Beware of analysis trying to count the number of bots, bots are hard to detect without false positive especially when all you have access to is public data.
Publishing observations about public handles on a public website, which handles are published publicly by same public website, could fall afoul of the GDPR... how?
On a lark I've looked at the limited available posting history of a few users and lets just say they don't have time for much of anything else during the day than to post on ZH.
Inevitably there's propaganda and disinformation on either side. But the unarguable fact in this war is that there's now mass death, destruction and suffering because Russia chose to invade Ukraine.
(There are clearly enormous effective coordinated propaganda campaigns on Ukraine's behalf, but I'm pretty sure kids on Reddit shouting about killing 'orcs' aren't part of it)
Any even neutral story about Russia brings out vitriol about how obvious Russia's propaganda is.
But somehow they miss the same effect when the story is pro-Ukraine, no matter who the sources are, how unlikely the content is to be true, etc.
This was to be expected in the first months of the war, but after so many months of a steady diet of propaganda that doesn't turn out to be true, somehow Redditors still take it at face value.
Pair the narrative of the smaller country being invaded by the belligerent dictator next door with (in my case) a country where Russia is already unpopular due to various assassinations, sabre-rattling, and so on, its not hard to understand the current balance of
In the UK the mainstream (serious) news has been fairly reliant on reporting based on estimated troop movements illustrated by video so there hasn't been too much potential for egregious nonsense.
In my obviously biased view the thing that worries me is actually people (knowingly, twitter promotes a fairly distorted presentation of ones true feelings) swallowing Russian propaganda hook line and sinker out of a fairly boring contrarianism.
It is easy to imagine the debates in the neutral (or less than neutral) countries of past historical conflicts - you can make your own mind up about how those debates would go, but this conflict (paired with such easy access to differing opinion) seems to be a great source of material.
Contrarianism is often a very important thing to have in society, make no mistake, but many would benefit (and perhaps internally do, who knows) from being contrarian against their own beliefs, even just for a little time a day - this goes for both sides of this conflict although I won't pussyfoot by saying that both sides are in some way the same.
I'd agree with this. The BBC's Ukrainecast podcast seems to be very conservative here as an example. I don't listen all the time, but when I do it reports things as new days behind OSINT sources. And they're always very clear about what they can and can't independently verify, and specifically call out when Ukrainians are stopping journalists getting places to verify their claims.
The media products of mass mobilized military societies have some similarity with each other, when viewed this way, despite being "at war".
There is no equally valid argument against man-made climate change, evolution, gay rights, the right for people of color to exist without harassment, or Ukraine defending itself.
Most people don’t understand how many bots are influencing public discourse on reddit. It’s really concerning, particular that the “real” users on reddit tend to be young and impressionable.
Can you give an overview of how your bot detection works?
I assume you don't have any proprietary information?
Are you solely using the text features of the comment to tell if it was posted by a bot?
Thanks.
Well, do elaborate pls.
We really need some decent alternatives, to lots of services.
The threads on Ukraine are particularly bad since its just a bunch of bots and kids trying to meme and be clever and edgy about how Russia sucks, which isn't actually useful discourse or information, even if you sort of agree with it.
Most of the people knew with which side to side long before the war started.
No amount of propaganda is going to convince an average west European or American that Russians are good guys who just wanted to protect Russian-speaking people in Ukraine. Moreover, no amount of "western" propaganda will convince someone in a country that was hit by the USA or NATO bombs that Ukraine supported by "the west" is fighting for freedom and democracy.
With propaganda, you can soften these opinions a bit, but that's the limit.
And it just happens so, that both Reddit, Twitter and HN are dominated with the users from the first group, so they tend to believe Ukraine side more.
I have at least one online friend from just such a NATO-bombed (and even relatively pro-Russia) country who is an absolutely solid supporter of Ukraine's fight against Russia's aggression.
Few people who live in countries with actual historical experience with Russia actually believe this garbage "NATO backed Russia into a corner" narrative.
It's a tough sell indeed when government-controlled prime-time TV shows in Russia promote genocide: wholesale destruction of Ukraine's civilian infrastructure to deprive them of electricity, heating, food and medicine, to drive 20 million refugees to EU.[1]
[1] https://twitter.com/JuliaDavisNews/status/157049364928437862...
"Flairing" posts doesn't do much good either, because the vast majority of users don't filter. I wonder if this actually makes things worse because the people who would downvote and present counterpoints have opted out of seeing such posts - furthering the echo chamber.
The real power of Reddit is to manipulate perception by a barrage of likeminded content, displayed over and over again to people who don't have their ideological defenses up because they're just browsing casually.
As with all things, it's on smaller community subreddits where people are allowed to think independently to some degree.
Even my hometown's subreddit (city pop less than 500K, subreddit membership less than 100k) is so heavily group-thinked that many topics of current national debate are 100% settled on the subreddit and no-go for discussion.
Outside this I find it somewhat bizarre that we've let the unemployed mentally ill decide what is and isn't acceptable for millions to see.
You'll also get a sitewide permanent ban for talking about or mentioning the places where moderators sell their accounts for significant chunks of money. This is automatic and not in response to a report with certain keywords.
It's a problem they really want to pretend doesn't exist.
See: r/startrek
Any criticism of Star Trek: Picard or ST: Discovery (or any CBS property) is deleted instantly.
And redditors still have the gall to describe themselves as anti-corporate leftist freedom fighters.
It's an anonymous site and you don't even need an email address to sign up, so it's very easy to spin up many accounts.
