Analysis of Twitter algorithm reveals Twitter down-ranks tweets about Ukraine
english.nv.ua
english.nv.ua
https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm/blob/7f90d0ca342b92...
UPD: here is link to main branch without specific commit. Line is still there, it's not some fake or something:
https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm/blob/main/visibilit...
Never seen this before. Why would a commit to a fork show up on the original repo?
https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm/blob/main/visibilit...
The problem is, the branch 'main' and its contents will change over time, so GP linked to a 'permalink' of the exact commit hash instead.
I understand the Ukraine crisis is listed along misinformation but that's not enough to know what this map is made for. I'd like to see where this map is used before taking someone's word on it that all those topics are down-ranked.
When analyzing a code base you can make some educated guesses based on naming but generally you want to check those guesses by seeing how, where and why a variable is used.
If a very specific claim of down-ranking is made I expect to see a down-ranking function, short of that it's a list of names that might be used for bot detection, for manual review of the tweets, for requiring the user to add their phone number to their account, it might come along another map factors that down or up weighs those topics, I could go on...
DoNotAmplify, CoordinatedHarmfulActivityHighRecall, UntrustedUrl, MisleadingHighRecall, NsfwHighPrecision, NsfwHighRecall, CivicIntegrityMisinfo, MedicalMisinfo, GenericMisinfo, DmcaWithheld, HatefulHighRecall, ViolenceHighRecall, HighToxicityModelScore, UkraineCrisisTopic, DoNotPublicPublish
What would you suppose the list is for? Almost everything on that list is something they have publicly stated they are trying to reduce. I don't think we have to play dumb here and say "it didn't specifically use the word downvote therefore we can't possibly know what it is for"
This is what people are doing.
> but generally you want to check those guesses by seeing how, where and why a variable is used
Agreed, but without the full source code available, this simply isn't possible.
If it hasn't the answer is to very carefully qualify the statement "Analysis of Twitter algorithm reveals Twitter down-ranks tweets about Ukraine" rather than treating the people who question it as heretics.
> This is what people are doing.
no, they're reporting on it as fact
Considering the massive propaganda operations from both Russia/Ukraine, it's actually not a bad flag.
Sure Ukraine is the good guy, but if you think that Ukraine doesn't run propaganda, you are completely naive.
Also all other filters on the list have very unambiguous names.
It is UkraineCrisisTopic and not UkraineCrisisMisinfo.
PS: All filter names: DoNotAmplify, CoordinatedHarmfulActivityHighRecall, UntrustedUrl, MisleadingHighRecall, NsfwHighPrecision, NsfwHighRecall, CivicIntegrityMisinfo, MedicalMisinfo, GenericMisinfo, DmcaWithheld, HatefulHighRecall, ViolenceHighRecall, HighToxicityModelScore, UkraineCrisisTopic, DoNotPublicPublish
Btw this class seems to be for spaces not tweets and a quick search for Ukraine in TweetSafetyLabels in the same package turns up no results, really shoddy writing.
Also while it was just rumours so far, various well known Tweeter tweeting about this war have been complaining since last November that their tweets had suddenly much less engagements. This is just too much of a coincidence.
You’re right. But Musk was hosting Twitter polls, posting memes and proposing territorial borders and conflict resolution that seemed to be much closer to the Russian view than the Ukrainian view.
So you’re right that more info is needed, but Musk inserted himself into this topic in a way that raised a few eyebrows.
"Where is the war footage?!" is one of the main talking points among far-right disinfo accounts to dowplay the severity of Russia's invasion.
Selectively down-ranking war footage from Ukraine is suspicious when they don't do the same for war footage from other parts of the world.
I actually think it's a good thing that twitter doesn't censor or down-rank war footage from the Middle East showing the results of American and Israeli bombings.
However that just makes it more suspicious that they are down-ranking footage that show the results of Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
If Twitter doesn't want people to draw the wrong conclusions, maybe they can release the whole actual algorithm? Not just some weird category preprocessing whatever thing?
As it stands, they throw this out there, their PR email responds with poop, Elon is in some space spreading misinformation/having no clue what he actually released.
