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This was a lot funnier before Russia invaded Ukraine
Russia mocks Western media
Numerous outlets had suggested that Moscow would invade Ukraine on Wednesday morning
© Press Service of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation
The spokesperson for Russia’s foreign ministry has jokingly asked Western “disinformation media” outlets to publish the future schedule of Moscow’s “invasions,” after the previous prediction of a military incursion into Ukraine passed without incident.
Writing on Telegram, Maria Zakharova poked fun at American and British outlets, which had suggested that Russia would launch an invasion at various times on Wednesday morning. Those forecasts proved to be wrong.
“A request for US and UK disinformation media like Bloomberg, The New York Times, The Sun, etc. Please announce the schedule of our ‘invasions’ for the coming year. I would like to plan a vacation,” Zakharova joked.
Since late October, Western media outlets have suggested that the Kremlin is planning an invasion of Ukraine. In the last few weeks, suggestions that a war is imminent have become more frequent. This claim has been repeatedly denied by the Kremlin, and has also been played down by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
On Tuesday, British tabloids The Sun and The Mirror published claims that Russia was planning to invade Ukraine on Wednesday morning. After this deadline passed, The Sun changed its headline to state that war could begin “at any time.”
American outlet Bloomberg, which had previously mistakenly reported that an invasion had already begun, suggested Russia could attack on February 15, citing anonymous officials. This date also passed without incident.
Speaking on Tuesday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov slammed invasion predictions as “genuine information terrorism” and claimed that all troop movements near the Ukrainian border were part of planned drills.
Pennsylvania school bans CNN from classrooms,
offers patriotic videos instead
“A Pennsylvania school board voted to end mandatory streaming of a CNN-affiliated program in its middle school amid arguments that such broadcasts are biased,” Fox News reported.
“[T]he television will be shut off in the classrooms unless students, teachers or administrators want them to watch the broadcast or videos pertaining to topics such as Veterans Day or the Dec. 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor,” TribLive.com reported.
Pennsylvania US Senate Candidate Carla Sands tweeted in support of the decision in her state writing, “Winning!”
CNN is a trash network that promotes a far-left agenda. But even better, students will spend valuable time learning and reading books or discussing topics with their classmates, not glued to a TV!
The fact that they could not find a channel to replace CNN is a poor comment on the state of Media in the USA, or anywhere in the west.
They say that 'Truth is the First Casualty of War'; the internet has made truth an even greater casualty as any techno-fool can create what appears to be true out of a complete lie and convince millions of people that it's true. This is a necessary step for the emergence of the beast of Rev 13.
Game footage being shared as ‘Ukraine videos’
Clips from ‘Arma III’ and ‘Digital Combat Simulator’ are circulating online as
“videos from Ukraine”
Several videos which have made their way around social media described as footage of the ongoing military conflict in Ukraine have been debunked as clips taken from games.
A report by Bloomberg has revealed that some of the most-viewed videos on Facebook’s gaming channel were clips that were being spread as on-the-ground footage of military action in Ukraine. The videos were reportedly viewed by more than 110,000 people and shared over 25,000 times before they were taken down. Nevertheless, they made their way to other social media platforms, being spread around with titles such as ‘Ukraine fires missiles to intercept Russian aircraft’s artillery fire’ and ‘Intense dogfight in the skies of Ukraine’.
The first video which went viral on Thursday purportedly showed a military plane performing a bombing run while dodging fire from AA defense systems. However, the video turned out to be footage from the ‘Arma III’ military simulator game.
Another clip made the rounds on social media on Friday, supposedly showing a combat engagement between a Ukrainian MiG-29 and a Russian SU-35, with the latter being destroyed by a missile. The video went viral on social media, including English-speaking Twitter, with a caption praising the “ghost of Kiev” - a supposed pilot of Ukraine’s Air Force that has “managed to single-handedly take down 6 Russian fighter jets,” even spawning several comic strips. However, the footage was soon revealed to be a clip from ‘Digital Combat Simulator’, with the author of the original clip explicitly stating it was made in ‘DCS’.
