to talk of peace and the impossibility for both sides to win on the ground"

Re-read his statement. He says that "there has to be a mutual recognition that a military victory is probably, in the true sense of the word is maybe not achievable through military means" in order to "turn to other means" and seize "a window of opportunity for negotiation." He has not explicitly said that Ukraine cannot achieve victory on the ground, it's that in order for a peace conference, both sides must come to the conclusion that battle will not achieve their goals, similar to the response I made earlier.

"Despite CIA's intense propaganda, Kiev is...Axed on the ground."

Last I checked, it's Russians losing territory, not the Ukrainians, or did you not see the latest battle maps? And if what I'm reading from Russian Telegram is any indication, the Kherson retreat isn't going well.

"For one Russian soldier lost, Kiev sacrifices seven"

This one is particularly funny. Not even the Russians claim this high of a casualty count. According to Russia's own statements (which no honest observer believes), Russia has lost 10,065 troops among the VSRF, Wagner, and forces of the Luhansk and Donetsk DPR, while they claim 61,207 Ukrainian KIA, that’s six-to-one, not seven. 

"The average quality of forces is inexorably declining"

This doesn't seem to be the case actually. Ukraine is still capable of multi-theater operations and their largest operational constraint doesn't appear to be manpower or expertise, but materiel. You don't see calls for more volunteers or foreign fighters, but equipment. Contrast, Russia has severe problems with troop quality, including open-source reports of rampant drunkenness and disorder, and this is only getting worse with the arrival of the mobiks.

"Also, millions of Ukrainians have already fled."

According to most estimates, as many as one-ninth of Russians have fled to avoid conscription. Comparatively speaking, while there are Ukrainian refugees and IDP's, manpower does not appear to be the sustainment concern.

“Other countries will soon have to be thrown into the conflict against Moscow in a more frontal way, as the president of France implied in yesterday's speech.”

Macron is looking to strengthen the military and make an independent European one, that’s been a goal of his for a while (and a pipe dream). Tell me, who’s going to be thrown in there? Frankly speaking, the Russian army is so incompetent that it would probably lose a war against Poland and the Baltics.

So there you have it folks, we've got the full gamut from Surovikin becoming the next Steiner, out-and-out lies about casualty counts, and the good old-fashioned Ukraine Nazis myth. Have fun with it!

Thanks for the contribution, Vatnik. You just made my day with how hard you're trying to cope.

SomethingLikeALawyer, Hand of the King

[nerianasims]

So uh. You know that horrible stupid dangerous YouTube/TikTok channel, Five Minute Crafts? Turns out they're owned by a Russian company that also makes false history videos and Russian propaganda political ads. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvqa8dsBtno (Info starts at 13:20.)

I was not expecting to learn this while listening to a three-year old video debunking false online cleaning and cooking "hacks."

[mariacallous]

The winner of the 2024 US presidential election will confront complicated questions about whether the government is doing enough to protect the country from cyber threats. But one leading conservative group is sidestepping those questions and pushing to shrink the government’s main cyber agency, calling it a bastion of far-left tyranny.

Project 2025, a widely circulated playbook from the influential right-leaning Heritage Foundation, takes aim at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on several fronts, especially its efforts to reduce dangerous online misinformation. If former president Donald Trump wins the election and appoints officials who follow the playbook’s recommendations for CISA, the five-year-old agency could face an unprecedented crisis.

Trump has disavowed Project 2025—a 900-page document full of controversial proposals—but its authors have close ties to his former administration and his campaign, and many of its recommendations align with Trump’s agenda. If he wins a second term, Trump is likely to embrace Project 2025’s combative approach to CISA, whose director he fired for debunking his lies about the 2020 election. That makes the 2024 election an existential moment for CISA.

“If every recommendation in this proposal were accepted, this would significantly weaken CISA as an agency,” says Steve Kelly, a former special assistant to the president and senior director for cybersecurity and emerging technology at the National Security Council.

“It would essentially see CISA cease functioning as a principal element of cybersecurity,” says John Costello, a former chief of staff to the national cyber director at the White House. “It really takes out many of its central functions.”

Missing the Mark on Misinformation

No aspect of CISA’s work has sparked as much GOP ire as its efforts to combat online falsehoods destabilizing American society, and Project 2025’s most substantial recommendation for CISA concerns this work.

“Of the utmost urgency,” the plan says, “is immediately ending CISA’s counter-mis/disinformation efforts.”

During the 2020 election, amid conspiracy theories and hoaxes about Covid-19 and the presidential election, CISA flagged state and local officials’ concerns about online falsehoods to social media companies. This practice, dubbed “switchboarding,” outraged conservatives, who accused CISA of suppressing their speech. House Republicans produced a report on what they called “the weaponization” of the agency, two GOP-led states sued the government (the US Supreme Court dismissed the case), and CISA and its federal partners all but froze their conversations with social media firms.

“CISA has devolved into an unconstitutional censoring and election engineering apparatus of the political Left,” Project 2025 declares. After dismissing Russian interference in the 2016 election as a “dirty trick” by Hillary Clinton’s campaign (despite it being extensively documented, including in a lengthy bipartisan Senate report), Heritage’s policy proposal recommends that the military and the intelligence community take over the responsibility of combating foreign propaganda.

CISA and its defenders maintain that the agency never pressured tech companies to delete posts, but regardless, the agency’s current counterpropaganda operation is a shell of its former self. Talks with tech firms have resumed, but in the election space, the agency is now relying solely on its “Rumor vs. Reality” fact-checking page.

Cybersecurity experts say the government needs to be debunking harmful lies, especially those spread by foreign adversaries.

