Kremlin runs disinformation campaign to undermine Zelensky, documents show | Hacker News Reader

Kremlin runs disinformation campaign to undermine Zelensky, documents show

washingtonpost.com

146 pointslxm96 comments

Who finds this surprising? (don't get me wrong, it's good to see reporting on this)

It's still newsworthy to have evidence, c.f.:

> The Kremlin instruction resulted in thousands of social media posts and hundreds of fabricated articles, created by troll farms and circulated in Ukraine and across Europe

I mean, would you prefer this not be reported simply because you aren't personally surprised? Where does that logic end? The German invasion of France in 1940 was hardly a surprise either.

No, that wasn't my intent at all. I was only pointing out that this is not surprising because this is how Putin has always played the information warfare game. It's definitely good to report on it.

The playbook: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundations_of_Geopolitics

> The United Kingdom, merely described as an "extraterritorial floating base of the U.S.", should be cut off from Europe.[9]

We can only wonder how much influence did Kremlin had over people voting for Brexit.

not at all. They must have people and a budget, they are going to do their job. The result was very close. It would have been cheap and take little effort. They must have people to estimate the obvious.

By what weird mechanism would people imagine all of them could not do the job they are hired for with their superiors being fine with it?

You were pointing out it's not surprising, but I don't see anybody expressing surprise.

I'm more surprised that it is the top comment. I may be misreading, but I'm not quite sure how your comment is promoting discussion.

One of the things I find surprising about propaganda is that so many people think they are immune to it but do not ask why it is so effective. I think the obvious bad propaganda is propaganda to make you feel like you are good at recognizing it while enabling more subtle propaganda to sneak in the back door.

I believe that was more of a rhetorical question than an actual question.

The Kremlin.

Or at least, if you asked them or anyone doing their work, they'll profess lots of surprise, not to say disbelief.

That's because they are obligated to express surprise or disbelief, not because they are actually surprised or skeptical. If you tell a US government worker about the contents of the Manning leaks, they will also express surprise and disbelief.

Mostly surprising are 50% of the HN comments, the "what-about", "but the west...", etc.

A quote which applies well "...Some men just want to watch the world burn."

Some men just care about their own tribe at the expense of all others, and other men care about truth and justice.

I mostly see men who care about someone else's truth and justice, while having this huge leeway for things happening in their own backyard, which they objectively cannot affect.

People who care about justice are not hypocrites. People who claim to care often are.

It's possible to care about your own tribe (if you didn't, it wouldn't be your tribe, would it?), denounce things other tribes do, and also denounce things your own tribe does.

Its also possible not to see humanity as being composed of competing tribes.

It is not surprising when you don't assume that HN has not become a target of the intelligence agencies running mentioned campaign. Considering the potential of the crowd here it is actually rather unsurprising.

I wonder how the troll farms are doing without Prigozhin. Perhaps he was just a Kremlin paycheck collector for various dirty businesses to supply Putin with goods and services.

He seemed like a sort of effective director but he was already knee deep in Ukraine with his mercenaries to not be involved in that anymore before his demise

His vlog-like videos made it appear that way, but it's hard to say what the dude did or didn't do when the cameras weren't rolling. He did come a long way from being a restauranteur. Unfortunately, he exceeded his station and received a customary Putin retirement {{Buk missile, Polonium, Novichok, starvation in Siberia on false charges}}. He violated the prime directive of the oligarchs' social contract: Never challenge emperor Putin's fame, ego, policies, or profits if you wish to have a long life inside or outside Mother Russia.

RIP Navalny

Troll farms are flourishing on Youtube. Especially this week when lots of bad news from Avdiivka started coming. Most of comments by @user-... are from trolls. They will share similar amounts of likes too.

And the WP is happily taking part in this campaign. Pecunia non olet.

It would be extremely weird and unsetting if they didn't.

It certainly would be weird, but not sure about unsetting.

The absense of such campaign would mean that Kremlin has so low esteem of Zelensky that they think any replacement would be to their detriment. And this is even after taking the collateral damage to the Ukrainian image as a whole into account.

... fake video on Telegram claiming that the main war aim of authorities in Kyiv was “to fight to the last Ukrainian.”

Sorry, maybe I'm a victim of Kremlin propaganda but when you are facing someone who is 3-4 times your population, isn't that obvious?

No. There are other ways it could play out.

In an ideal world Russia could admit defeat and go home.

More realistically it looks like a bit of a stalemate and they may have a N Korea like ceasefire. Or Trump will get in, give the occupied lands to Russia and a similar cease fire.

US estimates of Ukrainian deaths so far are ~80k, or 0.2% of the population so we are a long way off the last Ukrainian.

Also the recent Ukrainian strategy of taking out Russia's oil refineries seems quite promising. Eventually Russia may get fed up and do something else https://uk.investing.com/news/economy/factboxrussian-oil-fac...

I'm reminded a bit of the fighting between Britain and the IRA. For a long time the IRA said we want this and that and killed people and it didn't achieve much as the Brits said we won't give into terrorism. Then the IRA switched tack and blew out the windows in London's financial district which didn't kill people but was massively expensive and led on to the peace process. It's probably easier to figure a deal when it's about money rather than killing each other.

Since bullshit is so cheap, why wouldn't everybody run a campaign to undermine everybody else they don't like at the same time? State actors sure have money to do this.