Considering that the Ukraine conflict has been going on since 2014 it would be nice to get more info before bringing out the pitchforks.
One notable vignette: Elon Musk called the Crimean handover “Kruschev’s mistake”. That’s a very specific statement steeped in Russian revanchism.
* One has to know Crimea used to be part of Russia
* One has to know Kruschev handed it over to Ukraine in the 1950s for an anniversary
* One has to believe this was wrong
* One has to ignore voting at Ukraine’s independence suggesting the inhabitants at the time wished to be part of Ukraine and not Russia
It suggests the comment was inspired through talking to a Russian revanchist. One would not get this interpretation from, say, Wikipedia.
I don’t think he is a vatnik as some here have said, but one of the memes going around the bubble is „think for yourself, question everything”. This makes him think that Russian aggression has some justification simply because „things are never what they seem” or „things are never black and white”.
https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/formex/physical-...
People can just read history and interpret them... This trend of interpreting every politically adjacent thought as originating from one propaganda source or another is insane and absolutely destructive to having any sort of reasonable discourse.
"He picked up the children's history book and looked at the portrait of Big Brother which formed its frontispiece. The hypnotic eyes gazed into his own. It was as though some huge force were pressing down upon you--something that penetrated inside your skull, battering against your brain, frightening you out of your beliefs, persuading you, almost, to deny the evidence of your senses. In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it.
Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense. And what was terrifying was not that they would kill you for thinking otherwise, but that they might be right. For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable what then?"
Interestingly enough the original title for that work was intended to be "The Last Man in Europe." It was only commercial interests that drove it to "1984."
It isn't impossible or contradictory to hold both concepts in one's mind. If Russia wants Crimea, it was a mistake for the USSR to hand it over. From that point an individual could also believe that every region has the right to secede. The two views are not contradictory.
It takes a specific kind of bias to read intent into the statement.
Let us try again with an issue divorced from the inflammatory topic.
"The getaway driver made a mistake by turning off the engine."
The above statement doesn't assume support for getaway drivers or bank robbery. It is an observation of folly, nothing more.
Yeah, no. The Independence referendum asked "Do you support the Act of Declaration of Independence of Ukraine?". To which 37% of the electorate of Crimea and 36% of Sevestopol said yes. They were never asked if they wanted to join Russia.
Results in Crimea:
54.19% yes
45.81% no
It would not have been sensible to ask “would you like to join russia” as Ukraine was already part of the USSR at the time the question was asked.
Now, those are obviously not strong results, but it also doesn’t immediately suggest the handover was a mistake. The split is even.
My point was, to come to the framing that this was “Kruschev’s mistake” one needs some preconceived ideas about how things ought to be.
Your original claim was that the independence referendum results suggested Crimea wanted to stay in Ukraine and not Russia. I agree, that framing was misleading as they were never asked that question.
> Now, those are obviously not strong results, but it also doesn’t immediately suggest the handover was a mistake. The split is even.
You are listing the Yes and No percentages while ignoring the low turnout. Only 37% of the electorate of Crimea and 36% of Sevestopol voted yes. The next lowest Yes vote was 64%, a clean majority.
> It would not have been sensible to ask “would you like to join russia” as Ukraine was already part of the USSR at the time the question was asked.
Ukraine was part of USSR, not Russia. I don't see why it would not have been sensible to ask Crimea if they wanted to join Russia. If Ukraine has the right to self determination, why doesn't Crimea?
> My point was, to come to the framing that this was “Kruschev’s mistake” one needs some preconceived ideas about how things ought to be.
After witnessing recent events, one could also look up the history of the region and conclude that Krushchev made a mistake.
Everybody has a bias. But you are pretending your particular framing is neutral.
My point is the odds of adopting this specific framing as a non-russian are minimal without contact with russian revanchist sources.
My own framing surely comes from exposure to pro Ukranian sources, but that’s sort of too my point: it simply isn’t normal for an outsider to know the details of these things. “1783 until Kruschev’s mistake” is highly specific.
