By Catherine A. Fitzpatrick

I'm getting so tired of Twitter, not only its 140 character limitations (sure, there is more space now and the Threads enables you to keep a set of tweets in one "package") but…

I'll assume that Morten Bay here, who is a scholar of disinformation, is in good faith, and not trolling when he asks:

 

Hey, @catfitz you know a ton about Russian/KGB history: Have you ever come across anyone writing about the parallels btw the KGB involvement in taking Franz Josef Strauss down in 1962 and the Wasserman-Schulz resignation in 2016? In my dissertation work, they look so alike.

— Morten Bay (@mortenbay) February 21, 2018

I have no idea what Morten Bay's "operating theory" or "theory of the case" is regarding disinformation in general or the US hack in particular. 

I haven't ever really thought about the West German case, I saw it in its later stages (I was six years old in 1962 so not up on Soviet propaganda quite yet but when I was 7, my father, who was a US army linguist at one time in the Korean War, began to teach me Russian from Soviet children's books. We didn't get to the Strauss case then, however!)

Here's a fairly good summary of it from 1985, from the Christian Science Monitor which is on the liberal/left spectrum but pretty good in criticizing Moscow (as they stem from a religious worldview, I guess).  And Elizabeth Pond, who I recall covering the Balkans wars quite well, is on this case in this particular instance. But…you'll see in a minute what was left out.

In 1985, she writes that this case "has been widely presented in Britain and the US as a classic exhibit of Soviet disinformation." I recall that.

But then at the end of her exegesis, she writes in 1985 – the Soviet era:

Certainly West German conservatives do not refer to it as such. And an exploration of the convolutions of the affair suggests considerable difficulties with the thesis of disinformation.

Well, I don't know. I'm not sure she is right about this. Because I know from how wrongfully the Soviet anthrax case was reported at the time and STILL reported (leaving out the 13 years of disinformation caused by an "unwitting idiot" — an American scientist) that it's very hard to get liberals to admit when disinformation actually occurs. And again — I speak as a Hillary voter, and a registered Democrat who staunchly opposes Trump.

In 1986, the left-leaning New York Times — left-leaning then as now only not as much — still found it possible to say Strauss was "about" the KGB

Not only "possible" — which Elizabeth Pond, as good as she is, couldn't say in 1985, maybe she didn't have the information or maybe her worldview in some way didn't admit it or maybe her editors' worldview. But there was reporting from a defector — which we don't get anymore as I keep explaining:

Mr. Dzhirkvelov said in an interview today that he personally had not ''co-opted'' any American journalists, although he said he knew indirectly of such cases in what he said was his career of more than four decades with Soviet intelligence and as a journalist. He did not provide any names.

Mr. Dzhirkvelov, who now lives in England, is in Washington to present the latest issue of Disinformation, a monthly newsletter published here that seeks to predict what themes the Soviet authorities will play up in their press campaigns and elsewhere. He serves on the advisory board of the newsletter.

Discrediting a Rising Leader

In the two-hour interview, Mr. Dzhirkvelov described how the K.G.B. carried out schemes to use the press in Africa, Moscow and elsewhere. He said he was present in 1960 when senior Soviet officials asked for suggestions on how the press could be used to discredit Franz Josef Strauss of West Germany, now the Premier of Bavaria and then a rising political star in West Germany who was seen as a contender to replace Chancellor Konrad Adenauer.

As Mr. Dzhirkvelov recounted, ''They said, 'We have a very big problem in West Germany. It's very possible that after Adenauer, the Chancellor of Germany would be Strauss. We have to do everything necessary to compromise him. Who can compromise Strauss? Of course: journalists.' ''

The result, he said, was an article planted with the help of intermediaries in the West German magazine Der Spiegel, which had been a bitter opponent of Mr. Strauss.

Oh.

OK.

But then come over to Wikipedia, and you see the KGB isn't mentioned, and it ends with a prize to a journalist who talks about the "Deep State" in Germany and..oh, dear.

Wikipedia can be so uneven!

But wait, we just read this thing, in the New York Times even, about a planted…

It's here someone on Twitter will tell you that you are "a functional illiterate" (what Bershidsky calls me when I confront him over leaving out the $5 million settlement in the Prevezon case related to Magnitsky, and call out his moral equivalency between the US and Russia, which I think shouldn't have to be proven, it's obvious). Or they will say that you are "hysterical". Or "hopelessly mired in Cold War categories" or even "unhinged" (that's Neil Hauer's latest for me after he was done harassing Molly McKew for weeks, whom I tried to defend).

So all I can tell you here is that:

• there is the way Pond covered this in 1985
• there's the way the Times covered it once they had a defector
• there's the way Morten might cover it, I haven't seen that yet
• there's the Goldsmith statement claiming a KGB caper

And..the suit was withdrawn by Der Spiegel against Goldsmith.

What can I say about Der Spiegel? Der Spiegel publishes Jacob Appelbaum and worships Snowden, I have all this in my book. Does it also have other important stories, perhaps even exposing the Russian aggression in Ukraine? Sure. Let's look at all the stories, let's RATE THE MEDIA BECAUSE THAT IS OK TO DO!

But we'll leave this analysis for another day, and try to examine what Mort "might mean" when he links up this case "that some thinks isn't really disinformation" to…Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

I remember once seeing her live on Yahoo Live or something (I don't have a TV) and finding her really awful — just too far left, too credulous of the tech left nonsense around copyleftism, just in general not someone I felt "ideologically compatible with". But here's the thing…Debbie Wasserman Schultz, whatever her "more leftist" positions was pro-Hillary. Either by job description, or Democratic Party mandate, or however you want to look at it. I remember thinking "she supports Hillary because they've told her to, but does she really?" based on seeing her interviews which were "not-like-Hillary".

I think she's worth actually studying in her own right, to see if she was quite on board with Hillary as much as seemed — doesn't anybody remember when Samantha Power — who got the UN ambassadorship then under Obama! — called Hillary "a monster"? I could tell you stories. Hillary-hate was big, and to find an actual Hillary lover — hmmm.

So Debbie then gets involved in this national meltdown where it is "outed" that the Party "was unfair" to Sanders. And that's usually how the story ends. No one looks past that. They say, yes, it was unfair, or well, too bad, politics is brutal, and Hillary was the ultimate candidate for the Party, so too bad, so sad.

But let's look at from the other end of the telescope, shall we? From the Sanders end.You know, from the end of the candidate who RAN FOR PRESIDENT AS A SPOILER, unlike Howard Dean or name-a-more-lefty-candidate still ran for president, taking votes away from Hillary and even swinging some Bernie-bro votes to Trump (12% changed to Trump, the number believed helped by the Kremlin trolls).

Why didn't Bernie withdraw earlier, because my God, look at the results! Because of Leninist "worse-the-better" ideology, that's why.

Bernie Sanders is not some unknown quantity for me, folks. I appreciate that Bernie-buster filibuster he made in which he cited many important things about labor rights, union rights, and not shipping jobs overseas and other socialist positions that in fact I share as a liberal Democrat who is NOT a socialist and NOT a progressive, and proud of it.

But Bernie Sanders, back in the Soviet era, was declaring Burlington, VT a nuclear-free zone.

Well, let's go back a little further. First, Bernie was in YPSL — Young People's Socialist League — summer camp. Having had a number of friends in YPSL, including the late Joanne Landy of the Campaign for Peace and Democracy, I have heard many stories of YPSL over the years, its role in shaping ideology, its very rigid ideology that left life-long stamps (sectarian socialist ideology tends to do that, in my observation), its ideology that in fact was critical of Moscow but…well, not for every little grouplet in every little faction that might have even spun off from Max Shachtman.

The Shachtmanites, you will recall, would shout at meetings Max's famous slogan about the USSR: "Four Lies in Four Words!" It was not a union, not voluntary, it was not soviet, not really about authentic workers' councils (YPSL denizens tend to worship Lenin's workers' councils where people like me already see them as a fiction behind which terrorism and mass crimes against humanity proceeded, but that's a story for another day); not socialist (the USSR was communist) or not a republic — it wasn't really so much a country with a proper constitution but a terrorist band that committed a coup d'etat, stayed in power, and used "revolutionary communism" and "expediency" instead of the rule of law or even a German rule-by-laws for the state. I don't know if Max would have put it that way, but you get the idea.

