This Week in Misinformation: Convoy Redux, Information War in Ukraine, Truthiness, Of Stylometry and Sonnets
24 February 2022
This Prism newsletter strives to be the paper of record for all that’s happening in misinformation. For any citizen whose life is impacted by misinformation, it helps you see how storylines evolve from multiple, sourced angles on important stories in one place. For amateur and professional misinformation watchers, it is your go-to resource for updates on peers, platforms, propagandists, and politicians. Learn more about Prism and our other products on our Substack page, follow us on Twitter, or like us on Facebook!
________________________________
Misinformation is the best lens through which to understand news about the world. Remove the garbage cluttering your view, and you can see things clearly for what they are.
I’m grateful you choose to spend part of your week with this newsletter. The best way to get it to more people is for you superfans to share with kindred spirits!
Please click this button.
Reliability scores for media outlets cited in the summary are in parentheses for each, courtesy of the terrific folks at Ad Fontes Media.
Now, on to our top three stories.
We promised convoy news, so convoy news we shall convey!
Canadian authorities shut down the Ottawa truckers’ “Freedom Convoy” last week, with police completing its arrest of the remaining protesters shortly after (CNN, 42.93). The chaotic end to the conspiracy theory-fueled demonstration involved pepper spray, tow trucks, and Bitcoin seizures (Fortune, 44.49).
In the U.S., Q adherents (Media Matters, -) and other fans of the Canada convoy--which you’ll recall had swastikas and Confederate flags on display (Snopes, -), have now organized a “People’s Convoy” of their own in this country. That adventure is now underway from California (Washington Post, 43.30). Details are fuzzy, but a few large trucks and many smaller vehicles definitely seem to be heading for Washington, D.C. (Newsweek, 38.24). Some could arrive as early as 1 March (Roll Call, 46.31), just in time for President Biden’s State of the Union address.
The convoys are not the only way conspiracy-minded people have been asserting themselves as a political force lately, either. NBC News (45.79) detailed bad-faith efforts by people against masks in schools to bury school districts with sham lawsuits.
Disinformation ran rampant as Russia launched its massive, unprovoked invasion of Ukraine.
Vladimir Putin did the best he could to fabricate a justification for his premeditated attack on neighboring Ukraine (New York Times, 44.37). And he would have gotten away with it, too, if Joseph ‘none of us should be fooled’ Biden (New York Times, 44.37) hadn’t meddled! The success of Biden’s strategy is hard to gauge; at the very least it seems to have delayed the invasion by a few days (@alexplitsas via Twitter). Mass demonstrations against the war in Russian cities (ABC News, 46.81), though, suggest a larger impact is possible if lack of support for his war winds up changing Putin’s calculus.
Putting the plan into execution, Putin convened a national security council meeting (Financial Times, 45.13) to debate whether to recognize two separatist regions as independent from Ukraine. But wait! It turns out this “debate” was staged and happened after Putin signed documents recognizing said independence in the presence of separatist leaders (@Forrest_Rogers via Twitter). In the statement accompanying the decision, Putin of course cited the phony reasons he had been working on convincing everyone of for weeks. This charade was followed shortly after by Russian “peacekeeping” troops moving into the separatist areas en masse, under the pretext of defending against a Ukrainian attack on the breakaway states. (Axios)
Putin waited about a day, then gave a speech outlining his falsely predicated views as to why Ukraine deserved to be dismantled, for example he wrongly asserted that Russia had created Ukraine (Washington Post, 43.30) and that Kyiv intended to build nuclear weapons (New York Times, 44.37).
But all that is just the beginning of the fake stuff Putin had in store for the domestic and international audiences’ benefit. You can check out the fuller, but still incomplete, thread that Prism has been tracking here. Some lowlights and false flags from “on the ground” in Ukraine include fake chemical plant attacks (@mjluxmoore via Twitter), fake “Ukrainian-sourced” footage (@juliaioffe via Twitter), fake Telegram videos (@AricToler via Twitter), fake videos of separatist leaders calling for evacuations (@RichardEngel via Twitter), fake evacuations (@MollyMcKew via Twitter), fake Ukrainian shellings of Russian positions (@NovelSci via Twitter), fake gas pipeline bombings (@NovelSci via Twitter), fake lost legs (@NovelSci via Twitter), fake mass graves (@julianborger via Twitter), and so on from Russia’s “fake-producing factory” (@DmytroKuleba via Twitter).
While the Biden Administration worked to pre-bunk what it could, Trump (Washington Post, 43.30) and many (@Green_Footballs via Twitter) on the right (@RonFilipkowski via Twitter) essentially parroted, defended, and praised Putin even as he was annexing and invading chunks of a sovereign country. I genuinely wonder why they do this.
Donald Trump is back on social media, but people are having trouble joining the party.
Truth Social, a new site put together by Trump ally and former elected Republican Devin Nunes, launched this week with much fanfare but little functionality (Washington Post, 43.30).
Of note for those interested in content moderation, the site’s terms of service forbid ‘false, inaccurate, or misleading’ posts and ‘other objectionable content’ (@PatHedger18 via Twitter).
Never ones to let a clue that isn’t really a clue slip by, Q-following Anons baked the ‘17+’ age label on the Truth Social launch post to derive some profound, yet indefinable meaning (@Q__talk via Twitter).
As if the above weren’t enough, there’s also the grab bag: a BBC reporters’ thread of all kinds of misleading images from Ukraine; crypto scammers have been targeting dating apps; QAnon straight loves Putin’s invasion; stylometry points to Paul Furber and Ron Watkins as being the individuals behind 'Q' (to which Ron rejoined most denyingfully with a Shakespeare-ish sonnet); a U.S. senator called Russia a 'communist country'; Facebook’s climate change denial problem is bad; that Japanese study ended up finding ivermectin doesn’t help for COVID; and why conspiracy theorists don't use Google.
That, and a lot more, below. This is This Week in Misinformation.
-- Kevin