Twitter suspending OSINT researchers debunking Russian disinfo ops in Ukraine | Hacker News Reader

Twitter suspending OSINT researchers debunking Russian disinfo ops in Ukraine

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37 pointscormacrelf7 comments

It was fascinating to see just how quickly some of the Russian propaganda has been debunked.. a group of technically savvy Twitter users just dismembering claim after claim as obvious false flag nonsense.

My favorite so far;

Russian media reports Ukrainian 'saboteurs' were targeting chlorine storage near Donestk and air a video of the alleged attack. They release the raw video and it's immediately shown that the video was created several days earlier based on metadata (https://twitter.com/bellingcat/status/1494994802705850368)

After which, people go further and tease apart the video where they discover the name of a youtube video with audio of very similar sounding explosions -- so they do spectral analysis and prove that it's the same audio overlaid on the stupid propaganda video: https://twitter.com/AugustGraham/status/1495069297911156740

I'm surprised at how clumsy the propaganda has been so far. E.g. this farcical video of Russian journalists being "shelled" by Ukrainians: https://twitter.com/jakluge/status/1496521293126066181

edit

It's hard to gin up a war these days -- pics of a Ukrainian SU-24 being towed toward the front lines, presumably to be claimed as shot down while attempting to attack Russian or Belarusian troops; https://twitter.com/nevedimka123/status/1496523365112238080

It probably depends on your audience.

Irony is that it only needs to look legitimate-ish to select few officials. Most of Russians don't believe it (though too scared to say), most of officials don't believe, but obliged to. No one abroad believes it since it's a stupid thing Russia was doing forever. Diplomats, well they have to remain diplomatic and respond to everything as if it was true.

It seems Twitter moderation is increasingly automated. No central moderation was probably better than bad actors gaming the system.

P.S. Why is this buried on page 3 already? And the other one on page 4?

It certainly looks like it. Here’s hoping they have a way to bless accounts and exclude them from automatic enforcement. A couple of accounts here have already been suspended twice and are now advertising backups for when it likely happens again.

P.S. it’s probably due to the low number of comments. I don’t usually submit to HN, I don’t know. Maybe people are bored of account suspension stories and can’t even bring themselves to care when a war hangs in the balance.

UPDATE - Twitter is now aware. It was not a result of mass reporting, but rather human error in a counter-disinfo operation of their own. They’re reaching out to affected accounts. States it never automatically enforces rules based on mass reporting. This is good news, at least the situation is under control, hope they do better in the coming hours and days. Some of the human errors were pretty egregious. https://twitter.com/yoyoel/status/1496544199478583297

If you’ve been following the Ukraine crisis at a distance, you may not have realised but Twitter is one of the key battlespaces right now. For the past weeks organisations like Bellingcat and hundreds of individual researchers have been tracking Russian force movements, geolocating videos of convoys, identifying equipment and correlating this with reports from all over social media. These people have put together tweet threads thousands of tweets long, which is an invaluable tool for transparency and radically reduces deniability of those operations, by an aggressor who has claimed not to be preparing an invasion at all. Such open source intelligence is relied upon by international aid organisations, media, even the UN.

Presently they are engaged in a whack-a-mole of false flag operations created in an fumbling attempt to manufacture a pretext to begin a large scale invasion of Ukraine. This has included shelling separatists’ own infrastructure to blame Ukraine; cutting together training videos with explosion audio from somewhere in Finland; recording fake helmet cam footage of fake cross border raids; and now posing corpses who have clear signs of having been autopsied already in burning vehicles and claiming it was Ukraine setting up IEDs. https://twitter.com/eliothiggins/status/1496418900107579396?...

Now, they have most likely provoked a mass-reporting campaign by Russians, and Twitter has obliged, generally with 12 hour suspensions or account lockouts. The researchers are given notifications with the “Reason:” field blank https://twitter.com/oalexanderdk/status/1496452673008279552 . It seems as though something has tripped an automated system, and these people cannot for the life of them get through to a human.

If you or anyone you know works at Twitter, these researchers need your help. 12 hour suspensions may seem bearable to you, but in this conflict, that is enough time for everything to go haywire while the observers are locked away.

Some more links:

https://twitter.com/osinttechnical/status/149640967257162547...

https://twitter.com/intelcrab/status/1496521974138519556?s=2...

https://twitter.com/walterlekh/status/1496517291349057537?s=...

An apparent leader of mass-reporting: https://twitter.com/bvasylchenko/status/1496536608778108928?...

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