So Bernie — what can I tell you. Kind of critical of the Soviets, maybe on the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact? The Moscow trials? As some Trotskyists were. But not really thoroughly, to understand that the "other superpower" was always engaged in a mass crime against humanity (and in the 1980s, there was the war in Afghanistan which peacenikes like Bernie ignored).

So for Bernie to declare a "nuclear free zone" in a context where his Soviet "sister city" would never, ever do this, not even as a fake thing, but just…never — in a world where most peace activists never criticized the SS20s, but only the Pershings and Cruises in Europe at the time (American missiles deployed to counter both Soviet tank superiority and their deployment of nuclear weapons) — well… 

I'm not aware that Bernie ever signed the END declaration denouncing both missiles East and West. I'm not sure he even endorsed the Freeze (freeze on both sides' nuclear weapons) of the 1980s, I'd have to look ("freeze and reverse the arms race" was a rather one-sided proposition as it froze Soviet superiority in Europe, but whatever, I endorsed it even myself then as a starting point).

Bottom line, Bernie was not critical of the Soviet Union. He went on his honeymoon on a boat trip up the Volga, friending up with the Soviets. How many critical pieces were written — was it by P.J. O'Rourke? – about people going up the Volga on a ship of fools! And they were, as they were useful idiots being used by the Soviet Peace Committee (actually called the Soviet Committee for the DEFENSE of Peace which believed, of course, in SS20s fervently AND the war in Afghanistan) and the Soviet Friendship Committee.

I remember going to a peace conference in the 1980s in Burlington. That I was even able to speak about independent peace movements at this conference on some minor workshop panel or even be invited was a plus, I suppose, for the sectarians in the peace movement politically ruled by Bernie at the time. But Bernie himself was not supporting independent peace movements, you know?

Bernie was, well, what he was — and is — a sectarian socialism who had managed to take over a small town. (By a quirk of fate a Soviet dissident I knew well who recently died, Valery Nikolayevich Chalidze, often called THE OTHER SAGE OF VERMONT as he was on the left, as distinct from Solzhenitsyn, lived in Vermont, not that far from Burlington, and I know that Bernie was beloved even by non-socialists there for various reasons, maybe he got the garbage picked up on time and funded the schools properly.

BUT fast forward to our time! Bernie VOTES AGAINST THE MAGNITSKY ACT. One of two votes. Why? He has some doctor's excuse, that if we do this, we can't get Russia to help us on Iran. Hey, this was the Obama Administration's perennial whispered explanation from diplomats and officials at State if you ever complained about their silence on massive human rights problems remaining in Russia. BTW, it was the mantra of Bush's Administration, too, you know? "We need Russia for Iran". At a certain point, the US got off that, and not only because "they made a deal with Iran" but even BEFORE that when MOST NORMAL PEOPLE got it about Russian impunity and massive human rights abuses, the wars in Chechnya only being the chief among them — and it was ONLY Bernie Sanders and hey, Rand Paul from the libertarian right that could vote against ending Russian impunity. Now WHY is that?

All of Bernie's votes — and they aren't the wondrous thing you imagine even if you credit him with wondrous things in Burlington are not really all that. People have sometimes noted that. His main purpose in Congress was to spout the socialist line and have a presence for DSA — that is, Bernie himself may have had his sectarian differences with DSA, but he and Conyers and other DSA regulars pushed that line.

So let us come to Debbie and the Democratic Party.

Have I explained enough about WHY BERNIE SANDERS HAS NO BUSINESS BEING IN THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY AT ALL?

That's really how you have to ask this question. The Democratic Party is not a Socialist Party, boys and girls. It's a Democratic Party with some social justice planks that is NOT unfriendly to business. It does NOT disavow capitalism. It does not, like Matt Taibi says of Goldman Sachs,  saying about capitalism or even just Goldman Sachs that it is a “great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.”

Sigh. Matt is like Zero Hedges or any of the sites echoing Kremlin Troll talking points on this one and will endlessly insist on his utter independence and even his days of the eXile that was forced to close as proof that he is completely organically coming by these views all on his own. Sure. And the critique of Goldman Sachs is obvious.

But…

When Obama speaks at Cantor Fitzgerald — the Wall Street law firm that lost so many people in 9/11! Our neighbours! A terrible thing! — and gets twice more than Hillary at Goldman Sachs, it's ok, it's about a law firm (Obama's major contributions come from law firms which is why Trial Attorneys of America, his people, are always able to successfully crush any effort to cap malpractice lawsuits which add endlessly to health care costs in ways they need not do, to enrich lawyers — hey, if you want to talk about socialism, and health care, guys.)

Lawyers for capitalism? Good. Actual capitalism firm doing trading? Bad.

Do you see how silly all this is?

Say, I don't see any Kremlin trolls complaining about Obama's big fees on Wall Street, only Hillary's, you know?

So again, Bernie — socialists — avowed socialists — YPSL denizens – nuclear-free-zone declarers with absentee partners in the Soviet Union — people who vote against Magnitsky, even (most Democrats voted for? There's a very few in the senate against but it's mainly Republicans) THEY DO NOT BELONG IN THIS PARTY, FULL STOP.

If there was more airing, debate, awareness, action around this point, we would all be in a better place.

But we're not, and we have Trump instead, like people who took the wrong off-ramp in Back to the Future and got Biff (who was modeled after Trump!)

So I think the Debbie W-S cases starts WITH THAT. A real thorough questioning as to why these socialists a) needed to barge into the Democratic Party b) the reality that as a Socialist Party which is what they need to call themselves for truth-in-advertising could NEVER get elected with that "brand" — and that's why they use stealth and subterfuge to invade the Dems c) why even after they lot the nomination they continued to be — in the words of Soviet ideologues — "wreckers and splitters". Could we please examine that, people?

I know the preference is to keep wading through leaked emails and deciding if it was really the GRU who hacked the DNC — and guess what, I firmly believe it is and I will explain why in another post.

But the reality is you have to ask why this aging YPSL summer camper had to barge into a party and lose the elections for the actual chosen candidate.

Was he helped in this from the start? You could argue perhaps he was 30 years ago but that's to look for "the hand of Moscow" or "Moscow gold" where it doesn't really exist or would be unfindable in any event.

You could argue that Kremlin Trolls could help this along without Bernie's participation at all (and he is silent about this) merely by getting to his chief lieutenants, his lesser-known cadres, even some touts of his on social media that are mere volunteers. Who are all those guys?

I'd be happy to have a four party system in America, with a Socialist Party that stops using subterfuge and invasions of the Democratic Party or invasions of single-issue NGOs or cadre-org invasions of mass movements not about socialism (as they have done with the Women's March, inserting the communist Angela Davis (!) and worse as leaders.

Then the Democatic Party might be social democratic or more liberal and Blue Dog depending on the candidate or season, but at least the stealth-socialists LIKE OBAMA would be gone from it to end the branding confusion. You lefty Insta posters, go over there, please, stop it with your waving around of Bernie flags when the gadgets in your own goddamn bedroom from the capitalist BIG IT firms would power a small third-world village. Be ashamed of yourselves. Stop telling me blandly at dinner tables that your parents still pay for that you want to "overthrow capitalism". Get a job, and PS get a hair-cut, too. Get a paper route. Oh, you can't get those anymore. OK, well, make a YouTube channel and collect ad revenue, there's a good boy.

Then on the right, we would have the existing GOP (shudders) which might reform itself. And then…a Christian Democratic Party? I just don't know. It's not my job to imagine this…thing for them.

But four would be better, and sort things out better. That we will never have this and are still doomed to third-party disruption and wild pendulum swings from left to right in my lifetime — a great sorrow. Let's at least describe it correctly.