Can it be called "propaganda" if it's just like, an r/worldnews link to a story on some website and then 100,000 "actual users" (I don't think they're all bots?) on their own volition/will/brainpower spread/support (upvote) the "pro-Ukraine" message in the comments?
I highly recommend watching two videos..."The Dead Internet Theory", by All Time, and "Reddit is Being Manipulated by Professional Shills Every Day" by Point. They go into how Reddit works algorithmically, and how there is a strong incentive for corporations, governments, and political movements to write bots to manipulate karma. If hackernews lets me, I will link both of them and the darknet diaries episode. Im new here, so Im not sure how links work on ycombinator.
Darknet diaries 27: https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/27/
Dead Internet Theory: https://youtu.be/DEn758DVF9I
Reddit is run by shills: https://youtu.be/4uIrnEIuL8o
Propaganda is defined as:
"information, especially of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote or publicize a particular political cause or point of view."
If we accept that as a definition, it is clear that everything that is biased (* and is misleading ) is propaganda ( and if you think for more than a second, you recognize that everything is indeed biased to a degree ). Now.. whether is it is misleading.. can be in the eye of the beholder.
<< and then 100,000 "actual users" [...] upvote
Believe it or not, people do have an interesting tendency to follow the wisdom of the crowd. As such, social sentiment is a valuable indicator of what they 'should think'.
Unless you believe that the mass graves being found are fake. If you do, I wonder what other famous war crimes you think are fake.
Also I’m curious, what Ukrainian propaganda didn’t turn out to be true?
Essentially the western media just repeats everything they hear from the Ukrainian MOD. According to an American reporter, Seth Harper, who was over their reporting on the volunteer battalion, western reporters are basically given no access so they just have to repeat everything the ministry of defense tells them. This is why we've ended up with so many ridiculously false claims printed.
Try reading Chinese news on that topic, for example. They're neutral party on this one.
What terrifies me is that you people don't seem to notice it.
But they aren't going to hitch their future to Russia, especially when Russia shows itself to be both weak and incompetent. They aren't going to aid Russia in this war. But they're not neutral. Their news about the war is going to have a definite slant.
People tend to approach a country differently depending on whether it's a genocidal regime invading another country, or the defending nation. When thinking about WW2 we think of Nazis in a fundamentally different way than we think of their victims.
Another thing is, it's been six months and we can tell how close to reality Ukrainian and Russian propaganda turns out to be afterwards. And from that we can tell that while the Ukrainian one is pretty close - you can compare their estimates of Russian losses with eg Oryx - the Russian propaganda is... far out. The joke about Russian Air Force completely destroying Ukrainian Air Force three times over is not a joke - that's official Russian stats.
https://www.newsweek.com/kosovo-cover-160273
To be clear, I am not trying to justify Russian lies or imply any sort of moral equivalence. Just pointing out that you can never take such claims at face value.
During war time even today, propaganda is a powerful and pervasive weapon.
The weird thing is Redditors seem to understand this fully, and yet assume this rule applies only to one side.
If I'm a white supremacist, I'd hate to find out what actual white supremacists are.
I messaged the mods asking which rule I'd broken (because I hadn't broken one). They responded by muting me for 28 days.
Forget it Jake, it's Reddit-town.
There's a clue in there.
A small side-story: In one of those groups I told them I am Turkish (as they really kindly asked the non-Russians following the group to state their reasons for doing so) and out of nowhere they went 15 mins about how disgusting my race is and when I asked how is that different than the behavior of alleged nazis in Ukraine, they banned me :)
So is the US. Rising fascism is simply the state of the world right now.
To pick the first story at the top of my feed right now: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/15/us/jan-6-camp-auschwitz-h...
It's pretty difficult for me to see how Ukraine can be "overrun with explicitly neo nazi groups" with that amount of support for their right-wing parties.
Unless of course you live in Russia's fantasy world where a Jewish president can be a neo-nazi
But generally people don't seem to have much problem with Jews (at least publicly). Middle-aged people and older don't like homosexuals, but the younger generation is totally LGBQ-friendly, albeit not sure about 'T'.
Black people aren't revered or hated- if anything they're so rare that they're either a subject of curiosity or ignored when walking by on the street.
WW2 never left the public consciousness. Older people remember cowering from Nazis and seniors remember fighting them.
It's not "overrun" with Neo Nazi groups. Ya they exist though, but they don't seem to have much sway if any at all.
It's so ironic that this thread about purported Ukrainian propaganda is so thick with Kremlin propaganda.
fyi -- i was born in ukraine and i can say from experience that it is a massively corrupt country, and so is russia.
From the article:
> Pro-Russian accounts have a mean CAP score of 0.42, while pro-Ukrainian accounts have a mean score of 0.43, with medians 0.36 and 0.34 respectively.
The CAP score is the estimation of bottiness from the Botometer software they used.
For instance, I strongly believe that the process of corrupting Wikipedia has started and in a few years time we'll read articles about how troll farms altered a massive number of wiki articles about certain topics to revise historical facts.
This is typical for military-to-civilian communication, defending and advancing big bureaucracy, and territory administration including highway transportation, rental property, the insurance industry, big agribusiness; less so for technocratic authority for example current network big tech, social media manipulation, women in positions of power for liberal political reasons, and obvious new wealth of any kind.
$0.02
HN is an ideal place to hit the minds of very influential people. Reddit is the place to hit very influenceable people.
