#information war
Text
This is a WIRED article from 2018 about Russia's propaganda/disinformation campaign on Tumblr.
The thing is, while Tumblr has addressed it in the past, it is very clear that Russia still uses trolls on this site. The list that they've provided of Russia-linked blogs back then isn't available anymore (I can't access it). The reason I'm posting this now is because I see a lot of people posting screenshots of pro-russian users and I want you to know that there's high chance that these users you are interacting with might be a troll spreading Russian propaganda. With the invasion of Ukraine these blogs must have intensified their activities so you can imagine the state of disinformation on this site.
Here's a useful article on how to spot russian bots/shills
343 notes
·
View notes
Text
How Israel Lost the Information War
Yesterday I was listening to a news program on the radio while preparing dinner. The host asked his subject – I don’t recall who it was, probably an opposition member of the Knesset – this question: how can it be that world opinion has become solidly anti-Israel only a few months after the worst pogrom since the Holocaust, in which more than a thousand Jews were murdered in the most brutal fashion imaginable, in which hundreds of women were raped and children tortured to death? The predictable and stupidly self-serving political answer was that it was the fault of the Netanyahu government, which had “mismanaged” the war. But what is the correct answer?
The real reason is that Israel, while successful in the “kinetic” aspects of the campaign against Hamas, has been overwhelmingly defeated in the less visible theater of information warfare.
The roots of this defeat go back decades. There was as yet no “mismanagement” on the day after the Hamas invasion, when there was an outburst of anti-Israel demonstrations and attacks on Jews around the world while the rampage was still continuing in parts of southern Israel. The ground was prepared as far back as the 1970s, when a wave of Arab petrodollars, guided by the Soviet KGB, flowed into a massive project of psychological and diplomatic warfare against the Jewish state. It wasn’t so difficult for them – the built-in antisemitism of the West, temporarily suppressed after the Holocaust, found a new outlet. It was easy, too, to nurture antisemitic elements in the Muslim world. In the West, the educational systems were infiltrated and subverted, starting with the “best” universities and continuing down to textbooks and curricula for elementary schools. A reality-inverting identification was made between Zionism and Western colonialism and racism, benefiting from both the anger of the formerly colonized and the guilt of the colonizers.
Funds for anti-Israel initiatives also came from the network of charities associated with George Soros, starting around the beginning of the 1990s. This money nourished many of the NGOs and human rights groups that became centers of anti-Israel propaganda, and continues to support them.1
In the diplomatic realm, the invention of the Palestinian Refugee after Israel’s War of Independence (a war of national liberation in which the formerly colonized Jews fought Arab proxies of the British Empire!), provided Hamas with the troops it needed, fed and educated to the point of fanatic hatred with Western money. Hamas combined the multi-faceted indoctrination against Jews and Israel, pioneered by the PLO after Oslo, with religious jihad. Both the West and the Muslim world were primed and ready to blame Israel for the murder, rape, and pillage of her people. And the great-power rivals of the US, Russia and China, were only too happy to join in the take-down of what they see (correctly?) as an American satellite, an outpost of the US in an important zone of contention.
Given the fertile soil, the propaganda offensive of Hamas and its supporters when Israel counterattacked blossomed into a worldwide flourishing of anti-Israel and anti-Jewish expression. The Palestinians, who have developed the technique of exploiting their supposed victimhood, sometimes by exaggeration, sometimes by invention (as in the alleged shooting of the boy Mohammad al Dura in 2000, probably the most blatant yet effective “Pallywood” production ever), and sometimes by deliberately putting their people in harm’s way, pulled out all the stops. Soon the horrors of October 7th were drowned out by the suffering of the Gazans affected by the war that their leaders had started. Western media and humanitarian organizations slavishly repeated Hamas propaganda about civilian casualties with proforma disclosures that their only source was Hamas.
Mismanagement on the part of Israel also goes back decades. It includes overdependence on the US and consequent weakness in the face of pressure from unfriendly administrations, inability to overcome wish-fulfillment illusions about Palestinian motives and plans, weakness in the face of domestic pressure (for example, the release of more than a thousand imprisoned terrorists in return for one kidnapped soldier), and the tendency to prioritize internal political issues over serious external threats. A very serious failure has been our sporadic, inconsistent, and poorly funded actions in the information arena, while our enemies have implemented a long-term, carefully planned and meticulously executed campaign.
