Pekka Kallioniemi Profile picture
May 4, 2023 24 tweets 12 min read Read on X
In today's #vatniksoup, I'll be talking about the Russian style of online propaganda and disinformation, "Firehose of Falsehood". It's a commonly used Kremlin strategy for Russian information operations, which often prioritizes quantity over quality.

1/23 Image
I have mentioned this particular strategy in many of my previous soups, but have never discussed it in more detail, so here goes. The term was originally coined by Paul & Matthews in their 2016 paper, The Russian "Firehose of Falsehood" Propaganda Model.

2/23 Image
They based this name on two distinctive features: 1) high volume, multi-channel approach, and 2) shameless willingness to spread disinformation.

Academic Giorgio Bertolin described Russian disinformation as entertaining, confusing and overwhelming.

3/23 Image
The high volume, multi-channel approach means that these operatives attempt to control the narrative on each major social media platform. Russia has conducted, and is conducting, these operations on Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, Telegram, VKontakte, YouTube, and even on Tinder.
4/23 ImageImage
The volume of these operations shouldn't be underestimated: already back in 2015, more than 1000 paid trolls worked at Yevgeny Prigozhin's Internet Research Agency (IRA), the most well-known troll farm in Russia, and each commentator had a daily quota of 100 comments.

5/23 Image
These numbers have probably gone up a LOT since then, and many more countries are using troll farms to conduct political campaigns or to spread propaganda.

One of the most famous case of social manipulation was the social media influencing around the Khashoggi murder.

6/23 ImageImage
These trolls would work in shifts, and the work goes on daily around the clock. A better description of these sweatshops would be troll factories, since they have turned trolling into an assembly line of propaganda and disinformation.

7/23 Image
The high volume is accompanied with the willingness to spread disinformation. Russia often utilizes the "throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks" strategy, pushing out hundreds of contradicting and false narratives, only to see if some of them starts gaining traction.

8/23 Image
Some examples of forgotten narratives include Zelenskyy leaving Kyiv after the invasion started, secret NATO base in Mariupol, Poles trying to blow up a chlorine tank, birds as bioweapons, combat mosquitos, the use of dirty bomb, and Ukrainian Satan worshipping.

9/23 Image
Troll farms also often "borrow" ideas and narratives from conspiracy theorists. One example of this was the "bioweapons lab" theory started by a QAnon follower, Jacob Creech. The narrative was spread, along with the Kremlin,by people like Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon.

10/23 ImageImageImage
There is also no commitment to any kind of consistency and these narratives can naturally be contradictory - as I mentioned, the goal is not to persuade but to confuse and overwhelm.

11/23
A lot of the "argumentation" from these trolls focuses on anecdotal evidence or faked sources. A good example of this are the "Ukrainian Nazis" replies that flood the discussion with anecdotal image collages of Ukrainians waving Nazi flags or having Nazi tattoos.

12/23 Image
The firehose also often utilizes non-sourced and out-of-context materials. Using (fake) imagery is an effective way to invoke strong reactions and emotions. Sometimes Russia produces false flag videos, but have done them less after various videos were geolocated to Russia.

13/23 Image
This strategy works extremely well in so-called low trust environments, meaning countries or societies where the trust against politicians, journalists and authorities is relatively low. Naturally, the effective use of this method degrades this trust even further.

14/23 ImageImage
The sheer number of messages and comments drown out any competing arguments or viewpoints, and this also often makes any kind of fact-checking obsolete - after the information has been debunked, the topic has already changed many, many times.

15/23 Image
And this is exactly why #NAFO has been so efficient against this particular strategy: it counters the strategy with similar measures. High volume, nonsensical replies from braindead cartoon dogs...

16/23 Image
...shuts down the firehose of falsehood extremely well, and as a bonus ridicules the main sources of pro-Russian narratives, including the country's ex-president, the embassy and diplomat accounts.

17/23 Image
Like with most production, propaganda has been outsourced to cheaper sources. These days many of these troll farms have been moved from places like Russia and Macedonia into various African countries, including Nigeria and Ghana.

18/23 Image
China has utilized the firehose in their own propaganda, and their most famous troll farm is the 50 Cent Army. The biggest difference between Russian and Chinese operations was that the Chinese focused on national networks,mostly neglecting the online world outside of China.19/23 ImageImage
Russia also focuses more on bashing and blaming others, whereas China focuses on praising the CCP. After realizing the success of Russia in their info ops, though, China has also started using more aggressive strategies against their rivals, especially against the US.

20/23 Image
Based on BBC, Russian and Chinese propaganda accounts are "thriving" on Twitter after @elonmusk sacked the team that was countering them. Allegedly the current system relies fully on automated detection systems.

21/23 Image
@DarrenLinvill, an associate professor from Clemson University said that one of these networks appears to originate from IRA. They have also identified troll farm from the opposite camp, with tweets supporting Ukraine and Alexei Navalny.

22/23 ImageImage
Before Musk took over the site, Twitter was relatively effective in removing troll farm accounts, but one can only assume that this is not the case anymore.

As is tradition, social media giants prioritize profits over safety.

23/23 Image

• • •

Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh
 

Keep Current with Pekka Kallioniemi

Pekka Kallioniemi Profile picture

Stay in touch and get notified when new unrolls are available from this author!

Read all threads

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

PDF

Twitter may remove this content at anytime! Save it as PDF for later use!

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

how to unroll video
  1. Follow @ThreadReaderApp to mention us!

  2. From a Twitter thread mention us with a keyword "unroll"
@threadreaderapp unroll

Practice here first or read more on our help page!

