One App – Two Worlds: This Is TikTok in Russia and Ukraine
nrk.no
nrk.no
On thing that caught my attention was the supposed USCentric approach since it counted a distance in miles. I also wonder whether it was translated into russian so it can be shared with russian citizens that they’re being lied to by TikTok
Naturally, I can't get Google Translate to do this now, but I see text like "Vi kjører 100 km. Det koster 30 kr" translated to "We drive 100 miles. It costs 30 SEK" -- km/miles is obviously wrong, and I think kr→SEK (even when it's either kr, kronor, crowns or NOK in English) is because there's more Swedish than Norwegian on the internet.
(I get unreasonably annoyed when people convert metric units into American when translating text into English. The English is used by a far wider audience than Americans, and outside the USA it's reasonable to expect Americans to understand metric units.)
NRK is Norway’s equivalent to the BBC. I’m not sure about the BBC, but NRK is not allowed to run ads. More importantly, they have a number of great in-house developers that churn out quality content and a great video streaming service (tv.nrk.no).
They can display adverts under certain circumstances though. Public billboards aren't censored in news reports, and adverts on the sidelines/stands of sporting events (like football) can still be seen.
Which is britain's equivalent to RT?
The BBC under Greg Dyke and Gavyn Davies was fiercely independent and objective though, until they were unceremoniously let go for not towing the party line on Iraq's WMDs.
Also, noteworthy, is that most people can not remember, or talk about, the fact that certain nations lie to us so they can go to war. They also can't think about the whole actual reasons why what's happening is happening.
Always remember that 99% of all people only parrot what the mass media present to them, with no critical/analytical thought applied whatsoever.
It isn't by accident George Orwell modeled the Ministry of Truth after the BBC. After all he worked as a propagandist for the BBC during ww2.
You truly have to be brainwashed to believe that the BBC is any different from RT. Just gotta tip your hat to the BBC. They do a good job.
I'm surprised that, having held such a strong opinion about the BBC for such a long time, you are still able to immediately make a factually incorrect statement regarding such common knowledge as where its funding comes from.
That's a long-winded and highly convoluted way of saying government funded.
You have to admire the BBC. They've done such a good job brainwashing people that they jump through all kinds of hoops to hide the fact that the BBC is government funded state propaganda. BBC is what RT aspires to be one day.
The TV license system is set up specifically so that the institution is somewhat isolated from day-to-day politics. It's a completely different situation if the PM can decide on a whim to fund you or not, or if there's a difficult-to-change law that sets the fees that you get for a decade in advance
If you insist that everything is the same and all politicians are corrupt and all media are lying then you're just giving away any power you might have. Why would any politician not turn corrupt or leave id you are screaming invectives at them at the top of your lung, completely divorced from their actual work?
That's why RT loves cynicism and tries to amplify exactly that work view: it's a self-fulfilling prophesy.
Arguably there has been a multi-decade push to extinguish the institution altogether, or at least to drastically shrink it and simultaneously bring it under more rigid government control. The trend towards official state broadcaster and away from public interest broadcaster has been ongoing for many many years.
I think the BBC is not exactly like RT in degree or in kind, but there is a definite trend towards its kind. It's also interesting to note that some of the official US complaints about RT influence on US public opinion are based on RT platforming legitimate social critics in the US. Dissidents for thee but not for me.
Or maybe I've heard the "tv license" excuse for many years now. Nothing you wrote is new to me. Surprised you didn't post a link to BBC edited wikipedia article.
> If you insist that everything is the same and all politicians are corrupt and all media are lying then you're just giving away any power you might have.
No. I insist that propaganda is propaganda. I've no problem saying RT is state propaganda because that's exactly what RT is. I've no problem saying that BBC is state propaganda because that's exactly what they are. I've no problem calling putin a corrupt politician. Just like I have no problem calling zelensky or biden or trump a corrupt politician.
What you are saying is my corrupt politician isn't corrupt because he is on my team. My favorite propaganda outlet isn't propaganda because they are on my team. That's the difference between you and me.
> That's why RT loves cynicism and tries to amplify exactly that work view: it's a self-fulfilling prophesy.
Where did I hear that from? Oh that's right, it's the anti-RT propaganda. Funny how that works huh? Funny how propaganda say X and people just repeat it endlessly? You are the one amplifying propaganda you heard not me.
But believe what you want. BBC is a government created and funded state propaganda. This is a historical fact. You can invent all kinds of excuses if it helps you sleep at night. But it doesn't change reality. How crazy is it that only our enemies have propaganda? Only russia, china, north korea, etc have propaganda. We don't have propaganda. Nope. Your comment is proof that we have the best propaganda.
> I've no problem calling putin a corrupt politician. Just like I have no problem calling zelensky or biden or trump a corrupt politician.
Don't forget Pol Pot. These politicians are all the same.
I'm reminded of murderers Oscar Pistorious and Jeffrey Dahmer.
Likewise the terrorism of the French Resistance and Osama Bin Laden.
What a unique and valuable perspective to have. I'm sure you'd agree that such enlightenment is a curse, which is why the more feeble minded of us hide our eyes from these blinding truths.
> Likewise the terrorism of the French Resistance and Osama Bin Laden.
I mean, Robespierre probably killed more people and not exactly for better reasons. Reign of terror was exactly what the name implies.
How out of touch are you?
For God's sake, they can practically see Kharkiv out of their window!
Heck, in many places around the world people get most local news from social media apps.
Imagine an alternate universe where Canada and USA went to war. Do you really think that people in Seattle would have to depend on German social media apps to figure out what goes on in Vancouver while it's being bombed? Seriously?
Russia has banned foreign media, in addition to restricting local media to publishing the government view.
Since I'm British, and you'd probably consider the US and UK equivalent for this purpose, here's a major British newspaper article arguing against NATO action in Libya: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/mar/23/nothin...
(Given https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guardian_US, it probably counts for the US anyway.)
Yes the US has problems. But Russia is just on another level considering that being a free and independent media source is literally illegal there.
Famously debunked the justifications for the Iraq war at the time they were being spread.
https://amp.theguardian.com/world/2022/mar/18/sergei-lavrov-...
The Russians view Fox News as a balanced news source.
Walter Kronkite, perhaps the most famous TV anchor in US history was publicly against the Vietnam war https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Cronkite
Iraq war is where "embed" journalism became the only acceptable source where journalists were killed by US.
