Why the Chinese Internet Is Cheering Russia’s Invasion (or, third world sympathies for Russia)
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Petr
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I find this a relatively neutral-minded, and genuinely informative piece:
time.com
BY RICHARD STENGEL
MAY 20, 2022 12:17 PM EDT
Stengel is the former Editor of TIME, an MSNBC analyst and the author of Mandela's Way, a book about his work with the South African president, and Information Wars: How We Lost the Global Battle Against Disinformation.
Is Vladimir Putin losing the information war with Ukraine?
Well, it depends on who you ask.
It’s never easy to measure such things, but here are a few numbers.
While 141 countries in the UN voted to condemn Russia’s aggression, the number of African, Middle Eastern and South American countries who have imposed sanctions on Russia is 0.
Last week, President Joe Biden hosted a summit with eight nations of the Association of Southeast Asian nations, and pressured them to criticize Russia. Their response: silence.
When the Russian Federation released an official list of “unfriendly” nations, no country from Africa, Asia, or South America was on the list, and neither was India or China—the two most populous countries in the world—both of which have been pretty chummy with Putin.
Yes, Putin is losing the information war in Europe and America, but he’s holding his own elsewhere.
According to the Economist Intelligence Unit, two-thirds of the world’s population live in countries who are neutral about the war or support Russia. While China is an ally of Russia, the big non-aligned nations—Brazil, South Africa, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates—voted against Russia in the UN, but resolutely refuse to criticize Putin.
Part of the reason for this is that two-thirds of the world doesn’t see the war that we see. That is due to the balkanization of the internet, which Russia is in part responsible for. Today, there are three internets. There’s the American and Western internet which we think of as the internet. There’s the unfree internet in places like Russia, Turkey, and India where content is restricted and policed. And then there’s the Chinese internet, which is censored and not at all free. The Chinese internet—used by one out of five of the world’s internet users—is pro-Russian. In the unfree internet of Turkey and India and the rest, they get much of their information about the war from Russian state media. They are not seeing Zelensky’s nightly invocations to democracy. They are seeing images of noble Russian soldiers. Two of the most popular hashtags on the Indian internet are #IStandWithPutin and #IStandWithRussia.
In the first few weeks after the invasion, there were a spate of stories in America and Western media about how Ukraine was triumphing in the information war with Russia. Zelensky’s inspiring nightly speeches; the destroyed Russian tanks on Instagram and TikTok; the Ukrainian social media influencers decrying Putin’s invasion. The Ukrainians were nimble and modern and authentic and had a powerful story to tell.
By contrast, Russia’s messaging efforts were top-down, clumsy and slow—a little like their invading army. In 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea, the infamous Russian troll farm was still largely unknown. But its use of false personas, phony websites and blog posts, and malicious bots, seemed to be the state of the art of disinformation.
Back then, Russia had the advantage of surprise—remember the Russian troops in Crimea that were first described as “little green men”? The reports of alleged harassment of Russian speakers in Crimea? Few connected this rash of disinformation to a Russian troll farm in an unmarked building. That was two years before the 2016 election and long before the Mueller report detailed Russia’s efforts to interfere in that election.
This time, Putin telegraphed his efforts for weeks and months. He had over 100,000 troops on the border of Ukraine but couldn’t or wouldn’t explain what they were doing there. The Russians were pioneers in what is called hybrid warfare—the mixture of information war and kinetic war—but the Russian military machine seemed to have no meme battle plan or even how the war would be seen on social media.
Russian messaging was sophisticated in 2014, but they didn’t get much better. Everyone else did. Back in 2014, social media was still text-dominant. Today is the era of real-time video. Zelensky understands this; Putin doesn’t.
When I worked in the Obama State Department, I visited Ukraine in 2015 to help with their messaging. When I met with their then acting information minister, the first question he asked me was, What is a press conference? They were pretty hopeless. But over the next few years, American and European funding for fact-checking organizations and social media training helped jumpstart their transformation.
