Thread by @althecat

I'd love to know who @Jack talked to when he visited Ethiopia and what they talked about?

The role of @Twitter in reversing the information warfare dominance of TPLF, based mostly on lies, and replacing it with narratives based on reality has been an outstanding success.

There are spectacular differences between the approaches applied by the TPLF's cyber corps and those of Ethiopia.

TPLF: trolling, lying, gaslighting, bland unspecific allegations.
ETHIOPIA: humour, amplifying, revealing, informing, investigating, thanking and politely rebuffing

On the news media side the TPLF maintain clear dominance however. They have put in a lot off effort with things like story fabrication and placement, engineered and carefully deployed leaks.

The Ethiopian response to this has been to target the stories, and publishers and critique their work, point out the omissions, double standards, errors and providence of laundered information.

A lot of effective work has also investigated and targeted the key misinformation launderers, who are relatively small in number and very obvious - @Qnie_Addis's quantitative analysis work on this has been particularly spectacular.

On the TPLF side there has also been a breakdown based around the violence and brutality of their military offensive - and the emerging facts around their use of aid resources for their war becoming too obvious to conceal.

The Tigray conflict has become a very interesting example of asymmetric information warfare.

There are lessons for other conflicts, especially for scenarios where one party has a massive network/influence advantage, as the TPLF had in this one. Palestine vs Israel for e.g.

But this could also be true in the climate crisis activism space. In that case the foe is fairly amorphous - Govt. inaction fuelled by corporate greed, influence and elite indifference & corruption - but this is still an identifiable target.

One of the other key differences between the TPLF and Ethiopia cyber approaches is the degree of command and control and investment. Like the Govt.-Corporate alliance, TPLF also uses lobbyists and interpersonal network choreography.

Ethiopia however doesn't have the networks nor the capacity and cash to play this game. Instead its activities are grass roots, distributed, leaderless and independent. Like the climate activism community.

Politeness, and orderliness, community modelled and managed, and accompanied by kindness is a key factor in all of this too.

Trolling can be an effective tactic to discourage and shut people down. But when the numbers of people are too big, it becomes ineffective.

The Ethiopian twitter community's natural disposition towards politeness and respect for human dignity has also, in my opinion, stood it in very good stead.