Fox News is the most widely watched news network in the US.
Tucker Carlson has the highest rated show on that network and has taken an anti-Ukraine stance.
The insanity that they are spewing is just a tool to create the illusion of a debate.
Even forgetting the Pentagon Papers already mentioned, papers have published the abuses in Guantanamo and the Iraq War Logs. Plenty of articles have documented killings of civilians by US drones. And plenty of editorial boards have written articles calling on the US to end whatever current war it's fighting.
Sure, big media probably kowtows more to the government than we'd like, but they absolutely are free criticize the wartime actions of the government.
Trump tried and failed to ban TikTok is exactly the difference being discussed.
The US operated censorship during WW2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Censorship ; who knows what would operate during the war with Canada?
I'm not sure whether you're ignorant of the near-total state control of media in Russia and Belarus, but how do you expect them to get accurate news?
Because that thought's beyond ridiculous.
Picking a random story from the BBC front page, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-manchester-61002096 , what do you think is inaccurate about it? Do you think the MD has not resigned? That there have not been queues? That they have mistaken the names of people involved? That Manchester does not in fact exist and is a liberal conspiracy?
(The main problem with political news is disproportionate coverage, double standards of scandal, and the selection of who gets quoted - as well as a vast area of "op-ed" which is not technically news but is on the same websites.
As well as reporting on "future" or "possible" events, which by definition are difficult to be accurate about)
I intentionally didn't call "descriptions of what happened" as "facts", because that would sidetrack the discussion on how to determine what's true or not etc. Just force media to clearly separate "here's what our reporters saw" from "here's what they think it means"
But that requires an active desire to go find the truth. Such people already know the truth of the war.
But plenty of Russian citizens are just following the state propaganda right now, and are consuming zero information outside of it. If such people saw the reality of the war while casually scrolling through Tik Tok, that might make it harder for such people to deny what's going on.
In one of these incidents the news article seemed like it might be a coverup to me so I looked up user forums in case someone leaked the real information.
In my original post I was referring to an explosion _inside_ Belgorod: https://www.reuters.com/world/ukraine-strikes-fuel-depot-rus... which may or may not be directly linked to the war; Ukraine has denied responsibility.
It doesn't. At all. Why?
Because it's the same dumb people, regardless of source.
It doesn't matter if they believe TikTok or any other mass media. At all.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scandinavian_mile
TIL.
This was a first, and I blame someone else.
Actually, my experience was the exact opposite on a desktop. First, I landed on a black page which showed some video for less than a second and afterwards the page didn't respond anymore. After switching from Firefox to Chromium, the page probably worked as it was intended.
Nevertheless, scrolling with a mouse I landed somewhere between the right positions. So I tried using the buttons on the left and while the positions, I landed were much better, it felt very awkward to continuously press buttons on the left while my hand was on the right (might be good for left-handed people). Furthermore, the videos played somewhat irritating, as if they continued playing when you went to the next part or paused a bit delayed. So when switching to a previous part you land somewhere in the middle of the clips.
So while admire the story, I didn't enjoy the experience.
This is but one example of a larger systemic issue with media in the 21st century, and an issue with how people consume that media.
Virtually every platform is like this, not just TikTok. It's not like TikTok tries to present itself as a neutral, unbiased source. Their whole premise is delivering "highly curated" content to you as fast as possible. The problem is that people have accepted that as normal and it's doing horrible things to the world. There's a reason everyone feels like we're the most divided we've ever been...and it starts with things like this.
As far as the war in Ukraine is concerned, this is just like classic WW2 propaganda but turned up to 11 due to the nature of how fast and easy it is to spread [mis]information these days.
But the current strategy of appealing to China to at least not help Russia in any way, is the best outcome.
And thankfully China has opted to pursue a rather novel way of fighting COVID, which prevents them from getting stronger economically.
I'm not saying that they didn't just make up the article, but how do we know?
How do we know their bots didn't have bugs in them that pushed the results in favor of the tone of the article?
Bots may be prejudice to the war content in terms of how they watch videos and how they scroll through them, and as such changing recommendation algorithm, but the original reporting is about censorship of war related content. Which doesn't require that much of a proof, it is officially confirmed by TikTok even in the statement at the end of a submitted report - it doesn't show newly uploaded content in rus region.
[1] https://www.pling.com/p/1515346/ [2] https://github.com/tigr1234566/TikTokMod
Russia can't upload new things at all. There is nothing about the show from Russians to show.
Russia's are also not being shown new Ukraine videos. This is as designed as mentioned and as you know due to technical-implemnted regional bubbles.
What were you saying in your last two sentences?
> How do we know their bots didn't have bugs in them that pushed the results in favor of the tone of the article?
> how they watch videos and how they scroll through them, and as such changing recommendation algorithmYou don't need the bots source code to reproduce the experiment, just as you wouldn't ask to borrow/inspect a biochemist's beakers to reproduce their experiment.You simply follow the same steps they did and see if you observe the same results.
Not comparing but I did a similar project 8 years ago at the peak of Israel / Palestine conflict to compare tweets from Palestine vs tweets from Israel.
Incredible difference when you see them side by side.
It would be great if someone would execute such an idea for more areas of conflict to bring awareness.
> It would be great if someone would execute such an idea for more areas of conflict to bring awareness.
Edit, thanks internet archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20180118162502/https://98clicks....
Its been different
The current CEO of NPR is a former USAGM exec. PBS FRONTLINE has unprecedented access to interviewing top DoD/State officials for stories that advance their agendas. Interesting.
Indirectly, all the establishment media has close ties to national security. NYT admitted that potentially sensitive stories need to get screened by the government before publishing. That's state control over media where it counts.
The parent Bytedance does, and their Chinese equivalent is Taiotao. Even the TikTok data servers exist in South Korea.
This is an important distinction because there has been zero proof that TikTok is spying or is a tool for China, despite clickbait articles, memes, and accusations existing. This is the first time TikTok is being used observed to be used for government political censorship... And in Russia of all places.
Or maybe they checked but didn't find anything?
Study: https://citizenlab.ca/2021/03/tiktok-vs-douyin-security-priv...
Original Twitter thread: https://twitter.com/RonDeibert/status/1374010176534118400
This is ongoing government political censorship in the PRC.
It's the same with governments. Non-transparent governments which do not make its reports and internal statements public should be assumed to be committing massive crimes. It's up to them to prove to us that they aren't.
