Daily Stormer The Most Censored Publication in History
The Rotten Empire isn’t even winning the meme war.
Well, this is true. The West is definitely winning the information war – in the West.
But it’s not really that hard to do when you have a totally controlled media and censor all dissent. If you lock down an electronic media machine and just bombard people, yeah – you’ll win the information war.
People are not smart enough. But even if they were smart enough, if all of their input is disinformation, how can they possibly figure anything out?
Speaking behind a podium bearing the Ukrainian state emblem, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, in his now signature green attire, calls on his soldiers to lay down their weapons and return to their families.
The one-minute clip is a deepfake, the term for a sophisticated hoax that uses artificial intelligence to create a phoney image, most commonly fake videos of people.
A deepfake of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky calling on his soldiers to lay down their weapons was reportedly uploaded to a hacked Ukrainian news website today, per @Shayan86 pic.twitter.com/tXLrYECGY4
— Mikael Thalen (@MikaelThalen) March 16, 2022
What unfolded next was the latest episode in the infowar that has accompanied the Russia-Ukraine conflict, a war being waged across social media platforms, via satellite images of battlefields and on hackers’ keyboards.
Zelenskiy posted a bona fide response on his Instagram account on Wednesday dismissing the “childish provocation” and telling Russian troops to return home. His response to the deepfake, which remains of unknown provenance and is not of a high quality, received more than 5m views.
I think it was almost certainly produced by the West for the purpose of “debunking” it, though obviously that can’t be proved either way.
So, okay.
But this is always the framing of this discussion – they start out with “deep fakes” as the core of “disinformation,” then go on to equate it to any dissident opinion.
Social media platforms swung into action as well. Facebook and Instagram’s owner, Meta, said it had removed the video from its services and tipped off other platforms after the deepfake appeared on a reportedly hacked Ukrainian news site and started spreading across the internet. Twitter said it was “actively” tracking the video and removing it if it was being displayed without comment or held up as real.
Sam Gregory, programme director at Witness, a technology-focused human rights group, said the Ukrainian response showed Zelenskiy’s team had an effective strategy in place to deal with this type of disinformation. “The Ukrainians had warned about a video like this,” he said, referring to pre-bunking efforts. “Then the video itself was poor quality and discernible as faked to the human eye and ear. And then the subject of the deepfake was able to rapidly rebut it in real-time, via his own social media channels to an audience who trusts him.”
One expert said the concept of an infowar between Russia and Ukraine and its allies needed be seen in a global context.
“Ukraine is doing an extraordinary job. It is making sure the world understands the gravity of the situation and the fight that they’re undertaking on behalf of the rest of democracy,” said Andy Carvin, managing editor of the digital forensic research lab at the Atlantic Council, a US thinktank. Russia has “failed and fumbled”, he said, including by “posting questionable videos of doubtful provenance”.
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Internationally, RT and another state-owned news service, Sputnik, have been removed in the UK and EU by Facebook and Instagram, and RT’s UK broadcast licence was revoked on Friday.
But Carvin noted that RT and Sputnik are “thriving” in South America and pointed to a recent study showing that 50% of posts examined on Weibo, the Chinese social media platform, backed Russia’s argument that the war was the fault of western countries, Nato or Ukraine. In places like sub-Saharan Africa, he said, the Russian narrative was also playing well. “Region by region, it’s not necessarily looking as great as it may appear through our lenses,” he said.
Yeah.
You ban opposition media, you win the infowar. You’re winning so hard you’ve got retards from reddit going over to the Ukraine to die for literally no reason.
(Frankly, I am posting disinformation on reddit also to try and get more of these morons to go over there, but that’s neither here nor there.)
If other countries don’t ban opposition media, you don’t win the infowar. Aside from RT and Sputnik, countries outside of the “Western world” just have a generally more free media, where people are allowed to say more things. The censorship in America and Europe in current year is worse than it ever was in the USSR.
Craziest 2 minutes of TV news ever, with opposing guests on the Ukraine war hosted by Indian TV. the ending is a MUST watch.🤦 pic.twitter.com/1USI8bjHif
— Sk Boz, PhD 💙 (@skbozphd) March 3, 2022
This is the entire core concept of the First Amendment – the assertion was that if you allowed free access to information, the people could discern what was real. Without free access to information, they can’t discern anything, because they’re locked in a Skinner Box.
