91: The Anatomy of Misinformation
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Hello and welcome to the August 29th edition of Ukraine Without Hype. I'm Romney Kokratsky and with me is my colleague Anthony Bardaway. Hello. We'll be starting off this episode with a quick news recap. There was a massive missile strike on Ukraine, probably one of the largest since the start of the full-scale war. The Russians damaged quite a lot of things.

But combat is still going on despite the rocket attack. And then we'll talk about one of our favorite topics here at Ukraine Without Hype, which is disinformation in all of its varied forms. So with that said, let's jump right into the news update and we'll start with the missile attack.

On August 26th, Monday, although it continued into Tuesday and really the rest of the week, but mostly on Monday, there was an extremely large Russian missile attack on Ukraine. And by Ukraine, I mean really all of Ukraine. There were strikes in every major city and some smaller ones. Over 100 missiles were shot that day, as well as 100 drones. And

Most of them were intercepted. Roughly about 100 missiles were intercepted. However, there are some points on here that really do bear mentioning, is that the Russians did strike at the Kiev hydroelectric power plant. This is the dam just north of the city, holding back the reservoir known as the Kiev Sea.

Now, it's extremely, extremely unlikely that Russia will be able to breach the dam with missile strikes. This is a dam built to withstand a nuclear war. And even with the Khohofre Dam, that required sabotage from the inside.

by the Russians laying charges within the dam, not a strike from the outside. So there has been some concern that the Russians would be able to destroy this dam via missile strikes and basically wipe out a lot of the low-lying parts of Kyiv, which includes my neighborhood.

but that is unlikely to be the case. However, what it did do was strike at Kyiv and Ukraine's electricity generation capabilities. We are once again seeing mass blackouts, partially because of the damage to the hydroelectric power plant and other power plants throughout the country, and back onto our power outage schedules.

It's not great to be back in blackouts again, though miraculously the power grid did not collapse despite, according to Ukrainergo, Ukrainian national power company, nearly every single thermal power station in the country suffering damage in the attack. There was even an article where an Ukrainergo official said that the company has no idea how the Ukrainian grid

survived and kept on trucking. I'm currently in Vienna, my hometown. And while we had a blackout situation on Monday, we had like 16 hours of blackout with like four hours of power. It's stabilized and we don't have any emergency power cuts. Everything is what they call stabilization measures, which is

when they have a strict schedule of power going in and out so they can balance the load. So somehow our power grid survived despite this, though, to be honest, I feel like this is just a preview of winter. Every winter, the Russians love to leave us in the dark and cold. And I am fully convinced that they will repeat this this winter as well. So I think we're just getting an early taste of that.

Also notable is that the Russians really targeted hotels this time around. A hotel in Krivyi Rih was destroyed, as well as in Kramatorsk, the Hotel Sapphire, where a team from Reuters was staying. So the security advisor for this Reuters team was...

was killed and two of his team members were injured in this strike. Often it is the case that Russia has frequently targeted locations where journalists gather. So think hotels, restaurants, that kind of thing closer to the front. And this is just another in a string of these incidences.

And Reuters did not exactly take it very honorably, I do not believe. They issued a statement that their team member had been killed in a missile strike without naming whose missile did the killing. We've seen this kind of behavior from international organizations before. The UN and the Red Cross will very often put out statements even after their own facilities or personnel are involved.

saying, oh, it's such a shame that this attack happened without naming the perpetrator. But Reuters, as a newswire, as one of the premier global newswires, we only have two, the Associated Press, the AP, and Reuters. As a journalist, I hold them to a higher standard to report the truth. We rely on these newswire services to bring us...

almost the majority of the news that everyone consumes to see that they have the same ethical standards as the UN or the Red Cross. And I mean that derogatorily is it's really disappointing. So other than that, like I said, there were a significant amount of strikes on that day. There were casualties. But again, it was largely targeted at electricity generation. They're going to keep doing this forever. They've done it in the past.

Some of the pro-Russian news and propaganda accounts have been saying, oh, now Russia's getting serious about doing... They're doing the same thing that they always have. They do this, I'd say, once every two months or so, seems to be the regularity. It's been just shy of two months since the attacks on July 8th. So they're pretty much on schedule. I don't see how anyone can see this as a reaction to anything.

There have been reports that this was in reaction to the Ukrainian escalation by invading Kursk. It's been over 20 days at this point since Ukraine went into Kursk, but that was in only a bit over a month after their previous massive missile strike, so it wasn't on schedule for another one yet. It's all just about what they're capable of doing. Once they build up the capability of doing a missile strike, they do it. It doesn't matter what Ukraine did before that point.

Yeah, they quite obviously have a schedule of stocking up these missiles for mass strikes on the grid. Like you just said, Anthony, this is really the nth time this has happened. It's it's so often that there's scarcely any point in tracking it, to be honest, of, oh, was this the biggest strike or this isn't? It's not escalation. This is just part of the Russian war strategy is to save up missiles

and then bomb our grid. Save up missiles, bomb our grid. And it takes them a couple of months to save up enough missiles because missiles are expensive and hard to produce. Another set of attacks came a few days before that, and we're looking now at the city in Zaporizhia region called Hulia Pola. And this is a very historically important city, and it has been on the front line of the conflict since as long as that front line within the Zaporizhia region has been there, almost since the first coup.

couple months of the war. The front lines have pushed further away from it, closer to it as time has gone on, but largely this has been the front line. And a lot of the town, because of that, has been quite heavily devastated by it. This was a considerable regional center in this part of Zaporizhia Oblast, and because of that, it's been a major target for Russian attacks. However, on August 24th, the Russians finally targeted

two of the more important historical landmarks within the city, referring to the legacy of one Nestor Makhno. If you're familiar with Ukrainian history in the early part of the 20th century, Nestor Makhno led an anarchist insurrection in what was called the Free Territory of Ukraine that was largely based out of

Lyapola or nearby Zaporizhia or Alexandrovsk, as it was called at the time. I'm not going to go too much into what that history means, except to say that he has become a symbol of Ukrainian resistance in a way not fully attached to his anarchist beliefs at the time. He's become kind of, here's a Ukrainian that fought against the Russians type figure. To be honest, it's not dissimilar to how Ukrainians seized upon Bandera. Again,