Why should I trust an organization that hides reality from me to not abuse its power?
> But I think it is a bit surprising that TikTok hasn't met more criticism and resistance on this
If the users are liking their new digital crack / cocaine on the platform and as long as the algorithm is happily manipulating them, then they will never criticise or complain about it, nor will they be able to distinguish between fact or fiction.
Hence, I think many jealous governments, three-letter agencies and even ancient wizards want their reality distortion spells back from social networks like TikTok.
With that said - it would interesting so see what tik-tok looks like in China. Based on reports, Russian invasion is also heavily censored in China[0]
We did not need this war to make this obvious.
What's truly unsettling is that in the world today we must contend with the conflict between achieving capitalist goals (more money) and ideological ones (democracy).
Though it's so bad in Russia now that it seems the only moral choice is to shut down services.
With all respect for the author's work, this is not very relevant, since TikTok is in "zombie mode" now for Russia.
It stands to reason, with the nontemporal algorithm behavior parent comment pointed out, that a vast amount of those consume-only users will not even notice the new content restriction.
Wikipedia as a source is good enough for this:
And yet what you described is... Tor, almost exactly.
The clip is shared by a Russian account and contains a gaming reference for pausing games
Good factoid to note for dodging automatic filters
For years Kremlin cultivated in Russians a sense of injured pride, something akin to the “straight white male” victimhood and persecution complex you see in US fringe groups. Russians were told of greatnesses of their achievements of the past, and how it was stolen from them, how the West is weak, gullible, and corrupt, and is trying to sabotage the inevitable rise of Russia to it’s destined glory.
Russians have enough access to sources of truth, but their world view simply does not compel them to believe those sources that create dissonance with their righteous cause - they can’t be brother killing monsters that rape mothers in front of their children, crush people with tanks, bomb maternity hospitals - so it’s obviously all lies. And since everyone is accusing them of this - then it simply means that everyone is lying and will get what is coming to them.
How do I know this? I was born in Soviet Union, am Russian-speaking and I am unable to explain my anger and grief over what is happening to my own father who thinks that I am a fool to believe in propaganda staged videos full of crisis actors manufactured by Western media.
Sorry, but unbiased sources do not exist. Free speech does not exist. It's not two worlds, but two bubbles.
Does it look something like this?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Per...
Meanwhile people in the west, or at least outside of the conflict zone, discussing about free speech.
Nothing has changed.
You can be proud of yourself and your principles.
Full history of changing official Russian narrative is available.
There is no problem to find Russian official statements at all. The issue here is that you ignore what they are saying in order to pretend it is not available or that it was somewhat convincing.
What about panama papers proving zelensky and ukrainian politicians having twice as many illegal activities as whole or russia?
and ghost of kiev or the snake island bombing or the tank dude or the other million of fake news being peddled
People are stupid.
In the same breathe you can, in fact, never ever bring up how genuinely worse the US is compared to any other country on this planet, while actually sparking a useful discussion. You do not find such conversations on the top, be it here, on reddit or on any level where it is actually both useful and spreading.
This is demonstrably not true and easily disproved. All the official Russian accounts are on twitter and keep posting lies after lies, lately main topic is denial of massacre in Bucha. For example: https://twitter.com/mod_russia/status/1510649349482635265
Even with maternity hospital bombing, the women in photographs said that the Ukranian army had occupied the hospital and forced them out of the maternity wing.
Like the other poster said: it's fake news on fake news. Two different bubbles.
Maybe I'm delusional, but I found it positively surprising that: 1. The Ukrainian user saw videos about the war despite Russia and China wanting to suppress news around it, and I'm sure TikTok taking pressure around it. 2. It mostly isn't algorithmic deception, it's a byproduct of the fact that they had to turn off new video uploads in response to a crazy fake news law.
>Russian Alexei sees a man tripping over in the water, a puppy patting a duckling on the head and some funny, homemade costumes.
Is it just me or does the first one sound like propaganda and the second one sound like normal TikTok?
The people that were just railing against “misinformation“ by their political opponents, have been happy to jump all over snake Island, ghost of Kyiv, Z dressed in uniform last year, higher Russian death rate than frontlines of World War II, and going out of their way to ignore neo-Nazi groups there.
No one has to be pro-Russia, to notice all the Ukrainian propaganda. Proves to me that everyone is full of shit when it comes to actual standards of acceptability.
source? while I don't doubt there's a many people for both groups, I haven't seen concrete examples of what you're describing.
It's just TikTok does not want to be part of this.
If Ukrainian side being awash with war videos is "propaganda" and is "not normal for TikTok" (GP's claim), then is this normal?
But can we reflect for a second that we are all in the same boat? We don't know what we are presented on screens is real either. Who's to say we are receiving the truth? Are our leaders beneficent? I think not.
We are all in the same boat. We are all propagandised. We don't even know what is going on anywhere else, except for what we are able to personally verify. And even that is limited by how we are able to explain and frame our experience!
The core claim in the liked article isn't about content moderation, it's about censorship. And it's really upsetting to see the extent to which HN commenters want to conflate them.
You seem to be unaware of the level of censorship that goes on here, youtube, twitter, etc, etc. It is called breaking community guidelines, de-platforming, shadow banning, hate-speech, etc.
Do you remember when Alex Jones was removed from everywhere in a couple of days? Regardless of what you think, should he be allowed a voice?
All of this is taking place outside of the legal system btw. Which is meant to establish people's right to free speech.
Alex Jones has a voice, it just isn't on mainstream platforms.
Do you remember when Trump was banned from Twitter?!?
>Do you remember when Trump was banned from Twitter?!?
Yes, and he deserved it. And yet everything Donald Trump says and does still gets national press coverage, and he's starting his own social media platform with a backlog of millions of followers. It's garbage, but that isn't censorship's fault.
We should all wish to be so censored.
Good god.
Do you ever think you're part of the problem? Should we censor people who have a different opinion?
People really should stop picking Trump as an example of a martyr to the cause of free speech, he's a really bad one. I know they want the narrative to be that "cancel culture" was just so powerful that it silenced a sitting President but it's just not working out that way.
It simply is not. And the proof is that you can see in this very thread a bunch of flagged, dead comments that are still visible, still citable, and (importantly) whose posters are not guilty of crimes for their creation.
I'm sorry, but no. Difficulty of finding information is not the same thing as censorship. And we have to stop pretending that it is.