 

By Catherine A. Fitzpatrick

I'm not so sure that Twitter Threads are really the best way to communicate. For one, they often stall and lag out — this can be due to one tweet being too long, but even cutting them back, they won't post.

For two, they might get noticed or might not, but then they sink like a stone. A few people tweet them as a Thread, maybe more, if it has resonance, but some people only tweet individual parts they like and may never even 

Every time I think of the problems of social media, I think of the scene in Vernor Vinges' Rainbow Ends, which is really a seminal book and important to read even if you can't understand all of it. (It's Linden Lab's bible, interestingly, along with Snowcrash)

In this one scene, the characters are in a library, but it's not a library any more as we understand it. They take all the books, and shred them into little bits of paper. Then they throw the bits up into the air, and that makes new literary works which are supposed to be coherent in some way, I guess.

In other words, it's an enormous Fractured Fairy-Tale, literally.

So it's hard to connect all the dots and explain "Why Steubenville is like the Kremlin Trolls" which a very few people out there might instantly understand, but I will try to make some points about it.

First, my coverage of Stuebenville which is very different than the witless daily news coverage of these events then; the biased and agenda-ridden coverage by various left and liberal media and magazines then (and even conservative publications) and so on. Google the terms "Stuebenville" and "Anonymous" and you'll understand. One problem that hampers your understanding of these events is how long it takes to arrest, try and convict people sometimes. But it's interesting to know that at least one of the Anonymous disrupters who was supposedly fighting for "an end to rape culture" — while of course using rape culture itself in various ways virtually — was tried and convinced and sentenced to two years in prison in 2017.

The ladies from the New School that didn't grasp this when we discussed it at the time; the Nation feminists; tons of other writers never followed this story after 2013 and don't realize that these people committed crimes and some went to jail.

Of course the Steubenville football players who committed this rape were tried originally, and that was right and proper. Let me note that one of the agitprop slogans that the Anonymous gang used to try to get themselves off the hook was to claim they faced "longer prison sentences than the rapists themselves did". But that was fake, like all computer hacking/geek criminal mayhem stories that invoke "25 years" (remember how they kept saying this about Aaron Swartz? When he faced…six months. And the judge also ordered him to seek mental health treatment (usually not reported in tech press) and…he committed suicide (and the fact that his girlfriend pleaded with him not to hurt himself while she nervously went to work as she had a number of times before — because he was unstable — is never reported either, and to this day he is characterized falsely as some sort of "victim of the man" who only "in a group" drafted a Guerilla manifesto — which as I've reported was lied about by Quinn Norton, she of the New York Times of late, because in fact Aaron wrote it on his own and his colleagues acknowledge this)

So here are some articles and the thread not on Twitter but Typepad:

1) I was just trying to explain to someone why Steubenville Anonymous were similar to the Kremlin Trolls of today:

Anonymous Only Hampered Justice in Stuebenville

Doxed by AnonLuverz over Criticism of JustSec on Steubenville

Latest Anonymous Active Measure Distracts from Its Own Sexism and Assange's Charges

Of Course It's JustSec of Anonymous Harassing Me, That's Their Real Nature

Yes, Anonymous is Antisemitic

Anonymous is a Rigid, Hierarchical Cult, Not a Looseknit Hacker Collective

On Anon

I think one is missing, wherein some sort of creepy Archangel in the Anonymous hierarchy appeared to me at one point (!) and assured me that he had "dealt with" some lower-level Anon (that I had also reported to the FBI online crimes center) and that he would "not be on the Internet anymore".  See, that's how these people are. They are like the mafia or the Russian KGB and its successors. I would rather have the FBI deal with Anonymous, not feminist magazines and not their own archangels, you know?

And that's actually what happened in real life, although these people will be out of jail soon enough (like Weev) and out harassing people again

Oh, hey! I've been meaning to point out…

When was the last time you ever heard of any Anonymous action? You know, in defense of Iranian freedom fighters! Against evil prosecutors who were prosecuting hacker cases! Against…I don't know, the Pentagon! Against PayPal, because it refuses to process payments for courageous freedom-fighting WikiLeaks

It's been a long time, hasn't it? Think about that deeply.

Why is that?

Is it because some effective real-life prosecutions of these criminals — they are criminals and not interesting "transgressives" as griefer-professors call them — finally paid off and that thinned their ranks?

We know that 4chan and its offshoots are as active as ever on their websites, in places like Second Life and so on, although perhaps not as much as they were at their peak.

But where did Anonymous go? No Scientology demonstrations. No demonstrations of anything — a rape in Steubenville — with Guy Fawkes masks?

And I will suggest a theory that no one will like and I don't care because one must always mount hypotheses and one has the right to be wrong:

Because Anonymous, 4chan, JustSec, LulSec, KnightSec, whatever — these were prototypes, trial runs, and then the Kremlin Trolls took over in earnest.

One of the things that useful to do in thinking about these shadowy online movements is to strip away all the hype about them peddled on fatuous tech sites that think they are wonderful, or other lefty and trendy sites that think they are effective tools against capitalism or forces for "good" (huh? Taking down PayPal? Don't you use PayPal?), and just look at their actions, especially in the real world, look at the actual indictments and trials of them, and then study not only the Bolshevik movement in the past and its ideas and actions, but current actives measures in the present out of Moscow and oh ,the Mueller indictment.

It's not about finding a conspiracy of the "hand of Moscow" and "Moscow gold" at every Rainbow's End. It's about seeing how ideologies make Internet technology and affordances, and then their ills. And also seeing how real-world actors exploit them. And see that online hackers' movements whether Anonymous or WikiLeaks (which yes, children, is a hacker's movement) are easily infiltrated. And how you will never have proof of this but that doesn't matter — the defense measures you take are the same, whether you identify by threat action or threat actor.

2) Yes, I wonder with this as with other things (Scientology demos) whether these were "trial runs" for grander plans. Very easy to infiltrate Anonymous 4Chan! Yeah, those basement-dwellers come by their alt-left/alt-right creepy views organically! No Russian trolls needed!

3) Except…There is that nudge in the IRC channel. That suggestion on Twitter. That post even on G+. Facebook even which they don't use as much as anonymity is discouraged there. You feel them, those Russian operatives, because you see their methods coming alive online & RL 

4) How can you prove this? You can't! And even if you document actual Russian-language trolls even accidentally geolocating to Russia, how can you prove they are FSB or GRU! You can't! But with enough documentation, patterns emerge.

5) It's funny, @stranahan did a pretty good job of reporting the Anonymous antics then altho I didn't agree w all his takes on it as I wrote. What I did detect was that some "hidden hand" coaches some of these people in methods that are so much like Moscow Center. How to prove?

6) You can't. On all those weird attacks on me in 2013, among the worst in my life, with even a creepy Anon video on YouTube that they were "coming to get me" lol — there were Russian-language Twitter accounts harassing me, then deleting themselves before I could catch. Traces.

Perhaps you have never been the victim of a "Twit storm" which not only Anonymous but Occupy and creepies like Jacob Appelbaum of WikiLeaks are experts at, using a combination of their actual bots they wrangle and their pals they whistle for to flash mob you.

Thousands of people can spam you, harass you, on Twitter or on a blog like this one, but on Twitter, they instantly delete their tweet so you can't abuse report it. They change alts, they might be banned, they spawn new ones.

So if a half dozen or a dozen people writing nasty things to me in Russian appear — I might not even be quick enough to screenshot them right away — and they disappear. You can't spend your life screen-shooting.

I don't have any "proof" of the sort that nerds demand online but even if I did, they'd cry "Photoshop" so it's endless.

I will note that one of the characters that harassed me is still on Twitter, only completely devoid of their past tweets and still an eternal youth chuckles now with a real-life name that may or may not be the person claimed. Have you ever noticed how weird things like that happen on Twitter? Like Joshua Foust is banned from Twitter, but his account lives on in the hands of some totally other person. How does that happen? It's banned and removed and someone recreates it? (not him)

I'll note another thing — the geolocation of the computer that hacked into my daughter's account during  those attacks in 2013 matched the location of one of the bad actors. There were other match-ups but you could never make anything of it. None of the worst actors identified in RL during that period are the ones who went to jail.

