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March 23 2022, 15:20 pm

Russia Likely behind Viral Twitter Thread Claiming Ukrainians Torturing Each Other; Thread Shared By Western Far Left and Far Right Figures

Nov­el Sci­ence, a US project research­ing media manip­u­la­tion, is report­ing that Rus­sia appears to be behind a viral Twit­ter thread claim­ing to show Ukraini­ans tor­tur­ing each oth­er. Accord­ing to a report by Nov­el Science’s Hoax­lines blog:

March 22, 2022 A thread claim­ing to show Ukraini­ans mer­ci­less­ly beat­ing men, women, and chil­dren has gone viral. That Ukraini­ans could even be out­side their homes with the non-stop shelling beg­gars belief. Still, I found a lot of ques­tion­able details about this account and the post, fol­low­ers, and retweet­ers. Archive his­to­ry shows the user claimed to be from Scot­land ear­li­er but has since removed that from the pro­file. The account used to have a list­ed name that looked some­thing like “Elon Musk,” at which point it pro­mot­ed links for “eloninvest.org.” The account went dor­mant for a years-long peri­od, as is com­mon with inau­then­tic accounts. The user is clear­ing 400 tweets per day, with the major­i­ty of tweets in sup­port of pro-Krem­lin nar­ra­tives. This is an excep­tion­al­ly high num­ber of tweets, espe­cial­ly from an account that had no tweets for years before this. TruthNest assess­es the account as high­ly active and high­ly influ­en­tial. Con­tent from this user may be designed to reduce sup­port for Ukraini­ans by por­tray­ing them as Nazis or violent.

Read the rest here.

Accord­ing to the Nov­el Sci­ence report, the Twit­ter post linked to Rus­sia was shared by peo­ple in the West on the far right and left over 20,000 times before Twit­ter removed it. The edi­tor of Nov­el Sci­ence point­ed out that both the account that orig­i­nal­ly post­ed the vio­lent videos and a sec­ond account sus­pend­ed by Twit­ter were pre­vi­ous­ly ampli­fied by US con­ser­v­a­tive influ­encer Jack Posobiec.

The Glob­al Influ­ence Oper­a­tions Report has exten­sive­ly report­ed how pro-Russ­ian sen­ti­ment is spread­ing online as an exten­sion of US “cul­ture war” pol­i­tics and that Russ­ian pro­pa­gan­da is being ampli­fied by QAnon con­spir­a­cy the­o­rists and far-right Amer­i­can polit­i­cal fig­ures, includ­ing Fox News anchor Tuck­er Carl­son. GIOR has also recent­ly pub­lished a report on a new and devel­op­ing alliance between US con­ser­v­a­tives and Euro­pean nation­al­ists, seen as a means for Rus­sia to exert covert influ­ence in Europe and the US. Accord­ing to that report, cul­ture war issues play a promi­nent role in that alliance. As the report syn­op­sis states:

Rus­sia is a pro­lif­ic actor in the influ­ence oper­a­tions are­na, both in the US and Europe. Russ­ian Pres­i­dent PUTIN has expressed an inter­est in Rus­sia becom­ing the ide­o­log­i­cal cen­ter of a new glob­al con­ser­v­a­tive alliance, and Euro­pean far-right lead­ers have tak­en pro-Russ­ian posi­tions based on a sim­i­lar ide­ol­o­gy. Hun­gary is at the cen­ter of a devel­op­ing alliance between Euro­pean far-right nation­al­ists and Amer­i­can con­ser­v­a­tives that Rus­sia could poten­tial­ly exploit for use in infor­ma­tion war­fare. This alliance oper­ates under the rubric of “Nation­al Con­ser­vatism,” cen­tered on nation­al sov­er­eign­ty, cul­tur­al iden­ti­ty, and oppo­si­tion to glob­al insti­tu­tions and rep­re­sent­ing a poten­tial­ly rad­i­cal change for the US con­ser­v­a­tive move­ment away from long-held Rea­gan-era philosophies.

Down­load the full report here.

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