The Kremlin, conspiracy theorists and the extreme right wing fuelling lies and false news about Ukraine

[TwoWhalesInAPool]

The Kremlin is lying about its invasion of Ukraine.

It is throttling independent journalism and freedom of speech to try to kill the truth.

No one should be fooled by the Russian government's barrage of lies.

Russian forces are targeting civilians in Ukraine and causing a refugee crisis in Europe.

It's time to stop the lies and stop the war.

 

[TwoWhalesInAPool]

Anti-vax conspiracy groups lean into pro-Kremlin propaganda in Ukraine​

Fringe groups across the EU and US have used the ongoing war to push falsehoods and misinformation about the West.

Before Russia invaded Ukraine, Booba — one of France's most popular rap artists, with an online audience of millions — spread wild claims about COVID-19.

But since late February, the French musician has shifted gears to another global crisis: the war in Ukraine. And in post after post, Booba, who cancelled a sponsorship deal with Puma after the German company pulled out of Russia, has shared content with his 5.6 million Twitter followers aligned with pro-Kremlin talking points.

The rapper, whose real name is Élie Yaffa, is just a high-profile example of how Western anti-vaccine groups and conspiracy theorists have shifted quickly from parroting falsehoods about the global pandemic to peddling misinformation about the war, often from Moscow's viewpoint.

Over the last four weeks, Russia’s invasion of its European neighbour has grabbed global attention, putting everything else on the back burner — including the two-year-long COVID-19 crisis. For those deeply involved in online conspiracy theories, that means having to find another topic to keep online audiences interested and engaged. With the common denominator of Russia-backed misinformation and a ready-made digital ecosystem of Facebook groups, Telegram channels and various alternative social networks, it's been a seamless pivot from the coronavirus to the war in Ukraine.

The information war is playing out in real time across the European Union and the United States as well-organized and large online communities that had previously pushed back against COVID-19 restrictions are now framing Russia’s invasion as being between good-guy Moscow and Kyiv and its Western allies — now cast as New World Order oppressors — according to misinformation experts and fact-checking groups.

"The conspiracy sphere is an empty shell of sorts that aggregates as news unfolds," said Pauline Talagrand, who’s overseeing Agence France-Presse’s fact-checking work worldwide. "Whether it's vaccines or masks, there is always something that will trigger people who can be easily manipulated and are distrustful of traditional information."

“The problem with these recurring crises is that they contribute to the enlargement of these spheres and lead to the entrenchment of their narratives,” she added.

As with COVID-related misinformation, social networks like Telegram and alternative video-sharing platform Odysee — one of the remaining platforms that provides ready access in Europe to banned Kremlin-backed broadcaster RT and COVID-19 conspiracy documentaries — are playing a key role. While mainstream platforms have removed, or demoted, much of this conspiracy content, there are few if any restrictions on the outer fringes of the web.

COVID-19 conspiracy groups on Facebook — some with tens of thousands of members — blame the West, not Russia, for causing the war. Telegram channels that in early February railed against the so-called deep state now post pictures of dead Ukrainians, claiming they are fake. QAnon-affiliated websites suggest Russia invaded its Western neighbor to weed out child sexual abusers — a central mantra of that conspiracy theory framework.

"The amplification of pro-Kremlin narratives about the war isn't really about Russia, it's about the ongoing skepticism that these groups have in their own governments," said Graham Brookie, senior director of the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, which tracks online falsehoods. "The world's attention is focused on Russia's invasion. It's only natural Ukraine would become a main talking point in conspiracy groups."

Pan-European shift​

The speed with which former COVID conspiracy theorists have pivoted to pro-Russia talking points in European countries like France, Germany, Spain, Switzerland and the Czech Republic has been rapid and stark.

Far-right politicians and influencers in places like France, Germany and the U.S. — many of whom had been vocal opponents of COVID-19 restrictions — are championing misinformation alleging that NATO instigated Russia's invasion or the Ukrainian army attacked innocent civilians.

In Spain, a prominent Telegram channel, once known for its COVID-19 misinformation, spread a widely debunked picture of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy wearing a T-shirt that supposedly featured a swastika, according to the Spanish fact-checking media outlet Maldita.

In Germany, another Telegram channel with more than 200,000 subscribers, jumped on false claims that the U.S. had a secret biological laboratory in Ukraine, based on research from the Center for Monitoring, Analysis and Strategy (CeMAS), a German group that tracks online extremism and conspiracy theories.