8) What is the solution when the Internet is so shadowy and the average person outside a company without a big budget cannot track all the attacks even on themselves, all the personas, etc? all you can do is try to document what you see, keep documenting, triangulating, trying to find facts, eventually you build up the case. And mindful that even when a professional does this like Mueller, it will never be enough for some people. 

 

 

• 
  

Map of Sverdlovsk

The world of anti-disinformation is expanding, becoming more varied, more academic, and more active.

o I don't have a full roster of these and even my "recommended" list to the side here is too short, but I'm reading and finding more and more.

o CEPA's Stratcom program is a good place to read about topics like the Zapad exercises. Here's their self description:

This list of terms for techniques is particularly handy.

 o The EUvsDisinfo site has a shiny new revamping. 

It describes itself as follows:

This website is part of a campaign to better forecast, address and respond to pro-Kremlin disinformation. The ‘EU versus Disinformation’ campaign is run by the European External Action Service East Stratcom Task Force. The team was set up after the EU Heads of State and Government stressed the need to challenge Russia’s ongoing disinformation campaigns. In March 2015, the European Council tasked the High Representative in cooperation with EU institutions and Member States to submit an action plan on strategic communication.

This chart is interesting, as it suggests that Russia spends more time on disinformation in Ukraine and at home to snow its own people and neighbours than it does foreigners:

But it may only be an artifact of what the authors found interesting to cover.

Scroll to the end of this page and you'll see a list of that week's disinformation stories, tagged as such. 

There's a lot of duplication among these various anti-disinformation sites now but that doesn't bother me. Duplication is part of diversity and you need a lot of independent centers doing this, as well as governments, to get the job done. This list seems particularly thorough, more than others.

People debate about whether the clinical naming, tagging, categorization, publishing of disinformation only helps spread it, and say there isn't enough debunking. So this sort of thing annoys some who think it isn't pushing back enough. Here's a fake story I missed, although I cover Ukraine closely.

 

I don't have a problem with a site collecting, naming, categorizing, publishing disinformation itself. By the framework of doing this in a context where it is understood there is a critical attitude, perhaps you take care of the concerns.

But there is a job to be done to take this further into battle as it were, and that's maybe the missing piece. There have to be polemics.

I quite understand that some people find there isn't enough countering of these memes on the spot. And the question is whether you should wear yourself out retorting to all the Kremlin trolls? Or work harder to get pieces in the media that can effective push back on this. A TV story or even print journalism that takes us through the fake meme that "Americans are fighting in Ukraine" or "NATO is bombing in Ukraine" and covers some of the crazy deza stories around that in the past would be useful. Basically, this material needs to be not only identified but placed. And the think tanks may not feel that's their job. But getting media to be as interested about Kremlin debunks as they are about Snopes and Politfakt should be the main goal of anybody with the resources to be in this business.

o The London School of Economics and Political Science Institute of Global Affairs has launched Arena  which describes itself as follows:

• Arena is very much a ‘do’-tank, dedicated to finding the practical tools, best practices and methodologies to defeat disinformation. Arena will take advantage of its unique network of academics, opinion-makers and policy-makers interested in this field– from heads of State, the military, and the media, all the way to bedroom activists, academics, computer scientists and NGOs – to move into responsive action.
• Arena works with partners across the world to carry out relevant projects and disseminate results. Once a specific tool has been developed, such as new internet technology that helps activists understand when material online is planted or organic, Arena will distribute it to a large group of stakeholders.

That sounds intriguing; some activists already do this just by searching Twitter for the first appearances of images or memes and seeing the accounts pushing them, so I wonder if the tool will be something like that.

I don't demand that think tanks "do," and "doing" can sometimes mean merely things like having conferences or making tools — and that's ok.

There will be projects on the efforts of the Kremlin to interfere with the German elections and the problem of falsehoods about migration to Italy (which I gather is not only a Russian disinformation problem) but I found this one particularly intriguing:

Propaganda and the Cold War

Over the summer, Arena’s directors, Anne Applebaum and Peter Pomerantsev, have worked with Jigsaw, a Google subsidiary, to complete a study of Cold War responses to Russian disinformation. The report highlights a dozen case studies of Soviet propaganda and Western response. The object of the report is to understand the attitudes and tactics that lay behind those responses, and to ask whether any of them can be used in the more complicated online context today. The result will shape the projects that both Google and Arena design in the future.

 

This is interesting, and the first (or at least a rare) mention I've seen of trying to learn from the Soviet era, which is the obvious place to start looking. This is why I want to get Mrs. Grant's book published.

I can't wait to see what Appelbaum and company come up with and the conclusions they draw as to how this may apply today.

Can Google Counter Disinformation?

It's interesting to me that in connection with the Arena project  Google is mentioned, which must be Jared Cohen who is a Democratic operative who used to be at the State Department (the one who while still at State, famously asked Twitter if they could hold their weekly maintenance day while the Iranian revolution was going on and students and their supporters needed Twitter).  Maybe it's not related to him, but usually Google doesn't do a lot of freedom-fighting stuff but prefers "study". When you study a thing, you can almost look like you're doing something about it!

Google's intellectual culture, as I've often said, because of Russian-born Sergei Brin's own influences, is like a cross between the Soviet Knowledge Society and Gorky's (and HG Wells') vision of a World Encyclopedia for the Masses. The figures that are in the Google Doodle at the top of the page are usually scientists, technicians, politically-correct writers and other liberal public figures — there isn't a Sharansky or a Sakharov, let's say or even a mother of the Plaza del Mayo.   

Google likes bland, political correctness but without controversy if they can manage it — and SCIENCE. And MATH. So it's interesting that they have anything in relationship to Disinformation, but I see this as utterly self-interested at one level. They've seen as Facebook has taken a beating over fake groups and fake news that they could be next or even are already under the microscope. They realize that algorithms have gotten out too far ahead of us and are too weaponized by bad guys now.

So they want to do civic things and show they've spent funds deflecting some of this. If Google actually went and funded some of these struggling disinformation publications in places like Ukraine or Czech Republic they'd have more credibility in my view. But it's a start that they're related to this Arena project.

I lived through the latter part of this era and of course was knee-deep in all those Soviet propaganda stories and the past REALLY DOES need to be heeded and analyzed instead of being dismissed as a Cold War exaggeration, McCarthyism, evil rapacious capitalism, etc. which is all part of the deza itself.

So…There was the claim that the CIA spread AIDs in Africa, referenced to this day by African leaders and ordinary people. There was the claim that in the West, ambulances drove around kidnapping people and then murdering them and selling their body parts, such rapacious capitalists they were.

The Sverdlovsk Biological Weapons Explosion as a Casebook Disinformation Case Abetted by Westerners

Alevtina Nekrasova vists the grave of her father, Vasily Ivanov , who was one of the first victims of the 1979 anthrax outbreak in the Soviet city of Sverdlovsk.

But then there were things like the claim that the anthrax outbreak in Sverdlovsk in 1979 was only a naturally-occurring outbreak of bovine anthrax — when in fact it was an explosion at the Sverdlovsk chemical and biological weapons factory that spread weaponized anthrax into the environment and sickened and killed at least 66 people along with  animals 

If we're going to look at how "the West" dealt with these, there's much that in fact can be drawn from this story at all levels.

I don't think even the pro-Moscow left believed the ambulance organ-vendors story, and while the AIDS story had more traction, it was more intended to discredit the West among Soviet people than to undermine the West at home although it did a bit of that, too.

But something more sophisticated like what happened with the anthrax cover-up had highly effective help from people whom you couldn't accuse of being fellow travelers or Communist dupes let alone "agents" but who simply thought the Soviets should be treated at face value as "people like us," especially their scientists and leaders who were felt to have legitimacy (although they didn't) and that we should "give the benefit of the doubt" or "approach in good faith" every story like this in the Soviet Union (even though legions of samizdat reports, had they been heeded, would prove the opposite).