(And nah, HN is a terrible place to hit the minds of people that influence whether their country is sympathetic towards rival superpowers, and Reddit is worse...)
This level of self importance seems unwarranted, IMO. The readership almost certainly wields a teeny, tiny fraction of influence of say, the Economist or the WSJ.
Something like “I stand with Ukraine” has become such a ubiquitous feel good signal on social media among the masses, that I could see a good bot farm tweeting it out amongst a sea of other tweets, just to “keep up appearances”.
Kind of like tweeting a “condolences” tweet after a celebrity dies or something - a relatively timely, non-vulgar thing to lend credence to your bots.
But then I’m not sure I know how these bots are typically controlled, so I’m just speculating.
Even after Putin compared himself to Peter the Great [1], in that Peter righteously conquered possessions of Sweden to "return" them to the rightful possession of the Russian empire, and Putin was now doing the same with Ukraine - which, according to him, seems to have no right to possess itself.
Putin is the worst thing to happen to the international community since Hitler. He wants to return Russia back to its former imperial glory, and he doesn't care how many millions of lives he must destroy or subjugate to achieve that. I don't understand how it's difficult to see. Or maybe some people don't want to see.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jun/10/putin-compares...
> Pro-Russian non-bot accounts are most influential overall
The Ukrainian bot networks are much bigger but also less effective than the targeted Russian troll farms when it comes to the invasion of Ukraine, at least the way this was measured.
I don't see how they've compensated for the difference in popularity of Twitter in Ukraine and Russia. Russia has its own social media full of its own propaganda, there aren't that many Russians on Twitter in comparison. Furthermore, Russians speaking out against the government can face some serious consequences so the pro-Ukrainian Russians probably know better than to voice their opinion with a hashtag, shifting the balance further.
I also question the reliability of this machine learning network; this data doesn't come from a human verified data set, just from a machine learning algorithm trained on other bot data. I'm sure the network can detect bots that behave like the bots flagged in the original data set it was based on (though I hope that didn't include the faulty French data set) but that doesn't prevent one from setting up a new bot network that this system doesn't catch.
Finally, regarding biases of the linked website, India is generally more in favour of Russia in general. I'm not sure why India chooses to support Russia in such a black-and-white situation, especially given their own history of being invaded by greedy expansionist powers that claim to "help" the local population, but I suppose the dislike for the west is stronger than the compassion for the Ukrainians.
[0] https://carnegieendowment.org/2022/04/25/what-is-in-our-inte...
Pick 'leave'. Is this "I think _we_ should leave" or "I think _they_ should leave". Without context these words could be used in either way. I searched the paper for the word "leave" and it wasn't there, so the article pulled this example from nowhere.
I am also not convinced whether the sentiment isn't also just amplified from that of real people. On page 11 of the paper [1] the "lag" seems to be the content from the bots becoming less emotive over time. On the other hand, page 12 in the conclusion it appears to amplify with time, which could also be somebody getting more exasperated. I don't know whether this could be concluded to have real intention behind it.
It was mostly about posting spam, DDoSing Russian sites and hacking them. (Majority of people weren't tech savy enough to be a hacker, they would just download a script and run it on a specific ip/domain)
That was about 3-4 weeks into the war and I left it so I don't know what happened to it maybe it still exists and has more members.
It is, 225k members.
The most amusing is what they are not only 'attacking' Russian sites, but any and anything what doesn't fit their view of the world (eg 1-star bombing some Germany *Bahn when they didn't 'didn't threw out the occupant from the job' when a conductor ignored some butthurt Ukranian)
And what it is freely accessible from Wikipedia: https://uk.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%92%D1%96%D0%BA%D1%96%D0%BF...
[1]: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=site%3Anytimes.com+u.s.+intelligen...
- Traditinal media has a long time been dying due to a changing landscape with the introduction of new technologies. We all get that.
- The ones operating today are completely reliant proliferation through social media. This has the consequence of turning social madia administrators into information gatekeepers.
- If your publication gets flagged as enemy propaganda on major social media, you have to basically close shop. - Most of these censors are working for free.
- Most suffisciently large tech companies now have embedded spooks, to keep this process locked in and in their favor.
- This creates artificial echo chambers where all people seem to be in agreement on important issues.
And if you are really interested in pro-Kremlin news try
All websites can be translated reasonably well with Google Translate. Medusa and Novaya Gazetta also do translate some articles to English, but these are always some days behind.
Wherever you read your news at the very least make sure there's no russian trace there.
Russian imperial midset is a huge bias in the current situation and the forementioned meduza isn't any different in this regard.
Meduza does not promote any kind of imperial Russian mindset. These are independent journalists, which do the best they can to deliver high quality news from Russia even under the very difficult circumstance nowadays. You clearly have never read their website.
>The studies posts contained hashtags like “StandWithPutin”, “(I)StandWithRussia”, “(I)SupportRussia”, “(I)StandWithUkraine”, “(I)StandWithZelenskyy” and “(I)SupportUkraine”.
Having said that, I have the feeling that Russia has been surprisingly playing catch up on social media on this war. Ukraine groups has been posting 'from the trenches' combat videos almost from day one while it took a while to Russia to identify it as an useful propaganda source and they are still not as good as the Ukrainian.
The kind who fled to Israel and Turkey because they could not stay in a country that wages wars :)
60-80% of Twitter accounts posting on Russia-Ukraine war WITH GENERIC HASHTAGS are bots
Most tweets I see don't have any of these hashtags
I'm worried that both bots as a means to message at volume and the rise of NLP and captcha-beating models will ultimately lead to a loss of freedom.
