In today's #vatniksoup, I'll introduce a Canadian conspiracy theorist and social media personality, @liz_churchill10. She's best-known for spreading the most outrageous conspiracy theories, and for promoting pro-Kremlin narratives on social media.
1/16
It seems that Lizzy believes pretty much any conspiracy theory that supports her worldview. Globalist satanic cults, vaccines/Bill Gates/Klaus Schwab will kill you, HIV/AIDS is a bioweapon, Pizzagate, that Kamala Harris is part fish... it's all there.
2/16
I mean, let's look at her takes on 9/11 - according to Liz, it was of course an "inside job", but she also wonders why the WEF leader Klaus Schwab was having "outdoor lunch" (he was not) in NYC in a place "that had a perfect view of the WTC... when they collapsed...on 9-11"
3/16
Other than that, she's just a regular housewife, who allegedly worked as a "street psychologist", whatever that means, until she retired. But this could be yet another lie, as she lies a LOT. Lizzy lies about the number of degrees her husband has (he has exactly one),...
4/16
...the number of languages she speaks, that her grandfather fought the Nazis, and that her grandmother was Dr. Frances Kelsey, a doctor who refused to authorize thalidome for patients. There's so many lies that it's hard to keep up, but in the end the whole family...
5/16
...seems to be a Canadian white trash ragtag that supports Donald Trump and rocks "Fuck Trudeau" tattoos. When your life is extremely boring and uneventful, I guess it's some sort of escapism to just come up with stuff to look better.
6/16
Lizzy has grown her account with a technique called rage farming. She posts the most outrageous, usually made-up stuff in order to garner likes and shares. This strategy is used by many conspiratorial accounts, including @jacksonhinklle, @dom_lucre and @MattWallace888.
7/16
Today's X is a perfect place to use rage farming, as spreading disinformation and lies has no absolutely ramifications. The owner of this platform actually encourages people to do so, and he even follows and comments on most of the biggest disinformation accounts.
8/16
Liz is currently at #29 position on the most community noted accounts on X, just one note ahead of the site's owner. Liz, you gotta step up, even the Embassy of Russia in South Africa (@EmbassyofRussia) is ahead of you!
9/16
On those rare occasions when she references to articles in her posts, Lizzy uses sources like The People's Voice, Info Wars, Real America's Voice, and of course straight up Russian propaganda. Her BS has also been fact-checked several times by various fact-checking sites.
10/16
Weirdly, considering that she's Canadian, Liz is also a staunch defender of Donald Trump. According to her, Trump was arrested for exposing the Biden family's "child-sex trafficking". According to her, the Bidens also invested into bioweapons labs, allegedly in Ukraine.
11/16
Lizzy absolute loathes Ukraine and especially their courageous leader, Volodymyr Zelenskyy. She was one of the first people to spread lies about Zelenskyy buying a house from King Charles, and she's spread other fake news about Zelenskyy's alleged real estate businesses.
12/16
Then there's the classics like the "secret" US/CIA/Ukrainian biolabs, "Ukrainian Nazis", EuroMaidan was a "CIA coup" orchestrated by Victoria Nuland, etc. But also something completely new - Lizzy claims that Ukraine's First Lady has been accused of child trafficking!
13/16
Putin she sees as some kind of "savior" who's fighting against the satanic globalists whose mission apparently is to spread decadence and "wokeism" in the Western societies. Interestingly, she doesn't seem to have any desire to leave her comfy homeland to, say, Russia.
14/16
She really is obsessing over Putin, and she's posted tens of posts where she praises his leadership skills, and his efforts in fighting against "LGBTQPS Propaganda", "Child Sterilization", "Gender Dysphoria Cult" and "Pedophilia".
15/16
To conclude, Liz is a housewife/conspiracy theorist who would be completely unremarkable if it wasn't for modern social media sites and their tendency to promote BS and lies. She's that aunt at family dinners who rants to everyone about chem trails & fluoride in toothpaste.
16/16
This soup was brewed in collaboration with the @UnintelAgency.