> Do you remember when Alex Jones was removed from everywhere in a couple of days?
Nope, actually I don't. But interestingly: I absolutely know that Alex Jones' rhetoric is still pervasively accessible to anyone who wants to hear it. Here's his site, if you're having trouble finding it due to all the, ahem, "censorship": https://www.infowars.com/
If major platforms de-platform you, in a co-ordinated fashion that's not censorship?
This is all works on account of corporate policies - not law. Law would dictate that unless what was said was illegal, that a person had a right to say it.
Which is supportive of the fact that we are living in a fascist (corporate + governance) system. That the legal system is now a joke.
Not in a world where you can continue to post on Infowars or 4chan or reddit or HN or wherever instead, no. Why would it be? You really don't see the difference? In Russia, it is illegal to report on international perspectives about events in Ukraine. That content doesn't exist, and you can't link to it without committing a crime (and, likely, also using a ban evasion tool like a VPN).
Do you have an example of an idea or perspective (even one!) that is being suppressed by "major platforms" in a "co-ordinated fashion" that I won't be able to refute with a simple link as I did above?
Yes, you can have a website and your own voice. But if you are being excluded from public platforms - not because you are doing anything illegal, but because a majority or even just the owner doesn't like your opinion - this is a genuine problem. You will live in an echo chamber.
These are legal issues and there is legal framework already in existence to prevent illegal acts. Shops cannot refuse service to the public. But an online public platform - eg Twitter - is able to refuse. The ability to refer to a terms of service document that can justify stopping your usage of a public platform when a person has done nothing wrong, should not be legal. That you can be silenced can interpreted as a political act, eg Trump. You might agree with the political slant (but then how would you even hear about alternative views?).
I really don't get how you can think or argue that voices are not being censored in the public domain.
Maybe. But it's not "censorship" as commonly understood in a historical context. And it's absolutely not, in even the remotest sense, comparable in severity or impact to the kind of criminalization of discourse that is happening in Russia right now. And any attempt to conflate the two is just ridiculously inappropriate.
Obviously, it would be valuable if someone could suddenly change TikTok so that it thinks all Russians are Ukrainians.
Such information warfare is vastly less violent than missiles and probably much cheaper to implement. The sooner the Russian population knows what their leadership is really accomplishing, the better for the world.
I wish more people understood this. There is SO much more going on in this conflict than any layman can fathom. There’s deep context behind it spanning years, and the situation itself develops at a breakneck pace, yet everyone is suddenly an expert on the culture and history of the entire region and fully informed on what’s going on.
Are the Ukrainian videos actually unavailable in Russian TikTok if you search for them? It seems obvious that as you watch more non-war stuff (which might be the default based on the demographics) you'll see even less of them in the Russian account. And if you really can't see them even if you try (which the article doesn't even say as far as I saw) then isn't that the real news rather than the experiment that just shows how different demographics see different things on TikTok? What am I missing?
"Via our Russian IP address, we try to search for some of the war videos that Ukrainian Nykolai has watched.
But they simply don’t appear. Someone doesn’t want us to see them.
Who?"
Either way, the point seemed to be more about the different feeds which is not a surprise anywhere while the real and only relevant information actually is that the content is banned.
One of the main reasons I prefer Reddit is the existence of r/All. Provides a very balanced view
Tailored to individual tastes - absolutely not
Kinda like a newspaper
/r/all is nauseatingly full of "russia bad, ukraine good" with mindless flinging of feces.
Yall be blaming facebook but reddit is the real snake in the grass.
(I didn't think I'd live, as a man, to be offended by sparsely-clad voluptuous women, but there I am.)
Regardless how much of this is because of my location or my behaviour, it supports OPs point: TikTok can be very different for different users.
Sure, there are thousands of proxies in Russia and Ukraine. Lots of them are free. Besides, any decent paid VPN with multiple exit nodes would likely have nodes in both Russia and Ukraine.
You could even order a VPS hosting, if that's your thing.
I've noticed that on Snapchat and Instagram, I'm not able to see any new public content coming from Ukraine. On the Snapchat map, Ukraine is completely empty. I have a few Ukrainian friends, and I still see their content, but public stuff seems to be filtered or censored somehow. I'm a US-based account, and I've been in the US and Dominican Republic lately.
I think this phenomenon is related to filter bubbles (but also more than that). I've already been noticing for years that my connections with different political views, or different interests, are being fed completely different realities. Sometimes it's benign recommendations, other times it's creepy advertiser-driven manipulation, and this example of Ukraine/Russia shows that there is clearly some blatant, wide-scale censorship going on. The narrative is being controlled by powers operating in the shadows. It really is an unseen information war.
As someone who has been traveling for 10 years, my friends are incredibly diverse. So I often hear news from outside of my country and my filter bubbles. And my go-to source for trying to peek outside of the filter bubbles is Wikipedia's current events portal.
I've got a few Russian friends. Most are outside of Russia, but one who I regularly talk to is in Russia and stays on Instagram using a VPN. I've had some conversations with her about the war, and while she's certainly not a fan of Putin, and knows there is a war going on, she seems to be completely naive about the severity of it. When we talk about it she says things about how truth is hard to know because the media lies. She is hearing stories from the West but having a hard time knowing what is really happening.
There really needs to be some new form of leaflet drops to get real information to Russians despite the Information Age Iron Curtain.
I’m not sure that sending local ad sales people who have no influence on the product, and depriving their family of their support is the ethical choice.
Very convenient.
It is a chinese social media app.
Use established media for news.
And yes I know that is how people get content, I use Youtube and Twitch for political news and its just as bad.
But this is on another level.
It is no wonder governments would love to use this glorified recommendation algorithm as it is the new digital crack / cocaine which is effective on manipulating billions of users today.
Now looking back at this once again [1], I don't even think it was a clever thing to say that "TikTok is the best thing to have happened to the Internet". At most it is the direct opposite and it is even worse than Facebook.
And what if the topic is say, Hunter Biden’s laptop?
If you got your news solely from TikTok, you probably would have know that was real about 500 days before NYT and WaPo finally admitted it.
So cherish your freedom of speech, and exercise and defend it. I don’t know what to do concretely, maybe donate to the EFF or something.
And notably, Russia hasn't banned VPNs yet, afaik?
You can still write anything in a blog that you own and have people see it. To me that freedom is the "internet".