One way to combat these is to massively fund anti-botting teams, which doesn't really feed the bottom line. The other way is to require full state ID - driver's license or passport - to register for services.
I'm doubtful pseudonymity will continue into the next decade.
Bots are clearly a problem. We're not addressing it adequately, and we may see harsh countermeasures imposed against us all to stop them.
You are obviously running into Russian propaganda spin without much analytical thinking. One should have by now learned that extreme care should be maintained about information that puts Russia even remotely into good light.
> The most commonly-used bot type both by pro-Ukraine and pro-Russia sides is the “self-declared bots — accounts that are transparent about being bots
Quite honestly, I refuse to deal with anyone who is a Russian apologist. There is presently no better example of Good vs Evil in the world than Ukraine vs Russia.
But of course pointing this out makes me a terrorist or a russian apologist, and therefore a bot. beep boop!
I don't like it and I am not fond of Russia. However, I have learned to accept we now share public spaces with various interests that now include spooks and the private parties they hired.
The only good outcome is a peace agreement.
I'm not saying you are one, but this opening "I hate Putin/Russia/etc. but..." is typical opening line of Kremlin trolls.
Business, politics, relationships gone south. Everyone seems to think this is an acceptable way to frame the other side.
I know rage drives clicks, but man is it killing our future. The news really is destroying the world.
Propaganda and information warfare being used by both sides as the weapon that it is, should in no way begin to imply moral equivalence between the victim (Ukraine) and fascist empire builder (Russia).
Second, that point is the most true about faceless comments on the internet, as your comment notes about Twitter, and according to your own comment the material on Russia/Ukraine bears particular scrutiny and yet in your comment on Russia/Ukraine there wasn’t any concrete evidence cited so at best you’re spreading unverifiable positions while also explicitly professing to not have any clue to what’s happening due to rampant misleading info.
As it happens it seems I was also born in Ukraine grew up in Russia and moved the USA [for the purposes of this comment but not really] so my take gives me special credibility on this matter.
I wouldn't say that's true Saying massively corrupt to me looks like either cheery-picking or exaggeration
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4139876 ("How Reddit's cofounders built Reddit with an army of fake accounts")
Will winter gas prices suck for European countries? Yes. Is there anything they can do about it? No. Even if they tried to they can't exactly get Ukraine to give up and surrender and it's in Europe's intrests to help Ukraine win
edit: source = https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-europe-2c77447fda4...
I was there for Javascript tricks and they insisted that I check my privilege. It got exhausting, not because it's insulting, but because the signal to noise ratio of what I came to a subreddit or mailing list to see was way off the mark.
This seems to have improved a bit in the last year or two, since Covid stole the show, but not entirely.
Ok now Russia’s turn. Ukraine being full of nazis, official statements, very harmful. Bio labs??? Official statements, 100% fake. Ukraine being a threat to Russia, official statements, 100% fake. Ukraine most corrupt nation on earth, well it’s military seems much more functional than Russia’s, not sure who’s the most corrupt in the end… Denial of torture and mass graves, etc…
All in all, seems to me that Ukrainian propaganda is culprit of wishful thinking, whereas Russian propaganda is just a disgusting pile of lies and hate.
> Snake island martyrs, you mean the go fuck your self thing ?
Not quite right. Ukrainian government initially stated that 13 border guards were killed and president Zelenskyy announced that all of them will be posthumously awarded the title of Hero of Ukraine. However, all of them were alive and 19 Ukrainian salor were later released.
> I’m not sure what’s fake about their evacuation, the last of them have been captured.
Ukrainian government said that Azovstal heroes were evacuated (I'm not a native English speaker, as you may have guessed, but evacuation means release), but in reality they surrendered.
> Mariupol hospital
It is assumed that russians hit hospital w/ aviabomb. Two days before attack, russian government mentioned, that Azov batallion used hospital X as a shelter and there were no (!) patients. But then russians attacked hospital Y (looks like by mistake) and one pregnant woman died. Another pregnant woman, who appeared on photoes, after that gave controversal interview where she said that she didn't hear any bomber, hence russian media assumed that Ukrainians attacked hospital using artillery. Interview is controversal, because it confirmed: everything that russian govt/media said about hospital before was a lie.
> Putin having cancer has always been rumors, no official statements, and it could be true, cancer doesn’t mean instant death.
Second that. He definitely has neurological issues, but not sure about cancer.
And Russia's turn.
> Ukraine being full of nazis, official statements, very harmful.
As far as I can see, there are more nazis in Russia. Russian propaganda always mentioned, that there was a political party (The Right Sector) and they used Nazi symbols, however on last election they didn't surpass minimal barrier. Worth adding, even before 2014, there was a famous Ukrainian chant: "Moskalyaku na gilyaku" - very offensive term towards russians (https://bazovo.ru/en/cerebral-palsy/moskalyaku-na-gilyaku-ch...).
> Bio labs
The funny thing w/ this bio labs is that they were created during Soviet period. The US saw them as a threat after the collapse of the USSR and therefore simply sponsored them to do NOTHING. Technically, they are still bio labs and yes, they are sponsored by US, but they are not harmful.
> Ukraine most corrupt nation on earth
Partially this is true. You can read about this issue from Finnish soldier perspective https://yle.fi/uutiset/3-12602381 (Google Translate is fine) - "Some of the grants disappeared into the wrong pockets".
