1/ Why are far-right 'influencers' suddenly claiming, against all evidence, that the Ukraine war is a fake? They can't really be that stupid, can they? Indeed, they're not – it's cynical manipulation, not stupidity. Here's what's going on.
2/ ⚠️ First, this is classic rage-farming: eliciting outrage to boost engagement and support. As @MollyJongFast has put it, it's "the product of a perfect storm of fuckery, an unholy mélange of algorithms and anxiety". They are baiting you to retweet and react angrily to them.
3/ Twitter's algorithms (and those of social media more generally) spread content if people are interacting with it. If you're retweeting it, you're boosting it to all of your followers, as well as to any random individuals who might come across it.
4/ Anger is one of the most powerful motivating emotions. Research on the Chinese platform Weibo has shown users share content that elicits disgust and anger more often than content that content that elicits positive emotions. Social media algorithms amplify human psychology.
5/ If rage-farmers make you angry enough to retweet them, they're winning. To avoid this, don't 'like' or retweet what they're saying. That will just boost it algorithmically and spread it further.
6/ If you must quote it, screenshot it, don't retweet. Ideally, don't quote it at all but just describe it in the most general terms, as I'm doing here. Don't name the individuals making the claims. Rage-farmers are looking for the oxygen of publicity. Don't provide them with it.
7/ ⚠️ Second, this kind of reality-denial is an attempted assertion of control over reality: "who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?" These people absolutely know that the war is real. Look how the denial has suddely appeared out of nowhere.
8/ This isn't a case of people having lingering doubts that have strengthened over time. They've seen the same TV and newspaper reports as the rest of us. Their own websites and blogs have reported on the war. But now they've suddenly rejected all of that. Why?
10/ Particularly in the US, politics has become a determining factor in how people perceive reality. This is particularly visible when it comes to people's subjective experience of weather, which was tested by YouGov in 2021 – a year of record-breaking heatwaves.
10/ YouGov found that 72% of Democrats and Democratic leaners said they noticed extreme weather events in their area compared to just 36% of Republicans and Republican-leaners.
11/ Republicans were more than twice as likely to say they had not noticed extreme weather events (60%) than Democrats (22%).
The obvious explanation for this is that climate change denial is so prevalent on the right that it makes many people unwilling to say a hot day is hot.
The obvious explanation for this is that climate change denial is so prevalent on the right that it makes many people unwilling to say a hot day is hot.
12/ It's important to note that this sentiment didn't appear organically – it was manufactured by politicians, activists and lobbyists. Influencers on the right made claims which denied evidence, reality, and in some cases, the laws of physics, but were nonetheless believed.
13/ Reality-denial is a powerful, but very dangerous, political tool. We're seeing a variety of it in Russia at the moment, where Putin has created an alternative reality to support his politics. Hitler did the same thing with his fantasies of a global Jewish conspiracy.
14/ Conspiracy theories regarding Ukraine range from the narrative of eastern European leaders being sockpuppets of the US/NATO, to claims that aid to Ukraine is all being stolen, to the maximalist claim that the war is all fake (which even Moscow hasn't yet proposed).
15/ It's pretty clear that some in the West are constructing an alternative reality to encourage disengagement from, or even opposition to, helping Ukraine to defend itself. The current claims should be seen in that light.
16/ ⚠️ This brings me to my third and final point: the people pushing these claims welcome your denunciations. Rage-farming isn't being done just to get clicks, but to solidify support. It's being used to boost claims that people are being 'cancelled' for their views.
17/ Negative partisanship – supporting one side because you oppose the other side – is a very powerful force. Helping Ukraine defend itself is supported by all the people the far right defines itself against – liberals, experts, human rights supporters, traditional conservatives.
18/ This has aptly been described as an "anti-anti-Putin" position. You don't have to be pro-Putin to support it. You don't need to care about Putin or Ukraine at all. All that matters is that the people you hate support a particular cause, so you must oppose it to oppose them.
19/ The people who are clicking 'like' on the claim that the Ukraine war is a fake don't necessarily believe it. Most probably don't. But they like the fact that someone they follow on social media is aiming punches at their political opponents, regardless of how truthful it is.
20/ The cynical people making these claims define themselves by their opposition to others. Being denounced by large numbers of people, especially blue checks from back when that meant a thing, is something they're very happy about. Don't give them that pleasure. /end
21/ P.S. If you're interested in disinformation in general, give @RVAwonk a follow – she's excellent on the subject. And bear the linked article below in mind when you're reading about Ukraine on Twitter. Caveat lector! weaponizedspaces.substack.com/p/twitter-exec…
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