Starlink et al. have a unique possibility of being state-agnostic and even leave citizens room for plausible deniability. (The next problem is how Starlink is payed in a way that states can't block, but it seems people are working on that...)
As I see it no corporation can be state agnostic unless you want a corporation more powerful then states themselves and you don’t want that either because a corporation is not beholden to the people.
In other words, you may have a legal freedom to express your opinions but nobody is forced to give you the platform to do so. It can become arbitrarily difficult to actually disseminate your opinions at the extreme. E.g. I may vehemently disagree with Trump's opinions, but I have to admit that I feel deeply uncomfortable with private entities controlling whether he gets heard or not.
At the same time, I don't have a good solution if I'm fully honest. Private entities absolutely should have the freedom to determine what they want published on their platforms. Maybe we need (as a society) realize that the social media has become a de-facto utility that needs to be provided as such, regulated as such and taken away from the hands of private entities?
It's easy when you have a domain, server in your basement, a reasonable ISP. But as soon as you break the ToS with your provider or registrar getting the word out becomes practically impossible without resorting to IPFS or Onion or whatever in which case the content you own becomes a little ghetto that nobody reads.
The internet is a group of technologies enabling near-realtime dissemination of information. It has no implicit promise of freedom of speech or press, democracy, or any other political ideal. Even the World Wide Web has no such implicit promise.
The great democratizing force to which you refer is the ability to publish content, and to an extent the content itself, and that still exists (modulo nationwide firewalls). Just get off other peoples' servers and start hosting it.
It's still besides the point, though: Internet is like radio waves; sure you can be prosecuted for using them for activity that's illegal in where you currently are, but it does not constitute a threat to electromagnetism.
Clients host the content they access.
The real IP address of people hosting any particular content is discoverable.
Using IPFS for this use case could make for an easy list of targets.
Does it, though? I'd actually like to see a thorough study done on this. My hypothesis is different from yours: the proliferation of "specialty sites" is a product and symptom of the walled garden phenomenon, and further serves to sequester and censor undesirable content from the wider audience.
What are you suggesting is better, though? really, that we all just publish one of 10000 articles to dev.to and hope their search and popularity algorithm puts your article in front of peoples' eyes? That everyone should upload video to a single time-ordered feed that you have to scroll through until you find something you like without algorithmic involvement? Im seriously confused, how do you do content selection or personal curation in a world without niches
I seem to recall a survey in South East Asia asking people about their internet use, and there were more Facebook users than internet users...
Ah, here: https://qz.com/333313/milliions-of-facebook-users-have-no-id...
"11% of Indonesians who said they used Facebook also said they did not use the internet."
I remember a rash of such loaded survey questions going around my country a few years ago, it looked like it was specifically designed to be answered with answers that could be used to slander my nation with "N% of these people think this" results. It's usually not disinterested parties investing the time and resources to run these survey, rather, it's usually people for whom the investment will pay off if they can get the results they want.
Truth is that people largely place trust in institutions and people they are used to and identify with, often for irrational reasons. People are prone to FUD. Theyre lazy and passive.
This means that, for example, Rupert Murdoch has a disproportionate level of political influence in the UK because he dominates media through which people watch and read about sports.
And Tiktok is an effective propaganda delivery channel because it already feeds kids videos of dances they like.
Sadly, programming people on a mass scale is just as effective as it ever was because it turned out how trust is acquired mattered way more than mere access to information.
Is it really so irrational? How many people have the technical know-how and access to equipment to personally verify that COVID vaccines are safe for human consumption? (Can you even verify that on your short of running mass human trials?) And yet, by and large, most of us are not conspiracy theorists who wonder if the vaccine will secretly kill us or render us infertile.
There are often good reasons to trust the official narrative. There are often good reasons to distrust it too, but placing trust in people and institutions is often not so irrational.
I'd argue it's deeply unhealthy to have any trust at all in governments that have shown themselves to be authoritarian or oppressive.
Anyone can publish a paper nowadays, technology has made that very easy. But trust is still something that needs to be earned, and that takes time. It makes sense to have trustworthy institutions, I don’t think it’s something we can easily replace with technology.
Humans will always accept some axiom as truth without really verifying it. It's impossible to do so. Can any single person truly know how everything in their computer works? Or how the machines that made the semiconducter work? Nope. All we can do is try to determine the truth by proxy, which means the truth can and will always be manipulated.
The question is which institutions and people do we place trust in? When they contradict each other whom do you believe? Should we believe them sometimes but not others?
That's where people get irrational and antivaxxers are just one example of that.
Yes, it's blindingly self evident that you cant run your own vaccine trials.
I think to a degree, this is a misunderstanding. The Russian approach to disinformation in particular does not sell the message "trust us!" - at least, not in the West. Instead, they push the message "trust nobody!" In fact, RT's slogan is "question everything". While that sounds enlightened, in fact, total lack of trust makes you cognitively disabled. You can't believe anything or any expert. All too often, you then "do your own research" and, as a gullible amateur, are sucked into conspiracy theories.
The problem isn't the sheeple, it's the wake-up-sheeple people.
Russian FUD propaganda resonates in the west because of the lack of trust in western media. That's them successfully exploiting a hole our media dug for themselves.
The fact that we've responded by banning RT highlights that that hole goes deep enough that we're responding by, as a matter of imminent practicality, violating a core value of our civilization. That both hurts and deepens the hole.
Unfortunately we cant go back in time and reinstate the fairness doctrine and render RT a pathetic waste of time. The cat is out of the bag now we deliberately eroded trust in our own institutions and autocratic regimes have been exploiting it for years.
Speaking of antivaxxers, the same thing happened in reverse. I have friends in Russia who absolutely refused to take sputnik because why the fuck would you inject something into your arm because Putin told you to?
You're arguing that RT exploits a hole the West dug itself into. The comment you're responding to argues the hole is besides the point. The exploit would work with or without it. (The fact that all media is lumped into a single category, a fallacy, seems to prove the point.)
They're making no comment about why RT resonates, just that those people it does resonate with "are the problem".
By media I was referring exclusively to mainstream newspapers/sites, TV, etc. I realize that the way I used the term was slightly ambiguous.
We are the problem. Not the misinformed masses.
That's the magic part: you don't have to be explicit to promote certain thing, you just create the ground tech-knowledge to enable the easy access of such thing, and hand everything else over to natural progression.