“There's a role for CISA in mis- and disinformation, but they'd be wise to keep it cabined and narrow,” says Kelly, who is now the chief strategy officer at the nonprofit Institute for Security and Technology.

Costello calls Project 2025’s proposal “deeply problematic.”

The report fails to acknowledge the seriousness of adversaries’ efforts to sow chaos in the US, according to Mark Montgomery, senior director of the Center on Cyber and Technology Innovation at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a conservative-leaning think tank.

The document “appears blind to the fact that Russia, China, and Iran are weaponizing social media networks to create a false narrative that weakens US national security,” Montgomery says.

Project 2025’s leaders did not respond to inquiries for this story. Ken Cuccinelli, a top Department of Homeland Security official in the Trump administration and the author of the report’s DHS chapter, declined an interview request.

Vague and Contradictory

Most of Project 2025’s proposals for CISA are difficult to decipher and reflect what experts say is a misunderstanding of the agency’s activities.

The plan envisions CISA helping local election officials “assess whether they have good cyber hygiene,” but it warns that “CISA should not be significantly involved closer to an election” and should not engage in any “messaging” work.

“It's unclear to me what a statement like that would mean,” says Kiersten Todt, a former chief of staff to CISA’s director, “because as the elections approach, the need to ensure the safety and security of those elections is even more urgent.”

Indeed, Costello says, the run-up to Election Day is “when misinformation [and] disinformation upticks the highest” and when it’s most important to debunk lies about things like polling places and voting times. “That's when [we’re] most vulnerable. And we saw that in 2016.”

Muzzling CISA during this crucial period, Costello says, “runs the risk of creating a bubble where Russia or China or any other nation-state threat actor could have a safe space for a massive disinformation campaign.”

If Trump wins and adopts this approach, Todt worries that CISA’s locally deployed election security advisers will be pressured not to offer help in a campaign’s closing stage. CISA’s empowerment of its field force is “one of the great achievements and successes of the past few years,” she says.

Project 2025 also vaguely decries what it characterizes as CISA’s overlap with other agencies. The report says CISA “should refrain from duplicating cybersecurity functions done elsewhere at the Department of Defense, FBI, National Security Agency, and US Secret Service,” but no cyber experts consulted by WIRED could figure out what that means.

If the idea is that the military, not CISA, should be defending critical infrastructure operators from hackers, that’s “a fundamental misreading of US law … about who's allowed to do what,” Costello says. “CISA helps facilitate things domestically that DoD can't touch and NSA can't touch.” That includes direct monitoring of intrusion-detection sensors on critical infrastructure networks.

If anything, the military has impinged on CISA’s territory—not the other way around—out of exasperation with the civilian agency’s constrained resources, says Montgomery, a retired Navy rear admiral.

“The Department of Defense would say, ‘We're having to do things that we think CISA should be doing,’” Montgomery says, which has meant “slowly creeping outside the base fence to make sure that electrical power grids, water systems, [and] telecom systems [near bases] are properly protected in case of a crisis.”

Department of Dubious Moves

Of all the CISA proposals in Project 2025’s plan, the most ambitious one is highly unlikely to succeed: moving the agency into the Department of Transportation as part of a broader initiative to dismantle DHS.

The recommendation reflects conservatives’ desire to shrink the overall size of government, but it may also suggest a belief that moving CISA would curtail its scope and make it “a little more manageable,” says Brandon Pugh, director of the cybersecurity and emerging threats team at the center-right think tank R Street Institute. Pugh says some Republicans believe the agency “went beyond its original mandate and [has] become too bloated.”

But this idea is a virtual nonstarter because the congressional committees with oversight of CISA won’t give up their power in a rapidly growing domain. “There's no way that would ever work,” Costello says.

Apart from being infeasible, the proposal would undermine CISA’s effectiveness.

Cybersecurity fits squarely into DHS’s homeland-security portfolio, so moving CISA into a department with a different mission “doesn't make a lot of sense” and “would undermine some of the organizational logic,” Kelly says. “I don't actually understand the rationale of that.”

DHS is also better-suited to facilitate the kind of cross-government collaboration that CISA relies on for its twin missions of protecting federal computer systems and helping companies and local governments defend themselves.

“Giving CISA to Department of Transportation would reduce the cybersecurity of our national critical infrastructure for some period of time,” Montgomery says, adding that Transportation is “one of the last places” he’d put CISA and calling the proposal “nonsensical.”

Still, observers say it might be worth reviewing the structure of DHS, which has steadily accumulated functions since its post-9/11 creation and is now considered something of a Frankenstein department. But that review has to be “well thought out,” Todt says. “Reorganization of government should never be taken lightly.”

Squandering a Moment

Even as Project 2025 appears to misunderstand some aspects of CISA’s mission and focus disproportionately on others, the document also misses opportunities to recommend meaningful reforms.

Congress has spent years waiting for CISA to complete a “force structure assessment” that would better define its mission and the resources and organization needed to accomplish it. But even beyond CISA, there are serious concerns that the government as a whole isn’t coordinating well on cyber issues.

Pugh says it’s worth examining whether the system is working well. “Do we need to take a harder look at who's responsible for different leadership aspects of cyber?”

For now, though, experts agree that Project 2025 misses the mark. The document, Montgomery says, is “full of little tantrums” and “shows a lack of understanding of how federal government works.”

Costello says it’s “embarrassing” to see Project 2025 “call for essentially the hollowing out of CISA,” and he worries that its implementation could create a perilous feedback loop for the agency.

“If you were to reduce the mission scope and importance of CISA,” he says, “morale is going to drop, people are going to want to leave, and Congress is going to be less willing to fund [it].”