Resources for Countering Disinformation, Misinformation, and Propaganda

General BS
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disinformation

Going to use this thread as an open document dump for people to reference when trying to strengthen their skillset for identifying and countering or debunking disinformation, misinformation, propaganda, or fake news.

Kicking it off with arguably the most important work on the topic: The NATO Defense College’s Handbook of Russian Information Warfare. Uploading the entire PDF for you to read here.

If you are even remotely interested in developing the skills to identify misinformation, this is a must read.
NDC fm_9.pdf (418.1 KB)

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Seminal research from 2001, if you really want to understand how well Putin has manipulated the last two decades of online activity, and why his “War Cloud” is beating us daily.

This paper aims at describing, according to the recent advances in social psychology and Computer Mediated Communication, how identities are perceived and constructed in cyberspace. All interactions analyzed in this study were performed within “Euroland,” a collaborative virtual environment. The interacting community was composed of students, teachers, and researchers working on a transnational educational project. Practices and dialogues within Euroland are analyzed using an ethnographic and conversational method. A sample of discourses and actions that occurred during 8 months of time, selected according to the research aims, was analyzed. During online connections, users were personified by an “Avatar.” Avatars are able to walk, fly, and look around the virtual world. They are also able to build and manipulate three-dimensional objects, perform virtual actions, and chat with other connected users. Results showed that “Eurolanders” showed and constructed their identities using strategic “positioning” depending on the interactive situation. Identities are thus dynamic and strongly related to the context, created and constantly recreated by the users. It is concluded that specific features offered by the Euroland environment are exploited by the users as resources to play with, while moving from one strategic positioning to another. Cyber identities involve resources given by specific technological tools and by community. The cyber-identity construction process seems to be highly congruent to the advances in the dialogical perspective in psychology, where identities are considered in their conceptualizations as multiple, “multivoiced,” “positioned,” and context-dependent.

2001StrategicidentitiesincyberspaceCYBERPSYCHOLOGYtalamoligorio.pdf|attachment (443.3 KB)

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[Administrator edit to include PDF]

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Wow, did Trump just claim Harris met Putin, and right before he invaded?

Yes he did.

  • “Remember when Biden sent Kamala to Europe to stop the war in Ukraine. She met with Putin, and then three days later, he attacked. How did she do? Do you think she did a good job? She met with Putin to tell him, ‘Don’t do it.’ And three days later, he attacked; that’s when the attack started. Did you know that, General?”*

Who told Trump that…Putin???

Could you imagine if it were all true…the pee tape, etc. Putin has been blackmailing Trump for 8 years. And there is a covert channel between the two autocrats…Putin did toss Trump a microchip enabled soccer ball, after all.

Man, that would be so classically Russian.

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This study is 3 years old and predates the emergence of casual generative AI usage, but the “dosage” information below (<5m) is, in my professional opinion, far too long.

It’s more likely that the time required for altering behavior is individual, and unique to each person, but heavily dependent on individual’s ability to assess ecological validity (often poorly), and in most cases almost immediate.

In other words, false information might affect someone’s subliminal mind in a matter of minutes or even days/weeks, but for most people it is likely instantaneous. Confirmation bias only take a few seconds to engage, meaning that disinformation designed to target specific people is effective in real time, and at scale. Our brains are all hooked on information, and it’s very easy to abuse that.

This stuff has been used by Soviet and Russian government leaders for 80+ years, and effectively because to date, there has never been a free press there. Ever.

Would you notice if fake news changed your behavior? An experiment on the unconscious effects of disinformation

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0747563220303800

A growing literature is emerging on the believability and spread of disinformation, such as fake news, over social networks. However, little is known about the degree to which malicious actors can use social media to covertly affect behavior with disinformation. A lab-based randomized controlled experiment was conducted with 233 undergraduate students to investigate the behavioral effects of fake news. It was found that even short (under 5-min) exposure to fake news was able to significantly modify the unconscious behavior of individuals. This paper provides initial evidence that fake news can be used to covertly modify behavior, it argues that current approaches to mitigating fake news, and disinformation in general, are insufficient to protect social media users from this threat, and it highlights the implications of this for democracy. It raises the need for an urgent cross-sectoral effort to investigate, protect against, and mitigate the risks of covert, widespread and decentralized behavior modification over online social networks.