Now, with their TikTok influencers and multiple channels on Telegram, they are very much up to the moment. They’ve even launched a state-sponsored volunteer IT army which has been carrying out cyber-attacks on Russian targets. In the early days of the war, they put out a call for volunteers on the messaging app Telegram—which has been the main digital battlefield of the war. As many as half-a-million people responded. They created an open source platform for white hat hackers to fight the Russians. They shut down Russia Today for a day after the invasion. It was like people volunteering to fight for the republicans in the Spanish Civil War, but using laptops instead of rifles.
Supporters and activists of Hindu Sena, a right-wing Hindu group, take part in a march in support of Russia during the ongoing Russia-West tensions on Ukraine, in New Delhi on March 6, 2022. (Photo by Sajjad HUSSAIN / AFP) (Photo by SAJJAD HUSSAIN/AFP via Getty Images)
But while Russia’s messaging has been clunky and old-school, let’s not forget, we are not the primary target. Putin has multiple audiences, but his most important audience—and his most reliable one—is domestic. According to the counter-extremism firm Miburo, 85% of Russians get the majority of their information from Russian state media. There, they get a steady diet of Nazis in Ukraine, claims that Ukraine is not a real nation, concerns that Ukraine is pursuing genocide against Russians, and the professionalism and generosity of the Russian military. It’s a simple formula: Russian state media is a projection of how Putin sees the world. According to the Levada Center in Russia, one of the country’s few independent pollsters, more than half of Russians see NATO and the U.S. as the cause of the conflict. Only 7% blame the Kremlin.
As if this relentless state propaganda was not enough, Russia is inoculating its own domestic audience against Western and international narratives about Ukraine by creating a host of fake fact-checking shows and organizations to pre-emptively undermine any news that contradicts Putin’s narrative. Russia’s largest state channel, Channel One, has created a show called “AntiFake” that rebuts what they say are false stories about the war in Ukraine. It employs all the tropes of fact-checking—statistics, forensic analysis, black-and-white video to prove that claims about Russian atrocities are made-up and staged. The Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs posts “Your Daily #Fake” which includes short videos debunking Western claims about the invasion. There’s a Russian channel on Telegram—where so much of the digital battle for truth is going on—called “War on Fakes” which says it is debunking “the information war against Russia.”
The encrypted platform Telegram has become the most important battlefield in the information war in Ukraine. It is the instant news channel for the war—used by both the Ukrainians and the Russians. Zelensky has a channel on Telegram where he talks directly to the Russian people in Russian. Russia has created dozens of channels on Telegram. One reason the information war is more hidden today is because so much of it is on an encrypted platform that does not broadcast, rather than Twitter or Facebook.
The other reason the information war is harder to see these days is that the platforms have abandoned neutrality and taken a side. Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Google have basically blocked Russian messaging. YouTube announced a global block of Russian state media and removed over 1000 channels and 15,000 videos. Facebook has restricted access to official Russian outlets Russia Today and Sputnik in the European Union and banned Russian state media from running ads. Netflix suspended its service in Russia. This is new territory for the platforms which have always wanted to appear apolitical. In response, Russian courts have declared Facebook an extremist organization.
Zelensky may be the TikTok Churchill and a champion of Ukrainian democracy, but he has taken some decidedly undemocratic actions at home. In March, Zelensky banned 11 Ukrainian political parties because of their links to Russia. Most of the parties were small, but one, the Opposition Platform for Life, has 44 seats in the 450 seat Ukraine parliament and is Ukraine’s largest opposition party. It is led by a pro-Russian Ukrainian oligarch with close ties to Putin. In that same month, citing national security, Zelensky effectively ended independent television broadcasting in Ukraine by consolidating all national tv channels into a single state platform. This wasn’t much reported on in the West, but it was headline news in Russia and China. Former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev posted the following on his Telegram channel: “The most democratic president of Modern Ukraine has taken another step towards the Western idea of democracy… He completely banned any activity by opposition parties in Ukraine. Well done!”