Musk’s original tweet: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1576969255031296000
It was obviously a cynical political ploy, because independence of Ukraine would be incompatible with the reforming of the USSR. But that's the context of going into the independence poll which happened in December 1991. Ukraine put Crimea into a lose/lose scenario. The only way to possibly rejoin the USSR would be to vote yes for independence. But obviously Ukraine had no intentions of rejoining the USSR, in spite of what their poll said.
This is probably why so few Crimeans chose to vote. It was 41% abstain, 37% yes, 22% no. It certainly wasn't about joining Ukraine over Russia.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991_Soviet_Union_referendum
This is Europe. Everything was part of something else if you go back long enough. And in most cases not even that long.
* One has to know Khruschev had been the head of the Ukrainian communist party before he became the head of the USSR
"Russian revanchist"
So the position that the Ukraine has to take Crimea back is 'Ukrainian revanchism'?
* "With the dissolution of the Soviet Union and Ukrainian independence the majority ethnic Russian Crimean peninsula was reorganized as the Republic of Crimea, after a 1991 referendum with the Crimean authorities pushing for more independence from Ukraine and closer links with Russia. In 1995 the Republic was forcibly abolished by Ukraine with the Autonomous Republic of Crimea established firmly under Ukrainian authority. ..."
---
There's an unfortunately (or fortunately for history buffs) large amount of history there. Here are some of the key events. One big one is a Crimean referendum in January 1991, that Wiki is indirectly referencing above. The other one is from December 1991, that the poster above is referencing:
* [2] January 1991: The USSR was still alive, but collapsing. Crimea, under Ukraine, under the USSR voted on reestablishing the Crimean Autonomous Soviet socialist Republic and participating in the New Union Treaty. The New Union Treaty was a failed USSR effort to reconstitute the USSR. In other words Crimea was voting to rejoin the USSR. It passed with 82% turnout and 94% approval.
* [3] March 1991: The first USSR referendum on the New Union Treaty was run. In Ukraine the wording was changed to also include joining the New Union Treaty being contingent upon a Ukrainian declaration of independence. This was more a cynical polling (in Ukraine) since independence and being part of the New Union would have been largely mutually exclusive. But it's important because it sets the stage for...
* [4] December 1st, 1991: The USSR still technically exists, but is in its death throes. Ukraine runs their independence referendum. All of Ukraine, including Crimea, votes yes. But not in the same way. Crimean voters were in a weird position. Thanks to the March referendum, Ukraine has left Crimea in a "heads I win, tails you lose" type scenario. You're supposed to vote yes to rejoin the USSR, but that's increasingly obviously not happening. Voting no makes it legally impossible to rejoin the USSR. 41% of Crimeans do not vote, 37% vote yes, 22% vote no. So "yes" wins. This was most certainly not a vote about joining Ukraine instead of Russia.
* December 8th, 1991: Russian, Belarussian, and Ukrainian leaders secretly meet in Western Belarus. They sign the Belavezha accords, declaring an official death of the Soviet Union.
And that's far from the end, but it's far enough for this little segment of history.
---
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crimea_in_the_post-Soviet_era_...
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991_Crimean_sovereignty_refer...
[3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991_Soviet_Union_referendum
[4] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991_Ukrainian_independence_re...
Would it be OK if Twitter allowed misinformation about the miltary operations in the Ukraine to run rampant? Would it be OK if Twitter censored pro-Ukranians (because they share a lot of misinformation)?
Twitter can't possible tell what is misinformation in a war.
russia lost multiple multi million dollar AA systems and a helicopter full of marines, all on crystal clear HD video. Other than 'gesture of goodwill' statement from one of the sides what part of it was disinformation?
> Social media posts, online articles and Ukraine's president hailed 13 of the country's border guards as heroes, saying they were killed on a small Black Sea island after rejecting a Russian warship's surrender demand. But Kyiv's navy later admitted the troops were captive rather than dead, and Moscow said dozens had surrendered.
Twitter repo + relevant visibility tweaking code at: https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm/tree/main/visibilit...
Still reading through it myself, but if I'm properly distilling the gist out of this, it seems they've implemented an "iptables for tweet visibility" through which the server sends instructions to the client to then run a rules engine against to drop tweets or specifically throttle engagement.