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My Deed (CIA man) would be rolling in his grave, if he weren’t ashes spread all over Mount Holyoke.

So, I roll for him.

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Benny Johnson and Tim Pool are both Kremlin assets, per the DOJ.

gomer-surprise-gomer

And check out what Benny’s posting right now: crowd sizes at the Tucker Carlson/Russell Brand show in Phoenix, talking about Brand’s baptism by Bear Grylls.

We already knew Tucker Carlson was a Russian stooge, and Brand is just a dipshit, but one look at this audience is enough to convince me this is a dead crowd in more ways than one. They don’t even realize how they are feeding Putin’s war machine, and they’re paying for the privilege.

I guess suckers are born every minute, and active measures monetize it fast, at scale.

https://x.com/bennyjohnson/status/1831538578846839142

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“The DOJ’s indictment doesn’t accuse the right-wing influencers—which it identifies only as Commentator-1 and Commentator-2—of any wrongdoing and instead suggests they were deceived by the company’s two founders and the Russian state media operatives.”

“When the influencers asked about the company’s funding source, the founders allegedly lied and told them they were sponsored by a private investor named “Eduard Grigoriann”—a fictional persona, according to the indictment.”

@W.Rabbit did you even bother to read anything further than a meme ?

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I’m not sure how much deception is taking place when you go from being a relative nobody covering Occupy Wall Street protests, on the side of the protesters, to a multimillionaire overtly repeating Russian talking points.

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What meme? I get my info from daily briefings, and I do post-doctoral research in this field.

I don’t think you understand what “asset” means in the intelligence sense.

Assets often don’t know they are assets, or are involuntary. Deception, blackmail, propaganda etc.

The whole point of Russian Active Measures ( Aktivnye Meropriyatiya) is the conduct of political warfare.

Edward Snowden is a Russian asset (and actual Russian spy), so is Steven Seagal. Putin uses both for propaganda daily.

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Money and influence have always been primary ways of establishing Kremlin assets in the post-Soviet days, where it’s only slightly harder to do it with black bag ops.

Nothing easier than someone who can be bought with cold, hard cash, and we all know some people will turn in their own mother for some.

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Trump is also a Russian asset, according to most of the intel community (ours and theirs). Let’s not forget that. Hence all the anti-NATO bullshit, which makes him a first as far as POTUS go.

Sometimes the most effective assets are the ones who think it’s all their idea. IT just takes a bit of finding their triggers, weak points, vulnerabilities.

There is over a half century of research on this kind of thing.

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I dont know much about him really as I saw him once interview Ra the Rugged man and he came off as a bit of a penis so have since avoided him save the occasional clip that pops up.

I imagine that if anything suspicious has taken place the DOJ will be on it.

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Well, here is a great example of him pushing a particular narrative:

GWshiO9XMAAsPUF
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Keeping in mind, dear reader, that the end goal is to diminish the influence and power of the US, which every little bit of civil unrest we have, accomplishes, by reducing our focus on progress to deal with it.

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Whos talking point is civil war at present left or right?

This movie (that I enjoyed) was made by Obamas production company.

Then there is the Netflix movie : Civil War

Which I understand is supposed to be neutral but I havent seen it.

From what I have read it seams to have been a bubbling theme since Obama took office with noises made from all sides.

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The film goes out of its way to be politically ambiguous, and succeeds completely at that.

It’s less about an actual civil war than about war photojournalism. Setting it in the US is a narrative device to make the stakes and suffering have more impact.

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And only hours after he was outed for having taken millions from Russia to promote their talking points (wittingly or unwittingly), he posts this:

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“The organs of state security are not allowed to function within the borders of your country”

“Organs?..”

“Yesss…”

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Looks like sarcasm

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It is. He’s a piece of shit.

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