That is something we often hear, yet I haven’t said these words for almost ever. You see, news media is now realising that the Russians are closer to losing the war that ever. For this I think it is time that we go back to (the beginning) February 24th 2022. This set it all in motion and we were given “The Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 was accompanied by practices of information warfare, yet existing evidence is largely anecdotal while large-scale empirical evidence is lacking. Here, we analyze the spread of pro-Russian support on social media. For this, we collected messages from Twitter with pro-Russian support. Our findings suggest that pro-Russian messages received ∼251,000 retweets and thereby reached around 14.4 million users” these are the opening words of Dominique Geissler, Dominik Bär, Nicolas Pröllochs & Stefan Feuerriegel. We are then given “A widespread concern is that practices of modern warfare in form of large-scale Russian propaganda campaigns are used to shape the narrative around the war, yet corresponding research is still nascent. On the one hand, the Russian government enforced new legislation exerting power over traditional media outlets to persuade citizens to support the war. As a result, domestic media outlets are forced to adopt the official narrative. On the other hand, Russian propaganda has been suspected to influence other countries outside Russia, in particular, by using social media to promote hostility against the West”
The funny part is that as far as I have seen, the western media largely ignored this setting and the consequences of that setting. This paper was published in 2023 (at https://epjdatascience.springeropen.com/articles/10.1140/epjds/s13688-023-00414-5) and was readily available. But the western media at large, always happy to cater to clicks and being the bitch of the digital dollar left it standing as it was. They also give us the settings that they used (particularly the numbers involving ‘#1standwithruss1a’ (I changed two digits as not to ‘support’ Russia) and that gives us that The Atlantic (at https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/04/russian-propaganda-zelensky-information-war/629475/) gives us the story by Carl Miller. There was a much larger setting to the Putin war and as I see it, the media left left it alone. I reckon the revenue that the digital dollars gave them was preferred against informing the people in what dangers they were. These four also looked into the Botometer and several other methods, relying on verifications by Prolific. The results are pretty horrific “We applied further filtering rules to select only messages where the content was pro-Russian (see Methods). Overall, this yielded messages. The messages further generated nearly 1 million likes. To measure the global exposure to pro-Russian messages, we estimated the overall readership based on the number of unique users that followed authors of pro-Russian messages in our dataset, amounting to ∼14.4 million users.” As I see it, Twitter is big business and they (of course) partially relied on these ‘bots’ to spice up advertisements.
As such Russia had taken out all stops to present their ‘winning’ war. The Guardian reported on February 27th 2022 ‘‘Don’t call it a war’ – propaganda filters the truth about Ukraine on Russian media’ (at https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/feb/26/propaganda-filters-truth-ukraine-war-russian-media) there we see “Kremlin clamps down on Facebook and threatens to muzzle outspoken independent news outlets” with the supporting text “the Russian government has taken extraordinary steps by throttling Facebook and threatening to shut independent media outlets such as TV Rain and the newspaper Novaya Gazeta, which published an edition in Russian and Ukrainian this week with the banner headline “Russia is bombing Ukraine”” and that is merely the tip of the iceberg. The larger setting becomes that people like Weird Duk (a Dutch Telegraph reporter) was, as I personally see it ‘filtering’ the anti-Russian news away. The setting we were given by Ukrainian writer and analyst Mykola Riabchuk was ‘Wierd Duk’s silence on Ukraine is deafening’ with the implicated “What is strikingly missing in Duk’s deliberations is Ukraine, and the silence is deafening. Omissions can be as important in rhetorical strategies as words. In his article any reference to the war, to its victims and culprits, would immediately put in question his central argument: that the West shares equal responsibility for the crisis with Russia” That is the larger setting. I am happy that at this point I don’t work for the AIVD, because in a few months they will have their hands full. You see, the Dutch will be experiencing a setting (not unlike) that dwarves the Dutch hunt of NSB agents (and operatives). And in Dutch media land there will be a culling of these people. I reckon that this will happen in Belgium, Germany, France the UK and Canada too. And all these people will cry like little bitches on the freedom of expression, the freedom of speech and the freedom to expose the ‘facts’ as they saw it. But one-sided reporting makes that harder and a lot more finicky for them to keep up. Partially I am curious what will happen to Thierry Baudet, massively pro-Russian. He is the founder and leader of the far-right Forum for Democracy (FvD). Baudet is opposed to the European Union–Ukraine Association Agreement. Together with GeenStijl and the Burgercomité EU association, Forum for Democracy was one of the behind the campaign to collect the signatures required for the 2016 Dutch Ukraine–European Union Association Agreement referendum. Why this is important is that during the campaign, Baudet at multiple occasions spread fake news, including false reports of purported crimes by the Ukrainian military, and associated himself with pro-Russian activist Vladimir Kornilov. A setting that seemingly connects to the entire social media warfare by Russia.
So as we take tally:
We see that after three years the Russians are down almost one million soldiers and they still are nowhere near a victory. I would like to start an autograph collections on confiscating the entire Hermitage collection to hand over to the Ukraine for reparations that was done by over 7,400 missiles and 3,900 Shahed drone strikes against Ukraine. And when President Putin has to hand over that collection, he will start feeling the sting of starting a war he had no business of starting.
And when some people say that this is merely speculation, consider that the media collected this evidence for publication, even the pro-Russian media did that and now as the pebbles are in boiling water, these weak minded people (traitor is seemingly too harsh a word) will need to set their tally to a new horizon, because Russia is no longer clearly winning and the moment President Putin sees that the game is up, he will cut loose all connections he had to social media and pro-Russian reporters, and as such the lives of people like Wierd Duk and Thierry Baudet will become massively complicated and they will hand over any name they can to get clear of the blast zones, where they are the target. The Dutch might remember that setting during the manhunts they had in 1945-1947.
A nice sidestep is the interrogation of Max Blokzijl the radio reporter of the NSB, yet the freedom of the press didn’t stop him being put in front of a firing squad in September 1945, as such I wonder how people like Wierd Duk think they will do. They might get some support form the 60,163 members that the FvD has, but the Netherlands has roughly 18,000,000 people, not really a majority seeing that he would hope for. And lynching in 1945 was not unheard of. So here are two people that might apply for a high life insurance, but only with the death by natural causes clause in place.
And the Netherlands is not the only place that will face this. I reckon that the bombings of Olenegorsk air base in Murmansk and the Belaya air base in Irkutsk might have something to do with that.
So have a great day and consider what you think is the right move, who should you support and I am not saying that you need to be an outspoken supporter in whatever direction you take. Because sometimes, certain choices are harder than you think. But the media gets no sympathy, they were paid to do a certain thing and they decided on other actions and that will scar them for life as they have been part of the ‘Digital Solution’ for years.
Lawrence van Rijn - Law Lord to be 