So you got things that Wikipedia doesn't tell you in the entry about the disaster, but does tell you at least partially about Matthew Meselson, the scientist who deliberately delayed the proper US and Western response to the Sverdlovsk anthrax disaster.

Matthew Meselson, a respected geneticist and molecular biologist still at Harvard University and now 87 years old, back then convinced President Richard Nixon to renounce biological weapons and suspend chemical weapons in a 1972 treaty involving the Soviets. There was no reason to do it in 1972 given Soviet secrecy and mendacity; there was no reason to keep it going in 1979. In fact, the 1972 treaty helped enable Sverdlovsk to happen by giving the Soviets cover.

This is a liberal morality tale that given the knee-jerk hatred of Nixon works especially effectively. Meselson was so bent on achieving the idealistic goal of the treaty that he refused to consider that the potential for Sverdlovsk disaster — due to secrecy and mendacity — is why one should NOT have been signed. And in fact it wasn't that "war-mongering West" that broke the treaty, but a Soviet biological warfare factory that did.

Wikipedia gives a muted version of this story, which I know from Soviet-era scientists and dissidents was a far more grave matter:

In April 1980 Meselson served as a resident consultant to the CIA investigating a major outbreak of anthrax among people in the Soviet city of Sverdlovsk. He concluded that on the basis of available evidence the official Soviet explanation that the outbreak was caused by consumption of meat from infected cattle was plausible but that there should be an independent on-site investigation

 

He was wrong. But that's not how to understand what happened here. It's not just about being wrong in a scientific judgement concerning the case itself. There's the political misjudgement that comes from ideological dictation.

First, Meselson convinced the CIA and Nixon not to complain or confront the Soviets, using his scientific credentials. There was no valid reason to sign a treaty with the Soviets that could not be verified, and when there were credible news stories that it had been seriously breached in 1979 and should have been suspended, Meselson preferred to make the facts bend to his desire for "peace" and "science" rather than justice.

He did the same thing in Laos, claiming that the "yellow rain" said to be a Soviet toxin was only bee pollen.

There is the belief is that "science" prevailed but again, I think this was more about "political science" than science, and the matter is still disputed.

Dead Wrong About Sverdlovsk

The "yellow rain" story is still debated and I remember the gleefulness of the pro-Moscow left at proving it wrong — supposedly.

But Meselson was dead wrong about Sverdlovsk, and his willingness to go there years later, and then reverse himself (which was played more as a "more accurate report now that there was a site visit") does not undo that.

What's annoying about this PBS account is that it simply fails to cover what happened for 13 long years before Meselson went to the Soviet Union — refusal to acknowledge independent reports coming from Russia and later an important and highly relevant defector; delay, obstruction, even due to what was seen as the overarching "detente" need of signing the treaty. There were people inside and outside of the Soviet Union clamoring to have this disaster be seen for what it really was — a biological warfare mishap killing people and threatening the world — but they were shushed because of a prominent liberal scientist in America.

The role of the liberal media in these incidents of obfuscation and distraction regarding the true nature of Kremlin deeds can be seen in the New York Times glowing profile of Meselson years later. I have to say Soviet dissident scientists of the era didn't view him with that halo, as their own people were killed and lies were covered up.

Given everything I have seen about the anthrax story, frankly, I will never buy the version the Times and others give here of the yellow rain story, and wonder if these accounts have more merit,

People forget that at the time scientists themselves debated this, the "bee pollen" concept was denounced as "childish" by *other scientists* and the US government had intelligence to back up their claims of Soviet abuses:

The Government's case is based on a broad array of circumstantial and scientific evidence, according to the two senior officials interviewed last week. It includes, for example, classified intelligence interceptions of radio communications indicating that lethal chemicals were being used, classified photographs of villages dusted with chemical powder, reports from refugees and defectors who say they witnessed chemical warfare, statements from doctors and relief workers who believe the symptoms of many purported victims suggest they were hit with chemical agents and intelligence reports suggesting that the Soviet Union has been interested in toxin warfare for many years.

These reports are buttressed by laboratory analyses of environmental samples from alleged attack sites and of blood, urine and tissues from purported victims which show the presence of one particular class of chemical agent – the trichothecene mycotoxins. Although these poisons are produced naturally by funguses found throughout the world, the Government and many academic experts say the amounts and combinations almost surely indicate man-made weapons rather than natural processes.

Two prominent academics who were briefed on the Government's evidence in their capacity as military advisers said in telephone interviews last week that they found the case persuasive though not scientifically unimpeachable.

 

Yes, I totally grasp that the "bee pollen" version won out in the end — like "yellow cake" derision did. I read about it all thoroughly at the time. But I doubt. And I doubt because of how I saw the Sverdlovsk story unfold.

The Times says coyly, "In the Sverdlovsk case, the truth was not so clear cut and Meselson not so right." 

But the Times is simply wrong in the Sverdlovsk case. The truth was clear and Meselson was very wrong. A nurse I personally spoke to at the time in Moscow gave the truth about people who sickened without coming anywhere near cows, and scores more in the region told the truth, and it was covered in samizdat and ultimately revealed by Boris Yeltsin after the coup — that's what it took. And conceding that "Meselson was not so right" doesn't give the full force of what it meant for 13 long years to give the Soviets comfort, keep a treaty with them they broke, and betray victims of Soviet biological warfare preparation. The Times applauds Meselson for being willing to revise his conclusions — but that's only when he has overwhelming data from the site, a reformed Russian government, and his peers among ultimately emancipated Russian scientists. And it shouldn't take that!

Along the way — just as we have today! — there appears an "American professor living in Sverdlovsk at the time who didn't see anything".  So those evil capitalists must be lying, right?

That Americans wouldn't necessarily see anything happening in this highly closed and atomized society even living right on top of it is an actuality of the Soviet Union that some wouldn't accept then — or now.

It took a defector — we have less and less of them nowadays — to promote an inside, truthful version of Sverdlovsk that had to challenge not only Soviet mendacity, but the Meselson-driven detentnik unwillingness to look at Soviet mendacity.

He was the Deputy Director of the Soviet biological warfare operation Biopreparat, Dr. Kanatjan Alibekov, now known as Ken Alibek.

It seems it takes the Canadian CBC to run an excellent fact-filled historical show in 2004 called "Red Lies: Biological Warfare and the Soviet Union" that were it to air here, would have only gotten bashed as "McCarthyism" in the US.

The moral of this story shouldn't be — as it was for the Times — that one scientist can challenge a government's "mendacity" and win with "truth" because the Reagan Administration was quite frankly right about the real nature of the anthrax story from the get-go, and had every reason to believe the stories of the "yellow rain" given the nature of this secret, totalitarian society.

The moral of the story should be: liberals and the left (easier for the former than the latter) need to apply the skepticism and demand for facts they naturally apply on their own governments to Russia's government as well, and not only apply their skepticism and distrust to their own government, leaving the Kremlin untouched or even celebrated, and then we will all do better.

Dealing with the Detentniks Among You Is Always the Hardest

I mention this old story because it shows that in every major disinformation drama, the hardest part is always dealing with your own people who will not get on board with suspecting the Kremlin and doing the necessary diligence to follow through on that valid, long-tested, amply-proven suspicion, but who insist on being detentniks, peace-makers, and contrarians and delaying or canceling confrontation.

If they did that and you could still have a fair fight with a kind of Team A and Team B approach it would be one thing, but the peaceniks always delegitimize those cynical about the warmongering of the Kremlin as "hawks" and warmongers themselves, and "neocons" — Jews! — who are bent on making war. This repeats itself over and over again as it has done with this latest Plame flap.

1) First of all, calm down. Re-tweets don't imply endorsement. Yes, very provocative, but thoughtful. Many neocon hawks ARE Jewish. https://t.co/m5oGgKPo2a

— Valerie Plame Wilson (@ValeriePlame) September 21, 2017

Sigh…

Weapons of Mass Obfuscation 

I sometimes think that if Assad ever falls, and the truth comes out — let's say — that the reason Saddam Hussein appeared not to have any weapons of mass destruction is because the Soviets smuggled them out to Syria so they wouldn't be found — there will be legions of people who will go on blaming America first and never accept any other version. 

