Here’s the story of how a 37-follower Twitter account seeded a propaganda narrative about Hawaii that made headlines around the world, thanks to a network of right-wing influencers — and amplification by both Russian and Chinese state media.
I first noted this campaign on Twitter a week ago, when I saw an unusual number of tweets not just expressing the same idea, but using the same specific phrase (“fund Hawaii not Ukraine”) to do so. So I decided to look into it.
While I was doing that, right-wing media picked up the narrative…. Then Russian state media started amplifying it… And then a few days later, Chinese state media joined in, too.
At that point, I knew I was looking at something interesting…
To figure out what was going on, I looked at a sample of 200 tweets using that phrase, and also purposively sampled the earliest tweets using that phrase to study its origins.
Immediately, the timing of the first 4 tweets using that phrase stood out to me. They were spaced out almost exactly an hour apart, nearly to the minute.
The jump from the 1st account, w/ 37 followers, to the 2nd account w/ 51,000+, to the 3rd — a GOP candidate for Atty General w/ 217,000+ followers — was eye-popping.
After analyzing the sample of 200 tweets, I found a lot of indicators of coordination and possible inauthentic activity, including repetition of text, imagery, & video — with one particular video appearing in at least 10% of sampled tweets/QT’s —as well as recycled content from previous fires, and from previous disinformation campaigns surrounding “directed energy weapons.”
Information laundering and recycling is extremely common in disinformation campaigns.
Several temporal trends also emerged as possible indicators of inauthentic/coordinated activity, including the spacing of the initial tweets & the time frames for subsequent tweets, with a disproportionate number of tweets posted during certain blocks of time (eg, 8-10pm)
The accounts also engaged in a lot of co-tweeting & co-retweeting — a pattern that is present in 74% of influence campaigns.
Before long, a talking point seeded by a 37-follower account was picked up and blasted across the headlines by right-wing media & fringe-“left” media, becoming the dominant narrative among mainstream & fringe media outlets alike.
(My personal assessment is that the initial account is part of an influence network, and the account’s activity serves as a sort of flag or traffic sign for others in the network. This is common in political “war rooms.”)
Then Russian state media started amplifying the (now multiple) narratives. Russia is quite effective at identifying and exploiting existing tensions and divisions in the U.S. and other Western nations, as well as selling isolationism to democratic societies by laundering Russian propaganda through western voices.
That’s what RT did here — employing a blend of information- and belief-laundering, with Ron Paul serving as the mouthpiece for their own anti-Ukraine propaganda.
Russia uses tactics like information laundering, persona accounts, ghostwriters, paid local media, & proxy websites to make outward-facing Russian propaganda look organic, local, & homegrown — & to evade the bans that were imposed when they invaded Ukraine. They have a pretty large number of dormant persona accounts that they can activate when needed — like when their official accounts got banned — & then use the personas to peddle Kremlin propaganda while posing as citizens of other countries.
Re. the “dormant” accounts: Yoel Roth, Twitter’s former head of Trust & Safety, testified during a congressional hearing in February that “thousands or hundreds of thousands” of “counterfeit” Russian Twitter accounts targeting the U.S. are still active on the platform as part of an ongoing campaign.
Russia also uses its vast network of persona accounts & proxy websites to peddle fake controversies & conspiracy theories, and basically manufacture stories to get a reaction.
For example, they do things like dangle controversial and false claims out there, then wait for people to start talking about it on social media — and then write articles that cite those very same social media comments as “proof” that people are concerned about the fake controversy that they just manufactured.
So perhaps it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Global Research — a Russian proxy site linked to Russia’s military intel agency — just put up a bunch of articles accusing the US military of waging “weather warfare” with directed energy weapons (DEW’s). This is the new buzzword among the conspiracy theory crowd, who is convinced that a DEW caused the Hawaii fires.
China, in recent years, has started echoing Russian propaganda and disinformation campaigns, especially targeting the US. So it wasn’t a big surprise when Chinese state media joined in here and amplified Russia’s anti-Ukraine talking points about the US response in Hawaii.
This is an alliance we should all be concerned about.
And to be clear: There are legitimate criticisms of the US response to the Hawaii fires, but these failures are not the result of the US providing aid to Ukraine. In fact, they’re the same systemic failures we’ve known about for YEARS and chosen to ignore despite a spike in annual disasters and increasingly severe consequences.
US disaster response & preparedness are not in good shape. We should do something about this! But this isn’t Ukraine’s fault.
But that little bit of nuance — which some of us might just call “truth” — is exactly what disinformation seeks to eliminate, mainly by preying on your social, cognitive, & emotional vulnerabilities. That nuance is like kryptonite to disinformation.
You see, disinformation thrives in a world of artificial simplicity, where context doesn’t exist, & where inconvenient facts can simply be written right out of history books along with things like war crimes and human rights abuses. Just ask Putin.
@rvawonk It is what they do best… but it is very predictable by now. The Russian Federation needs to be dismantled, its criminal regime is a danger to world peace…
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