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Vatnik Soup Profile picture
@P_Kallioniemi
Dec 10, 2022 • 15 tweets • 7 min read • Read on X
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In today's #vatnik soup I'll explain why Elon Musk's (@elonmusk) "balancing act" of purging just one side will increase the spread of fake news and disinformation.
First of all I'd like to say that biased, systematic blacklisting of content that Twitter conducted was WRONG.

1/14
Censorship is almost always bad and there are much better ways to fight dis- and misinformation (labels, semi-objective, external fact-checkers, etc.).

But based on recent events, it seems that Musk is just swinging this same system to the opposite direction.

2/14
In his Nov 18, 2022 tweet he said that "Negative/hate tweets will be max deboosted & demonetized", yet there are no definitions or clear rules what is considered hate speech.

Elon also promised to reinstate accounts that were previously suspended.

3/14
For example, on 23th Nov 2022, Twitter declared that it no longer enforces the COVID-19 misleading info policy: transparency.twitter.com/en/reports/cov…

At the beginning of the pandemic, troll farms spread disinformation that was actually dangerous and potentially lethal.

4/14
Lately several American neo-nazi accounts have been reinstated, including anti-semitic group Evropa's former leader, Patrick Casey:

Another neo-nazi, Daily Stormer's editor Andrew Anglin also regained access to their Twitter profile.

5/14
The leaks from the Twitter Files has been advertised as a conspiracy among Twitter's ex-executives where they secretly decide what content gets seen, but Twitter has had a FAQ about these issues since '18: blog.twitter.com/official/en_us…

6/14
Elon has also participated in the discussion about the Twitter Files. He has attacked the NYT (@nytimes), calling the outlet "an unregistered lobbying firm for far left politicians". He also said that Alex Stamos (@alexstamos) operates a "propaganda platform".

7/14
In 2018, Science published a paper by Vosoughi, Roy, & Aral, titled "The spread of true and false news online". The paper concluded that "false news stories are 70 percent more likely to be retweeted than true stories are" and that ...

8/14
... "It also takes true stories about six times as long to reach 1,500 people as it does for false stories to reach the same number of people." Allowing fake news spread freely will slowly drown the platform and more and more factual news stay hidden. doi.org/10.1126/scienc…
9/14
I also consider Twitter's latest design choices part of the "dark pattern design" group. These design choices "trick" users to specific actions on the platform or "nudge" their thinking to a specific direction.

10/14
Manipulation of the information flow, meaning what tweets Twitter shows us, can manipulate our thinking and "nudge" our worldview slowly to a specific direction.

How does Twitter shape our worldview if most of the content is actually disinformation?

11/14
I have discussed this type of dark pattern design in my 2022 publication, "Facebook’s Dark Pattern Design, Public Relations and Internal Work Culture": doi.org/10.34624/jdmi.…

12/14
Musk has also criticized the "woke culture" taking place in the Western society. We have to remember that this culture war has been fueled by Russian disinformation and propaganda throughout the years, topics ranging from LGBT+ rights to movements like BLM.

13/14
To conclude: With the recent changes, we can pretty much expect Twitter to be the same as before, but the pendulum just swings from the left to the right.

And it will also contain MUCH more disinformation than before.

14/14
In addition, disinformation spreads most effectively through "super spreaders": thebulletin.org/2022/06/how-cl…

Many of these accounts have now been reinstated.

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More from @P_Kallioniemi

Vatnik Soup Profile picture
May 1
In today’s Vatnik Soup, we introduce Hasan Piker, a Turkish-American streamer and millionaire. He’s best known for his champagne socialism, rabid criticism of the US and Israel, support for the Soviet Union and for Chinese and Russian invasions, and for mistreating his dog.

1/20 Hasan Piker in Havana, Cuba
Born in 1991, Piker grew up in a privileged and well-connected environment. His father held senior roles at big corporations and his uncle, Cenk Uygur, is the founder of The Young Turks media network. He graduated cum laude from Rutgers, a top-tier university in New Jersey.

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His main activity and primary source of income consists of hours-long livestreams on Twitch where he comments on news and yells at videos. He also keeps his dog in place the whole time with a shock collar.

3/20

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Read 21 tweets
Vatnik Soup Profile picture
Apr 26
What you see happening here is coordinated strategic communication by the Trump cult. Elon’s baby mama and former MAGA influencer Ashley St. Clair explained this ecosystem in a long video. They have built platforms where people can find narratives to spread and get paid for doing so.