The left has a very hard death grip not only on the Vietnam experience but the Iraq war experience. Saddam didn't have mass weapons, perhaps, but he still filled mass graves, as terrorists — not American soldiers — do in Iraq today. It turns out the Sverdlovsk story wasn't "ambiguous" or "nuanced" or involved "American error" or anything of the sort. The Soviets killed their own people in due to negligence in a weapons factory they shouldn't have had if they were sincere about a bio and chem warfare treaty they had signed, they lied about it, they covered it up, and we didn't do enough to keep faith with the truth and the victims.

So to conclude, compare The New York Times versus the CBC in how this historical disinformation plot was handled, and hopefully you'll accept my point — it's almost never the issue regarding the finding of facts about X or Y bad deed of the Kremlin. History has been mangled here and none is more guilty than the Ars Technica "techie" site that can now tell the truth about Sverdlovsk, but have no curiosity about their fellow scientist they claim "uncovered the truth in 1992" — and never ask why he didn't accept the facts in 1979.  Those of us in the human rights movement in those years with ties to the dissident Soviet scientists like Yury Orlov or Andrei Sakharov learned about the truth — their scientific counterparts in the West should have been less gullible.

It's almost always about arguments over whether they are facts, or what should be done with them, with your own people. There is no substitute for this political process in a free society. But it has to be a free and untramelled process that the left can't abort or deflect with cries of "McCarthyism" or what have you. These lessons of the past — where the leftists and liberals were so wrong — have to be mined, documented, debated and understood.

 

By Catherine A. Fitzpatrick

Some links on Disinformation stories: 

o There are 12 ways to spot a bot — at least! This will let you know if you are one yourself.

o Here's an analysis of how the Kremlin got into the story of the demo in Berkeley — some RT execs must be in a pretzel because they have traditionally, like all Stalinists, been pro anti-fa.

But now they are boosting the alt-right, they have to be against it, but but but.… This is a story that was influenced by Hamilton 68, which I discuss here. What the analysis by @RVAWonk seems to point to is that the delta of the dashboard is what's important — if you see a story shoot up within four hours by "a staggering 27,400%" why, it would just have to be a bot, as no human could have that successful a campaign, right? Well, only comparison of a list of "norms" — which sooner or later, someone will make and publicize — will prove whether this artifactoid is true.

o Bots are everywhere, and this is depressing. So big up NATO in your chat, guys, and fight the power!

 

2 in 3 Twitter users who write in Russian abt NATO presence in East Europe are robotic or ‘bot' accounts: NATO study https://t.co/h1sxQ7sCsM

— Tat Atfender (@TatAtfender) September 1, 2017

 

o Peskov is claiming — stop me if you've heard this one before! — that the arrest of Kirill Serebrennikov, the Gogol Center director, is "not about censorship," Polygraph tells us.

 

I'd be inclined to think Peskov's prevaricating. There is one nagging thing, tho, which is a Facebook comment by a former Soviet political prisoner I know who says that once all the hipster noise dies down, people will be embarrassed to find this guy did have his hand in the till.  Perhaps this is just Russian spleen or jealousy for the modern-day political prisoner and their glory, such as it is. The problem is, the whole system of grants and subsidies and such for the arts is so messed up in Russia, that I would not blame the guy in any event.

o Sometimes it seems like you just have to "follow the networks" to see how the disinformation may come about…

 

Officials of German far-right #AfD-party have contacts with Polish FSB-spy Mateusz #Piskorskihttps://t.co/7RkrsNbFDe // cc @20committee

— Florian Wagner (@_fl01) August 16, 2017

 

o So the Hamilton 68 methodology will go on being disputed:

 

Nor is it possible to say that they even are Kremlin bots without revealing your methodology https://t.co/L3bqI3bHsD

— max seddon (@maxseddon) August 7, 2017

 

But actually what's more interesting about that thread is the original tweet to which that was the response:

 

Guys, I'm going to say this once (I wish):

The proliferation of a hashtag by Kremlin bots is not evidence that the hashtag is influential.

— Alicia Dressman🤔 (@thedelphivision) August 7, 2017

 

So if a bot falls in the forest and nobody hears it, can it rightly be said to be an agent of influence engaged in an active measure? I think the whole anti-fa coverage and debate is a good place to watch this — how much people are shushed when they criticized it, and by whom/what;  whether there is accurate reporting on it and whether people are too afraid to RT it, etc.

Perhaps it's useful to point out now that McMasters wasn't fired, despite having a lot more enemies than just the Kremlin.

o Remember when I complained to Facebook in 2008 that "We Aren't 69 Million of Anything" given Zuck's creepy Betterworldist connectivist cult stuff? Well, now they say that 70 million may have been influenced by fake news that Facebook let slip in through ads purchased by a Russian company. Or maybe it was 100 million.

Hmm. While Politico may accept "the 600" without a fuss, if Facebook doesn't reveal more, it's hindering its anti-disinformation effort.

What we are told, however, is that the Russian company — the notorious "troll factory" with the bland name of Internet Research Agency — had an ad budget of only $100,000. It's hard to believe that 100 million were really influenced with that low a budget.

 Alexey Kovalev of the deza-debunking noodleremover.news is one of those Russian bloggers challenging the story, seemingly with credibility:

Private person purchases a service an American company is selling. Suddenly, America's sovereignty is violated and Putin is to blame. https://t.co/GI8g2w7So9

— Alexey Kovalev (@Alexey__Kovalev) September 8, 2017

Of course, Internet Research is hardly a private person like McDonalds corporation — it's run by Putin's personal cook and chief bottle-washer when it comes to trolling US sites. Obviously, now that it's outed, the same folks could make a new firm called "Belochka" or one of those other delightful Russian names ("Squirrel") or make up an acronym of their wife and kids, and no one would be the wiser. Facebook, which has had huge Russian oligarch investment, is hardly going to ban all Russian ad buyers.

But still, this is a budget?

The best bit about this thread are all the Americans with such faith in their democracy they think $100k in ads swung a general election https://t.co/zoqLVRoxtq

— Ant 🥑 (@AntBreach) September 9, 2017

 

So there's the larger issue of what it means for Facebook to try to police ad-buying with political criteria. This is what happened to the Google algorithms, remember?

Kovalev keeps doing "whataboutism" and "your Indians" Soviet-style on this, however, which undermines his valid point:

 

Bell Pottinger helped elect Yeltsin in 1996 – after his tanks shelled Russia's once independent parliament in 93.👇sounds uncannily familiar. https://t.co/mh6L6Z5Hue

— Alexey Kovalev (@Alexey__Kovalev) September 10, 2017

 

Yes, the Kremlin will exploit our freedoms for its nefarious purposes, making us crazy deciding whether to restrict them or not. No, we are not "like" the Kremlin if we are forced to do this in places or if some behaviour seems similar — last time I checked, Bell Pottinger wasn't catering for Theresa May. And PS, the people inside the White House were armed, and shot and killed people, and among them were the future leaders of the "Donetsk People's Republic".

o There's a lot on the Facebook Russian ads thing! Like this from PBS. But while Facebook isn't revealing what the ads were, it's funny, no Internet sleuths or investigative journalists or just plain people seem to be able to tell us what those ads were, either. Facebook said in a company post that they were "divisive" about "LGBT" and "guns". That could be just about anything from anybody on Facebook. To be honest, I never, ever, in my life look over to the right-hand side of Facebook at the ads. I never click on the news links, either. I wonder how many people are like me.

So just this once, I looked over and saw an ad for a real estate site. Then I saw the news, and it was CBS and Bannon –– just like the trending site on Hamilton 68. Nee-noo! What nefarious Kremlin plot may be boosting this? I don't see anything that looks like "fake news" but obviously you'd have to watch this over many weeks to detect it.