So... if I'm right, and this is the real kick in the teeth from my perspective; they aren't even doing the hard work on their side to sift through the datastream and drop things on their side. They're instead programming your hardware to do their gaslighting/censorship/filtering for them.
Dumb pipe for them, but you're left burning cycles on your phone/client/whatever to hide their material for them. Corollary being that with a sufficiently misbehaving client, one ought to be able to reconstitute an unfiltered stream to get a more accurate representation of the awfulness of those around you instead of only seeing what Twitter wants you to see.
It also means that server-side, there may actually be nothing preventing using a sufficiently misbehaving client from repurposing the Twitter backend as a Command & Control layer. In fact, one may even be able to compose several account provisioning/deprovisioning/visibility primitives to ensure no normal client would see anything, while the message nevertheless gets through. It's technically auditable, but if I put on my blacker hat; I miiiiight see a few ways to get up to some difficult to follow mischief if the system as posted is truly representative of what is there. May do dome net traffic analysis to see if I can figure out where the request is that would return the hypothetical ruleset to be consumed by the client. Not entirely convinced the engine is entirely client side, as that would have tipped their hand much longer ago I'd think. Not sure til I actually audit the full codebasr.
Yet another reason I've never quite been brave enough to pull the trigger on hosting a system like this for anyone but those I personally know and trust. After a certain point, probability goes to 1 that somepne is going to find a way to repurpose something nice no matter the level of good intention into something horrible. I like to think of it as a more abstract form of Rule34. If you build an information transfer system, someone will use it for something illegal somewhere.
Of course, even if I'm totally wrong, odds are that if I'm seeing the potential here, there is a smarter, less ethical version of me with a goatee that's already picked it apart and os likely actively exploiting it.
"Russian propaganda accounts are now openly praising Elon Musk for blocking Ukrainians from Twitter" - https://twitter.com/Biz_Ukraine_Mag/status/16030704554847150...
“When people show you who they are, believe them the first time.
- Maya Angelou
From the article:
> "Actually, I find their news quite entertaining," Musk continued, according to the filing. In a follow-up text, the world's richest man described Russian media as having a "lot of bullshit, but some good points too."
> "Free speech matters most when it's someone you hate spouting what you think is bullshit," Musk commented after Gracias agreed with his stance on free speech.
Spinning this as praise is borderline disinformation. But then again, spewing clickbaity BS is completely on brand for BI.
"Russia Praises Elon Musk For 'Very Positive' Tweets About Ukraine War" - https://www.ibtimes.com/russia-praises-elon-musk-very-positi...
"White House Freaked Out Over Elon Musk's Selfie With Top Russian Propagandist" - https://futurism.com/white-house-elon-musk-russian-selfie
"Elon Musk Fans Horrified as He Suggests Ukraine Give in to Putin's Demands" - https://futurism.com/elon-musk-fans-ukraine
The article is behind paywall, but the bit I could read says "The SpaceX Chief Executive Officer praised a snarky post by Dmitry Medvedev on Thursday about the UK Prime Minister Liz Truss, known for her tough stance against Russia’s"
Liz Truss is primarily known for being beaten by a Lettuce. Was that it?
> White House Freaked Out Over Elon Musk's Selfie With Top Russian Propagandist"
From the article itself: "As Bloomberg reports, there doesn't appear to have been much of an exchange between Musk and Russian TV personality Nailya Asker-Zade beyond the purportedly state-controlled journalist asking him for a photo at the World Cup in December." They admit there's nothing to it but still want to breathlessly report on.
As for the peace plan:
"Biden officials privately doubt that Ukraine can win back all of its territory" https://edition.cnn.com/2022/06/28/politics/white-house-ukra...
"U.S. privately asks Ukraine to show it’s open to negotiate with Russia": https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/11/05/...
"Elon Musk Praised by China for Suggesting Communists Exert Control in Taiwan" - https://gizmodo.com/elon-musk-china-taiwan-communists-tesla-...
"Elon Musk Doubles Down On Jan. 6 Denial With Defense Of 'QAnon Shaman'" - https://uk.news.yahoo.com/elon-musk-doubles-down-jan-0131079...