The Internet for example, enables everyone to exchange information with everyone else. That's textbook democratic-builtin design. Some undemocratic nations are so fearful such network, they go as far as creating their own little net to protect their pathetic little propaganda, the propaganda that those nations don't even dare to show to the world. And even that, they still have to fight a propaganda war (actual names might be different) in their own little net to keep democratic force in check.
Internet is democratic, there should be no question about that.
The problem about the Internet today, is that most people thinks Amazon+Google+Facebook+Twitter+other big brands is the Internet. They forgot that they can host things themselves without those big tech companies.
With all due respect the problem with the internet is that you (and many others) don't know what the Internet is.
You and many others believe the Internet is what the internet is capable of. It's not. The Internet is exactly what it is to the vast majority of people that use it. And that's Amazon, Twitter, Facebook, TikTok...
It doesn't matter that the internet could be what you want it to be, not that it once was. But it's not now, and history isn't on your side - ask usenet or IRC.
So here we are and yet again technologists are shocked or in denial after believing that the existence of a technology would somehow overpower the interests of the powerful and the system they've built - instead of realizing it will be co-opted by them.
The martial arts adage - don't bring a weapon unless you know how to use it / control it. Otherwise it will simply be taken from you and used against you.
If you are a technologist and failing to rigorously think through the negative cases and faults of your tech, or how your tech can be used against the interests of people or society you are a failure of a technologist. It doesn't matter if you're building an ML model, crypto, or a TikTok app.
As an example, where does crypto end?
1. High efficiency money laundering, permitting sanctions evading (like Russia would love to do right now on a massive scale), and the medium for illegal business like digital extortion / ransomware
2. Just as regulated as the existing banking/credit system, centralized in a few exchanges, failing at any anonymity, no better than existing banking and CCs, while using up massive resources.
Neither is any good and yet tons are in denial that that's where we'll end up.
Technology does not exist independent of society at large as much as we'd like it to.
> The martial arts adage - don't bring a weapon unless you know how to use it / control it. Otherwise it will simply be taken from you and used against you.
To put it simply, you think: a technology must be tested safe and can only be used for the intended purpose, otherwise it will hurt you back and it's your (a technologist) own fault.
While I do agree a technology should be designed with good intention, I must point out that your opinion is too idealistic.
Most technology that we utilize today were invented not actually by one inventor, rather, they were invented by the iterative advancement of our (as human) knowledge. Further more, technology itself is not static, instead, it iterates too, sometimes by different people in different organization at different place across different time.
Put it under the context of the Internet, an inventor maybe "rigorously think through the negative cases and faults" of their invention, but it is almost impossible for them to have complete control over even their own invention, let the lone alterations of it.
Often in the end, you can only hope that you've designed something good, and let the progress of things take care the rest.
Let me put my end opinion here: Internet is promoting democracy, the world will be a far worse place if the Internet don't exist.
> To put it simply, you think: a technology must be tested safe and can only be used for the intended purpose, otherwise it will hurt you back and it's your (a technologist) own fault.
No I don't belive a technology can only be used for it's intented purpose. In fact exactly the opposite - almost every technology will be used for purpose other than what you intented it to be used for. So understand what common, or motivating alternate purposes you are enabling with your tech and make sure you evaluate the consequences of them.
An example (not ideal because it is not how history happened): Inventing/discovering atomic enery also invents the atomic bomb. Don't jump start spreading the atomic energy everywhere touting its benefits unless you understand you'll also be spreading atomic bomb tech everywhere. Don't be surprised later when it happens and say "it's not supposed to be used that way". "They've corrupted the ideals we had of cheap clean energy for everyone".
> but it is almost impossible for them to have complete control over even their own invention, let the lone alterations of it.
Noone has absolutely/complete control over anything. (And a side point, frequently when arguments describe absolutes they are often standing up straw men)
> Often in the end, you can only hope that you've designed something good, and let the progress of things take care the rest.
This I strongly disagree with. You cannot an should not "only hope you've designed something good". You should also have evaluated in designing something good that you're not also designing something bad. That is your responsibility as well.
Don't make an information harvesting platform and then be dismayed when people use it to harvest information you don't think should be harvested. Don't make cell hacking software then be shocked that authoritarian govts use it to hack their citizens' phones. Don't put backdoors in software then be apalled that the "wrong" people use them.
> Let me put my end opinion here: Internet is promoting democracy,...
It is now. And I sincerly hope it continues to do so in the future. History, all of the above and the linked article on TikTok shows that "[letting] the progress of things take care the rest" means that it likely will not continue to do so in the future without diliberate concerted effort to ensure it does. When most of the internet looks and behaves like TikTok.
The internet original was little else than implicit promises of such things, if not explicit. “It routes around censorship” and all that…
More significantly, controlling the narrative is not new. The Cold War was a narrative war, each side warning their citizens of the dangers of the other, and that even the ideas from across the seas were virulent and treasonous.
World War II was a war that featured a huge amount of propaganda, and while I would hesitate to say that it was more prevalent in any part of the world, the most well known examples come from Nazi Germany.
All sides in warfare claim to be winning. Morale is a huge factor in survival and achieving victory, the morale of the military personnel and the populace.
The belief is that you can't go around saying that you're losing, because this is more likely to convince people to stop trying to win.
By contrast, you can say that it's challenging, and that many have died, because a challenge is something to aspire to do, and the deaths of your people is something to arouse anger and a desire for revenge.
During times of war, freedoms have always been infringed upon, to keep the citizens in line and to police the nation for spies and dissenters.
What you are seeing is the use of a new tool in the propaganda toolkit. While the press can be swayed, big global news outlets need far more than a little cash or aggressive coercion to adopt a story contrary to fact, especially if to support a regime hated in the West where all the business is.
The point here is that your traditional internet outlets for news and discussion, namely news websites and forums, are harder to game. They're entrenched, they have their own agenda and you can't coerce your agenda over them.
But social media is journalism that anyone can produce, edit, fake and broadcast from anywhere. The way the content is displayed isn't chronological like news and forums, it's based on whether something is "trending" which I take to mean that a lot of people are engaging with it (viewing, commenting, liking, saving whatever). This can be gamed, so now you're controlling what the content is and how it is presented.
The internet is not to blame.
The worst thing that happened to the internet was how obnoxious advertising was allowed to become, from your 200px x 75px pixel art banners at the bottom of the screen to over 40% of viewport being adverts, adverts that can play video, modals that pop up based on whether your cursor has travelled toward the address bar or tabs to close the site (seriously, if a website does that, I know the company doesn't give a shit about its users).