"All of these new [online] actors that became influential during the pandemic switched to a pro-Russia position," said Jan Rathje, co-founder of CeMAS. "They always focus on a large conspiracy going on from the elite against the people. People are suffering in Ukraine. And they wouldn't deny that. But they would say, 'Yeah, but that's part of the larger, inhumane conspiracy that's going on.'"

In France, the EU-wide ban of RT and Sputnik was a turning point in boosting crowds on well-known French anti-vaccine Telegram channels, according to Antoine Bayet, editorial director of France’s National institute for audiovisual, a public body that archives all of French radio and television audiovisual material. “It allows for the deployment of the argument, already used during the health crisis, that it’s about defending freedom against a state that censors,” he said.

The anti-vaccine and pro-Russian narratives have also found common ground with low-level hatred for French President Emmanuel Macron ahead of his expected reelection in April. While France’s head of state is on track to retain his presidency, based on POLITICO's Poll of Polls, some of his rivals are seeking to ride the wave of falsehoods about the war in Ukraine to stay relevant with voters.

Florian Philippot, a former high-level executive from Marine Le Pen’s National Rally who now backs presidential hopeful Nicolas Dupont-Aignan, has gone from organizing demonstrations against the country's COVID-19 pass to challenging the Western consensus about the war.

“They have been lying through their teeth for two years about COVID and they would tell the truth about the Ukrainian crisis? Come on,” he tweeted in early March.

Kremlin-backed narratives​

Even during the COVID-19 pandemic, many conspiracy groups quickly jumped on Kremlin-backed narratives, including accusations the West had been slow to respond to the pandemic or mainstream vaccines weren't as effective as those offered from Moscow.

Those close ties — fuelled by Russian state media outlets that had become a go-to source for alternative news for many of these conspiracy groups — are based on common ideological roots between anti-vaxxers, QAnon believers and the Kremlin, including a distrust of traditional media and political elites, and a hatred of either NATO or the U.S.

Some QAnon followers — as they turned their attention to the war in Eastern Europe — embraced Vladimir Putin as the successor of former U.S. President Donald Trump in the fight they envisioned against a shadowy "deep state" global elite.

"QAnon has changed direction and is now looking at Ukraine as the representation of the deep state in collusion with the U.S.," said Ciarán O'Connor, an analyst at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a think tank that tracks online extremism.

Multiple misinformation analysts and fact-checking groups told POLITICO there was no evidence of direct coordination between Russia and these groups to spread online falsehoods. Instead, groups already enmeshed in fringe narratives that question mainstream thinking are more inclined to believe other variations of the anti-Western themes coming from Russia.

“Conspiracy theories call for more conspiracy theories,” said Rudy Reichstadt, director of France’s Conspiracy Watch website, who argued that once people’s “vigilance threshold” about conspiracies is lowered, it becomes much easier to jump from one falsehood to another.

Referring to the Telegram and Facebook groups and YouTube channels that were already actively spreading COVID-19 misinformation, Reichstadt added, “The pipes are ready, they just need to be filled.”

 

[TwoWhalesInAPool]

Ukraine war: ‘vranyo’ – Russian for when you lie and everyone knows it, but you don’t care

The bloody and terrible war in Ukraine has been accompanied by a war of words. One of the more frequent words heard in the Russian media is vranyo, which means a “lie”.

The Russian government and media have hurled it at Ukraine and its allies, accusing them of exaggerating the devastating effects of its “special military operation” while Ukraine’s Russian speakers have used it to describe Russia’s apparently ad-libbed alternative explanations for the destruction wrought in Bucha, Mariupol and elsewhere. Vranyo, though, is not as simple as just a “lie” – it means more than that.

Russian has two words for truth, istina and pravda, and it also has two words for lies: lozh (ложь) and vranyo (враньё). Look them up in a dictionary, and you’ll find them cross-referencing each other, which isn’t much help. The English press has sometimes translated the former just as a “lie” and the latter as a “bald-faced lie”. That starts to get at the difference but isn’t quite there.

Lozh originates with the verb lgat’, the act of lying – the noun describes an untruth. Lozh is the word the US government used to translate Biden's inagural pronouncement that: “There is truth and there are lies,” and to connect it to the “stream of lies” coming out of Russia about Ukraine.