And finally..
> Ukrainian propaganda is culprit of wishful thinking
As a russian speaking, I read both media and Telegram channels, and I can see all the hatred towards russian citizens, who even DOESN'T support Putin and the War.
And the biggest lie so far is stories about the sexual rape. Notable fact is that Ukrainian ombudsman Denisova was sacked for excessive lies about woman rapes. The Commissioner of the President of Ukraine for Children's Rights Daria Gerasimchuk on the Polish TV channel "Belsat" exposed fake Ukrainian propaganda about the alleged violence by the Russian military against Ukrainian children (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GfUBRGUH-Kc). The Prosecutor General's Office of Ukraine has not a single confirmed fact of violence so far.
Far-right political parties only got ~2% of the votes in elections. Not enough for even a single seat in Parliament.
If there still are any Nazis in Ukraine, their influence is much smaller than the far-right factions in Poland or France.
Bucha though, I've seen drone footage of civilians getting executed by Russian BMPs.
You could argue the systematicity of that process, but Russia's occupation west of Kyiv undeniably caused a large number of civilian casualties
That's the problem with conflicts that have a long history. You can conveniently choose a point it time, like you choose 24.02.2022 and make a case for the side you already support.
For example, if you pick a date in 1944 or 1945 and ignore everything that happened before, you can come to the conclusion that Soviet Union did a full-scale aggression on Germany killing thousands of people. Those bastards, how dared they attach a country of poets and thinkers.
https://www.routledge.com/Understanding-Russian-Strategic-Be...
This book is useful for understanding (not justifying).
Yes hundreds of years of Ukraine being oppressed by Russia (also western powers at times)... Meanwhile when did Ukraine EVER attack Russia?
Reddit has no captchas whatsoever?
Is the kgb and it’s army of trolls not aware of Reddit?
How do I see "a lot of them"?
The thread has over 33k upvotes but has since then been removed by its author. You can find the original image online by looking up the url on webarchives.
The image shows mercenary fighters holding flags in front of a landmark. There are two Chechen flags, one flag depicting a skull associated with a certain ideology and one censored flag.
Without arguing about the rest of the comment, Russian narrative sees Nazis as a group that want to exterminate Russians, based on what actual Nazis in WW2 did when they attacked. And this "Jewish president" who banned Russian language, banned almost all political parties and organizations of russian-speaking people and sent an army to punish the rebellion in Donbas fits the Russian definition of Nazi pretty well.
That's an invention by Sergey Lavrov. Of course Ukraine didn't ban the native language of 30% of it's population.
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2022/jun/08/sergey-lav...
> banned almost all political parties and organizations of russian-speaking people
Ukraine did in fact ban pro-Russian parties. While I must admit I don't particularly like the idea of banning any parties in a democracy, it is understandable why you would ban parties and organizations supporting the enemy while you are at war.
This is, however, a long shot from the claim the he banned almost all political parties and organizations of russian-speaking people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_policy_in_Ukraine#Ana...
There is a grain of truth in your statement though: Russian narrative does define Nazis differently from the rest of the world (and indeed, from Hitler). It defines everyone that doesn't wish to be subjugated by Russia as Nazis.
Because sanctions affect their personal well-being. The war started at 2014 and they were OK with it for eight years.
In 2014 the West did some mild condemnations and so did Russian twitter crowd. In 2022 the West decided it's time to boot Russia and so they promptly left.
Many of them are returning now since they did not have means to stay there anymore (no job, no residency permit, no ways to draw sufficient money from Russia)
To be honest this feels kinda effective, since Ukranians are not bothering in hiding the Nazi at all (most recent example: Zelensky made selfies near his bodyguards, and they were wearing concentration camp division tags on their uniforms...)
But when I talk to random people on street here in Brazil at least, it is more likely they believe in Ukranian propaganda than Russian propaganda just because they never heard of the Russian propaganda in first place.
Russian sources love to speak of the enemy in general as holder of a certain ideology. They also like to repeat that civilian casualties and destroyed buildings are unilaterally caused by the other side, mostly by bombing the places they retreat from.
The first claim is obviously wrong since Ukrainians are just defending themselves. I've only heard proof of the second from eyewitness testimonies, yet I've seen real footage of Russian tanks firing at 20-story buildings and hysterical volunteers taking turns at blasting RPGs in empty, silent streets.
Yeahhh, the bodyguard for the Jewish guy is a Nazi! (Note grayzone is HEAVILY russian biased.)
Fuck it, I'm jewish and I'd rather be interrogated by the Ukranians than the Russians any day: https://twitter.com/olex_scherba/status/1570779528196399104
https://twitter.com/sameralatrush/status/1365746097117921288...
I don't know if we can draw conclusions about racist leanings by backpack stickers that require so much familiarity with historical nazi logos that you can recognize one re-interpreted into a "generic tough guy" aesthetic. Maybe we can! But even if it's the case that there are simply a lot of racists in eastern europe, it's still true that one side is brutally invading a non-threatening neighboring democracy and committing war crimes on a daily basis.
[1] https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=molecules+of+freedom&ia=web
Edit: Oh of course a Russian would be upset that the U.S. is helping Ukraine repel their invasion.
But it's all power play between states and ruling elites, what about citizens? They are dissatisfied in democracy as much in U.S. as in Russia. [4] We better fix our problems from within rather than turn on each other.
[1] https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=Biden+family+ukraine&ia=web
[2] NATO expansion
[3] (use translate) https://russian.rt.com/business/article/1010248-gaz-rossiya-...