For the global audience, the U.S. and the European Union have made something of a tactical error in portraying the war as the West versus Russia, or even as Democracy versus Autocracy. This meme is effective in America and Europe, but plays less well among developing and non-aligned nations. In Africa, much of Asia, and the Middle East, the West are the colonizers who did not permit democracy in the lands they ruled. A better way of mobilizing these countries against Russia is to depict the war as a fundamental, illegal violation of Ukrainian sovereignty, as an imperialist Russia trying to violently expand its own borders That’s something they can relate to. These non-aligned nations don’t hearken to America’s frequent invocation of the “free world.” What they want is some acknowledgement from America and the West that they will at least get rhetorical support if their borders are violated. Kenya’s ambassador to the U.N. rebuked Russia without mentioning democracy or autocracy—or Putin for that matter. “Kenya, and almost every African country, was birthed by the ending of empire. Our borders were not of our own drawing. They were drawn in the distant colonial metropoles of London, Parks, and Lisbon.” Russia, he suggested, is simply trying to repossess a now independent colony.
Even if we exaggerate Ukraine’s expertise on the information battlefield, and underplay the extent of Russian influence, I do think we are sometimes deceiving ourselves by talking about information war when there is a real war going on. Yes, there is an information war in Ukraine, but it is not the war. The war is where people are dying every day and homes and schools are being indiscriminately bombed. Winning and losing an information war is an oversimplified way of looking at things. In some ways, it anesthetizes us from the true horror of the conflict. No, a tank can’t stop a meme, but a meme certainly cannot stop a tank. Memes may wound people’s egos, but they don’t kill them. You can win the information war and lose the real one. The republican freedom fighters won the information war in the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s, but Franco won the real war. Let’s hope that is not what happens in Ukraine.
Putin May Just Be Winning the Information War Outside of the U.S. and Europe
While Russia’s messaging has been clunky and old-school, we are not the primary target—the rest of the world is
Putin May Be Winning the Information War Outside of the U.S. and Europe
BY RICHARD STENGEL
MAY 20, 2022 12:17 PM EDT
Stengel is the former Editor of TIME, an MSNBC analyst and the author of Mandela's Way, a book about his work with the South African president, and Information Wars: How We Lost the Global Battle Against Disinformation.
Is Vladimir Putin losing the information war with Ukraine?
Well, it depends on who you ask.
It’s never easy to measure such things, but here are a few numbers.
While 141 countries in the UN voted to condemn Russia’s aggression, the number of African, Middle Eastern and South American countries who have imposed sanctions on Russia is 0.
Last week, President Joe Biden hosted a summit with eight nations of the Association of Southeast Asian nations, and pressured them to criticize Russia. Their response: silence.
When the Russian Federation released an official list of “unfriendly” nations, no country from Africa, Asia, or South America was on the list, and neither was India or China—the two most populous countries in the world—both of which have been pretty chummy with Putin.
Yes, Putin is losing the information war in Europe and America, but he’s holding his own elsewhere.
According to the Economist Intelligence Unit, two-thirds of the world’s population live in countries who are neutral about the war or support Russia. While China is an ally of Russia, the big non-aligned nations—Brazil, South Africa, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates—voted against Russia in the UN, but resolutely refuse to criticize Putin.
Part of the reason for this is that two-thirds of the world doesn’t see the war that we see. That is due to the balkanization of the internet, which Russia is in part responsible for. Today, there are three internets. There’s the American and Western internet which we think of as the internet. There’s the unfree internet in places like Russia, Turkey, and India where content is restricted and policed. And then there’s the Chinese internet, which is censored and not at all free. The Chinese internet—used by one out of five of the world’s internet users—is pro-Russian. In the unfree internet of Turkey and India and the rest, they get much of their information about the war from Russian state media. They are not seeing Zelensky’s nightly invocations to democracy. They are seeing images of noble Russian soldiers. Two of the most popular hashtags on the Indian internet are #IStandWithPutin and #IStandWithRussia.
In the first few weeks after the invasion, there were a spate of stories in America and Western media about how Ukraine was triumphing in the information war with Russia. Zelensky’s inspiring nightly speeches; the destroyed Russian tanks on Instagram and TikTok; the Ukrainian social media influencers decrying Putin’s invasion. The Ukrainians were nimble and modern and authentic and had a powerful story to tell.