Even though the system technically breaks the platform's ToS, this is perfectly fine for @nikitabier and the rest of the X crew, because Elon pays their salaries and this is part of his election interference machinery.Image
If you wanna know how the system works, read this:

Here’s Ashley’s video, where she explains how the system works. She was immediately attacked by various MAGA actors, which suggests that what she said hit a nerve.
Read 4 tweets
Vatnik Soup Profile picture
Apr 13
In today’s Vatnik Soup, we introduce Yanis Varoufakis, a Greek economist and politician. He’s best known for rising to power at the height of the Greek debt crisis, not solving anything but endearing himself to the left, and using his fame to promote Russian imperialism.

1/20 Image
Born in 1961 in Athens, Varoufakis studied economics in the UK and built an academic career in Australia, the US, and Europe. His early work focused on game theory, political economy, and critiques of capitalism.

2/20 Yanis Varoufakis: How I became an erratic Marxist https://www.theguardian.com/news/2015/feb/18/yanis-varoufakis-how-i-became-an-erratic-marxist
Presenting himself as the fearless, unorthodox economist willing to confront the EU’s “neoliberal” elites, he rose to prominence during Greece’s debt crisis. At its height in 2015, he was appointed finance minister under the left-wing Syriza government of Alexis Tsipras.

3/20 Greek PM Alexis Tsipras appoints radical economist to new government https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jan/27/greek-pm-alexis-tsipras-economist-yanis-varoufakis
Read 20 tweets
Vatnik Soup Profile picture
Mar 29
In this 8th Debunk of the Day, we’ll discuss complaints about US financing of NATO, in particular how the US allegedly pays for European defense, leading to calls for a US withdrawal from the Alliance — which would only make it easier for Putin to invade more countries.

1/7 A flight of French and Polish Rafale and F-16 fighter jets above a NATO flag during the opening of the exhibition “Powerful because we are united”, dedicated to the 19th anniversary of Lithuania’s 2004 accession to NATO (OTD 22 years ago), in the bastion of the Vilnius defensive wall on March 29, 2023 (OTD 3 years ago) in Vilnius, Lithuania. (Photo by Oleg Nikishin/Getty Images)
NATO by itself costs peanuts. In fact, the core of NATO is a principle, an agreement, that ideally costs nothing. The main cost is defense spending, which the US is eagerly doing anyway: Trump has just announced a 50% increase in military spending for his “Department of War”.
2/7 Trump aides struggle with how to spend $500 billion more on military, Washington Post https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2026/02/21/trump-hegseth-budget-military/
Trump calls for US military spending to rise more than 50% to $1.5tn https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy59kxl2xwzo
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To sow division and thereby weaken the Alliance, vatniks deliberately mix up different figures, such as contributions to the NATO common budget, with defense spending. And US military spending has been huge by the sheer fact that the US is the world’s largest economy.

3/7 Newsweek falsely claiming that the US pays 68% of NATO’s budget. The real number is 15%.

Elon Musk falsely claiming that the US pays for 2/3 of European defense. In another post he claimed it was 1/4. Both made-up numbers. https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1870903805845598428 https://x.com/i/birdwatch/t/1870903805845598428
NATO has annual budgets and programs worth around EUR 4.6 billion in 2025 (representing 0.3% of total Allied defence spending), and up to EUR 5.3 billion in 2026. The US share for 2026-2027 is 15% of that: 0.8 billion. Source: Funding NATO https://www.nato.int/en/what-we-do/introduction-to-nato/funding-nato
Read 7 tweets
Vatnik Soup Profile picture
Mar 9
In today’s Vatnik Soup, we’ll talk about why we’re doing this: why we think Ukraine is so important and why we believe that souping vatniks and debunking their propaganda narratives is so crucial to counter Russia’s & their allies’ wars of aggression and achieve real peace.

1/20 Image
War is expensive, and Russia is not a rich country that could afford this: Hospitals? Roads? Plumbing? No: everything into terror and destruction.

But not only that. There is a 2nd item in the Russian state budget that remains strong no matter what:

2/20
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Manufacturing support for that terror and destruction. Propaganda. Vatniks. “Innocent” travel bloggers. “Independent” journalists. “Patriotic” politicians. Russia spends hundreds of billions of rubles a year ($5 billion) on this, and that kind of money buys you A LOT of BS.

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Read 20 tweets
Vatnik Soup Profile picture
Mar 2
In this second (and possibly last) Basiji Soup, we’ll explore how the Islamic Republic of Iran has prepared for a conflict with the US and Israel. We won’t cover the military aspects, but another kind of war — information warfare.

1/20 Image
In the 1st Basiji Soup, we souped the Islamic Republic, its disinformation operations, its hypocrisy, its support of terrorism including Russia’s, its (one-sided?) relationship with Putin, and the mass protests against it that started two months ago:

2/20
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The Internet blackout has been crucial in allowing the regime to cover up its massacre of the protesters and especially the scope of it, making it difficult to assess the number of victims. They went to great lengths to jam Starlink, after having made its use illegal.

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Read 20 tweets

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