[4] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/02/27/how-people-...
In my case, I have real-life interests, friends, and family involved and the reality of what's happening and the eventual outcomes impact my life in significant ways.
Also the invasion clearly had nothing to with NATO. It was about Russian imperialism. Putin clearly spelled it out for people
Ultimately I just take my toys and go home - they don’t want me there, and it’s their legal right to say so.
But it results in a forum of views that appear to show unanimous consensus that {x} is good or {y} is bad, which is potentially dangerous for society at large and certainly bad for an open society of debate and knowledge sharing.
Even worse, I’ve seen instances where a blatantly bigoted, racist, or violent extreme view is allowed to stay (down voted to hell, of course) while my and others’ more nuanced or intelligent takes are scrubbed and banned.
I can only presume this is intentional with the effect of demonstrating that “only violent extremists are anti-{x} or pro-{y}, and you wouldn’t want to be associated with those people, now, would you?”
I only wish I had an example handy to share, because it’s been pretty blatant at times.
Ultimately the moral judgements associated with every political argument is getting ridiculous and (intentionally?) stifling debate while stirring unrest, and most of it feels artificial.
Real, actionable incitement to violence and bodily harm is already covered by law as not legal speech.
You're left with either superficial hateful sentiment or someone who has a nuanced position. It's fine to say "don't do that here, thanks." But, it's being used as a cudgel from the top down to constrain public discourse and manufacture consent as what is "hate" becomes more and more abstract and more and more inclusive. If PETA is suddenly in control of the "community guidelines" on a site, would sharing the fact that I had eggs for breakfast be a form of hate speech?
I'm curious what you said. There is lots and lots of actual-neo-nazi recruitment material/copypasta out there that is deliberately written to sound "neutral." I can maybe see that if you accidentally drifted to close to that then you could get caught in the crossfire.
Least we forget that during that period Nazi death squads killed more people in the break away regions than have so far died in this war. The last time US citizens were killed abroad in large numbers by the army of another country was the Alamo and we still remember it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mhg8AXXHoRE
I did find some photos of supposedly nazi-symbol-wearing Ukrainian solders but I didn't recognize the symbol before reading the explanation, maybe they didn't too?
Also, I found some photos of Russian soldiers wearing such symbols too:
https://www.businessinsider.com/russia-fighter-neo-nazi-symb...
Tell me, when did Ukraine EVER attack Russia?
If the population elects a head of state you don't like, it's a pro-Russian puppet. If the person is pro-USA, it's an expressed democratic will.
If government gets changed on the streets, it's not a coup, it's a pinnacle of democracy, as long as you don't like the former head of state.
If people you don't like start a rebellion, they are terrorists who need to be crushed. Or a democratic liberation army, if you like them.
If the regular army of a state is sent to crush a rebellion, it's either a genocide and the country needs to be bombed to oblivion, or a legal action where any atrocity is allowed because you are fighting an evil terrorist organization.
Seen thousands of times on any of the mainstream TV in any "western" country. (in "eastern" countries too).
You just have to put a "correct" frame based on your pre-existing knowledge who's your friend and who's your enemy, and the whole narrative fits perfectly.
Putin attacked Ukraine in 2014 because of Euromaidan - because he saw that Ukraine ceases to be under Russian influence. And yet, we decided it is more convenient to trade with him and pretend the shelling doesn't exist and people don't die in Donbas. This emboldened him to start the war in 2022, take over KIev and install his own puppet government. This didn't work well and now Russia is in a very dark place. I hope you can get out of there somehow.
This is not true. Ukraine was willing to get nuclear weapons, and use them along with biological weaponry stations all over the border. see «Carribean crysis»
Ukraine was smart not to get rid of Azov. Putin invaded once for made up reasons, no reason to think he won't do it again. Ukraine's understanding of fascist Russia's true self was correct.
That sounds like a win no matter what.
Tacticians act on Intelligence. Dissent is not Intelligence.
Dissent is so toxic it is literally weaponized to cripple an adversary with indecision and domestic unrest. It is the militarization of gaslighting.
It's not something you want arising mid-campaign, especially when (as in this case) its proponents are entirely fictional.
Dissent, if it's based on intelligence, can be extremely useful. It's literally something that can save a society. But intelligence involves a careful analysis of facts, and it's something very hard if you deal with an army of trolls.
For example, the southern border. You have OpenBorders vs Close the border camps. But there has always been the guest worker visa program on the hoper but no one wants it. It would drive business costs up, it would drain the Ds and Rs of energy around that topic. If you look at many LatAM countries, they themselves implement controls so that locals have preferences for jobs even with respect to immigrants legally able to work. But CNN never mentions those aspects. CNN doesn't mention Bernie used to vote against having foreigners compete against the local workforce for jobs.
Or abortion vs Abortion bans. Let's look at the rest of the world, and if not the whole world, then Europe, and we see there a mixture with some consensus around some figures. But we don't get that coverage, it's all outrage one way or the other.
If your model of any political situation resembles a moralizing children's cartoon, 99% chance you are a mark, incapable of identifying propaganda.
> it's rotting people's ability to actually figure out what the right side of an issue is
99.9% of issues in the population of issues we ever think about do not have a clear right answer, because if they did we would just discharge the issue immediately, and it would not stick around. Everything that remains exists in a tradeoff space, and if you think there's a clear right answer, it's probably because your understanding of the tradeoff space is naïve and low-dimensional.