The Fendera's political platform outside of some fanatics is not highly followed. Most people just remember him as being a freedom fighter.

against the Soviets. And Makhno had much the same reputation that he was a freedom fighter against the Bolsheviks. However, I do think that there is a lot in his philosophy that's worth kind of meditating on in the aftermath of these attacks. I found some quotes of his referring to, I mean, he wrote a lot of things, but I was looking for some things he said about the Ukrainians specifically.

and how one of his regrets is that he did not engage more with Ukrainians as a national or ethnic group and solely as class-based group, as socialists often did. So he referred to Ukrainians, quote, "...the Ukrainians are a people who grasped instinctively the meaning of the anarchist ideas

and how to act them out. They suffered incredible hardship. They have never ceased to talk of their freedom and freedom in their form of life. That's from The Anarchist Revolution. In the work, a few words on the national question in Ukraine. In spite of everything, in broaching the national question, we should not overlook the latest developments

in Ukraine. Ukrainian is being spoken now, and by virtue of the new nationalist trend, outsiders who do not speak the local language are scarcely listened to. This is an ethnic thing and ought to be kept in the forefront of our minds. Whereas, up to now, anarchists have enjoyed only a feeble audience among the Ukrainian peasantry. That was because they were concentrated above all in the towns, and what is more, did not use the national tongue of the Ukrainian countryside.

I mean, reflect that now into the current trend where there is quite a lot of ideological diversity in Ukraine, but it is based around the idea of Ukrainians existing as a people and existing in a way that is somewhat separate from the Russians. That excerpt was published in 1928. In four years, it will be a century since that excerpt was published. And quite frankly, nothing has changed.

It is the same fight. You will hear the same sentiments echoed by Ukrainians today that Makhno wrote about in 1928. Yeah, two years earlier, 1926, in the work The Russian Revolution in Ukraine, he wrote about how in exile he could not write in Ukrainian about things happening in Ukraine. Another issue of representation. He's talking about representation here. I have one regret concerning the present work

that is not being published in ukraine and in the ukrainian language culturally the ukrainian people are moving forward to the full realization of their unique qualities and this work could have played a role in that development but i cannot publish my work in the language of my own country the fault is not mine but is due to the conditions in which i find myself this is both referring to how he was in france at the time after the after the bolsheviks fully took over

He was in exile in France, and also he himself was not a great speaker of the Ukrainian language. He was a russophone.

And you'll find, especially in that last quote from the Russian Revolution in Ukraine, one of the reasons also Makhno couldn't really publish in Ukrainian beyond not having a strong grasp of the language is because international leftism, even back then, did not recognize Ukrainians. It recognized Russians and the USSR and the Bolsheviks as the beyond and all of socialism.

There is a direct connection between that stance back then that kind of marginalized Makhno after the failure of the revolution and the victory of the Bolsheviks and the way the especially Western left reacts to Ukrainian socialists now. We are assaulted with the same things, that we aren't real leftists, that we aren't real people, that we don't have a real language or real culture, it's all peasant Russian, which

which obviously is a very colonial idea. But the fact that the narratives echo each other this strongly, I think, is another sign that very little has changed in the century since Mahnoa was alive.

So the two locations in the city that the Russians destroyed on the 24th were his family home that at the time of the revolution, he did not live in, but his brother did as he stayed in basically the city hall. And the other was the Museum of Local Lore, which is not only about Makhno, though a lot of people go to the town such as myself because of the Makhno heritage, but there's a lot more to the history than just that. And this museum, I quite enjoyed. I went there in 2020.

The people who ran this museum were absolutely lovely. Afterwards, they posted on their Facebook, oh, this foreign journalist came to our museum. Isn't that nice? And I would say that the historical society there is among the best in the country. It's a relatively small town, but everything was very... Lots of markings and maps of where everything was and

here's the factory where the revolution started, and here's the hospital that used to be a synagogue. It was all very clear, which is not often the case. I often have to dig and research a lot more. And losing that, like we talked about with New York last week of the destruction of this important cultural hub, I feel the same way about Leopolda. It was really kind of the gold standard, I feel, for smaller towns.

is in historical commemoration. Thankfully, a lot of the exhibits in this museum were able to be evacuated in the two years that it was the front line, but it's still an utter tragedy.

Moving on to more about the combat situation, I'll do this quite quickly. Looking at Pokrov's direction, the battle is still over the surroundings of Hrodivka, though that situation has worsened. To the south of Hrodivka, the town of Novo-Hrodivka was taken, as well as several smaller villages the Russians are occupying.

moving in on. The larger amount of their effort was pointed south. The M04 highway is now basically completely taken over by the Russians. It's cut in multiple places, and by the time you listen to this, they'll likely have taken the entirety of that road for their own use, which puts everything to the southeast of Pokrovsk that was using that road. It

cut off from its most important sources of supply. Though, as I said last week, because it has been on the front line for so long, it was long since pretty much useless. However, what this will do is turn everything south of Pokrovsk and north of Marinka into a

one fairly large cauldron of the Russians. As you see now, they are trying to close off this area, surround it, and take as much of it at one time as they can because they're able to push so far westward in this direction. Looking to the Kursk Front, not much to report there. Ukraine continues to make advances, and they have continued to further isolate this area to the south of the same river, as we talked about last week.

Ukraine had cut off most of their bridges to cross the same river, leaving the territory between the river and the Ukrainian border quite isolated. However, the bigger update that I saw about the same river recently was that the Russians poisoned it. They dumped something into the river, turning a lot of it nasty, inky black. This has killed a lot of the fish and wildlife within the area and

And more shocking for Ukraine is that the river empties into the Desna River in Ukraine, and some areas of the Desna River have also been polluted in such a way. This is environmental terrorism on the part of the Russians. Most likely, it seems, there's no other great explanation for why a river turns black.

