Hacker News Reader

https://euvsdisinfo.eu/ official site of European External Action Service that tracks and responds Russian Federation’s ongoing disinformation campaigns.

It's just amazing how much of all disinformation you can be tracked back to Russian sources. Russian disinformation is not trying to create consistent counter-narrative to the West. They just throw out stuff wildly to sow confusion, doubt and distrust. You can see people in HN who have been caught into this net of disinformation and start parroting same narrative.

Throwing coronavirus disinfo at the wall to see what sticks https://euvsdisinfo.eu/throwing-coronavirus-disinfo-at-the-w...

Yes, it is a barrage of trash, where they even support opposing viewpoints just to derail any normal conversation about a subject. You'll see one wave of accounts support the 'USA engineered this as a weapon' and another that 'China engineered this as a weapon', then using that fake controversy to rule out the middle ground or third option (that nobody engineered it) and instead try to polarize the discussion by only allowing either the one or the other viewpoint. Madness.

The internet grew up very fast, faster than we are able to cope with the degree to which it has been weaponized, and that of course in itself would be a nice conspiracy.

Of course, if I were a conspiracy nut I'd question your credentials, wonder why after 7 years on this site you haven't bothered to flesh out your profile or to state where you are from. Anonymity is part of the problem here. It is good because it allows for people to come forward with important information, but it is also bad because it allows operators to mask their location and identity which would be a strong indicator into whether or not they have some kind of agenda.

For instance, the site you linked to focuses exclusively on Russian disinformation but might be fine with Chinese or American disinformation, its ownership is not declared and is hidden behind all kinds of layers of obfuscation. For all you know it is the exact thing it pretends to fight against, just another arm of the disinformation machine.

>its ownership is not declared and is hidden behind all kinds of layers of obfuscation

This is another form of unnecessary doubt that comes out from laziness from your part and jumping into conclusions.

The ownership of the site is clearly declared in the About section and I mentioned it. EU East Stratcom Task Force part of The European External Action Service (EEAS). EEAS is the diplomatic service and combined foreign and defence ministry of the European Union (EU). https://eeas.europa.eu/

So it says. But: no address, no official contact, no link to any official EU offices and so on. If this is an EU official effort they are doing a piss-poor job of making their credentials public. Note the "official website of the EU" at the top of every official EU website notice and that that one does not have that banner.

"All official European Union website addresses are in the europa.eu domain."

I could set up a website within the .eu domain easily enough and link it to all kinds of EU official sites to give it a semblance of officialdom. Add a couple of flag banners and before you know it you're in business.

Interesting reading on that site here: https://euobserver.com/opinion/141458

The lack of transparency is rather interesting.

I also note you side stepped the other part of my comment.

> no address, no official contact, no link to any official EU offices and so on

Maybe you should read more carefully and not just skim in hurry. All the above is false.

>I also note you side stepped the other part of my comment.

Because I largely agree with it. No need to comment.

I read very carefully. I'm sure that the site is legit, I am just pointing out that they do a piss poor job of documenting that, are not transparent about their methods, criteria, associates and so on and do not have an official location or any oversight body or review process associated with them (as they ought to have). This makes them part of the problem, not part of the solution, it is essentially a blacklist without a transparent process for adding or removing entries which makes it very useful to achieve the opposite of what it purports to stand for.

If the EU is going to do something like this it should be done properly, not in a half-assed and shady way like this because they are lowering the bar for what an official approach to a problem like this should be.

You made also incorrect factual claims. Not just claims about them doing qualitatively poor job.

Did I now? Such as?

"no address, no official contact, no link to any official EU offices and so on"

Is absolutely 100% supported by the evidence: the website you linked to.

Their official contact is not any address that follows the EU address format, there is no street address, the official EU domain is not used, there is no link to any entity that could be contacted regarding the functioning of that website as is normal for anything EU related.

They are as close to a rogue entity as I've seen that is sponsored by the EU to date, and this is exactly how it should not be done, especially for an entity that is effectively able to censor news agencies, a very dangerous and responsible job.

I'm not going to debate with you anymore. I just copy paste this address I copy pasted from the 'Contact us' page:

    EEAS
    Rond-point Robert Schuman 9, 1046 Bruxelles, Belgia

> I'm not going to debate with you anymore.

That's fine.