GP made the very salient point that some things are clearly bad. Blind clinging to the idea that everything has two sides is just as simplistic as thinking everything can be viewed from a perspective which is just as moral as every other. Except maybe even more so, because at least the moral simplicity of black and white forces us to show flag instead of hiding in "neutrality".
Nihilism, strong moral relativism and contrarianism without a constructive goal are lazy pseudo intellectual positions that do not serve any constructive purpose (be it insight or improvement of the material world) and serve only as deflections and comfort arguments.
And for those that disagree with me: I'd love to hear where and why I'm wrong about thinking "Putin and other authoritarian strong men are worse than democratically elected politician" and "there are degrees of corruption, and the west is less corrupt than Russia". Because I've got evidence for these beliefs (the industrial output of Russia and Putin's palace being only two data points). What's yours?
Simple example of X would be stating Ukraine was never going to be part of NATO.
More complicated example would be if Europe prioritized energy independence from Russia putting in a weaker position. An example that loops in nuclear power debate, one which likely could have been manipulated (see other threads around Reddit bots in addition to twitter bots) by the Russians themselves to achieve that end.
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Russian being the bad guy doesn't make conflict inevitable. And if it does, then we're probably just buying time until full scale nuclear war within the next century and none of this actually matters.
I refuse to discuss it here, because much of the site's userbase seems incapable of having an even slightly nuanced political discussion, and I will possibly get a nasty comment from moderation accusing me of flame-baiting or something.
The best I can do it argue for epistemic humility, because at least people generally find that abstractly palatable.
> "Putin and other authoritarian strong men are worse than democratically elected politician ... the industrial output of Russia"
If your benchmark of how good a political system is is just its industrial output, China's anti-democratic system is better than Western systems. I can't even disagree with your argument, because it's not internally consistent.
I'd actually be interested in those cartoons, if you have links. Propaganda pointed at kids is fascinating!
Dora the Explorer's swiper the fox, G.I. Joe's cobra commander, He Man's skeletor, robbie rotten from lazy town
Still, I'd say it's a stretch to call, say, the oversimplification of the idea that stealing is wrong, propaganda.
The fact that so many believe this to be 100% the case, actually makes the point of the OP. We should be able to condemn Russia and still point out that we're lying when we pretend the US didn't get this ball rolling when we funded and fomented a coup in Ukraine in 2014 and installed our puppets.[1][2]
We should also be able to discuss war crimes regardless of the perpetrators.[3] The fact that anybody who points these things out gets called a Russian bot, really just proves the point. Especially considering which side 90% of the bots are on...
[1]https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-26079957
[2]https://moderndiplomacy.eu/2018/06/04/how-and-why-the-u-s-go...
[3]https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2014/09/ukraine-must-...
It seems to me at least that the Maida revolution was driven more by anger against corruption and a desire to join the EU than the US involvement (which there definitely was, along with Russian involvement).
While I somewhat agree with you, a discussion is good and necessary. Without such a discussion the subject becomes a dogma, not something reasonable. When someone is against evolution or, say, GMO they most often don't understand it. When they learned how these things work, and maybe making some experiments themselves, they can either accept the facts of decide that their beliefs are more important than facts, which is their fair choice. If you take away a discussion, you eliminate that possibility.
Also nobody is critizing Ukraine from defending itself. We're critizing Reddit and redditors in general for being hypocrites. Never in history were "people of color denied from existing without harassment", etc. What does people of color even mean? Doesn't that group comprise the vast majority of human beings?
You've swallowed an entire package of propaganda and, more importantly, implying that that's The Truth (tm) and that it cannot be argued with. That's why I think people like you are our biggest pressing problem.
I would suggest reading about Jim Crow, Red Lining, the fight against school integration, New York's Stop and Frisk, and a "Black Lives Matter" movement fighting against cops regularly shooting unarmed black men to death. I would suggest those things, if I had any indication your statements were being made in good faith.
But no Ukraine is pure as fresh fallen snow.
The extent to which westerners have internalised a fact free vitrolic hatred of russia is downright terrifying.
And regarding the point of China, aside from being a very naive read of Chinese economic history (see PolyMatters series on China for evidence) this is a non-sequitur, the output of a completely different culture and system has nothing to do with the output of Russia, nor did I claim this was the completeness of my argument.
I observe again that all you seem to do is exclaim you cannot believe how stupid peoples arguments are for not being nuanced or developed enough, without stating your own take. For anyone reading this thread, pay note to this pattern, it's basically debate smell for someone not engaging in good faith.
Have you considered that this may be because your comments are insufficiently original to ever fall outside of the overton window of the site?
> the output of a completely different culture and system has nothing to do with the output of Russia
My friend, you are the one who claimed that industrial output was the criteria by which we could judge the russian system is worse than the western one.
I agree this argument is nonsense.
> without stating your own take
I already explained why I can't do this on this site.
In the abstract, sure, we all want to purge Nazis. But not if you're saying Nazis == Ukrainians. If you defined Nazis to mean Putin's Wagner Group (headed by a guy with SS tattoo), then sure, I'd agree.
What's so cynical about all this is how they've undermined our language and our ability to talk about fascism (as exemplified by modern Russia) by coopting the linguistic tools that we use (the word Nazi) to do so. It's depressingly effective propaganda.
Somehow the same people who thought the OK symbol was a secret white supremacist dog whistle are now coming out of the wood work saying that akshually it's only 40% of the Ukrainian army that has Nazi tattoos and it's fine.