By contrast, Russia’s messaging efforts were top-down, clumsy and slow—a little like their invading army. In 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea, the infamous Russian troll farm was still largely unknown. But its use of false personas, phony websites and blog posts, and malicious bots, seemed to be the state of the art of disinformation.
Back then, Russia had the advantage of surprise—remember the Russian troops in Crimea that were first described as “little green men”? The reports of alleged harassment of Russian speakers in Crimea? Few connected this rash of disinformation to a Russian troll farm in an unmarked building. That was two years before the 2016 election and long before the Mueller report detailed Russia’s efforts to interfere in that election.
This time, Putin telegraphed his efforts for weeks and months. He had over 100,000 troops on the border of Ukraine but couldn’t or wouldn’t explain what they were doing there. The Russians were pioneers in what is called hybrid warfare—the mixture of information war and kinetic war—but the Russian military machine seemed to have no meme battle plan or even how the war would be seen on social media.
Russian messaging was sophisticated in 2014, but they didn’t get much better. Everyone else did. Back in 2014, social media was still text-dominant. Today is the era of real-time video. Zelensky understands this; Putin doesn’t.
When I worked in the Obama State Department, I visited Ukraine in 2015 to help with their messaging. When I met with their then acting information minister, the first question he asked me was, What is a press conference? They were pretty hopeless. But over the next few years, American and European funding for fact-checking organizations and social media training helped jumpstart their transformation.
Now, with their TikTok influencers and multiple channels on Telegram, they are very much up to the moment. They’ve even launched a state-sponsored volunteer IT army which has been carrying out cyber-attacks on Russian targets. In the early days of the war, they put out a call for volunteers on the messaging app Telegram—which has been the main digital battlefield of the war. As many as half-a-million people responded. They created an open source platform for white hat hackers to fight the Russians. They shut down Russia Today for a day after the invasion. It was like people volunteering to fight for the republicans in the Spanish Civil War, but using laptops instead of rifles.
Supporters and activists of Hindu Sena, a right-wing Hindu group, take part in a march in support of Russia during the ongoing Russia-West tensions on Ukraine, in New Delhi on March 6, 2022. (Photo by Sajjad HUSSAIN / AFP) (Photo by SAJJAD HUSSAIN/AFP via Getty Images)
But while Russia’s messaging has been clunky and old-school, let’s not forget, we are not the primary target. Putin has multiple audiences, but his most important audience—and his most reliable one—is domestic. According to the counter-extremism firm Miburo, 85% of Russians get the majority of their information from Russian state media. There, they get a steady diet of Nazis in Ukraine, claims that Ukraine is not a real nation, concerns that Ukraine is pursuing genocide against Russians, and the professionalism and generosity of the Russian military. It’s a simple formula: Russian state media is a projection of how Putin sees the world. According to the Levada Center in Russia, one of the country’s few independent pollsters, more than half of Russians see NATO and the U.S. as the cause of the conflict. Only 7% blame the Kremlin.
As if this relentless state propaganda was not enough, Russia is inoculating its own domestic audience against Western and international narratives about Ukraine by creating a host of fake fact-checking shows and organizations to pre-emptively undermine any news that contradicts Putin’s narrative. Russia’s largest state channel, Channel One, has created a show called “AntiFake” that rebuts what they say are false stories about the war in Ukraine. It employs all the tropes of fact-checking—statistics, forensic analysis, black-and-white video to prove that claims about Russian atrocities are made-up and staged. The Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs posts “Your Daily #Fake” which includes short videos debunking Western claims about the invasion. There’s a Russian channel on Telegram—where so much of the digital battle for truth is going on—called “War on Fakes” which says it is debunking “the information war against Russia.”