Then there's this method of combatting deza:

I know what's on tonight, and I refuse to watch it. Fuck Steve Bannon, and fuck white supremacy. Stop giving him a microphone.#60Minutes

— Charles Clymer🏳️‍🌈 (@cmclymer) September 11, 2017

 

o Look at what happened to Maks Czuperski!

 

Mock & shock… Here's what happened when a bot army came for the @DFRLab team & copied my identity. Read #BotSpot: https://t.co/czziX72sAz pic.twitter.com/spAcvnU4EX

— Maks Czuperski (@MaksCzuperski) August 30, 2017

 

Maybe we should all link to this and talk it up and tie the bots in knots.

 

Charge of the Light Brigade by Richard Caton Woodville, Jr.   This was a charge of British light cavalry led by Lord Cardigan against Russian forces during the Battle of Balaclava on 25 October 1854, in the Crimean War 

 

By Catherine A. Fitzpatrick

You remember The Charge of the Light Brigade by Alfred, Lord Tennyson?

Theirs not to make reply, 
Theirs not to reason why, 
Theirs but to do & die, 
Into the valley of Death 
Rode the six hundred. 

Cannon to right of them, 
Cannon to left of them, 
Cannon in front of them 
Volley'd & thunder'd; 
Storm'd at with shot and shell, 
Boldly they rode and well, 
Into the jaws of Death, 
Into the mouth of Hell 
Rode the six hundred. 

Sounds like a good description of a Kremlin bot, no? And from a war against the Russians!

Hamilton 68, a project of the German Marshall Fund's Alliance for Securing Democracy, is named after the Federalist Paper No. 68, mainly about electing an executive under the Constitution. While the explanation is that no. 68 contains a reference to foreign meddling in elections, it also serves as a reference to Trump — like so many things — and the view that he bends if not breaks the US Constitution.

Hamilton 68 tracks Russian propaganda in real time and lets you know what the current and trending topics are — so you can be on the lookout. How does it do that? By monitoring 600 accounts in particular, which are a mixture of actual Russian state operators, pro-Kremlin suspected state operatives, Kremlin sympathizers who may have "come by their views honestly," bots (Kremlin-sponsored or for-hire) and cyborgs (accounts run by bots sometimes, humans other times, and who knows?). 

Bot or Not? Moscow Tool or Fool?

So very soon after it was announced, Politico's Josh Rogin tweeted about the #FireMcMasters campaign on Twitter, citing "the 600" which was now blessed as "science". Naturally, there was a big debate then about it, with many pointing out that they were "real" and came by their view to fire McMasters "honestly".

The top hashtag among 600 Twitter accounts linked to Russian influence operations was #FireMcMaster https://t.co/Bv4mLAlO4d

— Josh Rogin (@joshrogin) August 7, 2017

Rogin, like Digital Forensics Research Lab, singled out Lee Stranahan (@stranahan) as the pro-Kremlin culprit leading the charge of the bot brigade — a known conservative and former Breitbart journalist who now works for the Kremlin propaganda outlet Sputnik (he has his own debate show together with a liberal commentator). All of this seemed like a slam-dunk, unless you'd been watching at home since 2007 on Twitter, as I have, when I first met Stranahan, who at that time worked for Huffpo and was a leftist libertarian of sorts. Later he became a rightist libertarian, although now he calls himself a "populist" — and has worked again for Breitbart and been fired again.

The Sputnik thing is mainly to pay the bills — Lee has a wife and children to support, and I don't think his Periscope TV show and "Citizens Journalism School" bring in tons of money, especially since Google shut down his YouTube channel after "three strikes you're out" offenses (a terrible thing, regardless of what you think of his views, and it could happen to you — he claims that one of the infractions was for running an ISIS film clip in the context of a story criticizing them — his point that only the offending video should be removed and not the entire channel and all the content is a valid one. Stranahan's TV, regardless of its rambling style and Infowars sponsorship (now) is no ISIS channel and more sophisticated than pewdiepie or some of the outright racists. Even if YouTube blocks you, they should at least give you a week to copy your work — it's outright theft for them to remove the whole channel and take all your work with you, which you may not have copies of).

I haven't known Stranahan to be a Kremlin symp all these years — what he's doing now with all his crazy "man bites dog Soros and Ukraine interfered in our elections" stuff is being contrarian — this is a simulacrum of investigative journalism for some (although in fairness, Stranahan has done some important shoe-leather work investigating stories over the years which is under-appreciated). Recently he had a stroke but recovered more or less; the success of the McMasters campaign I credit less from Kremlin bots and more to do with the fact that Lee's technologically-minded son now works for him and has helped him build up a lot more lists and presence on social media; that, and the fact that a sizable contingent of people are looking for someone to blame for the Trump Administration's failures while clinging to Trump himself. It's not really about the Kremlin; the Kremlin just amplified it. I don't think you will find that the Kremlin bots pushed #FireMcMasters first before Lee — but it's always worth checking.

In this case, the story of the 600 at least identified @stranahan as a carrier or instigator of the story — but we don't know if he is on the list. I cite this little anecdote mainly to point out that "it's complicated" determining whether the Kremlin runs disinformation campaigns and "interferes with our elections" — although unlike Stranahan, I have absolutely no doubt that Putin personally and his henchmen did indeed manipulate media and people in our last elections — and in politics more widely.

So…there might be among these 600 in the Light Brigade "those who came by their views honestly" or those who are "organically pro-Kremlin," and that is apparently why the curators of the web site are not revealing that list. They argue "practically," too, that if they reveal those people/bots, they or their wranglers will "change their behavior." They might close their accounts or stop tweeting, or seed their Twitter feed with just enough anti-Putin material to make you wonder, and so on.

ProporNot Backlash

There's another reason for this: the horrible backlash experienced by people who may have been the same people associated with Ham68 when they had a site called "ProporNot" (as in "is it propaganda or not") — no longer updated — and an anonymous Twitter account by the same name (who was said to be Andrew Weisburd even before he gave his name among the experts on Ham68). The two sites were mentioned as doing similar work in at least one news story; some believe it was indeed the same people, although I suppose this has not been scientifically proven.

At any rate, ProporNot ran a list of 200 sites they felt were spreading Russian propaganda. This caused the predictable howling from liberal journalists who were either on it (in which case they thought it was a badge of honour) or thought it was horrid McCarthyism on behalf of their colleagues who were put on it. Naked Capitalism threatened a lawsuit against Washington Post, not because WP mentioned them, but because they featured ProporNot which did.

Predictable — because this list-making and publication and howling has occurred a number of times before, with a list published by a Scandinavian blogger a few years ago of journalists he thought were soft on Russia in covering the war in Ukraine and in projects like the Ukrainian-sponsored Myrotvorets (Peacekeeper) which publishes the names of separatist fighters and at one point, to universal condemnation in the journalists' community, revealed a list of all those journalists accredited by the soi-disant "Donetsk People's Republic". In doing so, they revealed their phone numbers and addresses which could have put them in harm's way, although claims that a journalist who was murdered was exposed in this way were false, as he wasn't on the list and the story that he was in fact was a fake promoted by the Myrotvorets site owners to capture gullible journalists (RT.com wouldn't give up insisting that in fact it was true).

The Swedish blogger's list (I can't find it now) had obvious Krem-symps like the notorious Graham Phillips who works for Red Star TV (yes, that Red Army) and used to work for RT before they decided he was too much of a goof — but it also had liberal reporters like Oliver Bulloughs who are critical about Russia but just not craven about the Ukrainian cause. People rage and rage about these lists — just the mere fact that ProporNot listed us in their blog roll made people angrily suspect The Interpreter (we had nothing to do with it).

In the finest tradition of "anti-anti-communism,"  Adrian Chen devoted a widely-RT'd article, "Propaganda About Russian Propaganda" in the New Yorker to it; Glenn Greenwald went ballistic merely because the Washington Post reported on this site within the context of a story about Kremlin-sponsored fake news, as did others.

It's very hard to do anti-disinformation work without constantly being slammed as a propagandist yourself. That's why it's important that states do this work without caring whether they are viewed as propagandists because states propagandize, that's what they do; and why it's important that the non-profit and commercial media also tackle it because it's important that there be pluralism in debate and credible exposes — although it will never be enough for some.