In today's #vatniksoup, I'll introduce an American political strategist, Samuel Charap (@scharap). He's best-known for strongly arguing against the Western military support to Ukraine, and advising Ukraine to give up to imperialist Russia's demands.
1/18
Samuel Charap is a senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation, an American think tank largely funded by the US government. He also studied in Kyiv and at MGIMO, an elite Moscow university with close ties to Russian intelligence.
2/18
He's also member of the Valdai Discussion Club, a Moscow-based think tank that has been described as a "Russian equivalent to Davos", and Dutch sociologist Van Herpen wrote that the club is a soft power effort by the Kremlin in service of Russian foreign policy goals.
In today's #vatniksoup, I'll talk about the state of generative AI (GAI) today, and how it will affect propaganda & disinformation in the near future.The development of GAI right now is so fast, that it's very difficult to keep track of what's going on,but here's the latest.
1/18
Generative AI is a technology capable of generating text, images, videos, or other data using generative models often in response to prompts. Some examples of GAI are platforms like Midjourney, DALL-E, ChatGPT and all those chatbots you find on every service desk these days.
2/18
In the last two years, GAI platforms, especially those that generate images, have become much more powerful. For example below, you see a comparison between generated content with different versions of Midjourney: v1 was published in Feb 2022, and v6 came out in Dec 2023.
In today's #vatniksoup, I'll introduce confirmed cases where the Kremlin has funded or otherwise influenced European politicians & parties in order to gain their support with issues like conducting business with Russian businesses, aid to Ukraine & sanctions against Russia.
1/14
On 28 Mar 2024,the Czech Republic & Poland exposed a Kremlin-backed propaganda network that paid European politicians & spread anti-Ukraine narratives on media. According to the investigators, the Voice of Europe website was used as a vehicle to pay politicians.
2/14
But first of all, let's look at how to motivate people to work on behalf of a foreign agent. I have previously written about the acronym MICE, which translates to Money, Ideology, Compromise and Ego. More on this here:
In today's #vatniksoup, I'll introduce a Russian pediatric endocrinologist and businesswoman, Maria Vorontsova née Putina. She's best-known for being the daughter of Vladimir Putin, supporting the Kremlin's genocidal war on Ukraine, and for living a lavish life in the West.
1/19
Maria was born in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) but attended a German school in Dresden while her father was working there as an FSB officer. After the collapse of the Communist East German government, they moved back to Leningrad.
2/19
Later, during Russia's violent gang wars, Katerina and her sister were sent to Germany to safety, and were safeguarded by Putin's old friend, Matthias Warnig.
Perhaps due to the babysitting, Warnig was later given a big role in the Nord Stream pipeline project.
In today's #vatniksoup, I'll iterate on the Kremlin's main narratives and how they're currently being used to legitimize Russia's sham election, protest military aid to Ukraine, and confuse people with "whataboutism" ("What about the US/Gaza/Iraq/Israel/Ukraine?").
1/15
Of course none of this is new, it's just that the scale is much more massive than we've ever seen before. Russia's "Firehose of Falsehood" strategy attempts to flood us with a huge volume of emotional and biased content to confuse us and distract us from the topic at hand.
2/15
I'll use few of my recent posts about the Russian sham elections as an example. In the second photo, you see the massive amount of comments compared to likes/shares of the post - a ratio of 1:4 is actually very rare and suggests that the post was found by trolls and bots.
This media bias chart from @adfontesmedia provides you a lot of interesting insights. First of all, we can see some usual suspects in the LESS RELIABLE end of the spectrum, including @TheGrayzoneNews, Natural News, Epoch Times, and of course @TPUSA.
1/4
These are basically propaganda mills, and some of them are extremely political (pro-Trump Turning Point), some serve foreign interests and are connected to foreign intelligence (@TheGrayzoneNews) and some just post made-up BS for conspiracy theorists (Natural News).
2/4
When looking at the top-middle part of the chart, you find the MORE RELIABLE sources: @pewresearch, @bellingcat, @WSJ and @AP can be considered both politically neutral and reliable. And this is exactly why people like @elonmusk and outlets like @TheGrayzoneNews attack them.