The encrypted platform Telegram has become the most important battlefield in the information war in Ukraine. It is the instant news channel for the war—used by both the Ukrainians and the Russians. Zelensky has a channel on Telegram where he talks directly to the Russian people in Russian. Russia has created dozens of channels on Telegram. One reason the information war is more hidden today is because so much of it is on an encrypted platform that does not broadcast, rather than Twitter or Facebook.
The other reason the information war is harder to see these days is that the platforms have abandoned neutrality and taken a side. Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Google have basically blocked Russian messaging. YouTube announced a global block of Russian state media and removed over 1000 channels and 15,000 videos. Facebook has restricted access to official Russian outlets Russia Today and Sputnik in the European Union and banned Russian state media from running ads. Netflix suspended its service in Russia. This is new territory for the platforms which have always wanted to appear apolitical. In response, Russian courts have declared Facebook an extremist organization.
Zelensky may be the TikTok Churchill and a champion of Ukrainian democracy, but he has taken some decidedly undemocratic actions at home. In March, Zelensky banned 11 Ukrainian political parties because of their links to Russia. Most of the parties were small, but one, the Opposition Platform for Life, has 44 seats in the 450 seat Ukraine parliament and is Ukraine’s largest opposition party. It is led by a pro-Russian Ukrainian oligarch with close ties to Putin. In that same month, citing national security, Zelensky effectively ended independent television broadcasting in Ukraine by consolidating all national tv channels into a single state platform. This wasn’t much reported on in the West, but it was headline news in Russia and China. Former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev posted the following on his Telegram channel: “The most democratic president of Modern Ukraine has taken another step towards the Western idea of democracy… He completely banned any activity by opposition parties in Ukraine. Well done!”
For the global audience, the U.S. and the European Union have made something of a tactical error in portraying the war as the West versus Russia, or even as Democracy versus Autocracy. This meme is effective in America and Europe, but plays less well among developing and non-aligned nations. In Africa, much of Asia, and the Middle East, the West are the colonizers who did not permit democracy in the lands they ruled. A better way of mobilizing these countries against Russia is to depict the war as a fundamental, illegal violation of Ukrainian sovereignty, as an imperialist Russia trying to violently expand its own borders That’s something they can relate to. These non-aligned nations don’t hearken to America’s frequent invocation of the “free world.” What they want is some acknowledgement from America and the West that they will at least get rhetorical support if their borders are violated. Kenya’s ambassador to the U.N. rebuked Russia without mentioning democracy or autocracy—or Putin for that matter. “Kenya, and almost every African country, was birthed by the ending of empire. Our borders were not of our own drawing. They were drawn in the distant colonial metropoles of London, Parks, and Lisbon.” Russia, he suggested, is simply trying to repossess a now independent colony.
Even if we exaggerate Ukraine’s expertise on the information battlefield, and underplay the extent of Russian influence, I do think we are sometimes deceiving ourselves by talking about information war when there is a real war going on. Yes, there is an information war in Ukraine, but it is not the war. The war is where people are dying every day and homes and schools are being indiscriminately bombed. Winning and losing an information war is an oversimplified way of looking at things. In some ways, it anesthetizes us from the true horror of the conflict. No, a tank can’t stop a meme, but a meme certainly cannot stop a tank. Memes may wound people’s egos, but they don’t kill them. You can win the information war and lose the real one. The republican freedom fighters won the information war in the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s, but Franco won the real war. Let’s hope that is not what happens in Ukraine.
Petr
Administrator
How the Czechs Discovered Africa
Sometimes, interesting stuff is being published in the mainstream Czech media, such as this article. It is rather short so I will translate it here. Give them a lesson Russia, is being heard from A…
insomniacresurrected.com
How the Czechs Discovered Africa
insomniacresurrected7th Jun 2022
Sometimes, interesting stuff is being published in the mainstream Czech media publish, such as this article. It is rather short so I will translate it here.
Give them a lesson Russia, is being heard from Africa, anti-Western sentiment is being spread here.
There is an increasing anti-Western sentiment being spread in Subsaharan Africa. Local social media are being filled with messages supporting Russian actions in Ukraine. Russia is being defended by members of African governments, the opposition, and panafricanists. The television channels in Subsaharan Africa are airing the Russian version of events in their news programmes, and do not hide their support for the Russian president, Vladimir Putin.