Myrotvorets messed up by including people like Steve Rosenberg of the BBC, who is such a Russophile that he and his camera crew were roughed up and expelled from Russia for trying to cover the story of Russian volunteer fighters killed in Ukraine but not acknowledged. And continued to mess up, targeting the wrong Ukrainian journalists who work in Russia.

I always thought that a little-discussed aspect of the Myrotvorets fandango was that all these journalists had to go through the restrictive process of registering with the DNR and presumably taking their minders or checking in regularly with them, but how many of them mentioned that fact in their stories?

In any event, Hamilton68, now shorn of ProporNot, or at least its methods, is that liberal academic thing that should credibly do this job — were it not for the failure to publish the list.

Guess What, Kremlin Propaganda Sites Propagandize!

I suppose the most important factlet of the Dashboard — in the upper right corner — most people are right-lookers — traditionally the space where newspapers put their war news — is the "Top Tweet". This is the top tweet among those 600, evidently – and here you can see that surprise, surprise, RT.com owns this space more often than not.

A look at the dashboards "reveals" another "big scoop" — RT.com, sptnkne.ws and other outright Kremlin propaganda outlets are always on the top lists, i.e. doing the most propagandizing. Also leftist pro-Kremlin sites like zerohedges.com and American conservative sites said to be the home of the alt.right like truepundit.com are there, although sprinkled with what are viewed as "mainstream" sites like CBS or "alternative but liberal"  sites like dailybeast.com

So RT.com is earning its keep instead of making out-of-work American journalists do this job, but what are we to make of this? 

Of course, the point of this site isn't to tell you what you already know — that RT.com is a Kremlin tool and zerohedge shares the Kremlin's views. 

The point, journalistically, I supposed — backed by science! — is to show you those trending topics so you can batten down the hatches…or something.

Of course, there's another way to get Moscow's trending topics on Twitter — put your location as "Moscow" — Twitter doesn't care if that isn't where you are — and you will get a list, for example, like tonight's:

There's you'll see Saakashvili is on top — for breaking into Ukraine after being kicked out — he's a garden perennial with anything he does. Then there is "United Russia" — the ruling party that surprise, surprise, came out on top in the Moscow municipal elections. The hashtag "honestelections — well…. and "Novo-Peredelkino" — a district where the head of the elections commission got on TV the night before and told everyone whom her favourites were from United Russia. And so on — a very local topic, if you will, that didn't get much play in the Western press at all, although it may, as a number of opposition people like Ilya Yashin surprisingly won in their districts, with the low turn-out.

So what's trending on Ham68?

Well, Irma and other hurricane hashtags — Russian state media always loves to report on our misfortunes — and Ukraine — maybe due to Saakashvili. But stevebannon is a recognizable topic coming up — and we learn from what's perhaps the most interesting part of the dashboard — the list of most tweeted URLs — what these stories are:

o George Clooney Uncensored: ‘Steve Bannon Is a Pussy’

o 60 Minutes – Charlie Rose interview with Steve Bannon

If you look up just the straight URL of the first story on Twitter, you see there aren't that many references under "top news" – maybe there are more in the shortened URLs. A lot of them are negative — i.e. defending Bannon from Cluny, and therefore presumably alt-right fodder for Krem-bots. But some are positive. Same with the other story in reverse.

Ham68 doesn't want this to be the most interesting part of the site because they make it difficult for you to capture the URLs — if you click on them, you won't go to those stories, to try to fathom whether they are pro-Kremlin bait that these mainstream sites got infected with OR mainstream stories that proved to be fodder for alt-right and Kremlinoid sites. Instead, you will only be taken to a boring graph about how they are increasing or not. Don't try to copy it with your mouse, either, as it won't copy — but if you click SEARCH if you happen to have that option, that will at least finally give you a URL to capture. Annoying! But then, they don't want you doing this: trying to figure out IF mainstream media is either a) infected or b) infecting.

For my money, that's the point of this exercise, however. That the Kremlin will jump on the hurricane or a shooting in Texas (reported everywhere but not on these trends) is old news. That mainstream media sometimes gets busted with fake news is old news by now, too. But if you could watch in real time how this happens, that would be new news.

Algorithm — and Chocolate — Quality Control

It's work though, and of the type that needs humans, not algorith,s. I remember how I tracked the claims of a Russian OSCE ambassador about being especially banned from a voting station to the Daily Kos and Infowars — there are certain old networks that unfailing echo the Kremlin. 

Ham68 makes much of its algorithms — and what's all the rage now — its trained algorithms that it has made "smart" by "educating" it — this is artificial intelligence or "machine learning".

The dirty little secret to machine learning, hower, is that it is based on flawed organic human intelligence that devises the algorithms to use, rejecting some, accepting others.  What if the experts publicized the algorithms they use? This may be proprietary information or a trade secret, but insiders might then examine and critique them.

I recently attended a lecture on machine learning and the Internet of Things where a guy explained how algorithms were selected and computers "taught" to track the manufacturing of Hershey's candies. They have to be a standard weight and quality and years and years of engineering of the old-fashioned kind have gone in to making the process efficient — if a lot of candy bars that aren't 3 ounces have to be thrown out, it's a loss for the company. 

What this fellow noted in his lecture was the science of this process — that they put in sensors that they thought would yield them information they needed and found out that in fact completely different sensors were  needed. This was called "Learning from Your Mistakes". When the topic is making candy bars so you don't lose money, and real-life weight and heft, perhaps it is easier.

But Ham68 is a social science, and how does it check its work? There is nothing magic about algorithms — they are human artifacts, regardless of their effect on machines — although many people's eyes glaze over when they hear the word. More critical assessment is needed — algorithms, after all, gave us this wonder: the Google ranking system used to control debate in comments which has been roundly panned.

What Measures Success?

One of the ways funders judge a project like this is how many media hits it has — or perhaps "in group citations" or something more wonky (which you can read about in the methodology). And this might increase, but might taper off. Unless the curators constantly churn new analytical essays that might get requoted, they might not keep up traffic. Media hits are chosen by funders because that presumably shows interest and influence. What a real measure of success would be, however, is the foiling of a Kremlin disinformation plot — or at least the exposure of one. In my view, #FireMcMasters is not one, whatever its Kremlin elements.

Another measure would merely be the number of people who visit the site because they want to watch for the trending topics — just to be on the qui vive, as it were, of what the Kremlin is up to. It just might be that you won't guess on your own — or if you don't read Russian and don't have your Twitter location set to "Moscow" — that Moscow's beloved propaganda topics will include "Irma" and "Steve Bannon".

By itself, it may not be a site that you would visit daily, but if a news story mentions it, people will come. Right now, it's traffic, according to Alexa, is good:

o Atlanticcouncil.org

Global rank 114,924 2,232
United States 47,792

o dashboard.securingdemocracy.org

Global 156,036
United States 42,138

Remember, what's important about Alexa isn't what it does in and of itself, which may be flawed and is always savagely criticized, but what's important is that you can use it as a yardstick of sorts to compare one site to another.

Unintended Consequence

The project's owners will do what they do, but for my money, the sites that it is showing that are NOT the obvious Russian agitprop sites are the ones to watch. Are they infected? Or are they always super critical of Trump and thus always going to be fodder for alt-right and the Kremlin? What about a relatively unknown site like Tsarizm — good or bad? I haven't made up my mind yet because I haven't had time to research it. Why are certain mainstream sites always on the Dashboard, and others never on it? What's *different* about the way they cover a story that makes it click bait for Kremlin propagandists?

This section — and these questions — are an "unintended consequence" of the project perhaps — and as I noted, the construction of the site is set up to fight you analyzing this regularly and easily. No matter. The question is what sites make the news — real or fake — that is retweeted, not the bots and fellow travellers who re-tweet them with an evil purpose or the innocent "organics" who believe what they may believe — and perhaps could be persuaded by their fellow Americans to change.