Vranyo is a noun formed from a different verb, vrat’. That verb also means “to lie”, but it has a more colloquial, pejorative flavour. Vranyo has a dismissive feel: it is a lie that no one would take seriously, an excuse or a ducking of responsibility. It can be a mindless fib, like the story of how the dog ate your homework, or a tall tale.

So vranyo starts with lozh, the negation of truth, and goes from there. Vranyo is not about the proposition itself – it focuses attention on the lie-tellers and why they are lying. As on put it, vranyo means: You know I'm lying and I know you know, and you know that I know that you know, but I go ahead with a straight face, and you nod seriously and take notes.

The word has spewed consistently from the Russian side in this meaning. Following the lead of Russia’s foreign and defence ministries, Russian media have united to pooh-pooh almost anything in Ukrainian and western sources as blatant invention, whether that’s estimates of Russian losses (“propagandistic vranyo”) or details of how the Russian army levelled the Kievan suburb of Bucha (the amount of vranyo from Kiev) and bombed the train station in Kramatotsk (“they're steeped in vranyo”), among the many atrocities already documented.

But when a government does vranyo, the nature of the fabrication can change. We may well be talking about “the big lie”, and the reason for vranyo might not be evasiveness, but contempt. Western and liberal Russian sources have called vranyo a characteristic tactic of the Russian state, even coining a new compound gosvranyo, literally “government-vranyo”.

Ukraine certainly uses it this way about Russia. The Russian-language Ukrainian media have hit back, implying that Russia is formulating an alternative reality in which they do no wrong (“a war based on a great vranyo”, as one commentator saw it, or “straightforward vranyo dressed up as propagandistic clichés”, in the words of another).

Vranyo in the cathedral​

Encounters with a high-profile word, though, don’t just connect with abstract meanings and uses; they also evoke associations and echoes of other places we’ve heard and seen them. And vranyo has been a constant in recent years with Russia in the news.

For example, when UK police fingered two foreigners as FSB (Russian state security) agents who they said had carried out the novichok poisonings in Salisbury in 2018, the pair were interviewed on Russian state television. They explained that, quite to the contrary, they were simple tourists who had made a special trip to Salisbury to see the fabled cathedral with its 123-metre-high-spire.

The explanation was so far-fetched that it seemed they had barely put any effort into making it sound credible – liberal Russian commentators said the British were letting the Kremlin “drown itself in vranyo”. The government’s stance itself – denial without plausibility – can be seen as a display of strength, an indifference to the conventions of explanation.

But try to look up vranyo and mentions of the Skripal poisoning in Russian, and most of what jumps out is Russian media accounts dismissing the UK government’s accusations. Russian foreign ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova immediately fired back about “London's vranyo”, which was widely reported across the Russian web. The same has now happened with the invasion of Ukraine.

Vranyo is thus both more specific and more multifaceted than “lying”. It’s a technique of the current Russian regime, and a trope the regime uses against its enemies. Vranyo is not of course unique to Russia; to take just one example, Trump employed the same tactics in the US election with his “big steal” claims. But vranyo does neatly encapsulate, in a single word, the paradox of truth-telling in the current conflict.

 

[Moriarty]

The Kremlin is lying about its invasion of Ukraine.

It is throttling independent journalism and freedom of speech to try to kill the truth.

No one should be fooled by the Russian government's barrage of lies.

Russian forces are targeting civilians in Ukraine and causing a refugee crisis in Europe.

It's time to stop the lies and stop the war.

Uk based ISP's have recieved the following from the Department of Culture Media and Sport concerning OFCOM's new "Regulations".

DCMS Statement
The exact restriction will depend on the service provided, with full details outlined in the Statutory Instrument and accompanying Explanatory Memorandum. Most pertinent to your organisation are the requirements for fixed and wireless broadband providers, who must take reasonable steps to prevent users of their service in the United Kingdom from accessing websites provided by a designated person.
This will likely take the form of URL or DNS blocking. The restrictions will apply to persons designated by the UK Government and we expect the designations to be announced imminently. The Explanatory Memorandum also sets Ofcom as the specified body responsible for overseeing compliance with the measure, who will contact you separately.
We appreciate that you may require support in order to ensure the sanction measures are implemented as smoothly and efficiently as possible.

Basically it calls for a DNS block on rt.com, sputniknews.com and rossiyasegodnya.com.

So the UK government is limiting news from the outside world, not by a vote in parliament, but by statutory instrument.

As you say:-
"It is throttling independent journalism and freedom of speech to try to kill the truth."

