Thread by @carolecadwalla

NEW: Banning Facebook & criminalising journalism are not just the actions of a desperate man, they’re the equivalent of putting on a pair of bell-bottoms & dad-dancing across the internet.

Why I think Putin just lost the information war 👇

theguardian.com/world/2022/mar…

I don’t know what’s going to happen next, no-one does. But the Kremlin’s reputation as invincible masters of information war has taken a beating. Putin’s blunt force command-&-control response v Zelensky’s social media mastery is like watching Stalin versus the TiKTok kids

And the Ukrainian war isn’t just playing out across social media. That same social media is impacting the progress of Ukrainian ground operations in real time. The open source #OSINT community is acting as a global battalion of armchair intelligence officers

It’s absolutely fascinating to watch this play out in real time. Because every photograph you see, every video clip, is being verified & geolocate & fed into open source maps & databases.

This is a country of 44 million people capturing every twitch the Russian invaders make.

Even more remarkably, according to @EliotHiggins who pioneered so many of these techniques with @bellingcat, it’s first time a co-ordinated community has been able to do this from the start in real time.

And it’s one of reasons why Russia’s disinfo has been so piss poor

It happened in Syria, @EliotHiggins says, but there was a time lag. In Ukraine, there isn’t. And the radical decision by US intelligence to put their intel into public domain helped inoculate us. They said there would be fake news about fake bombs & then, guess what?

If any Silicon Valley company uses Putin’s actions to justify themselves, I will lose it - they are responsible for so much of this shitshow - but @bellingcat & #OSINTUkraine have recaptured some of early promise of the open internet.

This is a citizen army using citizen tools.

We are complicit in so much of this. We laundered Putin’s money, we failed to reign in big tech. Which is why we MUST call out this fundamental untruth: Russia didn’t launch a war on Ukraine last week. It invaded it in 2014 in a joint assault against both Ukraine & the West

In 2014, we had no clue that Russia had also attacked us. But now we do. From 2016, the FBI & battalion of journalists & academics have laid it out piece by piece. This was a military assault on what Russia sees as a theatre of war: the internet.

We have to start taking this in.

Putin’s crude thuggery, his desperation to turn off information firehose has exposed who he really is. A weakling propped up by our own greed & stupidity, aided & abetted by his quislings Western allies, the entire battalion of chocolate soldiers of the ‘war on woke’

If headline suggested this was a tech-will-save-us & Zelensky is TikTok’s new Daddy Cool type of piece, it’s very much not.

I think our blindness & stupidity has led us to a very dark place & the Kremlin’s information fuck ups make it even more dangerous
theguardian.com/world/2022/mar…