And looking north of there to Belarus, there is some concern over a buildup of military equipment and soldiers along the Belarusian-Ukrainian border. There is some concern that the Russians could once again open this northern front using Belarusian soldiers, a formal introduction of Belarus into the war. However, I don't think that's likely. The Belarusian army is basically dead.

used to, was cannibalized for parts to feed the Russian army. They gave up most of their tanks, their heavy equipment, all sent to Russia. Their soldiers are not loyal to the government, and the country itself is not loyal to the government. There's a reason why Belarus has not joined the war thus far, and that's because the Belarusian government would not last very long if they did.

And that has not changed at all since then. The fundamentals are the same. Yeah, the Belarusian dictator, Alexander Lukashenko,

He knows perfectly well how weak his support is. He would have been ousted in the 2020 Belarusian protests, which arose as a result of very poorly hidden electoral fraud, save for the fact that Putin sent Russian troops into the country to stabilize Lukashenko's rule.

And even still, even with how much Lukashenko owes Putin, he has still kept Belarus out of the war because his regime would collapse the second he told Belarusians, who don't even have the Russian imperial myth, to go fight and die in Ukraine. There's literally no way for Belarus to justify that kind of action, not domestically, not internationally.

And Lukashenko wouldn't survive. So the troop buildup, Ukraine officially filed a diplomatic note against Belarus, demanding them to remove their troops from the border. Again, the chances of Belarus actually doing something is not zero, but let's say it's in the single digits.

And most likely the only reason there are troops there is to force Ukraine to have to reinforce the Belarusian border, because regardless of how good the chances are, you can't leave a border undefended when an ally of the enemy you're fighting starts building up, even if everyone knows that they're not going to invade. But again, never say never. But the chances are infestationally small and would very likely lead to the collapse of the Lukashenko regime.

That concludes our news update for this week, and now to get into a larger special topic, which really became very, very important within the last two months, so I feared it could no longer be ignored, and that is the issue of misinformation. Lying. We can just call it lying, but it's a bit special in that these lies travel very far, very quickly, and become extremely politically relevant information.

in ways that they should not be. What's that old saying? A lie can travel halfway across the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes. In this case,

The two examples that we're about to give are going to deal heavily with Britain. This is not intentional. To our British listeners, you just kind of screwed up a bit these last two months. But this is something that affects all countries, and it's just because these two examples became very, very famous and were spread heavily by the Brits that we are unfortunately be talking a lot about Brits in this segment. But of course, America has been a big problem. You

Ukraine, everywhere, this has been a serious problem of misinformation. And our two examples that we're going to first look at the details of the case of before getting into more of the theoretical aspects refer to the Olympic controversy over the Algerian boxer, Iman Khalif, being accused of being a man, despite all evidence to the contrary, as well as

as the large-scale far-right riots in the United Kingdom that started off with some very bad misinformation. So talking about Aman Khalif, again, an Algerian boxer who, during the Olympics, fought and beat one Angela Carini of Italy.

Now, during this fight, Iman Khali very much dominated the fight. At one point, Angela Karini gave a very kind of sloppy punch, left her face open to the most obvious counter I've ever seen, leading to Iman absolutely rocking her and putting her down. Angela...

quickly thereafter gave up on the match because it hurt too much. I don't like criticizing fighters for how they react in a fight, but in this case, we're going to have to because it became a whole political problem that Angela herself contributed to.

No, I'm just thinking of how to say this. Where Angela talked about this hit as the worst she had ever received, heavily implying that there was some foul play afoot and refused to shake hands after the fight and was overall handled it poorly.

leading to accusations that Iman was actually a man. Now, within the world of sports, there's always been a huge... Within the world of sports recently, there's been a huge problem of people hunting down who the trans people are in sport. I mean, not just sport, but it's been especially bad in the sports world of, oh, is this woman really a man? This

This happened to Serena Williams a lot, even, just because, you know, she's a large, muscular woman. As an athlete, she was accused of being a man many, many times, and it's really rude because...

we can say and this spread very very quickly her next opponent was from hungary and as we've gone over many times in this pod hungary has a nasty track record of saying some very nasty things especially from the conservative angle have really been this on this whole beat of the europeans are a bunch of gay transsexual people trying to ruin our conservative structure

So they jumped in and also accused her of being a man. Multiple Hungarian government officials, including the Hungarian fighter who posted an image of her basically fighting a gigantic demon. Worst sportsmanship I've ever seen, though she beat said Hungarian opponent. This T8 cake campaign stretched all over the media. We saw mainstream media repeat this lie that Iman was a transgender.

We saw, of course, the usual suspects such as J.K. Rowling jumping in on this hate campaign,

Basically, the entirety of the right-wing media sphere decided that this was a quote-unquote man, a trans woman, who had joined into women's sport for the sole purpose of assaulting women, was the lie. As we are about to go into, that is all a lie, and a very complicated lie at that. The depths of this lie go quite far, but before we get into the kind of anatomy of that lie...

I will just say that this was extremely disgusting. Now, there's a good place for you to jump in. Like, let's let's make this completely clear. Iman Khalif is a woman. She's always been a woman. She's never been a man. We'll get into the specifics of where this lie came from in a bit. But I really want to make sure there is no ambiguity here. She's a woman.

She is so much a woman that her father, when she was younger, tried to prevent her from boxing because he didn't consider boxing to be a feminine sport. There is the only reason she was attacked is because her opponents decided to dispense with any form of professionalism or sportsmanship. And instead of attacking her skills and beating her in the ring, they decided to go after what they thought was a softer target, that being her gender.

And really, let's kind of face it here. She is a poor person from rural Algeria. We don't have to ask her about this because she might say something not so polite herself. But my feeling is it's very likely that she does not have very enlightened view on the LGBT spectrum herself. So I'm sure that did not make her happy on that aspect.

Of course, it would be better if she did, but we don't ask so many political questions of most athletes. The other thing is she has more masculine facial features, but she's a boxer. I'm sorry. Boxers, athletes, combat athletes tend to be a bit more burly. That's what makes them successful as athletes. She's not going to

be a dainty little thing. And I would also say that there is a racial aspect of this. Let's be real here. This is a brown woman, and in most cases where women athletes are accused of being not really women, quote unquote, is often because they are not white and do not meet white femininity standards.