Also, and this might be uncomfortable to know buta lot of people don't want to be bombarded with propaganda war on the internet. Most people browse internet to escape their hard reality. It makes perfect sense to decrease visibility if it is artificially being heightened.
But you are very right. This is totally the fault of social media companies but I am sure they are responding to market forces. It isn't that too far in past when I used to open facebook and see my friends' activities. Then they had advertisers, then they had activists shaming advertisers, then they had automatic filters.
My solution to this that I am sure eventually we will agree as a society, is to have a public list of filters and public list of algorithm applying that. It might even be regulated by government in future. But all that is too far in the future.
What I mean is that it’s OK to look at the totality of a person and not show gratitude for [Good Quality], especially when [Good Quality] enables [Bad Quality].
> Most people browse internet to escape their hard reality.
There are plenty of entertainment sites and subreddits to avoid reality if that’s your objective. But I don’t think people go to the “public square” to avoid harsh realities. In fact it’s the place we go when we want to hear any possible opinion.
> It makes perfect sense to decrease visibility if it is artificially being heightened.
What do you mean “artificially heightened”? War dominates headlines and people’s minds. The US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan dominated politics for decades and it was a key plank in Trump’s 2016 platform. Same with Vietnam. I’d be much more worried if an invasion by a major super power wasn’t at the top of the public discourse.
> artificially being heightened. I am not sure what's the confusion. There is propaganda, I guess to each on its own.
Starlink has been disabled on the frontline for now a few months. https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/spacex-cu...
Basically, Starlink is now useful just for the residents living in areas where the infrastructure has been destroyed, but it's not helping anymore the Ukrainians to win the war.
Ukraine tweets are negative about Ukraine as much as they are positive, and I for one am tired of seeing the absolute clusterfuck that is armchair war mongers going at it 24/7.
While I agree with that completely, the "free speech absolutist" narrative that was pushed in support of Musk is that far-right talking points were getting downranked, that platforms should be neutral to "political opinions." In Texas, this notion has been enshrined into law.
Russia is not "the good guy". Neither are we. Any action that promotes war between the two is an action that also promotes widespread death and destruction across the entire planet.
Maybe down-ranking Ukraine tweets have hushed the war drums to a degree, maybe not. But there is a justification that does not include supporting Russia.
The standard both sides are the same argument with black and white thinking. No mention of shades of grey or nuance.
The Russian political elite are enjoying their luxurious lives in Moscow. Many of their children and grandchildren live in the West. They are not going to destroy the planet just because they will a smaller slice of Ukraine than they had hoped for.
It is interesting that "Russia will nuke the whole world" fear mongering is only coming from the people who want Russia to win.
Putin has shown restraint over past two decades, so he probably won't use nukes. Those who may replace him, real hardliners, may be less restrained.
Ask the people living in Georgia, Ukraine, and occupied Chechnya about how much "restraint" Russia has shown them.
>Those who may replace him, real hardliners, may be less restrained.
In the context of geopolitics Putin is the hardliner. The other "hardliners" are all puppets that are used to give the illusion of dissent in Russia.
Actually people from Chechnya are fighting for Putin now. And the government of Georgia resist attempts to draw it in war with Russia like crazy, so they also appreciate the peace with Russia.
Interesting framing. Do you also refer to Donetsk and Luhansk under Ukranian authority as Occupied Donbass?
The worry as I have heard it that Russia may not be willing to accept defeat in the Ukraine and will use nukes in the Ukraine, not USA or Western Europe - which is of course bad enough in itself - and that this might escalate into a global nuclear exchange.
Your final point is interesting - I suspect it is a logical artifact. The people who are worried about nuclear war are generally people who want to minimise death; and people who want to minimise death generally prioritise peace; and people who prioritise peace are generally labled as wanting Russia to win, as they would give Russia concessions if it means fewer hundreds-of-thousands of deaths - and anything other than a total victory for Ukraine is said to be a victory for Russia.
Actually if Putin thinks that it's an existential threat, he WILL use nukes, no matter what other people think on this matter
Imagine for yourself what "victory" against Russia, China, and Brazil would look like. How many millions would be dead?