> I just copy paste this address I copy pasted from the 'Contact us' page:

> EEAS > Rond-point Robert Schuman 9, 1046 Bruxelles, Belgia

Which does not show for me on that contact page, neither does it on the 'about' page. A 'view source' does not contain that information either. So I'm not sure where you got it off that page but I can't find it.

I'd expect a regular format EU contact page, with the address in normal text, which this website does not follow.

Conditioning people to accept EU official information from websites that do not follow the EU house-style, live on different domains and in general disavows being "an official EU position" is simply wrong.

Open the https://euvsdisinfo.eu/contact-us/ page without noscript/adblock, there's a google map embedded. Couldn't see it at first as well.

Thank you, for figuring that one out. An official EU website that requires you to disable your adblocker in order to figure out their address, that's a first. One more bit of proof to me that this website is administered outside of the normal EU website property regime (as if the domain name wasn't proof enough).

Maybe clicky the search box on the official EU website?

https://eeas.europa.eu/headquarters/headquarters-homepage/se...

See this news article: https://eeas.europa.eu/headquarters/headquarters-homepage/32...

Yes, I know. The point is - in case it isn't abundantly clear yet - that that website does not itself follow the EU official format: an europa.eu web address, no address for the office it is run out of, the normal banner at the top, transparency in who runs the office, what its mandate is, what process is being used to place entities on the list, what appeals process there is and so on. It is as shady as it gets within the EU.

Note that they totally undermine everything they do by stating "Not official EU position".

If this is the best we can do against disinformation we're fucked, besides the fact that it only focuses on Russia whereas China and the United States are also quite active in this respect.

> Russian disinformation is not trying to create consistent counter-narrative to the West. They just throw out stuff wildly to sow confusion, doubt and distrust.

Adam Curtis covers this in his 2016 HyperNormalisation in "A World Without Power":

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperNormalisation

It's about 2h22m into the doc. Do a search for "political technologists" for more articles.

I wonder what the Russians are hoping to achieve apart from annoying everyone?

Introducing chaos and disrupting the internal cohesion of their adversaries:

> Russia should use its special services within the borders of the United States to fuel instability and separatism, for instance, provoke "Afro-American racists". Russia should "introduce geopolitical disorder into internal American activity, encouraging all kinds of separatism and ethnic, social and racial conflicts, actively supporting all dissident movements – extremist, racist, and sectarian groups, thus destabilizing internal political processes in the U.S. It would also make sense simultaneously to support isolationist tendencies in American politics".[9]

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundations_of_Geopolitics

Ah that explains quite a lot thanks.

It does not matter. Propaganda is a nice way to get money from the state. It is easy to show immediate results and blaming external factors is always possible when asked about long-term effects.

To make it harder to get people to vote on real information, in turn making it easier for candidates they support to get moved into positions of power. See for instance Thierry Baudet in NL, who is clearly favoring Russia in the same way that Donald Trump does in the United States.

It's a counter propaganda effort against pro-Kremlin propaganda, which is still propaganda in itself, no matter how factual and analytical. An honest anti propaganda effort at minimum would not label undesired propaganda as "disinformation" and would focus on all propaganda in the media to provide a baseline for comparison. I don't see this ever happening though, political systems on the West rely on propaganda just as much as Russia, and something like that could only weaken the power they have, while pushing counter propaganda couldn't, so they just do that.

On this topic though I think we have to be huge grateful to HN, its community, and its moderators, who keep it - in my opinion - one of the least ridden with unsubstantiated nonsense sources on the net.

Yes, but it is a constant battle.

Even the news outlets themselves are the ones spreading fear and non-substantiated claims. Just look into BBC's reporting of Molly Russell and how they use words like "Instagram helped kill my daughter", in quotes, to try and add substance to their piece.

They are willing to lay the blame squarely at Instagram's foot and yet offer no critical analysis of how her dad or teachers or society may have failed to help her - she may have tried reaching out, or showed signs of distress, but that's just glossed over because fuck instagram, they clearly have all the blame.

And that's a very dangerous narrative that people soak up - no critical thought, no attempt to try and offer thoughtful analysis whatsoever.