We saw this with Kester Seminyak. We saw this with the Williams sisters. It comes up enough to be remarked upon. But what actually happened with this specific incidence? And this goes back to the International Boxing Association. The IBA had disqualified Iman Khalif beforehand because they said that she did not pass a gender test beforehand.

of some kind. And before we get into what that test could possibly be, let's get into what the International Boxing Association is. It is very relevant when talking about misinformation generally is that there's always the saying, I'm sure everyone knows, don't shoot the messenger, listen to the message. But when it comes to misinformation, disinformation,

Hostile actors specifically use that gap, that fact that people will listen to a message and not pay too much attention to who said it to spread their misinformation. And the IBA and the IBA's history is critically important to this story. And as Anthony will explain, there's a reason it acts like this.

So the IBA has been the regulatory body for amateur boxing for a very, very long time. And throughout that very, very long time, they've always been hounded by accusations of corruption. I think back to the Rio Olympics of 2016 specifically, where watching boxing during that Olympics was inrushable.

raging. So many of the fights were clearly rigged or had some kind of tomfoolery around them in some way. And with investigations afterwards, it turned out, yeah, a lot of the judges and including some of the athletes in the Rio Olympics 2016 for boxing were

were just being straight up bribed. Judges were taking bribes to call fights a particular way. This came out years afterwards, but even just watching it, it was so clearly corrupt. So the recent problems I'm about to go into, this is the reason, this has always been dark. Like if you know the International Olympic Committee, you know it's corrupt. If you know boxing, it is corrupt. And if you know the IBA, you know that is bad.

one of the most corrupt organizations in the world. And that's the source of our information. It's so corrupt that the International Olympic Committee themselves have censured the IBA for being corrupt. Imagine how corrupt you have to be. Those guys...

And then in 2020, we have a yet another stage in the corruption of the IBA, leading to what eventually led to them being banned. And that is the election of one U.S. president.

Umar Kremlev to the head of the IBA in 2020. Beforehand, he was the head of the European Boxing Association, and he did it all with Russian oligarch money. And when he became the head of the IBA, it became so obvious how deep he was into the pockets of the Kremlin, not only because he is friends with Putin himself. After becoming the head of the IBA, he moved the operations from

From Switzerland, which is the base of, like many international organizations where IBA was based out of, sent it all to Russia. The staffing, operations, everything went to Russia so he wouldn't have to travel far for work. The source of the funding for the IBA became Gazprom, which...

kind of officially became where a lot of the problems came into place. They became solely reliant on Gazprom, the Russian state gas company, natural gas company. They miraculously solved all of the IBA's previous financial concerns.

And they became really almost the sole financial backer. And where the money is, the power is. So the IBA fully bought out by Gazprom and therefore the Russian state. Now, even before they were banned, there were a lot of conflicts.

controversies, including how they suspended the Ukrainian National Boxing Federation in 2022 after the full-scale invasion. One of the previous heads of the organization, Volodymyr Krodivus, was recognized by the IBA as the president because Volodymyr was a personal friend of Umar Kremlin,

He was very pro-Russia, still is, and in some of my research on this, people have referred to the Ukrainian National Boxing Federation under Volodymyr as an outpost of the Russian world in Ukraine. Now, in 2022, he lost his post to Kirill Shevchenko, who was a much more pro-Ukrainian figure. However, he was not recognized as the head of the Ukrainian National Boxing Federation by either the IBA or by the European Boxing Federation.

So actually, I didn't know much about Bredivis. I don't really follow sports or boxing, whatever. But I just quickly pulled up his Ukrainian Wikipedia page here. And it turns out he is from Vienca Oblast. And he is one of the leading figures of the Vienca Mafia.

So, yeah, great guy. And that was who the IBA wanted to head Ukrainian boxing. Although I will say that this conflict has been resolved partially due to the extreme pressures from European boxing and international boxing. So good old Mob Don Volodymyr is once again the head of Ukrainian amateur boxing. That's a problem I feel should be looked into further.

But because of all these shenanigans, like was mentioned, the IBA, their status as the international boxing regulator was revoked by the IOC in 2023. And ever since then, they've been in a long feud with the IOC, calling the international Olympic community all kinds of nasty things, especially with this Olympics and the various controversies that we're not going to get into, but have to do with

you know, look at the woke scolds who took over the Olympics from us and they're turning everything gay, that kind of thing.

But while they were still the regulator, turning back to Iman Khalif here is that Iman Khalif, as the regulator, they were overlooking a lot of international boxing competitions. And in one of them, Iman Khalif beat a Russian boxer named Azalia Ameneva. Azalia was an undefeated boxer at that point and was a favorite of the Russian boxing community. She was the up-and-comer. She was a future of the sport until she lost to Iman.

This outraged the Russian boxing community that their protected boxer could possibly lose, so what they did was try to disqualify Iman so that Azalea could get her undefeated status back. And to do that, they claimed to have done a gender test on Iman that they claim she failed.

failed, and because of that, she was disqualified, and Azalea had her undefeated status returned, so she was right back on track with her career like her Russian masters wanted her to be. Some details here. There never was an announcement of what this gender test actually was. Initially, Umar Kremlev told the

the Russian state news service TASS via telegram, not even through some kind of official press release or anything like that, just through the TASS telegram that Amman had XY chromosomes. By the way, TASS is the Russian state propaganda organ. It is literally where the Russian state publishes its propaganda directly.

So it goes without saying that it's not a press organization. It doesn't have journalists. It's not a newswire. It's not a news organization. It's a propaganda agency. As a result, literally anything printed in the pages of TAS is, let's say, highly suspect is the best thing that I can say about them.

Yeah, so there was no fact-checking on this. The TASS journalists did not ask what this test was. Yeah, I say that with all the derision I can muster. So someone decided to actually ask WADA, the World Anti-Doping Agency, what this test was, because there's a lot of confusion on this subject. And WADA responded by saying that not only did they not issue Iman Khalifa,

a gender test, they don't do gender tests. That's not a thing they administer. They test for various performance-enhancing drugs, they test for blood doping, but they don't test for gender. It's not a thing. So the claim that Iman Alif failed a gender test is quite literally impossible. It's no way for it to be true.