Al Jazeera, began broadcasting in Arabic by satellite in 1996, and since then has added multiple languages, including English. Based in Qatar and very influential in the Arab world, it has been in the forefront of anti-Israel propaganda ever since. In wartime, it specializes in inflammatory stories and photos of “atrocities” allegedly committed by the IDF (pictures from Syria and natural disasters are sometimes used). Left-leaning Western media, like the British Guardian newspaper have always followed an anti-Israel line; and the BBC is far from impartial. More recently, mainstream media in the US like the NY Times and Washington Post newspapers, the NPR radio network, CNN, and others – staffed by the products of “good” universities – have become more than merely biased: at their worst (which is often), they are mouthpieces for Hamas. Pro-Israel media in the West are rare and marginal. Some of Israel’s own media – in particular the English edition of Ha’aretz, which is widely read throughout the world – is only slightly less toxic than Al Jazeera. Israel is overwhelmed on social media as well, in part by botnets, but also by individuals and anti-Israel NGOs which dedicate staff to this function.
The combination of governments, international institutions, NGOs, media, academic institutions, and the arts all promulgating the carefully nurtured myths of Palestinian victimization and Israeli malevolence have overpowered Israel’s woefully inadequate attempts at a response.
In short, Israel has been and continues to be outgunned in the realm of information warfare. There have been sporadic attempts to improve the situation, but the funds for such a massive undertaking have never been available, nor would there likely be agreement on precisely what the message should be and how it should be presented. And we don’t have decades to lay the groundwork and gradually uproot the deep-seated antisemitism and hatred of the state of the Jews that has developed over time, even if we knew how to do it.
The best strategy in the face of this defeat therefore will be to depend on the human tendency to cheer for the winner: to be the “strong horse” that everyone bets on. Israel will need to defeat its enemies on the physical plane, to humiliate them and strike fear into the ones that are left. Rather than a picture of “responsible citizenship” that the world has been conditioned to disbelieve, our image should be that of a violent and dangerous player. In an environment where we can’t create warmth, we should at least inspire trepidation.
1 Alexander H. Joffe, “Bad Investment: The Philanthropy of George Soros and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, How Soros-funded Groups Increase Tensions in a Troubled Region: May 2013
https://www.ngo-monitor.org/soros.pdf
20 notes
·
View notes
Text
By Raúl Antonio Capote
This is not a light accusation; behind this false news lies the intentions of reactionary sectors in Washington that seek to justify the intensification of the blockade and escalate aggressive actions against the island.
It is part of a premeditated and sustained process aimed at destroying credibility, delegitimizing the government and justifying any punitive measure. Even though the Pentagon denied the article the lie has been set into motion.
53 notes
·
View notes
Text
16 notes
·
View notes
Text
Ben Collins: It’s time for journalists to draw the sword and throw away the scabbard
“Triumphs of the truth are not accidents. They are times the American media — including and especially those outside of the disinformation beat — did not equivocate and did not give an inch to lies and the liars who tell them.”
By BEN COLLINS June 13, 2023, 12:16 p.m.
Editor’s note: NBC News reporter Ben Collins was one of the winners of the 2023 Walter Cronkite Awards for Excellence in Television Political Journalism, given by the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. This year’s awards focused on “best practices of TV journalism aimed at combating disinformation and defending democracy.” Collins included this memo to the judges, along with a compilation of TV news reports.
An update on the information war, for the 2023 Walter Cronkite Awards
We’re losing.
I’m hesitant to start off this memo on such a grim note, but it’s true: The people putting out the truth are under siege in the information war, and we’re not doing so great. That’s, in part, because a lot of those people aren’t even aware they’re in an information war to begin with.
There is good news: We can still win. It will take a change in tack, and a little bit of courage.
But first, since I’m doubling down on bad ideas right out of the gate, I’m going to do something else that’s probably ill advised. I’m about to quote Edward R. Murrow, who, I’ve been told by a bunch of books, was not a pal of Mr. Cronkite. They both wound up at the same place — the facts — and they took two separate ways to get there. They were in the trenches and were too deep in it to see they were on the same side. I get it. We’ve all been there. A lot of us are there right now.
Murrow, famously, said this:
This instrument can teach. It can illuminate. Yes, and even it can inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends. Otherwise, it’s nothing but wires and lights in a box. There is a great and perhaps decisive battle to be fought against ignorance, intolerance and indifference. This weapon of television could be useful.
Stonewall Jackson, who is generally believed to have known something about weapons, is reported to have said, “When war comes, you must draw the sword and throw away the scabbard.” The trouble with television is that it is rusting in the scabbard during a battle for survival.
We’re back in that very same battle right now, and it’s against the same enemy: ignorance, intolerance, indifference. The box is smaller now. It’s in your pocket. It’s brighter and faster and it vibrates and dings and brings you horror and joy and knows what makes you feel better and sure as hell knows what makes you feel worse. Then it assigns those bad feelings to a political enemy, and the good feelings to anybody trying to get rid of those people.
youtube
That’s what you’ll see in the stories I’ve covered in the last year. Fear and panic and paranoia and lies and deceit that led to terror, death and the attempted disenfranchisement of American voters.