It's not necessarily bad that advertising became the primary means of extracting revenue, it's just that we as a user base didn't do enough to punish websites that adopt dark patterns. We didn't as a majority categorically refuse to engage with content obscured by such methods, we just clicked through it to get what we individually wanted.
The real problem is that a lot of content is generated for the purposes of attracting people to it rather than providing new or true/useful information, but this tends to be solved by simply keeping a list of trustworthy, useful websites in mind and add to that list very selectively.
The internet is okay as long as you filter it, is my point, and I'm very grateful that it's still around precisely because I am here, talking to you now.
If we want the internet to change, that's something we as its users have to bring about ourselves. And while that may mean nothing happens, it's better than an internet where something or someone is in control of it.
Google would love to think of itself like such an entity, but I honestly think its losing influence fast.
I don't personally trust Google to keep a product around, so I daren't use half their services because I don't like thinking that my use of the service is on a clock. Rather than take an ailing product and make it profitable, they just kill it.
There are also the privacy violations etc but I strongly suspect that most companies that have the opportunities do the same things as Google has been accused of doing. That's not a pass, it's just cynical apathy on my part because I don't care if Google knows what porn my partner watches.
The reason Google is losing influence is simply because their search isn't very useful. It was good in the beginning, I feel like it was easily gamed for a bit, then it was more or less unbeatable for many years, and now it just... delivers promoted or garbage content. I've been trying DuckDuckGo out, which has been ... okay? I was surprised to learn it's powered by Bing, I thought Bing was supposed to be kinda bad but it has been working ok so far.
I digress. The internet is full of junk content but it's not dead or buried. It's still better than TV, it's better than your newspaper -- unless you buy all of the newspapers every morning -- and it's better than no internet.
It's primarily the social media subset of the internet that's creating problems and those problems are not confined to the misrepresentation of this Ukraine-Russia conflict.
People are coming to define themselves as the characters they perform as on social media, rather than who they are. I find it ironic because I have always kept my online and irl lives completely separate, both me (maybe I'd be a bit braver years ago with opinions and discussion topics than irl) but with no overlap of people I know.
and yet people who merge the two irl and online lives end up becoming some persona.
I think the way social media works is very dangerous. It predicates the value of an individual on how liked they are, and how liked they are is determined by whether their opinions and sense of humour converge with those of the majority of a userbase of a social media network.
There are numerous articles about the mental health of young people -- I don't think you need to look much further than social media to find some answers.
What has died is the idea of the internet. It is thoroughly balkanized now.
We're here on this internet talking. Things are different on other internets.
The original design was that individual state level actors couldn't sever access to the internet without significant investment.....
We just balkanized the internet in a different direction (walled gardens)
Platforms on the internet are not the internet, as much as people like to conflate them for the sake of the narrative.
Putin blocking media ... sure... dictators block stuff all the time.
EU blocking RT.com (and a few others) was quite a shock for me,... really a thing that should not be happening in EU (no matter whose propaganda it is).
eg. in belgium:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Websites_blocked_in_Belgium#EU...
https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/11/06/germany-online-crackdow...
It's funny how people think EU or europe in general is a bastion of freedom. It's not. Never has been. And never will be. What europe is exceptional at is self-promotion and virtue signaling.
Why? Neo-nazi sites have a long history of getting banned everywhere.
For that I'd say that the Russian TikTok is more in like with what TikTok is for and that's the Ukrainian TikTok that is unusual. I guess that you can't avoid it when there is a war in your country, despite all the efforts TikTok makes to keep things carefree.
This goes into some of said propaganda in it, and how they have more "soft" propaganda in the US version of TikTok vs more intense propaganda in the Chinese version of the app: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3aYCG4vEe5s
your characterization of TikTok is shallow, its a social media platform. Just like every other social media platform people want to share and talk about the world along with their silly dances and you miss the point of OP and the article that it isn't about what TikTok should or shouldn't be, but that the limits set on free speech result in a neutering of of the social media platform, and is one example of many apps/website/platforms/news stations that will have been effected by this.
That freedom doesn't exist in two of the three countries involved here.
You seem to be implying that people just don't know, when it's exactly what they're talking about?
There isn't one at all here, so why is there any debate at all on the freedom of speech being violated?
At the end of the day, we still have a choice. All of a sudden, Mastodon and like projects start looking more attractive.
Edit: as others pointed out TikTok =! Internet.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media_and_the_Arab_Spri...
Perhaps that was before your time?
We’re surely all guilty of facilitating this. Forget the global village of a billion voices - the number of news sources I regularly read isn’t even dozens.
Anybody can still put up a web server, but it’s the attention channels that matter, and those are well and truly under control through non-internet means (money, regulation, threats, lobbying, …).
With information and media, lots of us originally thought that lowering barriers to entry for media dissemination would make it easier to have this "global village of a billion voices". But instead what it has done is made it easier for users to filter to the top content, and easier for producers to use tons of data mining and machine learning to filter in on the most addictive (if definitely not the best) content. In the long term it can make it harder for smaller producers because they are competing against a much larger set of competitors for attention.
The early internet's utopianism took place in the window when the new ability to communicate had not yet been used to effect the new centralisation.
Diversifying your news sources is a poor form of hedging. What we should encourage people to do is trying to come up with methods to increase trust: can you think of a way to verify some snippet of news from first principle?
At least you've added "nrk.no" to your list this week. The problem is real for people who live in Facebook or TikTok bubbles, but the democratized news dream of the internet is still alive, but it takes some work to break out from the world of the algorithmic feeds.
The "bubbles" we create, consume, and participate in are a subconscious attempt to slim down our giant "tribe" into something that our brains can manage. Of course these bubbles are readily aligned to people like ourselves - language, interest, appearance, culture, etc.
Expanding your bubble is hard. It takes work. As a result, most people don't.
Link sharing sites like Twitter and Hacker News have exposed me to articles from lots of less popular news sites, not to mention, all the blogs I'm subscribed to.
Also, research-heavy blog posts about COVID and the war in Ukraine have lots of outgoing links. Some sources are in languages I can't even read, but I can get a rough translation.
There are people who geolocate photos from Ukraine as a hobby, aggregators who find patterns, and people who do amateur military analysis. Sometimes they're ahead of the newspapers. (By a few hours. I assume reporters read them too.)