“Putin wants to elevate his country, he does not have the blood of slavers and colonisers on his hands. Even though he isn’t my messiah, I prefer him over those damned African presidents that are beholden to Western oligarchy,” - said supporter of panafricanism, Kemil Seba, reports AFP.
In a similar manner, the leader of the South African far left, Julius Malema: “We say to NATO and America that we are not supporting them. We are with Russia and want to thank them. May they give the West a lesson, we need a new world order, we are tired of taking orders from the Americans.”
On social media, an increasing number of people are critical of the “imperialists” and those that agree with Russia’s actions. “On YouTube, channels spreading destabilising discourse are bustling. They are distancing African regimes from the West, and serve Russian interests.” -Said Mahama Tawat from Malmö University in Sweden.
We can see Russian influence in practice on the streets of Bamako, Ndjamena, and Ouagadougou, where protesters with Russian flags express their displeasure with French military presence in the Sahel. And it is also visible in the media.
Panafrican television channel, Afrique Média, which broadcasts in Cameroon regularly features debates where support of the Kremlin and Kemil Seba is also frequently featured there. “Ukrainian-Russian war, how the Putin government has sown panic in the West?” and “The plan to murder Vladimir Putin, how far can West go?” are just two examples of debating topics on their Facebook page.
Some African governments also support this pro-Russian atmosphere, as was shown in the vote in the General Assembly of the UN that was held on 2 March on a resolution condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Out of 35 countries that have abstained from the vote, 16 were African. Among them we need to count also Eritrea, which voted against the resolution, and 8 African countries that did not take part in the vote.
“The countries that have abstained are all, with the exception of Senegal, countries with authoritarian regimes, or those that have historical and often military ties [to Russia] since the days of the USSR.” -commented Tawat.
Some African nations have openly sided with Moscow. For instance, the Central African Republic has asked Moscow for help during an offensive of militant groups in 2020. Military units in these countries, according to the UN have been recruiting reinforcements in the form of many Russian mercenaries from the Wagner group.
Mali, that asked French troops to leave their territory receives weapons from Russia, including attack helicopters. Their military speaks of an “old and honest” partnership with Russia. There are many Russians heading to Bamako that are labeled as instructors, the French and their allies consider them to be close to the Kremlin affiliated Wagner group.
Russia adjusts its propaganda according to the receiving audience
English speaking Africa is in a similar situation. Tanzania has signed an agreement on military cooperation in 2016, which includes training of African soldiers on Russian bases.The son of the president of Uganda, Yoweri Museveni, an important general named, Muhoozi Kainerugaba has recently expressed support for Vladimir Putin with a tweet saying: “The majority of the non-white people support Russia’s actions in Ukraine. Putin is absolutely justified here.”
As is featured in an analysis of the French institute for international relations, the Russians tailor their messages according to the public it is intended for. “Xenophobic appeals and statements against migrants and muslims are aimed at European society, while messages about decolonisation and the end of imperialism are aimed at Africa.”
A fertile soil for the spread of disinformation was created in Africa. The start of the war in Ukraine is congruent with the boom of panafrican social networks, where the Russian invasion is justified and Russian military might is demonstrated.
***
Petr
Administrator
India Increases Russian Oil Imports Because It’s Good Business - Daily Stormer
There's one rule in life that outweighs every other rule: get money. If the rule overrides that rule
R Crowley the White
Megaphoron
does "the world overwhelmingly condemn" ? I dont think so. But that is where I quit reading
Charles Silvius Haddock
Megaphoron
The interesting thing is that there was a lot of pro-Ukrainian sentiment in China circa 2014 when the controversy first appeared. There was a fairly large contingent of Westernized intellectuals in China with anti-Russian views. However, events since then have moved China decisively in Russia's favor. Also, Russian-Chinese collaboration on a currency bloc to attack the petrodollar system dates to around that time also.
It has been a very busy 8 years.
It has been a very busy 8 years.