Understand that medically, it is in fact quite complicated to state definitively what a person's "gender" is. There are not only two genders, there is a range of chromosomal expression that the human genome can muster.

And there is a lot of variation in that range. There are people who are intersex. There is no binary line that says on this side, you're a man and on this side, you're a woman. And no, it's not as simple as whether you have XX or XY chromosomes. Like I said,

these chromosomes express themselves in various different ways for humankind, and there are a lot of variations. There is no such thing as a quote-unquote gender test. Now, of course, you could design a test that would look for what people consider to be gender. Very crudely, there is the check the genitals approach. But like I said, there are people with

genitals that seem like they should be male or female, but belong to people with chromosomes that don't reflect that or vice versa. So again, there's no fucking such thing as a gender test.

And that's just looking at the biology of it, which I don't, I really want to stress is not the be all end all of this. There is a world of gender expression that we are not talking about right now, but we are not being biological determinists in any way. However, this is a biological test that they wanted to say. So it is worth saying that even such a test would be impossible.

partially because there's a lot of people out there who believe that they are fully one gender that would also fail such a test because they have an extra chromosome. They also have an XY chromosome or something, and it's not the biology that you learned in high school. It's much more complicated. Biology is complicated. But anyway, moving on from that. So this test not only does not exist, the World Antidoping Agency claims that it never happened. However, Umar Kremlev,

He actually claimed that the reason the IBA was unable to release the results of this supposed alleged gender test is that Khalif herself refused permission for the results of this test to be public.

And again, no such test exists. So it really is very curious what possible results they could have released. It is far more likely that whatever results they would have released would be immediately torn apart by third parties for being a shitty test that doesn't test for what it claims to do.

The next stage of this is that people claimed that Oman did not appeal this decision to the relevant judicial authorities. If she was really a woman as she claimed, she would defend herself in the court of appeals to say this. However, keep in mind that she is a poor woman from rural Algeria.

she does not have money for this. The reason she did not appeal this case was because the case was too expensive, she could not afford a lawyer, and she especially could not go up against, as we said, Gazprom. You

Umar Kremlev has very deep pockets because he's backed by Gazprom against one woman from rural Algeria. That is not the thing that the law is very friendly towards. She would have lost because she could not have a lawyer. The others would have the best lawyers that Gazprom has.

could buy. So this nonsense of, oh, why didn't she appeal? Because she's poor. Now you're just being mean to her for being poor as well. However, because the IBA would go on to lose its certification and would no longer be the regulatory body that oversaw Olympic boxing,

Such a disqualification ended up being meaningless. Everyone else saw what a terrible organization this was to the point where they no longer had authority, so Amon could compete in the Olympics without Umar Kremlev telling her no. Which of course made him very mad. He now had it out for her. Which is why he decided to spread this story even further.

further. So what we have here is this official body, or that had the appearances of being an official body, at this point disqualified from being an official body, giving this information that she was failing gender tests, even though their opinion was no longer even relevant at this point. And to cap off this whole tale, Kremlev

offered Carini, the Italian boxer we mentioned who had lost to Iman Khalif, $100,000, which would have been the purse for an Olympic champion, as some kind of... Well, I hate to say bribe. I am not going to make a legal accusation here. I think it's entirely possible that the IBA just saw their opportunity and jumped on it, but it sure looks like they paid someone to take...

a rhetorical dive, at least. She played her role in this and is being rewarded for it. She may not have done so on purpose, but Karini should have denounced it much earlier on. And Karini had tried to say, oh, I would like to shake hands with my opponent. I handled this poorly, etc., etc. But oh my, it does not look good.

The other case that we're going to get into is the case of the Nazi riots in the United Kingdom. This story begins on July 29th, where there was a knife attack on a Taylor Swift-themed kids' dance workshop in Southport, England, killing three and injuring ten. The actual perpetrator here, the alleged perpetrator here, was one

Axel Rudacubana, a Cardiff-born British man whose parents were from Rwanda. There is not yet any stated motive for what would have caused this. This was a tragedy.

And we're talking about kids here. Kids were killed. Obviously, it's going to be something people are going to have difficult emotions with. And as always, in such a case, there are predatory people willing to pounce upon those emotions. So our story then goes to a woman from Cheshire.

who was a very prominent conspiracy theorist regarding anti-vax stuff and everything else that you can think of in the world of conspiracy theories. She was Brexiteer the whole deal.

and is herself quite wealthy apparently, named Bernie Spothforth, which is... I'm sorry, that's a very English name, Spothforth, that she posted on Twitter that the actual perpetrator was named Ali Al-Shikati, an Islamist terrorist who came to the United Kingdom by boat. But here's the rub. Ali Al-Shikati isn't real. There is no person named Ali Al-Shikati. It is a fake.

fake person made up to spread a racist lie. Now, this all started off on as a simple Twitter post. And as is often the case, a lot of people just make stuff up on Twitter or other forms of social media, and usually it blows over like nothing. Maybe they'll get some people calling her an idiot in her replies before we all move on with our lives and the next stupid Twitter post. However, in this case, it was picked up

by media. The first of these was a Pakistani fake news site called Channel 3 Now, and the other is good old Russia Today. RT took this post and greatly amplified it. From there, it spread, like with the previous one, to all corners of the internet.

After it was boosted by Russian media and by dodgy media that we all know is actually Russian, though not just that. We'll get into this later. It's not just the Russians doing this. There's a very fertile ground for such conspiracy theories, and not only the United Kingdom...

but also other countries as well. But it spread throughout the British right especially, and it was not helped by other parts of the British media talking about the concerns we have with illegal immigration and all that within the context of it, and therefore...

treating it like a real point regarding this attack on this Taylor Swift party. One of these people who really jumped on it the most was one Stephen Yaxley Lennon, better known by his activist name Tommy Robinson. Tommy Robinson is a longtime member of the British far-right,

starting off in the British National Party, the BMP, and really doing a tour of the rest of the British far right, including the English Defence League, which was much bigger in the kind of mid-2010s, an anti-immigrant group that got quite violent from time to time. He was also an advisor to the UK Independence Party leader, Gerard Batten.