This results in big differences between what we can read and what would be possible in China or Russia, without a VPN anyway.
(Changing majority opinion is a whole different story though.)
Look at all the disinformation that you will see on the "news" channels (both sides) and "news" sites (which have replaced paper). Faux outrage is extremely profitable and as long as that is true, there will be no news, just infotainment click-bait for profit.
At best the Internet gives us some _freedom of choice_ in selecting whichever authority we'd like to operate under the reign of. Having (some) freedom of choice does not in and of itself lead to democracy.
That said, even this freedom of choice is increasingly being challenged with the erection of more and more national boundaries on the Internet. Collectively we do need to figure out how the Internet is to be governed in the future, because if we just take the default, we will end up replicating the same national borders as we have now.
Doesn't explain why both democratic and non-democratic countries ban press. It's amazing how quickly people forget that democratic countries have banned russian, iranian, chinese, etc government/press/etc.
It's like the same people saying only "autocratic" countries russia ( which is actually a democracy ) is a threat to other nations. When in actuality, 90% of all invasions in the past few decades have been by democracies.
Maybe democraticizing forces is the evil we all should be fighting against because democraticizing forces have done so much damage worldwide. Even though we pretend to be the saints.
Americans barely talked about Afghanistan. For 20 years, our internet was full of funny videos, stupid songs, and memes of Osama bin Laden. Sure we bombed civilians targets and committed war crimes too, but we had very smart lawyers that taught us clever words for why it was moral when we did it. And we nodded our heads in agreement and turned the channel to American Idol.
Americans are well aware that technology enables us to live in our own artificially constructed reality. We spent the last 20 years building it.
From where I'm sitting, Biden's folks did no small part in subtlely goading the Russians into doing stupid things. But really, they just led Putin and Xi into their own worst excesses, much like how those have been doing to the U.S. in turn.
The world is an ugly place, and it's up to us citizens to figure out what's going on. We are not served when the U.S. invades Afghanistan. How was that geopolitically smart, even in a realpolitik sense? Likewise the Russian people would be smart to realize just how much the public opinion in sympathetic countries (like Germany) has turned against them. When we buy into this Brave New World stuff, we are creating a worse situation for ourselves – and even more so for future generations.
Most of all, we need to know ourselves, because these artificially constructed realities work against us when the algorithms know us better than we do.
I was really against the Iraq war and nobody ever threatened me with 15 years of jail for it.
The architects of that conflict left when term limits were up. (Putin did not.)
Don't get me wrong, Iraq was pointless. Afghanistan seemed to have a justification at the start but was mismanaged early on. In terms of culture, wide swaths of the population were brainwashed in a similar way to how we talk about Russia now, though with a little more vocal opposition. But what I can say is there is room in the American system for course correction.
Moreover, some specific individuals have been murdered for speaking about Putin. Anna Politkovskaja and Aleksandr Litvinenko were both murdered for questioning the official narratives on Chechnya.
I really doubt this would happen.
He would probably face a lesser punishment, and you could argue about it being right or wrong, but this doesn't cancel out Russia's terrible track record.
I see my point of view reflected only in alternative, independent media. This includes, for example, Pulitzer-prize winning journalist Chris Hedges who had years of his work purged from YouTube simply because he had a show on RT which was never once sympathetic to Putin.
My anti-war, pro-diplomacy POV is banned from corporate media, and flagged/downvoted into oblivion on Reddit and even Hacker News. From my perspective most supporting sending arms and money to Ukraine has been the victim of a policy campaign by the arms industry which has already generated windfall arms sales to Ukraine and now Germany (!). So am I surprised by this story? No. I've been seeing a banned perspective on this conflict in the US from day 1.
[1] “We reiterate the decision made at the 2008 Bucharest Summit that Ukraine will become a member of the Alliance” June 2021 https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/news_185000.htm
Whereas in the free world, no one, not even Putin, should and absolutely will not have a say in other nations agreements, because that is a preposterous idea that no supporter of democracy would even consider to be a valid stance.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monroe_Doctrine
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_invasion_of_Iraq
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...
Not to mention that leading up to this transition of power we backed a violent coup of their democratically elected government in 2014.
What of the Ukrainian people in Eastern Ukraine who have been getting bombed for 7 years in a civil war? The Ukrainian people through their government agreed to the Minsk accords which would have prevented this but were then never honored.
I wouldn't say this idea is tired at all, it's the opposite, it's banned and unspoken on corporate media that serves as the mouthpiece for the US government and arms industry.
What about them, exactly?
https://www.osce.org/special-monitoring-mission-to-ukraine/5...
There was a major decrease in ceasefire violations in 2020 and 2021. Looks like to Russia that sounded like it's time to escalate and fix "the problem" whatever that is, by starting a major war and invading straight to Kyiv of all places. I'm sure poor people of Donbas will benefit greatly from a major escalation caused by Russia, that's going to reverse all this. Whole year of reported civilian casualties by OSCE now happen in a day.
> The Ukrainian people through their government agreed to the Minsk accords which would have prevented this but were then never honored.
Why OSCE SMM observations of agreement violating weapons are consistenly much higher in the separatist areas, by a large margin? (80/20 or so)
Yeah, according to your own linked report there were only "93,902 ceasefire violations" in 2021 with the violations clearly growing by the end of report period. I don't know anything about the credibility of this report, but your own evidence refutes your argument.
It's pretty obvious from the report that ceasefire violations as defined by OSCE SMM are down to one third to one fourth of years 2019 and prior.
Name a single country that is in NATO against its own will due to "US policy".
No, he wasn't. That's just another bullshit excuse manufactured to justify this criminal invasion. Here, read it from the man himself: http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/21598
The Hill, April 2021 "Putin draws a ‘red line’ on Ukraine, and he means it"
https://thehill.com/opinion/international/550036-putin-draws...
The Ukrainian Weekly, June 2021 "Following summit, Kremlin says NATO membership for Ukraine would be a ‘red line’"
https://www.ukrweekly.com/uwwp/following-summit-kremlin-says...
Reuters, September 2021 "Kremlin says NATO expansion in Ukraine is a 'red line' for Putin"
https://www.reuters.com/world/kremlin-says-nato-expansion-uk...
ABC News, November 2021 "Putin warns West: Moscow has 'red line' about Ukraine, NATO"
https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/putin-warns-w...