Posted by Irony: patriot American twitters probably Russian on Sun, 08 Oct 2017 13:41 | #

In this ironic age, one must assume that if you are followed by a “patriotic, pro-Trump, pro-American” account on Twitter, that it is actually alien, actually Russian!

Posted by Active Measures on Mon, 19 Nov 2018 12:20 | #

NPR, Fresh Air, “Inside The Russian Disinformation Playbook: Exploit Tension, Sow Chaos”, 15 Nov 2018:

A new video series by New York Times reporter Adam Ellick explores Russia’s role in spreading fake news, dating back to the ‘80s conspiracy theory that the AIDS virus was created by the U.S. military.

[...]

So I want to start with the conspiracy theory about the AIDS virus. And you track how this originates with Russian fake news, with Russian disinformation. So just describe the conspiracy theory for those people who don’t remember it.

ADAM ELLICK: So this is the AIDS conspiracy theory that was born out of the Soviet Union in the early 1980s. And it basically, says that the U.S. government - specifically the Pentagon - created the AIDS virus as a way to kill blacks and gays. And they worked for about six years from Moscow and all around the world spreading this and planting it in different countries, first in Africa and then in Latin America and in South Asia. And eventually, it made its way onto the “Evening News” with Dan Rather.

GROSS: So this conspiracy theory still has some traction, doesn’t it?

ELLICK: It does. I mean, one of the lessons in this is that a lie never truly dies. And we found in surveys as recently as 2005 that at least 30 percent of African-Americans still believe in the AIDS conspiracy theory. And it is repeated often in popular culture. Our film shows a bunch of examples where you can see it on TV, on YouTube and in musical concerts, including - it’s repeated often in a song by Kanye West.

[...]

GROSS: So this conspiracy theory that the U.S. military created the AIDS virus to kill African-Americans and gay people was created by the Russians in 1983. This was before the fall of the Soviet Union. So it’s the Soviets who are creating it. Of all the conspiracy theories that they could have cooked up and tried to spread, why this one?

ELLICK: Well, they cooked up and spread many. This is certainly not the only one. They’ve been doing this for decades, even before the early 1980s. But this one was incredibly successful because it did sort of - it followed a very specific Soviet playbook when it comes to disinformation. Which is they were trying to sort of sow chaos and exploit existing tensions in American society. And this was a time in the early 1980s when there was a lot of hysteria around AIDS. A lot was unknown. People were dying, and a lot of people did not know why.

So it was a vulnerability in terms of the West. And it was also a time with racial tension. So the Soviets always try to exploit any sort of tensions, whether it was class, race, religion. And they definitely have an affinity for infections and disease. And the Russians still do that today. We noticed that in the past few years with the Zika virus. And even the AIDS conspiracy has returned in the past few years.

GROSS: And politically, in 1983, when the Soviets started spreading this rumor, there was a lot of political homophobia. Like Republicans were trying to activate their base with anti-gay scare tactics. So that was like a political vulnerability that they could exploit. And, of course, racism never dies, it seems, in the U.S. So that’s an easy one to exploit, too. So the first place that the Soviets planted this conspiracy theory was in a newspaper in India. That seems like an odd route to take, but it made sense to the Soviets. Why?

ELLICK: Well, I would argue it’s sort of a masterful route to take. What the Soviets did - and we sort of laid out the tick-tock chronology of how this hoax went viral before the Internet ever existed. And the first thing they did is they planted the story in an Indian newspaper. It may sound and feel like no big deal, but The Patriot was a newspaper in Delhi. And the newspaper was left-leaning, so it had some sympathy for communist ideology. And the Soviets often planted stories in countries where journalists could be easily bribed. And they also planted stories in countries that had a vulnerable audience, and by that, I mean sort of a lack of media literacy.

So they first planted it there, and it was published in The Patriot. And then we didn’t hear about that story for some time. And then a year or two later, I believe in 1985, it resurfaced in a weekly Soviet newspaper. And the source in that Soviet newspaper was the article in India. And basically they rev up - they rev that tactic up, and soon, you could find this story all over Africa - in Kenya, in Zimbabwe, in so many countries around the continent. And a few years later, we found that story had reached 80 countries, from Pakistan and Bangladesh to Argentina and Brazil and Central America.