So he's a neo-Nazi. He's a neo-Nazi who is very tightly connected to a lot of other neo-Nazis and unfortunately connected to some prominent political leaders, especially those who were behind Brezhnev.

Brexit. But his career kind of kicked up a bit in 2020 when he made a political trip to Russia. He did the whole tour, talking to press, talking to quote-unquote NGOs, various members of the government, especially done through two people, Zahar Prilipin, who is a national Bolshevik, a member of that movement, and was involved in the Donetsk People's Republic. He

apparently led a Donetsk People's Republic militia for a time that claimed to have killed a lot of Ukrainians, though his actual involvement in the leadership of it is in question. He could be making a lot of it up for clout. He could have just been some kind of formal leader. Another is Alexander Malkovich, who had set up a lot of Russian propaganda media in occupied Ukraine, in Mariupol, Militopol, Crimea.

spreading the myths of the Russian world and is, by the way, or was, by the way, very connected to Prokofiev, the head of Wagner, up until his untimely death last year.

So Tommy Robinson, aka Steven Yaxley, is highly connected to Russia, as is really most of the European far-right, who see Russia as their, you know, the great white homeland where Christian values are protected from the gays again. It's all coming down to homophobia is really the running theme here.

Tommy Robinson himself was not present in the country for all this. I believe he was actually on vacation in Cyprus. Leaders are often avoiding the real trouble, but a lot of far-right groups, neo-Nazi groups throughout the United Kingdom, though primarily in England and Northern Ireland...

had massive riots. During these riots, they burned down immigrant-owned businesses, they looted, they assaulted people, and in one of the more severe actions they took, they burned down a hotel housing immigrants in Rotherham.

It is quite frankly amazing that nobody happened to be killed in these riots. They were gigantic. And in many cases, they were met by anti-fascist counter-protesters who tried to prevent them from gaining access to places where immigrants lived, for example. But these right-wing rioters were on a warpath against anything deemed illegal.

Muslim or foreign. Although, like I said before, this was a UK-born Christian who did this, not a Muslim, not an immigrant. It really goes to show you that this, for all their talk of racial supremacy and all the other garbage that these types of people say,

They're in it for the scandal. They don't actually care what anyone's identity really is. They just want to indulge their basest impulses with the minimum amount of introspection and self-awareness that is humanly possible.

So with these two case studies, we're going to break down how they worked and ultimately how we can combat it. So what is our anatomy of misinformation here? Well, the first thing that is done is you introduce a narrative of some kind.

Often, they don't even work. They have varying degrees of success. There was, for example, a disinfo campaign in July of an AI fake saying how Zelensky's wife had bought a Bugatti car by scraping together a bunch of fake documents and a fake AI video of a guy talking. Now, this did catch on for, you know, like a day or two, but...

The laziness of the fake, just the amateur attempt at creating misinformation meant it mostly died away, though it did build into pre-existing narratives of Zelensky stealing all the money to buy fancy things. But the actual disinfo, this specific disinfo attempt was quite weak, and a lot of them are. Often you will see...

just really bad English behind them, or just, it doesn't really catch on. There's no spark to it, really. And so the strategy has to be just create disinfo after disinfo, just throw it out into the darkness, hope something sticks, but even the things that don't stick create an overall atmosphere that is more conducive to more disinfo being created. Even

Even if something is debunked, an idea sticks into people's brains beyond the debunking or the humiliation of it being so shoddy. Another one was an AI fake showing Tom Cruise criticizing the International Olympic Committee. Again, it didn't really take off because it was so fake, but people wanted to be mad at the Olympics for things that...

They should have not been mad at them. I don't like the International Olympic Committee, but you can't just make up things that aren't true about them either. I mean, as journalists...

We're quite fond of finding the actual bad things that bad people do and not just making up stories about them. Because if you make up stories about them, those stories are pretty easy to dismiss and your credibility goes down. So we do try and put an emphasis on, you know, finding the actual factual bad things that bad people do and not just imagining those bad things.

Now, in the case of the UK riots, this was the bad information by just one woman who said that it was a Muslim terrorist who did this by illegally breaking immigration laws. Lots of information about that comes out in every country saying that similar kind of thing, but for whatever reason, this time it really picked up on it. And often what happens is our next step here is that there will be some news site where

with some level of a realistic name or something that's made to look like news website. It's often fake, fake news of various kinds. It could be something like a Alex Jones type situation where it's just a very famous conspiracy theorist.

who takes this small bit of misinformation and expands upon it and makes it bigger and bigger and bigger and by introducing it to more people. And from there, there are two distinct branches of what happens with that misinformation. One of them is that people start to...

add their own embellishments. This was especially the case with the QAnon conspiracy theories, where a large part of what caused the QAnon conspiracy theories to really become as big as they were was that people were encouraged to make up their own misinformation, make up their own conspiracy theories, add an element of gameplay to it almost, where people were encouraged to kind of have fun with making stuff up and to ever...

came up with the most ridiculous thing that would be grabbed onto. And now someone who was just sitting at home glued to their news feeds now creates their own news because the thing they made up, other people liked hearing. And the other direction it can go in is basically the same thing, but with...

more so-called legitimate news sources, which was especially the problem with the Iman Khalif story. We have the misinformation from a very shady source, this Russian mobster, but other news outlets picked up on it and repeated it and treated it like it was true. So this bit of misinformation just filtered its way into things that were actually believable. Like,

actual news stories. And often these real news outlets that reported on Iman Khalif failing gender tests or whatever issued retractions of these stories, but that doesn't really matter. No one reads the retraction. They see the initial headline, not even the story. They see the headline, it gets buried into their brains, and that just becomes true no matter what debunking or retractions happen after the fact.