Ukraine was invaded by its neighbour. Russia started a war.
Would you deem tweets that encourage donations toward Ukraine's military defence to be "promoting war"?
How about tweets that boost morale of their defence forces (well-produced propaganda videos, etc)?
The war isn't something that Ukraine wanted, but it was forced on them.
To then demote any tweet about Ukraine is throwing out the baby with the bathwater, and (in the examples I've given above) making their digital 'life' harder when trying to deal with a problem they didn't want.
If they were to enter peace talks based on the premise of ceding territory, would that not strengthen Russia; sending the message that this sort of robbery works and is rewarded? And would that not pose a danger to other neighbours of Russia?
I can see why it's in both Ukraine's interest, and its allies, for it to not cede territory.
Having said all of this: I am not a military strategist or diplomat, and I don't really know what I'm talking about.
Ask Ukrainian men who are forbidden to leave the country and risk getting drafted every day.
It's only their health, their limbs and their very lives that would be sacrificed so that Ukraine's "allies" can get a better footing in their next confrontations with Russia.
I think this mindset betrays a lack of understand at how power-hungry bullies work. They aren't reasonable.
It's not a case of "negotiate with them THIS time, and all will be fine" (as if they have a single, specific grievance).
Choosing to defer pain now invites much, much more later.
What exactly are you imaging?
IMO, given the current direction, the chances of a much more massive conflict in 10-20 years are only increasing, all while currently there is realistically NO actual threat to Europeans.
> I think this mindset betrays a lack of understand at how power-hungry bullies work. They aren't reasonable. It's not a case of "negotiate with them THIS time, and all will be fine" (as if they have a single, specific grievance).
I think we really shouldn't anthropomorphise geopolitical processes as it substitutes the actual nature of what is going on and what is at stake. It's not some bruises, bloody nose and a bit of pride. This is serious. This people securing their futures and livelihoods.
And yes, there should always be a negotiation when it comes to fates of so many people getting crushed between leviathans. This whole blood bath could have been avoided with proper negotiations, but instead people of Ukraine and Russia were pushed into a conflict they both hardly need. Remember how Minsk agreements were a thing? Good times.
> Choosing to defer pain now invites much, much more later.
This is a horrifyingly cozy outlook on condemning someone else to die. What is even a definition of win here? Currently all participants of the conflict: Ukraine, Russia, Europe/GB/US seem to be enchanted with ritualistic slaughter, afraid to take a wider look and realise what they've done.
For example: https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-zelenskyy-kyiv-bor...
> “We have to fight, but fight for life. You can’t fight for dust when there is nothing and no people. That’s why it is important to stop this war,” Zelenskyy said.
> [..]
> Zelenskyy said he is confident Ukrainians would accept peace despite the horrors they have witnessed in the more than six-week-long war.
> [..]
> U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson also made an unannounced visit to meet Zelenskyy, with his office saying they discussed Britain’s “long-term support.”
Which links to https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-zelenskyy-kyiv-bus...
> Johnson’s visit came a day after the U.K. pledged an additional 100 million pounds ($130 million) in high-grade military equipment to Ukraine.
On top of that, Ukraine joining NATO guarantees Russia not backing down. It's at least part of the reason Ukraine wasn't a member in the first place: Russia doesn't want NATO advancing to their border. Ukraine joining NATO is the opposite of that.
Ukraine stated it will not yield an inch of land. It stated the peace talks are out of the question.
Stop spreading misinformation.
If Ukraine will stop fighting their independence and the country is over.
They'll never join EU or NATO. There will be no investments to rebuild.
People who left will never return back.
https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-zelenskyy-kyiv-bor...
> They'll never join EU or NATO.
That would probably be a good thing. Russia doesn't want NATO to advance to its border, doing so is just provoking them, as it has before Ukraine: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/may/27/ukraine-drops-...
> Ukraine was considered a potential Nato partner along with Georgia. Concern in many Nato countries increased in 2008 when Russia responded with military force to a Georgian attack on South Ossetia, an enclave in Georgia.
> [..]