ELLICK: So every successful disinformation campaign needs a useful idiot. And a useful idiot is someone who’s useful because they can help spread and disseminate that lie. And they also kind of have to be an idiot because they need to be able either to be willing to pass it on or they need to genuinely believe it. And in this AIDS example, the useful idiot was an East German couple who worked at a university in Berlin. And they wrote a long scientific report which is essentially unreadable and makes no sense. And its sources are very murky and ambiguous.

And it basically argues that the U.S. government created the AIDS virus in Fort Detrick, Md., which was an actual U.S. military base. And they cooked it up as a so-called ethnic weapon in order to kill blacks and gays. And Dr. Jakob Segal and his wife Lilli were the useful idiot professors who wrote the scientific report that the articles then cited.

GROSS: So Dan Rather reports on the story.

ELLICK: Yeah. So Dan Rather was an evening TV anchor. And he repeated the story. And he sourced it to the Soviet newspaper, which was the second source when this went so-called viral. What happened in between when the article was first planted in that newspaper in India and when it finally reached the evening TV broadcast with Dan Rather’s show in the late 1980s is sort of the secret sauce or the magic of what the Soviet Union did so well. And it just popped up in country to country across Africa and Latin America.

And it was repeated so often that the sourcing almost became impossible to untangle because all different countries were quoting other left-leaning newspapers around the world. And Dan didn’t repeat the actual story as if it was real, but he referenced it. And he cited the Soviet newspaper. And The Sunday Express in London ran a story about it as well. So it wasn’t just Dan. It reached the Western press in the U.K. and in the U.S. And that’s sort of the ultimate triumph for the Kremlin at that time.

GROSS: So when Dan Rather reported on this, he was just saying, this story is circulating. He wasn’t saying it’s true. Is that right?

ELLICK: That’s correct.

GROSS: OK. So Putin was in the KGB during this era when KGB agents were expected to contribute disinformation as part of their job. And you say that now disinformation is his favorite tool. Why do you think it’s his favorite tool?

ELLICK: Well, disinformation has a lot of advantages. First of all, it’s very cheap. It’s certainly more affordable than tanks and aerial bombardments. It’s also a long game. So the fruits of disinformation pay off over many, many years. And Putin is not - unlike many politicians in the West, Putin doesn’t have a four- or eight-year term. He’s been in power for a really long time, and there appears to be no end in sight of his rule. And disinformation definitely requires a long view. There’s a great quote in one of these videos that we surfaced from the 1980s. And someone said that it’s like when water hits a rock in the middle of a rainforest, you return a few years later and the water is still hitting the rock, but there’s no dent in the rock. And then you return 10 years later, and there’s a small dent in the rock. And you return 20 years later, and there’s a massive hole in the rock. And that’s sort of how a disinformation campaign succeeds, with a really, really long view.

GROSS: So one of the videos is about the seven commandments of fake news. And, you know, one of the, you know, so-called rules in the playbook that you developed was, you know, wrap the fake news around a grain of truth, wrap the conspiracy theory around a grain of truth, and that leads to Russia Today, which has more truth than conspiracy theory, but it’s embedded. Like, the conspiracy theories and fake news are embedded in the journalism. You say Russia Today is about 80 percent actual journalism and 20 percent disinformation, which gives the 20 percent of disinformation a lot more credibility ‘cause you think, well, so much of what’s on here is true. This must be true, too.

ELLICK: Yeah. It’s a fascinating story, and a largely untold story of Russia Today. I mean, when Russia Today launched in the States, they were in the back seat of New York City taxicabs, and they hired people like Larry King, who were familiar faces to an American TV audience. And this helped normalize the TV station and made it appear like just yet another TV station in the U.S. on your expanded cable package. And if you watch their coverage sort of passively, most stories are quite typical, and not offensive and not full of disinformation campaigns. But when you sprinkle in a few cases here and there, they become much more believable because they’re wrapped in what is otherwise normal broadcast TV coverage.