It’s hard to deny the videos do look realistic at first glance, which makes it understandable why many take such posts at face value and are quick to share them around, however it highlights a long standing problem where unverified videos provided with little to no context or research end up being spread throughout social media and even used by news channels and government agencies, like, for example, when the Russian MoD used an image from ‘Arma III’ in a report on Syria in 2019 or when CNN showed clips from a ‘Fallout’ game in a segment about Russian hacking in 2016.
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The White House Is Using TikTok Influencers
to Peddle Propaganda | Opinion
ANGIE SPEAKS , COHOST OF THE LOW SOCIETY PODCAST
ON 3/16/22 AT 5:50 PM EDT
Newsweek
In its continued attempt to help Ukraine fight against a Russian invasion, White House officials and National Security Council staffers gathered 30 influential TikTok stars on a Zoom call to receive guidance and information about the unfolding war in Ukraine and the rising cost of energy. White House director of digital strategy Rob Flaherty told the influencers that he saw their influence as "a critically important avenue" to the American public and asked them to assist the government in "opposing misinformation."
The meeting yielded immediate results. Marcus J. DiPaola, a TikTok influencer with over 3 million followers, was at the White House briefing and went on to tweet the administration's priorities clearly: "The number one message the White House has is U.S. unity with partners & allies. The number two message is to prevent a more expansive war," DiPaola wrote.
18-year-old TikTok star Ellie Zeiler, who has over 10.5 million followers, told The Washington Post how she saw her role. "I'm here to relay the information in a more digestible manner to my followers," Zeiler said. "I would consider myself a White House correspondent for Gen-Z."
The results of the briefing—a humorously uniform bevy of tweets and videos—reveal how slippery the slope is between "fighting misinformation," "civic duty," and just spreading propaganda.
And yet, this is not the first time the Biden White House has deployed social media influencers to promote its agenda. Officials did something similar at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, when the White House authorized thousand-dollar cash payments to influencers on TikTok as part of a campaign to encourage higher vaccination rates among young people. The goal was to create an "influencer army."
But even the vaccine influencer campaign wasn't the first of its kind of Biden. It amounted to "repurposing the influencer marketing tactics that Mr. Biden had used on the campaign trail toward promoting vaccinations," Flaherty, the White House director of digital strategy, told The New York Times. Those tactics were laid out in a 2021 piece in TIME Magazine that exposed what it called "the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election" in a report that detailed alliances between tech companies, business giants, DNC operatives and "left wing" activist groups. "The handshake between business and labor was just one component of a vast, cross-partisan campaign to protect the election—an extraordinary shadow effort dedicated not to winning the vote but to ensuring it would be free and fair, credible and uncorrupted," TIME reported.
A free and fair election is of course a goal worth pursuing. Yet the means outlined here—a shadowy liaison between different private interest groups rooted in social media campaigns and public influence—is something the Democrats are very good at denouncing when such measures are being deployed against Democrats' political goals. Somehow, it's fair game when it's pushing Biden's agenda.
The Biden team's repeated willingness to deploy propaganda works not only to push narratives that are important, like free elections and the use of vaccines to combat COVID-19, but also to squash political dissent—under the guise of civic duty. If the TikTok briefings served the goal of raising awareness and vaccination rates during COVID, they also served the less noble goal of cementing a social consensus about the efficiency of the vaccine for very young people while shaming skeptics. Because that's how propaganda works.
You're seeing something similar with the latest round of TikTok influencers deployed to fight the White House's propaganda battle on inflation and skyrocketing gas prices, which is using attractive young people whose online existence is little more than a full-time marketing gig to evade responsibility for rising costs by blaming economic failures on Putin's actions.
The cultural appeal of TikTok influencers and young people who fulfill themselves by doing creative work online is already controlled and instrumentalized by social media platforms that thrive on clicks and views. It's even more alarming to witness government powers use similar methods to engineer consensus by tapping into this influence to generate propaganda. The Biden administration's clandestine relationship with Big Tech allows these state-sanctioned messages easy access to public consciousness while forcing dissenting perspectives away from the mainstream arena.
Although we all like to think we are, nobody is immune to propaganda. And in times of international conflict and global turmoil when it is deployed more brazenly, vigilance and skepticism are the keys to maintaining a clear view of reality. The seedy and anti-democratic coalition between Big Tech and the liberal establishment and their deployment of influencers to distract from government failures will only intensify as the conflict abroad continues.
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