> Since then, most Nato countries, including the US and Britain, have realised membership of Ukraine and Georgia would provoke conflict, notably with Russia. This month, the Albright report on Nato's new strategic concept made no mention of prospective Ukrainian membership of the alliance.
It became pretty clear in this war that refusing Ukraine was a mistake and caused the war.
> The war isn't something that Ukraine wanted, but it was forced on them.
I rate both of these claims to be indisputably true.
> Would you deem tweets that encourage donations toward Ukraine's military defence to be "promoting war"?
> How about tweets that boost morale of their defence forces (well-produced propaganda videos, etc), [are they promoting war]?
The answer to both of these questions is indisputably yes.
War propaganda from the side which I support is still war propaganda. It doesn't stop being war propaganda just because it's also in the right. Remember "loose lips sink ship"? It was a WW2 American propaganda slogan designed to address German u-boat aggression. America was plainly on the right side of that conflict, yet those posters are still cited today in American classrooms as an example of war propaganda, because that's indisputably what it was.
Morally in the right and war propaganda have never been mutually exclusive.
Or that tweets in support of Ukraine's efforts / donations / etc are "supporting the war".
I am, rather, disputing the "both sides"-type thinking of the person I replied to, who seems to imply that stopping ALL talk of war (regardless of whom it is in support of) is desirable.
It's a private platform isn't it? By conventional logic, twitter has the right to decide what sort of content they promote. If a fashion magazine or a twitting website decide they don't want to cover a war, that is a perfectly valid business decision.
It doesn't really matter anyway. Twitter isn't as important as the media says it is. Only a small fraction of the population actually use it, but it just happens that this small fraction includes people in the media, so they think it's much more important than it actually is and give it undo coverage. And no, I don't think that makes twitter actually important in a round-about way, because when most people see "somebody tweeted something" articles they roll their eyes at the media scrapping the bottom of the barrel for news. The media is blind to their twitter bias, but most others cringe. If Elon Musk ends up running twitter straight into the ground, nothing of value will be lost.
Actually this is promoting war. Because if you are donating to someone who is at war, you are participating in this war.
Some people just think that Russians will never come and ask them why did these people give money to kill their brothers.
Also it works like a promo. First you are supporting someone with tweets. Then you are sending money. Then you are sending weapons. Then they send you to the battlefield, because You know, it's very important to support Ukraine.
Insofar as that meets the criteria of "supporting war", then yes it's "supporting war" (a country's defence).
I see that as a wholly good thing.
No one wants to be in a war except malignant psychopaths like Putin. But once you are, the only way back is through.
This is the jingoistic phrasing we hear a lot, which implies that Russia did something unique. As Americans, certainly we invade many countries, but we have the integrity to invade countries who are not our neighbors.
Other examples of stealing territory / starting wars can also be bad.
You ignored the content of my original comment. If you don't think "invaded their neighbor" is jingoistic, that's fine, but you didn't address that. I'm not commenting on specific ethics of their invasion; I am commenting on that specific phrase.
How about well-produced propaganda that targets people outside Ukraine and Russia? Why should a foreign military be allowed to influence public opinion in America or India?
Say it with me:
Russia invaded Ukrainian territory.
Ukraine does not seek war against Russia, they seek to reclaim the territory that Russia stole.
If Russia were to leave tomorrow, the war would be over.
There is no way to "promote war between the two" by supporting Ukraine, because the war was caused (and continues to be caused) by the unilateral actions of one party: Russia.
What country do you think should stop us?
Wouldn't it be better if the people demanded an end to war instead of being convinced we can bomb our way out of conflict?
However, the way to demand an end to the war is to demand that Russia leaves Ukrainian territory.
If they will not voluntarily leave Ukrainian territory, then Ukraine will seek to remove them by force.
It's unclear what you're trying to say with "how many countries have we bombed". Are you trying to say that the cruel and unjust actions of the US justify the cruel and unjust actions of Russia? I demanded that the US leave Afghanistan for my whole adult life. I now demand that Russia leave Ukraine. Anyone who actually cares about ending the war would be demanding the same. Surely you understand that Ukrainian capitulation would only lead to more war as Russia's inhumane expansion tactics would be validated.