Thread by @Nrg8000

OK, ISW is becoming a major problem in the media ecosystem. This assessment is just a hunch from their mapping team (one that I disagree with), and yet their role in providing maps will see this (bad) opinion laundered as fact by many journalists who print what they say verbatim.

https://twitter.com/TheStudyofWar/status/1653906530087890947

You can have reasonable theories that this was a false flag, I disagree for the simple fact that it makes the Kremlin look inept and weak as hell. But the point is, it's irresponsible to throw these largely baseless theories out there knowing how they'll be consumed.

And the other point is (and this is coming from someone who has mapped Ukraine in meticulous detail), the people you don't want making this assessment and putting it out there are the people who's only job is to map the situation in meticulous detail.

The skillset required for mapping are not the skills required to make a valid assessment about this incident. Especially based on the sparse OSINT information. Look how much effort journalists (not Hersch) put into the recent story about Russian ships near Nordstream.

These updates aren't just people posting theories on twitter, which is fine, but have become incredibly incorporated into the process that media uses to write the first draft of history for this war (and I'm sure it makes it to classified Intel summaries too).

And I understand the pressure to comment on each piece of news, especially knowing the media engagement it will get, but sometimes speculation and assessment based on incomplete information or one geolocated video, is irresponsible to launder into the first draft of history.

Their role in repeatedly spreading incorrect assessments implying Ukrainian forces have established a foothold on the S bank of the Dnipro show that the institutional pressure to publish 'newsworthy' assessment every day has overtaken their care for an always-accurate product.

See the nested thread of me complaining about this here.

https://twitter.com/Nrg8000/status/1652991907050704896?t=npvLWI41M_MaEbdSbRXUkA&s=19

Now I understand the media plays a role in this too, ISW does add nuance to their product that dampen the 'confidence' in many of these poor assessments, and they can't control how the media will often (& wrongly) jump onto the story and repeat their claims with far less nuance.

But they surely understand this now. When ISW says something, the media repeats it in their starved daily summaries without nuance, and that whole citogenisis cycle starts right up turning a 'may have' into a 'did'.
xkcd.com/978/

And it comes down to being responsible with the 'info' you put out, understanding its role in the media ecosystem and prioritising more than media engagement with a daily product.

Ukraine has settled on many fronts into much of a WW1, trench warfare type of situation, where the changes on the ground are absolutely not adequate for a 10-page daily summary. This begs for invalid speculation.

Yet it is hard to ramp back a product that serves you well.

This is the same for the UK MoD daily summaries, which are largely useless now.

https://twitter.com/NeilPHauer/status/1653098365440208897?t=2v7XFM9osMM1RytMvvC51Q&s=19

I understand why it is how it is, but not doing better really risks your credibility, and even if lazy journalists keep citing your work, once seriously observers start viewing your product as inaccurate and unreliable, it is really hard to come back from that.

There's nothing wrong with saying 'no major developments today, continued fighting in x, y, z with some reports of limited greyzone gains by blah in y.'
much better than trying to fill the space with speculation or feeling the need to prematurely assess breaking developments.

The ISW intel summary of this is so fundamentally flawed that it fails to mention that there were two drones that hit the kremlin, and implies it was a single strike that took place when people were already on the roof, not two strikes, one of which took place 13min earlier.

950 words on the attack without a single sentence entertaining the idea that it could be a genuine attack.

When lazy journalists read this there is a single conclusion they will make (given it being unbalenced in its entirity) and this is clear from reading media coverage.

Much of their assessment relies on the idea that drones could not penetrate Russian air defence... That is NOT an assessment I would trust open-source mapping professionals (very much including myself) to make.

It fails to mention how irrevokably incompetent it makes Russia look, it fails to mention the fact that this could be designed to pull air-defence away from other 'shaping targets' to protect Moscow, it fails to mention any balance, it's very lazy and one-sided.

Hard to expect more when you give a couple of people a deadline of 5 or 6 hours to write ten pages on an event that just happened without any clear information in the open source yet. Of course it will be full of errors and incomplete.

More broadly, the 24-hour news cycle problem is a massive problem for the online OSINTers when reality along with shaping and military operations are happening on a scale of months not hours.
But somewhere with the institutional audience of ISW should know beter.