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Jan 13 • 11 tweets • 5 min read
Just as we learn from failures, it's important to learn from wins.

So, I learned from my failure to get more people sanctioned this last year that some of what I do is working (backchanneling, essentially) and some isn't.

I've also learned from what people talk about as "wins".
So, you could regard the interactions we had with #parmesanGirl as a "win": she singled me out for attack, started blocking not only #NAFO folks but everyone on my follower list, then got called out for it and then turned into a trending hashtag.

There the lesson has a lot to do with disrupting the basic lies inherent in how Susli operates as a disinformation outlet and presents herself.

I'd argue it really lays bare the structural aspects of disinformation - not just what it says, *how* it says.

We got to a place with @gchahal, I'd argue, that was similar to the kind of de facto reflexive control op that #NAFO ended up running on Susli: we provoked him enough to make him publicly lose his shit.

This is, however, a somewhat superficial read.

It occurs to me, talking with #NAFOlks, that we're also looking at fairly classic abuser behavior writ large.

Chahal is, remember, a domestic abuser.

Not, like, a borderline case - a straight-up flagrant "kick people 117 times on camera" domestic abuser.
theguardian.com/technology/201…
Chahal demonstrates - even now, through his frankly pathetic trash outlets - classic "Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender" behavior.

I think it's usually horrid to cite Wikipedia straight-up, but I don't want to quote woo-woo therapy blogs, so...

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARVO
Chahal throws open a way of looking at public lying at scale, the same way that Susli shows the structural nature of disinfo in the lie of popularity that she has to keep up.

Basically, we're integrating therapeutic language into disinformation studies.
A therapeutic approach to anti-disinfo activism is actually not a bad idea in my opinion.

There isn't exactly a philosophical foundation of old white guys going back to Ye Olden Days to tell you how to fight nation-state sponsored digital influence efforts at scale, so...
It's a couple of intuitive leaps in very hand-wavey terms, for which I apologize; I'm in a place right now where I'm sort of jammed up with writer's block and a few different projects due.

But it goes like this, and it's simple in (regrettably) simplified terms:
If we're going to be real about actually doing something about disinfo, we need an empirical foundation of observations and theories, in order to build strategies.

That empirical foundation is psychology & cognitive science this isn't controversial (or it shouldn't be, I hope).
What's really interesting - what this entire excursion from thinking about Chahal's DARVO behavior projecting onto #NAFO - is this:

If anti-disinfo is necessarily psychological... then isn't anti-disinfo activism also necessarily therapeutic?

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More from @JoohnChoe

JChoe Profile picture
Jan 14
I think a mistake that people make when thinking about disinformation is to have an incomplete or overly ideological basis for what they're arguing, or assume that others do.

It's like in #NAFO, when tankies & vatniks assume you're a rightist because you support aid to Ukraine.
Take trans folks rights.

You might assume that's leftist, but you could support that because there's a solid biological basis behind it, or for any number of personal reasons, or you might actually, legitimately be hard-left in every sense of the word.
It's a mistake people make with feminism too; they assume that because something/someone is feminist, it's automatically left-aligned.

We could argue about whether "conservative feminist" is an oxymoron or not, but the fact remains: people think they ARE that.
Read 11 tweets
JChoe Profile picture
Jan 13
Attacking @gmfus's Hamilton 68 dashboard is one of the straight-up dumbest moves I've seen disinformation folks make in a long time, so-called "#TwitterFiles" or no.

The idea that it discredits Russian influence efforts on social media is pure gaslighting.

I'll explain:
Let me remind you of who I am and why my opinion on this might matter:

I am literally, not figuratively, the guy who got you banned.

As in, it was my job to find and deplatforms hate speech and extremist content.

It's why I was looking at the L/DPR.

washingtonpost.com/technology/202…
I've been in the game since 2017.

I ran with Reid Hoffman's operatives in Alabama, helping Democrats in an impossible fight against a child molester Senate candidate.

You want the "liberal political operatives" messing with your career?

That's me, mf.

nytimes.com/2019/01/07/us/…
Read 8 tweets
JChoe Profile picture
Jan 12
"Stealing shit on an industrial scale" is not totally adequate as a way of understanding Russia's war on Ukraine; it doesn't cover the genocide involved, for instance.

Still, it's interesting as a filter for understanding why Prigozhin is (allegedly) standing in a salt mine. Image
Multiple sources, including ISW, Newsweek's White House source, and a few other names from the think tank scene, talk about Soledar and, by extension, the fight for Bakhmut as about natural resources in-area - specifically, salt and gypsum mines.

newsweek.com/russia-ukraine… Image
I think the reason why trash like Jackson Hinkles are talking about it today - beyond the fact that they're shills for rashism, which is trivially obvious - is that it's more than just the resources or strategic value.

It's also the symbolic value.
bbc.com/news/64240404 Image
Read 8 tweets
JChoe Profile picture
Jan 12
An easy trap to fall into as an activist is flitting about from one disaster to the next, never having a planning horizon longer than a news cycle.

This is the power of distraction, and a key function of the Biden papers nothingburger.

It's an idiot ball.
It's no different than the conjured-up anger about supposedly slow reinforcements in Benghazi, or "cancelling" Dr. Seuss or Pepe le Peu the cartoon skunk, or migrant caravans, or Ukrainian CIA biolabs, or "woke" culture.
Or any of a dozen voting machines conspiracy theories, or the Federal government being out to get Trump, or antifa or BLM (they're the same thing to a lot of people) being out to get Trump, or Jewish people being out to get Trump, or Mueller being out to get Trump, etc., etc.
Read 4 tweets
JChoe Profile picture
Jan 7
These precise, proportionate sanctions are an inextricable part of the fight to defend Ukraine, I'd argue.

Over and above the rather mixed evidence on efficacy and overall goodness of sanctions, disrupting Russian supply chains is good in two ways:

cnbc.com/2023/01/06/us-…
First: after Noam Zohar, I argue that independently of any consequentialist impacts - arguably, even sanctions efficacy - sanctions are morally good when they prevent American complicity in monstrosity.

iep.utm.edu/ethics-of-econ…
In debate parlance, the moral imperative of avoiding American complicity in monstrosity is a "decision rule" - an a priori (not "apriori") impact that must be evaluated first.

To put it crudely, even if I lose everything else in a debate on sanctions, if I win this, I still win.
Read 7 tweets
JChoe Profile picture
Jan 6
There are moments that change you.

When I saw Peter Francis Stager beat a DCPD officer with an American flag on the steps of our Capitol two years ago, that was my moment.

I swore to myself, then and there, that I would do something to hold these people accountable.
The person you see in this video is, in a lot of ways, the product of that moment in history.

I used to see extremist-hunting on social media as basically whack-a-mole; the only real solution, I've argued for years, is a movement (like NAFO).

January 6 changed that.

I went from essentially volunteering to hunt extremists on Facebook, to taking a team of frankly rather half-assed activists and creating an industrial-scale Nazi-hunting process.

It's a process I call 'constructive deplatforming'.
Read 10 tweets

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