More from @P_Kallioniemi

Jun 2
In today’s Vatnik Soup, I’ll discuss the Ukrainian SBU’s “Spiderweb” operation and the main disinformation narrative vatniks have been spreading during the afterfall. While domestic Russian media stays silent, the vatniks and Russian milbloggers have been extremely loud.

1/20
This operation was probably the most impactful strike since the drowning of the Moskva, massively reducing Russia’s capability to bomb Ukrainian cities (or anyone else’s). It involved smuggling 117 FPV drones hidden in trucks into Russia. Once near airbases,…

2/20 Image
Image
Image
…the roofs opened remotely, launching drones in synchronized waves to strike targets up to 4,000 km away. The mission took 18 months to plan. The unsuspecting Russian truck drivers who transported them had no idea they were delivering weapons deep behind their own lines.

3/20 Image
Read 21 tweets
May 28
In today’s Vatnik Soup, I’ll introduce a Russian movie director, propagandist, and former priest: Ivan Okhlobystin. He’s best known for his strong support for the war on Ukraine and for his radical views, which are often used as a testbed for the domestic Russian audience.

1/20 Image
Ivan was born in 1966 from a short-lived marriage between a 62-year-old chief physician and a 19-year-old engineering student. She later remarried, and the family moved from Kaluga province to Moscow. Ivan kept the surname Okhlobystin from his biological father.

2/20 Image
After moving to Moscow, Ivan began studying at VGIK film school. He soon became a playwright for theatre productions and also wrote for Stolitsa magazine, which he later left because, as he put it, “it had become a brothel.”

3/20 Image
Read 21 tweets
May 22
In today’s Vatnik Soup, I’ll introduce a Ukrainian-born former State Duma deputy, Vladimir Medinsky. He is best known as one of the ideologues of the “Russkiy Mir”, for his close ties to Vladimir Putin, and for leading the “peace talks” in Turkey in 2022 and 2025.

1/20 Image
During the late 1980s and early 1990s, Medinsky interned as a correspondent on the international desk of the TASS news agency, learning the ways of propaganda at an early age. Some time later, he earned two PhDs – one in political science and the other in history.

2/20 Image
Image
As is tradition in Russia, Medinsky’s academic work was largely pseudo-scientific and plagiarized. Dissernet found that 87 of 120 pages in his dissertation were copied from his supervisor’s thesis. His second dissertation was also heavily plagiarized.

3/20 Image
Read 21 tweets
May 15
In today’s Vatnik Soup, I’ll introduce an American social media influencer, Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson). He’s best known for his plagiarism while working as a clickbait “journalist”, and for being paid by the Kremlin to spread anti-Ukraine and anti-Democratic narratives.

1/23 Image
Benny graduated from the University of Iowa in 2009 with a degree in developmental psychology. His former high school buddy described him as the “smartest, most articulate kid in school,” and was disappointed to see him turn into a “cheating, low standard hack.”

2/23 Image
After graduating, Benny dived directly into the world of outrage media. Benny’s first job was writing op-eds for far-right website Breitbart, from where he moved on to TheBlaze, a conservative media owned by Glenn Beck, and a spring board for many conservative influencers.

3/23 Image
Read 24 tweets
May 13
In today’s Vatnik Soup, I’ll introduce a Cypriot politician and social media personality, Fidias Panayiotou (@Fidias0). He’s best known for his clickbait YouTube stunts and for voting against aid to Ukraine and the return of abducted Ukrainian children from Russia.

1/20 Image
Fidias hails from Meniko, Cyprus. In 2019, he began posting videos on YouTube. After a slow start, he found his niche with clickbaity, MrBeast-style content featuring silly stunts, catchy titles and scripted dialogue. Today, Fidias has 2,7 million subscribers on YouTube.

2/20 Image
Image
Image
Fidias’s channel started with trend-riding, but he found his niche in traveling without money — aka freeloading. In one video, he fare-dodged on the Bengaluru Metro. The train authority responded by saying they would file a criminal case against him.

3/20 Image
Image
Read 22 tweets
May 9
In today’s May 9th Vatnik Soup, we discuss the ambiguous relationship of the Kremlin with Nazism and explain why so many vatniks can be outright Nazis, and promote or excuse them while at the same time being so hysterical about alleged “Nazis in Ukraine”.

1/23 Image
Of course, Kremlin propaganda employs the Firehose of Falsehood and often lacks any consistent ideology other than spreading chaos and seeking power, so such contradictions can be commonplace. However in this case there is a certain cynical consistency there.

2/23 Image
Image
To understand modern Russia, we need to go back a hundred years to the beginnings of Soviet Russia/Soviet Union — a genocidal terror regime under dictators Lenin and Stalin, whose totalitarian and imperialist legacy Putin’s Russia fully embraces.

3/23 Image
Image
Image
Image
Read 24 tweets

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Support us! We are indie developers!


This site is made by just two indie developers on a laptop doing marketing, support and development! Read more about the story.

Become a Premium Member ($3/month or $30/year) and get exclusive features!

Become Premium

Don't want to be a Premium member but still want to support us?

Make a small donation by buying us coffee ($5) or help with server cost ($10)

Donate via Paypal

Or Donate anonymously using crypto!

Ethereum

0xfe58350B80634f60Fa6Dc149a72b4DFbc17D341E copy

Bitcoin

3ATGMxNzCUFzxpMCHL5sWSt4DVtS8UqXpi copy

Thank you for your support!

Follow Us!

:(