And as we've already been through, Ukraine has no ability to pick and choose who is allowed to defend them from multiple Russian invasions. They are significantly smaller. Such luxuries only apply to strong countries that aren't being invaded. You keep dishonestly comparing Ukraine (small country being invaded) to the US (country not being invaded).
If Ukraine wasn't under constant threat of invasion from Russia, then I'd be the first to criticize their decision making around Azov.
What makes you certain that this was going to prevent the invasion? Russia gave a number of pretexts for the invasion, some unrelated to NATO: De-nazification of Ukraine, protecting Russian-speakers within Ukraine, among many others.
> Russian being the bad guy doesn't make conflict inevitable.
Oh, so you prefer the Chamberlain-style "Peace in our time" appeasement. What next, cede Finland or Poland to Russia when Putin demands it?
And let's be clear, the Russian Ukraine war started in 2014, not in 2022. I personally would be looking for allies if another country had already invaded part of my territory.
It's not certain but assuming the worst is just an extension of the same moral pure-good and pure-evil that this thread is about. My point is that if your view of the world is that Russia is an pure-evil actor that will keep invading more and more countries no matter what the west does then it'll eventually lead to nuclear war. In which case none of this discussion matters. The reason Finland (or any country) is joining NATO is because it makes that point explicit.
One doesn't need to delve morality to figure this out: empirical evidence alone is sufficient to come to the same conclusion. Russia's initial invasion of Ukraine was in 2014, and it still wants more than the Donbas.
Assuming the best goes against existing evidence. Russia has not explicitly said what the limits to its aggression are. Without invoking morality, why would you assume Ukraine is the limit?
Why would you pay attention to these, except as an exercise in PR strategy analysis?
In which case it's also worth taking into account that Russia was very loudly coming up with a bunch of other rationales for why it needed to go to war for domestic consumption, none of which would have gone away if Ukraine had ruled out joining NATO, making it even less likely that all Putin cared about was the remote possibility that it might join NATO at some unspecified time in future
Is this the only way that situation gets resolve or are there any alternatives? Why is the kid a bully? Why does he feel the need to copy homework? Maybe the classmates should group together and seriously injury the bully first, would they be in the right if they did so? How do you know the bully will actually harm the kid and doesn't just want to scare him?
You can make any situation a simple good-evil answer by drawing arbitrary boundaries around the situation. The propaganda this thread is mentioning enforces those boundaries and potentially prevents people from discussing the real underlying problems. Doesn't mean the outcome or conclusion is any different.
The situation would be different if e.g. Ukraine had invaded Russian territory after the invasion of Crimea, or had done broken armistices beforehand, or there had been a mass killing of ethinic Russians in Ukraine. There has not been. This means long before we can talk about Russia maybe feeling threatened by NATO expansion they need to stop the war they started.
There is no nuance here. Russia felt that for whatever reason an attack-war was warranted and couldn't even be bothered to come up with a believable justification. The fact that other countries have done the same thing (e.g. over allegations of WMD) changes nothing here.
One of the things that are crystal clear thanks to this war is that Russian army is in a deplorable state and while a few of their nuclear warheads still probably work, Russia can not be considered a threat in a conventional war except against a state like Azerbaijan.
But while it's worth looking backward at that to try to get our leaders to not pull political moves like that in the future, it in no way changes the Ukrainians being on the right side of this war, and Russia being on the wrong side. Yes, the US's actions were likely to cause a war, no, Russia is not justified in starting that war. In the same way that European appeasement of Hitler and USSR's neutrality deal clearly led to the Nazis invading Europe, but do not in any way justify the Nazis invading Europe, or the Nazis being the right side.
Hitler (Nazis) and Stalin (USSR) were allies and jointly invaded Poland.
USA/west could have made concessions that weren't really concessions (taking Ukraine NATO off the table) before the 2022 invasion. Those concessions may or may not have worked. We're now just supposed to ignore that fact and pretend that it never happened until some point in the future that may never take place?
You only know what they tell you and what your intelligence agencies can uncover. Russia said Ukraine joining NATO was a red line in diplomatic discourse and then they acted on it. Same way the USA told China that aiding Russia in this war would be a red line and China has refrained from providing direct aid even after what happened in Taiwan recently. I don't have any access to classified information so no idea what information is in there but hopefully it's a lot more accurate then what we can read on twitter and Reddit.
They acted on what exactly, considering that - as far as I know - Ukraine is not a NATO member?
As a result of this war, Finland and Sweden joined NATO, turning the Baltic Sea into NATO's internal waters, which isolates Kaliningrad and St Petersburg. Ukraine will sooner or later join it too. The whole western border from Sochi to Murmansk (except puppet state Belarus) will soon be in a mutual defence pact against further Russian aggression. So in this dimension, it's been a spectacular failure for Russia.
The argument of protecting Russians in Ukraine has become morbid at best, after Russia razed to the ground several major cities with large Russian populations, many of whom now lie in nameless mass graves. Daily missile attacks on civilians in eastern Ukraine, where disproportional number of Russians live, doesn't help the case either. After the spectacular counteroffensive, which expelled Russians from Kharkiv region, they have nothing left but threats of widening the war against civilians in pursuit of scorched-earth policy.
So what justifications of this war remain? What halftones are there to discuss? That maybe there still remain some undiscovered arguments in support of blowing up hospitals and power stations?
[1] https://twitter.com/DAlperovitch/status/1570808500053475331