 

[hell2bwith76]

Ukraine war: ‘vranyo’ – Russian for when you lie and everyone knows it, but you don’t care

The bloody and terrible war in Ukraine has been accompanied by a war of words. One of the more frequent words heard in the Russian media is vranyo, which means a “lie”.

The Russian government and media have hurled it at Ukraine and its allies, accusing them of exaggerating the devastating effects of its “special military operation” while Ukraine’s Russian speakers have used it to describe Russia’s apparently ad-libbed alternative explanations for the destruction wrought in Bucha, Mariupol and elsewhere. Vranyo, though, is not as simple as just a “lie” – it means more than that.

Russian has two words for truth, istina and pravda, and it also has two words for lies: lozh (ложь) and vranyo (враньё). Look them up in a dictionary, and you’ll find them cross-referencing each other, which isn’t much help. The English press has sometimes translated the former just as a “lie” and the latter as a “bald-faced lie”. That starts to get at the difference but isn’t quite there.

Lozh originates with the verb lgat’, the act of lying – the noun describes an untruth. Lozh is the word the US government used to translate Biden's inagural pronouncement that: “There is truth and there are lies,” and to connect it to the “stream of lies” coming out of Russia about Ukraine.

Vranyo is a noun formed from a different verb, vrat’. That verb also means “to lie”, but it has a more colloquial, pejorative flavour. Vranyo has a dismissive feel: it is a lie that no one would take seriously, an excuse or a ducking of responsibility. It can be a mindless fib, like the story of how the dog ate your homework, or a tall tale.

So vranyo starts with lozh, the negation of truth, and goes from there. Vranyo is not about the proposition itself – it focuses attention on the lie-tellers and why they are lying. As on put it, vranyo means: You know I'm lying and I know you know, and you know that I know that you know, but I go ahead with a straight face, and you nod seriously and take notes.

The word has spewed consistently from the Russian side in this meaning. Following the lead of Russia’s foreign and defence ministries, Russian media have united to pooh-pooh almost anything in Ukrainian and western sources as blatant invention, whether that’s estimates of Russian losses (“propagandistic vranyo”) or details of how the Russian army levelled the Kievan suburb of Bucha (the amount of vranyo from Kiev) and bombed the train station in Kramatotsk (“they're steeped in vranyo”), among the many atrocities already documented.

But when a government does vranyo, the nature of the fabrication can change. We may well be talking about “the big lie”, and the reason for vranyo might not be evasiveness, but contempt. Western and liberal Russian sources have called vranyo a characteristic tactic of the Russian state, even coining a new compound gosvranyo, literally “government-vranyo”.

Ukraine certainly uses it this way about Russia. The Russian-language Ukrainian media have hit back, implying that Russia is formulating an alternative reality in which they do no wrong (“a war based on a great vranyo”, as one commentator saw it, or “straightforward vranyo dressed up as propagandistic clichés”, in the words of another).

Vranyo in the cathedral​

Encounters with a high-profile word, though, don’t just connect with abstract meanings and uses; they also evoke associations and echoes of other places we’ve heard and seen them. And vranyo has been a constant in recent years with Russia in the news.

For example, when UK police fingered two foreigners as FSB (Russian state security) agents who they said had carried out the novichok poisonings in Salisbury in 2018, the pair were interviewed on Russian state television. They explained that, quite to the contrary, they were simple tourists who had made a special trip to Salisbury to see the fabled cathedral with its 123-metre-high-spire.

The explanation was so far-fetched that it seemed they had barely put any effort into making it sound credible – liberal Russian commentators said the British were letting the Kremlin “drown itself in vranyo”. The government’s stance itself – denial without plausibility – can be seen as a display of strength, an indifference to the conventions of explanation.

But try to look up vranyo and mentions of the Skripal poisoning in Russian, and most of what jumps out is Russian media accounts dismissing the UK government’s accusations. Russian foreign ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova immediately fired back about “London's vranyo”, which was widely reported across the Russian web. The same has now happened with the invasion of Ukraine.

Vranyo is thus both more specific and more multifaceted than “lying”. It’s a technique of the current Russian regime, and a trope the regime uses against its enemies. Vranyo is not of course unique to Russia; to take just one example, Trump employed the same tactics in the US election with his “big steal” claims. But vranyo does neatly encapsulate, in a single word, the paradox of truth-telling in the current conflict.

Remember ,the Covid19 Virus was a fraud to begin with ?.
CrispsOffers killed the protest when the Vaccine was born )