Yeah they’re called political campaigns. Attack ads have always been a thing with the same goal: exploit the overactive fear response of simple minds.

Viewers are made aware that it's a political attack ad though.

Yeah. The difference being the existence of laws. So why don’t others do it the Russian way? Campaign laws.

It’s politically risky to blatantly lie and cheat in a democracy, at least theoretically

Only if you get caught. And often times, not even then.

They are, and have been doing to some degree or other for thousands of years. It really picked up in the late 19th century (e.g. Franco-Prussian war actually started due to shrewd deployment by Prussia of information warfare)

It's not just cheap, it's profitable. Social media companies profit off "engagement", no matter what the content is.

When I was a teen I read that there used to be an anti-witchcraft campaign group in the UK. Apparently, if witchcraft was ever shown non-negatively on the BBC, they would call to complain, multiple times each in order to make it seem like their outrage was representative of a much wider audience.

Mary Whitehouse was famous for intensive campaigning against social liberalism in general and sex in particular.

I've seen enough examples that a long time I just assumed there were in fact no actually harmful groups out there, just people voicing their own phobias.

duh?

It is a war. In which war doesn't one party run disinformation campaigns to undermine the other party? I don't know what kind of disinformation the Ukrainian government spreads against Putin, it is obvious there is too. It is just the nature of warfare.

If you look at WW2 for instance, the information warfare is just as interesting as the actual combat, if not more so.

Also in the news: water is wet

What's most surprising to me is the comments. They seem to be replying to the title and not the content of the article. I think no one is surprised that Russia is running a disinformation campaign. But this is like how people show you clips of politicians asking stupid questions that are actually just questions so that the information is on the record. What do you want, the Washington Post to __not__ report on the disinformation campaign? Should it better be titled "Kremlin's disinformation campaign to undermine Zelensky?" Or "Document reveals how the Kremlin is undermining Zelensky through disinformation?" I suspect we'd get similar comments.

The perverse nature of disinformation and propaganda is that so many think they are immune to it and it is easily recognizable. But if you really think this, this is a mark of the success of propaganda, because you have let your guard down. Just think from a likelihood perspective, and how much your model fits reality. If propaganda was easy to identify then there's two outcomes: you can't explain why it is so effective (your model is broken) or you are particularly unique and special because propaganda is effective but just not on you (i.e. everyone else is dumb, I'm smart). This is the tool at play. We like to feel smart. So sample from people you know, do you think you're sufficiently smarter than enough of them? Are you in a bubble? Or what?

The obvious propaganda helps the more subtle propaganda in. It's like how I trained my cat to be terrible at hiding. I just pretend I don't see her when she's in an obvious place and I make it well known and trick her into thinking I wasn't looking for her when she actually is in a good hiding place. It's about the information imbalance and knowing how the other side will interpret the information.

At best, if you're just another comment patting yourself on the back, all you've done is create more noise. Which enables propaganda. At worst, you're helping train yourself and others to be like my cat.

The documents (PDFs linked inline in the article) are insightful. I haven't checked the metadata and my PDF viewer reports correctable encoding errors, but the contents look legit: language/jargon gives no reason to suggest these are fake.

Im sorry could you explain this cat training strategy? What is the purpose? How did it come qbout?

When cats are scared they hide. In an actual emergency I need to be able to grab my cat. This isn't so great if my cat hides by tucking herself behind the washing machine. If she instead thinks hiding under the table is a legitimate hiding spot I can quickly grab her when it is actually needed.

Training is simple. Be good at finding cats. When cat is in good hiding place, always make it known that you know and if they go to a place that is annoying to get to, extract them. Make the process annoying or uncomfortable (not harmful) so they have a bad association with it. But we also need positive reinforcement. When an easy to extract spot is used, pretend you can't find them. Make an excuse to call them. Make a big display. Walk around the house, calling them. Walk right past where they are and even get close. Cats naturally play hide and seek as a game, so we're just doing this.

Basically you are inverting the reward function on the hide and seek game.

In other news: The sky is blue

Very, very interesting to see all these random accounts immediately showing up in mass to defend the Kremlin. Especially on a post like this, where it is not some outlandish accusation. Those countries are coming up on a third year of a full scale war, it'd be more surprising if they didn't have a disinformation campaign to discredit each other.

It's almost too obvious. You'd think they'd try to be a bit more subtle.

It seems to work better when it’s not subtle. You’ll get all the *chan bois relaying your disinformation for the lulz. YouTube and podcaster hucksters trying to make a name for themselves to get a payday from some weird billionaire’s self-funded media machine. In the end you’ll get some local politicians on-board and maybe a US Senator or two.

Having observed them over a decade or so, I came to the conclusion that they don't need to be subtle because to be successful they just need to spread messages (photos, clips, etc.) that are in line with your view. For example, during BLM riots, they were inciting emotions on both sides of the conflict.

Subtlety was never their asset because once we get to the bottom of things, they have no real argument. For example, Putin pushes the narrative that Hungarians living in Ukraine would be happy if their land was Hungarian. But if you really ask these Hungarians if they choose a war over their land in order for this to happen, they would call you a madman. There is nothing to discuss and Putin knows it, and also these trolls know it, so they need to resource to not-so subtle arguments.

Yeah, I suppose they get paid the same either way. Why go out of their way trying to be imaginative?

You get what you measure. HNers with extensive corporate experience will be able to easily reverse engineer their OKRs :)

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