You’ll see that first with my coverage of the Buffalo shooting, a terror attack perpetrated by a white supremacist obsessed with the “Great Replacement Theory” lie that has pervaded extremist spaces online. The shooter posted his own tranche of racist lies on the internet in his manifesto for 4chan and 8chan users, which I had to convey to our viewers without further spreading his hate.
You’ll see midterm election night coverage of the attempts to shoo away voters from early voting ballot drop boxes by “mule watchers,” the conspiracy theorists obsessed with the lie that “2,000 ballot mules” had stolen the election from Donald Trump.
You’ll see the hate campaign targeted at America’s trans youth that continues to make some of the most persecuted Americans fear for their lives to this day.
But you’ll also see interspersed moments of justice and relief. You’ll see my reporting on a day I thought would never come: October 12th, the afternoon Alex Jones was forced to reckon with his decades of lies and pay almost $1 billion to the families of children killed in the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre. You’ll see how Russia’s global information war fell apart as its military began to invade Ukraine, and how Vladimir Putin’s propaganda arm scrambled to adopt lies first spread by American anti-vaccine groups.
I hope you notice something specific while reviewing my coverage of the last year of hate, and how hate loses. Triumphs of the truth are not accidents. They are times the American media — including and especially those outside of the disinformation beat — did not equivocate and did not give an inch to lies and the liars who tell them. No one attempted to falsely humanize the inhumane — like the horrors of Vladimir Putin. No one tried to bend over backwards to provide positive framing to intentional cruelty — like the lies of Alex Jones — even, or especially, if it was politically inconvenient at the moment.
When media manipulators were met with a unified opposition armed with clear facts — when that unified opposition stood firmly alongside those who were constantly attacked by men with powerful and profitable propaganda machines — that opposition won. We won. The news won.
But it takes unity, and not capitulation, in these moments. There is no meeting liars halfway, because the truth then becomes one-half lie. We must simply be louder, and clearer, with the truth.
The wires and lights in the box aren’t quite so simple now that they’re in our pockets. Some of them are keeping your kid up at night, telling your teenager fantastical tales about the Illuminati on TikTok. (And some of them are keeping your parents up at night, too, telling equally fantastical tales about the nightly gunfight that is actually just fireworks on NextDoor.) The people spreading those Illuminati lies are not playing by the rules, nor are they particularly interested in the truth. They are interested in money and power, and they have been gaming our algorithms to gin up fear and sell a balm for it.
I have been covering this stuff for too long now, and I can assure you that they are not going to stop. So we have no choice: We simply have to tell better stories than them. We have to be better at extolling truth — based in empathy, democracy, and human rights — than fearmongers have become at selling profitable lies.
We can win, but we have to be more unified, and we have to be more human. We’ve faced this before and we’re facing it again. “There is a great and perhaps decisive battle to be fought against ignorance, intolerance and indifference.”
Look down at your phone. The lights and wires in that box are smaller, but they contain exponentially more ways to do harm. If you want your vote to count, or if you were born in any way different, I’m certain you’d agree.
“When the war comes, you must draw the sword and throw away the scabbard.” I’m confident I threw away my scabbard.
—
Ben Collins covers disinformation, extremism and the internet for NBC News.
#ben collins#good words#walter cronkite awards#information war#journalism#nbc news#long post#Youtube
41 notes
·
View notes
Text
Russia 'will likely lose' its war in Ukraine if the US can keep from falling prey to Moscow's information game, conflict analysts say
4 notes
·
View notes
Text
7 notes
·
View notes
Text
I want so much to understand
These awful things, but cannot get
To truth. The narratives are planned
And fortified. They will not let
Me make the sense I need to make,
To pick the truthing from the lying.
I fear my little mind with break
Against their weapons. Why keep trying
To reckon real from counterfeit
When both sound equally insane
And great pre-emptive strikes of sh*t
Assault my undefended brain?
I'm far too dumb and far too small
To push against the vast machine
Of those who'd puppeteer us all.
Oh make these things unheard, unseen!
If not, then let me keep this rule
To heal a bullsh*t-wounded mind:
When all the world seems false and cruel
Be skeptical but still be kind.
4 notes
·
View notes
Photo
https://archive.org/details/information-warfare-a-new-face-of-war
this report summarizes research performed by RAND for the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense (Command, Control, Communications and Intelligence). The objective of this effort was to garner perspectives on a broad range of potential na- tional security issues related to the evolving concept of information warfare, with a particular emphasis on the defensive aspects of what is characterized in the report as "strategic information warfare." The study was undertaken in recognition that future U.S. national security strategy is likely to be profoundly affected by the ongoing rapid evolution of cyberspace—the global information infrastructure—and in this context by the growing dependence of the U.S. military and other national institutions and infrastructures on potentially vulnerable elements of the U.S. national information infrastructure.
5 notes
·
View notes
Text
From the court today. Israel IS committing a genocide.