So there are a couple of issues here, and I just want to take a moment and sort of disentangle them because this can seem like

a pretty overwhelming issue. But if you break it down into pieces, in my experience, anything broken down into pieces is less intimidating than the whole. So modern disinformation, like Anthony's been saying, spreads through, you know, these various fake or real news sites. And I think it's worth separating the kind of institutional propagandists versus the like, let's say, amateur fake news sites. So

A lot of these sites are set up for not even conspiracy theory reasons, but simply to make a buck. Clicks equal money and things that get more clicks equal more money. This, I think, is patently obvious to anyone who lives in the 21st century. So outlets like this and these are if you go on Facebook and

Some one of your family members shares a really suspect story and it comes from an outlet that's called Big News Today or, you know, some variation of that, of those words. These are the fake news spreaders who do it purely for the money. They really could care less about what the content was. They just want whatever clicks. So they're going to choose whatever the most controversial thing is.

and put it up in hopes that it will drive traffic.

These kinds of outlets spread usually virally through social media. People will share links on Twitter or Facebook or whatever. They'll talk about them in TikTok. They'll say, did you know that? And then the rest of it is just utter nonsense and craziness. And that kind of organic spread driven as it is by capitalism and social media is pretty difficult to combat. There's no silver bullet here. But again,

These kinds of stories and these kinds of platforms are very obviously low quality clickbait when you spend more than half a second of your brain on them. Whenever someone gets really interested into the details of these things, they'll very quickly realize that this thing is, you know, it's all bullshit. It's just a clickbait site or whatever.

However, the other vector that these sorts of stories spread is via quote-unquote official organs. So TASS is the official state media outlet of the Russian Federation. What this means is that other institutions, especially organizations and institutions that like to maintain a veneer of neutrality or objectivity, however you want to call it,

they will treat these kind of official bodies as objects

credible. They will presumptively give them credibility because, after all, it is the official state media outlet. Like, if it's lying, it's not for us as, you know, journalists to say, though, obviously, Anthony's high stance is the exact opposite. Especially when these bodies are lying, you should call them out on it all the time. But this isn't how a lot of Western journalism and non-Western journalism even approaches that.

Indian newspapers, for example, will simply parrot Russian claims without any disclaimer. And this happens with Western papers as well.

You can find examples in Austria, in Italy, in Switzerland, where, again, they simply report these claims made in TASS as if they are real, credible things based in journalism and reporting that conform to journalistic standards and ethics, when the reality is couldn't be further from the truth for bodies like this.

However, since these are centralized organizations, it's a little easier to deal with them, mostly by simply not repeating their claims. The easiest way to stop these claims from spreading is to ignore them. Now, of course, there is a symbiotic relationship between these kinds of organic clickbait driven websites that share these stories and these affirmations.

official propaganda bodies, because it's very easy to just scrape the official propaganda story and serve it as your own scandalous content or whatever. These propaganda organs, they aren't going to sue anyone for copyright infringement. Believe you me, like you can steal their content, you can steal their photos, anything that they don't, they can't sue you. Everything they say is made up in lies. Yeah.

If they had to go to a Western court and the only place they could possibly sue someone is in a Western court, they would lose instantly because they have no credibility to speak of. And that would come out. And also their whole point of existing is to get the word out. It's not necessarily to make money. So which is another one of the problems here is that often you would have to, say, pay a subscription for The New York Times or something like

that. They need funding because they need to be self-sustainable. However, with state news outlets such as Russia Today or TASS, they exist to serve the Russian state, and the Russian state is willing to really put a lot of money in them. And I would really like at some time in the future to do a deeper dive into Russia Today specifically and how it has spun out to eruptly and

all these sources that don't on the surface look like Russian state propaganda, even though they are. The whole point is to just get that information out, and if people pick up on it, all the better. And especially with RT, it has, you know, the production value, the money behind it, the nice graphics, the whole deal that it is

he very easily picked up on and treated like a real thing. It's not some crazy conspiracy website from the 1990s that is just a weird collection of, you know, text scrolls. It looks like a real news agency and is treated as such.

often in large parts of the world and also in parts of the U.S. political spectrum who are looking for counter-information. To put a very...

Specific example. We earlier in this episode, we spoke about the Russian missile strike on the hotel in Kramatorsk that killed a Reuters employee and injured a number of their journalists. And we spoke about the passivity of the statement that Reuters put out about the strike, namely avoiding naming names.

Russia as the culprit. It would probably not surprise our listeners to know that Reuters has a partnership with TASS or had a partnership with TASS up until the full-scale invasion. TASS was considered a content partner for Reuters. They would cross-share stories.

They would repost each other's stuff. They would serve up TOS stories as Reuters stories on their paid platforms and so on. Again, this all goes to the question of credibility. This lends these propaganda bodies credibility. And TOS didn't become a propaganda outlet in the year of our lord.

2022 after the full-scale invasion? No. It has explicitly always been a propaganda outlet. It has never been anything resembling journalism. They don't have that in Russia. Fundamentally, they don't have the concept of journalism in Russia. It doesn't exist. But when you have these Western organizations like Reuters that treat the state

propaganda outlets as credible partners, then their lies are shared. And people who are not, let's say, historically biased against Russians will look at these stories shared by TASS through Reuters and believe them regardless of the content.

And even though Reuters stopped working with TASS after the full scale invasion, that credibility has already been established. And other news organizations will continue to repeat TASS claims without checking because, again, it was treated as a normal journalistic publication, despite the fact that it is absolutely not. It's a fiction writing symposium.

And the other side of this institutional thing is that Russia has been very good at digging its claws into different international organizations. They are, after all, one of the members, one of the permanent members of the UN Security Council, or a major global power, and therefore have been given a lot of deference in the world of international organizations.

They have used international law enforcement mechanisms to put out hits, essentially, on dissidents. They have done a lot of nasty things with these otherwise reputable institutions or prestigious institutions. So when you have the IBA...

As we went over, a deeply corrupt and messed up institution that was lying through its teeth, but because it had this title of at least the former regulator for a sport, major news outlets treated it as trustworthy news.

