Thread by @irgarner

Big Thread: Why the pro-war “Z” campaign you’ve been seeing has proven to be another Putin regime propaganda flop.

What is this campaign? You’ve seen the “Z” pop up everywhere on cars, in “spontaneous” demonstrations, and in that weird fascisty macho video.

This is an astroturfing campaign. It’s supposed to be grassroots, but it comes from big state-sponsored accounts & sources.

The “Z” refers to the letter marked on Russian vehicles in Ukraine and also to the first letter of the word “Za” (За), which means “For”.

The Z logo is usually accompanied with hashtags: #ZaRossiyu, #ZaMir, #ZaNashikh, #ZaSpravedlivost: For Russia, For Peace, For Our Boys, For Justice. (I know they make no sense, but bear with me).

Why pick a Latin character? I think this is a stupid move. It alludes to the first letter of Zelensky’s name, it’s Western in a war against Western values, & it’s impossible to meaningfully search for it on social (try googling “Z”) = Campaign doomed.

But I *think* the logic is to link to the St. George ribbon, which is the Russian equivalent of the remembrance poppy. It’s becoming increasingly popular to wear the ribbon around Victory Day in recent years as a sign of respect.

The ribbon is often depicted crisscrossed to make new patterns. Same with the “Z.” So when you see this orange and black symbol, the reference is to WW2 memory.

What does that mean in practice? For us, memory of war is dominated by the phrase “never again”. For Russians, in a nutshell, it’s “We’ll do this again if we have to.” When you see these stripes, Russians are signalling their intent: we’ve sacrificed everything

– 25 million people – to do this before, we’ll do it all over again now.

The images are getting widely shared here, but the most striking images are those obviously choreographed by state proxies. This one is organized by the Youth Army (think cub scouts with guns). Obviously not spontaneous invocations of the campaign.

Here’s another, from sunny Stupino near Moscow. Supposedly spontaneous, but who the hell in Stupino has access to a fleet of shiny SUVs and a really, really long Russia flag except state operators?

“But people are attending!” you say. There was a big thread yesterday that claimed people’s participation in these actions as proof that people support the gvt. This is a very sketchy claim. The gvt has a long history of forcing students & state workers...

...who it can pressure into attending these sorts of demonstrations. This is an old Soviet method of encouraging “voluntary” work that was, well, not so voluntary.

So the only way to measure support is via social media. Unsurprisingly, given the blocks on FB & IG in Russia, the hashtags aren’t spreading widely there. But they’re not playing well on state-aligned network VK either.

Search for the hashtags on VK and “real” people are mostly just leveraging the hashtags to flog everything from Zumba classes to detox plans. The top posts have nothing to do with the conflict.

There are plenty of real posts too. This is my fave, because it’s a hodgepodge of every image you can think of: USSR symbol, Russian flag, United Russia (Putin’s party) symbol on the right, WW2 references, “Putin,” “army,” “fatherland!”

But users posting these are mostly reposting – they’re lazy, easy shares to boost sentiment, not any sign of a commitment to dig deep in the face of economic sanctions.

Take a look at “Vezhlivye Lyudi” – “Decent People” – a VK group with 340,000 members that spreads military-patriotic material. Almost nobody is opposing their myriad of “Z” posts – a couple of off-colour comments are dismissed as work of “crazy people”.

But is the “Z” campaign really flying? Well, no.
The big “Z” posts this VK group made over the weekend average 1,000 likes. Non-“Z” posts (eg shares of patriotic songs)? 2,500+. The most popular post? A tribute to a young soldier who died in Ukraine. 3,000 likes.

The Putin regime cannot build popular support for the war with an impersonal campaign based around a new symbol. If they want to do it effectively, they need stories of martyrs. Oh, and they'll need it to call it a "war." Which they're still not doing.