Those of us wise enough can see through their ploy, the agenda's they push, the propaganda they peddle. Just look into the BBC during the last election and you'll soon understand that disinformation, or out of context reporting is everywhere. Videos, quotes, images and basically all speech is being manipulated, to lure an unsuspecting reader into believing what they're ingesting, and has happened since civilization began.

YOU, as a human being, need to analyze and think about what you believe; are masks "ineffective" during this pandemic? News sources will tell you yes, others with experience will tell you no.

Stop relying on bots and algorithms to try and fill your world view, they're geared to feed you what you want to believe.

> Stop relying on bots and algorithms to try and fill your world view, they're geared to feed you what you want to believe.

That's super good advice and it would be actionable too if only we knew who are the bots and what the algorithms do. But presence/absence of the filter bubble need not be disclosed, bots are plentiful but masquerade as regular accounts and plenty of bots are meatware or the gullible themselves spreading the mental malware like any other infection.

The mainstream media here in the UK have also been misleading people into thinking sites like Facebook are to blame for a measles vaccination crisis they themselves created. About two decades ago the entire British press repeated bogus claims by a certain Dr Wakefield that caused a massive dip in MMR vaccinations, and now that gap in vaccinations is in danger of creating a measles epidemic. Sites like the BBC blamed this on antivaxxer communities on Facebook, quoting childhood vaccination statistics out of context to make it sound like there'd been a massive dip recently when in reality the percentage of kids getting their MMR vaccines in the UK had hit an all-time record high in 2017 and barely dropped since.

Was it obvious at the time that Wakefield‘s claims were bogus, or did that come out after the initial media panic? I don’t blame non-scientist reporters from believing an apparently-credible study, but I would blame them if they continued to push the debunked position after consensus had debunked it. Clearly the current Facebook groups have no such excuse.

The full extent of Wakefield's abuses didn't come out until later but it was clear at the time that the research did not support Wakefield's claims. Even if you ignored the methodology and simply accept the study's results, what it found was that the measles virus was present in the guts of 12 children with autism. This does not support the conclusion that autism is caused by the MMR vaccine (nor that the single vaccine Wakefield was promoting would be better). And indeed is too small scale to suggest much of anything except perhaps more research. At the press conference Wakefield was the only researcher suggesting MMR should be stopped.

The Private Eye and the Daily Mail were the ones to take the story and run with it. Turning it into a political "Wakefield vs. The Establishment" fight, rather than a scientific one.

So xkcd 386 but with global consequences?

I'm not a big fan of xkcd. It is used as a thinking persons' reaction gif around here and usually carries about as much substance. That you'd refer to it 'by number' already presupposed everybody has seen them so frequently you need say no more than that.

As such it is part of the problem, not part of any solution that I'm aware of.

I do actually happen to agree with your general position of needing to fight disinformation, but I don’t know through what effective means. The xkcd position is the old usenet “don’t feed the trolls” defence. When the trolls are nation-state actors, is ignoring them still the best we can do? Remembering that one objective of the trolls/psyops-trolls is to divert resources and attention from more important issues.

Don't feed the trolls has been superceded by the trolls feeding themselves. So they no longer need you or me to feed them, they're more than happy to set up opposing sides so that they can keep their fake debate alive.

Ignoring them is probably no longer an option, but it would take more than just a small effort to put this down. To think that we haven't even dealt with spam effectively makes me super skeptical about whether or not this problem can be contained without simply cutting off entire countries from the net.

Even that might not be enough, enough of these troll fires have been started now that they will continue to burn long after the firestarters have moved on or pushed out. And that's before we get into Western political parties doing this sort of thing to each other. Fox News for instance is worse than anything 'Pravda' would have dared to come out with in the good old days, but there is this huge campaign going trying to equate it to the right side of the street's version of CNN, ditto with the attacks on the credibility of the BBC (which makes mistakes, but is not a dark side operator) and so on.

The one pattern that I have noticed is that when it comes to reporting the news about a particular country it is usually best to get your information from anywhere except the news organizations in the country itself and to filter out anything that has Murdoch's dirty little fingers near it.

Unfortunately I think the problem we need to solve is not technical, and it doesn’t reduce to “source A can be trusted, source B cannot”. Feels like the answer is to increase the critical thinking abilities of the population at large, and it feels we’re about 10,000 years into that project.

I think we're actually going in the other direction, and that we were only maybe 300 years or so into that project.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_Enlightenment