#free palestine#free gaza#Israel#israel is committing genocide#palestine#gaza#south africa#icj#international court of justice#international law#united nations#UN#war crimes#genocide#information#important#current events
26K notes
·
View notes
Text
Shattering Illusions
View On WordPress
#diplomacy#educated fools#hypocrisy#illusion#information war#intellectualism#paradox#perception#secularism#self absorption#smokescreen#storytelling
0 notes
Text
How Google's browser became a threat to privacy and democracy
1 note
·
View note
Text
The images from the October 7 massacre in southern Israel are extraordinarily difficult to behold. Charred bodies, babies riddled with bullet holes, elderly women shot in the head. The depths of Hamas’s depravity are impossible to comprehend.
And yet, after reporters who visited one of the kibbutzim targeted by the genocidal terrorist group last weekend reported that dozens of children had been brutally murdered, the response from some wasn’t horror and revulsion, but rather mockery and incredulity.
This was particularly apparent on X (formerly known as Twitter), a cesspool inhabited by some of the absolute worst of humanity, where some users poked fun at the reporters and openly questioned the veracity of their reports.
In response, Israel violated a longstanding practice.
For years, successive Israeli governments have resisted displaying the mangled bodies, the severed limbs, or the pools of blood produced by Palestinian acts of terror. They did so out of a belief in the Jewish principle of kavod hamet – the dignity of the dead – as well as a refusal to stoop to the level of anti-Israel propagandists, who perversely parade the bodies of dead Palestinians in an effort to garner international support.
This time, however, Israel felt that it had no choice. On Thursday, the government sent media outlets three photos: two of small burnt and blackened bodies, and a third of a small body covered in blood.
We at The Jerusalem Post were among the first to confirm, on the basis of the photos, that the reports of Israeli children murdered by Hamas in unspeakable ways were true. We opted not to display the photos on our website, instead linking to government social media accounts on which the photos could be found, while warning readers that the photos were graphic and deeply disturbing.
Of course, this did not suffice for the propagandists, who suggested that the photos showed that children had been burned to death, but not beheaded, and questioned whether the photos were indeed from southern Israel. Some went so far as to suggest that the photos were fake, generated by artificial intelligence.
The entire discourse is nothing short of nauseating. But it is also telling.
Jews have become accustomed to efforts to deny atrocities of which they are victims. This is perhaps most evident in the obscene phenomenon of Holocaust denial, which is still prevalent throughout the Arab world and elsewhere.
The goal is twofold: to deny Jews sympathy and compassion and to cause them additional pain and suffering by forcing them to prove that the horrors they endured actually happened.
What we have witnessed in recent days is strikingly similar.
Those who deny that Jewish children were murdered by Hamas in ghastly ways do so for the same reasons Holocaust deniers deny the Holocaust: to deny Israel international sympathy and support and to compound Israeli families’ agony by casting doubt on their unthinkable loss.
The release of the photos was necessary to allay any lingering doubts held by reasonable people – though why anyone would doubt that Hamas, a genocidal terrorist organization hell-bent on destroying Israel and murdering Jews, is capable of such horrors is beyond us – but, predictably, it did nothing to silence those who questioned the veracity of the reports out of hatred and spite.
Fight the information war
There is a lesson here.
It is important for Israel to fight the information war, to combat lies and misinformation and tell its side of the story. Doing so helps fortify the international legitimacy of Israel’s actions and gain the sympathy of societies and governments.
But at the end of the day, there are some – many of them simple antisemites – who will never be convinced, because they simply don’t want to be. To them, the Jewish state is always in the wrong, nothing it does will ever be right, and no evidence – including photos of dead Jewish babies ��� will change their minds.
Israel must invest its efforts in reaching the large majority of people around the world whose minds haven’t yet been made up but who are mostly decent and well-intentioned. They must be the target of Israel’s international media efforts. Trying to change the minds of those blinded by hate and impervious to reality is a waste of our spokespeople’s breath and our nation’s resources.
39 notes
·
View notes
Link
By Ana Hurtado
We are confident that it is possible to fight against the predominance of capitalist values and hegemony, which have the upper hand in the Western world, and which little by little, through the Internet and cultural aspects, are trying to infiltrate Cuba. Manipulation is powerful, but it is not all-powerful.
This fight is the greatest challenge facing the defenders of the Cuban Revolution, the defenders of Fidel and those who hope for a better world.
#Cuba#socialism#imperialism#information war#baseball#Cuban Revolution#Fidel Castro#youth#capitalism#media#propaganda#Miami#Struggle La Lucha
51 notes
·
View notes
Text
0 notes
Last Seen Blogs
chaotic-tired-cat
taking half a step forward is better than none at all
ilmg-bbw
ILMGBBW
televisionaryfemme
Five By Five
johannepetereric
Shipping Story Ideas