The other thing that I think it’s important to understand about RT is some people say, well, RT is not a very popular cable channel in the U.S. But they have one of the fastest-growing YouTube news channels in the world, outpacing both CNN and Fox News between 2015 and 2017. Their numbers are astronomical, incredibly popular, including with a young audience. So they shouldn’t be thought of as just a cable TV channel.

GROSS: So we’ve been talking about conspiracy theories and fake news that have been spread by Russia and have caught on in the U.S. But as you point out in your series of videos, we’re starting our own fake news now, and it’s catching on quite well. President Trump has frequently described the media as, like, bad people, the enemy of the people. And he revoked Jim Acosta’s White House pass, his White House press credentials. And CNN is now suing because of that.

ELLICK: So one of the challenges in making this film is that the news sort of moved faster than we could.

I think one of the things this series does is it enables you to consume the news at a higher level because every single day, there would be examples of from George Soros conspiracies around the Kavanaugh hearings. And I think every day, there are examples of stories where there are either fakes out there, disinformation campaigns or even just somewhat softer lies that needed clarification. And we were trying to shed light on how this stuff gets cooked up in the kitchen. And the fake video, the example that you just gave, is a really important one because that is no longer the future. A lot of people, a lot of analysts, even, still describe fake video as sort of the future frontier of fakes. But it’s the present.

I mean, the software isn’t so advanced yet that every user, every layperson can make fake video in their basement. But it’s changing at a rapid rate. And what worries is that our government is still trying to get its head around what happened around the 2016 election, and those attacks were first planned in 2014. And I just worry that we’re constantly lagging behind a lot of other countries when it comes to detecting this and sort of wrestling with the consequences of disinformation.

GROSS: As you point out, the Russians used a lot of Eastern European countries to test out the Russian techniques - or before that, the Soviet techniques - for spreading conspiracy theories and fake news. And those countries in Eastern Europe have tried to protect themselves against this happening in the future. What are some of the techniques they’ve used that we could maybe learn from?

ELLICK: So part of Putin’s brilliance in leaning on disinformation is the many iterations of testing that he employed after he took power. And soon after he took power, he tested disinformation campaigns on his own people, on Russians. And then he took his game overseas but still kept it in the region. And he tested it in places like Georgia, Ukraine and the Baltic states. These are former Soviet republics. And then of course, as we all know, in recent years those tactics have landed on the doorstep of Western governments.

But there is a lot we can learn from Eastern European nations. We argue in the film that they are far and away the most advanced at sniffing out Russian lies. And there’s an obvious reason for that. They’ve lived under Russian or Soviet rule for generations now. They’re media literate. They’re skeptical. They’re critical thinkers. And they’re used to this. It’s old news to them. I lived in the Baltic states between 2001 and 2003. And I was always really impressed with the sort of healthy skepticism in those societies. They seem to be fully aligned that Russia, as a former occupier, is still up to no good.

GROSS: So of all the things Eastern European countries are doing now to combat Russian disinformation, what’s one of the most effective things you think they’ve tried?

ELLICK: I mean, they’re the stars when it comes to countering Russian disinformation. There’s an example in our film which is just so powerful. I think on Sunday night, in Latvia on the most popular TV channel, there is a show that’s basically “This Week In Russian Lies.” And they reveal and debunk all of the most popular lies that the Kremlin disseminated that week. This is in a prime-time slot on Sunday night. It’s basically the same time when, in America, we’re watching “The Bachelorette” or “The Voice” or one of these popular reality shows.

And Eastern European governments, I mean, they’ve come to Washington. Their leaders have testified in Washington. And they’re just incredibly savvy. This is an issue that they’ve been dealing with for decades. There’s also an amazing example where Estonia has a volunteer cyber army. And they fight disinformation in addition to doing a bunch of other things. It’s basically like a digital national guard.

GROSS: So back during the Soviet era, before the end of communism, give us a sense of the resources that the Soviets were putting into spreading disinformation.

ELLICK: When you look at the way the Kremlin operated during the Soviet Union, they had up to 15,000 agents who did disinformation campaigns. And this is at a time when the U.S. government’s policy was basically not to respond to these lies. So they - for decades, Russia has dwarfed us when it comes to the scope, the scale and the prioritization of disinformation.