Thread by @plwarre

New Research Thread! (1/?) (w/ @DarrenLinvill, of course)

"Infektion’s Evolution: Digital Technologies and Narrative Laundering * "

tigerprints.clemson.edu/mfh_reports/3/

Narrative Laundering is the process by which shady narratives are cleaned up introduced to the mainstream conversation.

Like money laundering, it proceeds in 3 stages: placement, layering, and integration.

The folks at the @gmfus have a nice primer:
securingdemocracy.gmfus.org/online-informa…

This strategy traces back to (at least) the Cold War, with Operation Infektion/Denver being the most famous example (AIDS invented in US labs).

Looking at an active Russian-originating campaign targeting Ukraine/Zelensky, we show tech has accelerated each stage of the process.

We show how about a dozen narratives were placed, layered and integrated into political debates. And how technology affected each stage. What took months to years in the 1980s, proceeded in days and weeks.

The most interesting element was a new kind of tech-enabled integration- The whole-cloth invention of a credible Western news source. , with fake authors, fake origin story, and thousands of stories written by ChatGPT using content from @FoxNewsDCWeekly.org

For me its (of course) an economics story. Tech has reduced the costs of each stage of the process, so we get more of it and it happens faster. And the quantity suppled increases more in the long-run than the short.

The punchline is that this campaign has had an impact. During Zelensky's visit last week, one of the narratives they pushed was cited by @JDVance1 as a reason to deny funding to Ukraine. Just search Twitter for the terms "Zelensky" and "Yacht". Here's the timeline.

For excellent reporting on this whole saga, check out the recent BBC coverage by @Shayan86,
@O_Rob1nson, @PaulMyersBBC, and @mwendling.

bbc.com/news/world-us-…

Ohh... The * in the title:

"*This title was created using ChatGPT"