And it took them a couple of days to realize that it wasn't the case. But in those couple of days, the damage was done. So to recap on the anatomy of misinformation, the most important thing is to throw out as much disinformation as possible to create an environment that is friendly to disinformation.

and makes people question what is real and what is not. The next step is sometimes one of these bits of disinformation is able to, for one reason or another,

become actually popular. It bites down on something salient in the culture, maybe. In this case, either anti-immigrant moral panic or anti-trans moral panic. Huge topics that we talked about here. Next, it will go down parallel routes of official channels building into more and more real versions of news from something fake, like some stupid Twitter internet post, up

up to something that appears in actual newspapers. And on the other hand, going through non-official sources of people just making stuff up on their own in a little game of misinformation. And finally comes the last step, which is something being debunked, but

The debunking step takes a few days, and by the time that has done, the misinformation has burrowed its way into people's brains, making them more likely to believe similar misinformation in the future.

Now, that's not to say that these are unstoppable forces that can't be dealt with. We've outlined quite a big problem, but there are ways to fight it. Again, there's no silver bullet. There is no the one simple trick to beat disinformation forever. That's not how it works. Being conscientious of your media consumption is

is kind of something you constantly have to do. However, there are steps that we can take, both as a society and personally, to minimize the impact of this disinfo.

The first of these is actual formal legal mechanisms, like the actual law. Some of this breaks it. And in this case, look at the case of Iman Khalif. After spending several weeks being constantly harassed by major media figures while competing in the Olympics and still winning gold, after her competition was done, she looked at the people who were harassing her

and is currently in the process of bringing lawsuits against J.K. Rowling, Elon Musk, and others for cyber harassment. This legal case, especially for J.K. Rowling specifically, who has an absolute obsession with any kind of anti-trans moral panic, it led to her initially deleting a lot of her statements that she made against Iman. However, she cannot help herself, so is digging her hole.

further. Although this is a difficult route to take. We're talking about J.K. Rowling and Elon Musk, two fabulously wealthy people who have a lot of lawyers at their side. They're quite literally both billionaires. Their resources, by definition, are going to exceed everyone else's. So whatever lawsuit is taking place in French courts...

It will be a long process, and she may not have the funding to actually follow through on that. Well, basically, what we're trying to say is that is not a systemic solution, though it can be a solution for a particular person in a particular case being defamed or whatnot. However, there are also some arrests. So if we look at the UK riots in Pakistan...

A person heading up the Channel 3 Now outlet, the fake news outlet that did a lot of the promotion of the fake news about Muslim terrorists, has been arrested on counter-on-cyber-terrorism charges. While Bernie Spothforth, the person who made that Twitter...

Post was arrested for inciting a riot. And she has since been released, but she's looking to a lot of legal problems. She said that she was just passing on information that she heard because a lot of the problem with misinformation is people just spreading rumors that they have no confirmation of. Now, there are other legal problems.

more systemic ones that could begin to tackle this problem. There's a disinformation scholar called Nina Jankovic who has written a number of books on the topic. She

She's active on social media where she constantly talks about this problem. Her preferred solution is regulation of specifically of these major social media platforms. Social media is without a doubt one of the largest, if not the largest vector of misinformation today. And they wield simply outsized influence over the body politic, over our collective consciousness, over the zeitgeist.

The social media platforms claims that, oh, they're just little guys, you know, fighting for free speech or whatever their excuse today is, does not correspond with reality. Everyone uses social media. It clearly is one of the biggest social factors in people's lives. Then it goes without saying that.

without constant moderation, these platforms can very easily contribute and assist in the spread of misinformation, as we've seen so, so, so many times, even with just the example of the UK riots, though, again, that is far from the only one. And it is clear that self-regulation, that is, moderation, has

has failed. They have failed to self-police. And even when they start succeeding in self-police, as these social media platforms are privately owned entities, they are not state-owned entities, they're not publicly owned entities, their ownership can change and the new ownership can decide to throw out all of the work done to improve moderation, as we see in examples of Twitter.

A lot of the initial focus was on Facebook back in 2016 when Facebook was considered, it still is, but much more so back then, one of the major ways that people got their information, especially in these Facebook groups that were often promoted to people that were often conspiracy theory mills. And during the 2016 election, this issue of misinformation became especially prominent.

There was a lot of focus on the massive amount of misinformation and fake news that was passing through Facebook and Twitter and everything else, but especially Facebook. And even before the 2016 election, there was focus on Facebook groups being used to organize rallies.

racial and ethnic violence in places like India, Myanmar, and elsewhere. After 2016, the next big push was through COVID, and that was when a lot of social media was getting quite serious about banning people and blocking misinformation, specifically about the COVID pandemic.

Famously, Trump was banned from Twitter. However, like Romy was saying, things change. The ownership of Twitter changed to Elon Musk, who has completely abandoned any pretense of wanting to fight misinformation. Elon Musk himself, as we said, is being sued right now for spreading the Iman Khalif cyber harassment. I mean, we could do a whole many. We could do we could shift this podcast to just talk about Musk.

The man himself spreads misinformation. He is one of the larger vectors on Twitter of misinformation. The owner of Twitter is himself the guy who spreads white replacement memes and Protocols of the Elders of Zion conspiracies and other assorted conspiracy theory garbage. The owner of the social media platform.

Regarding the UK Nazi riots, he was saying how this is the start of an English Civil War. He was promoting all that Nazi stuff as well. Though the other alternatives, TikTok is terrible for this. There's a lot of AI-generated content on TikTok, especially that drives misinformation and

Oh my, AI is a serious problem of just making up videos of people talking who do not exist. And this has only become a bigger and bigger problem in the future as they become more and more realistic. There's lots of, I think the element of it being video adds to the parasocial element on TikTok where someone sees like a person talking to them and this person who I like won't lie to me.

And that's not even touching the fact that TikTok is a Chinese company. It has members of the Chinese Communist Party and its governing board. And given how seriously China takes its internet policies, you bet your ass they are very, very involved with the operations of TikTok. Yes, I am aware that the owners of TikTok by dance have denied this

However, their servers are physically located in China. And again, the Chinese Communist Party, as part of their Internet policy, make sure that it is all routed and sorted via Chinese sensors. They may not use those sensors on the Western or non-Chinese facing part of the app.

But those censors are still reading and judging and collating everything said there. And which brings me to another point. The algorithms used by the social media companies are private. They are often

some of the most highly guarded industry secrets in the world. And the fact that these algorithms are private means that we cannot tell. We simply cannot tell, aside from the most obvious and crude changes to the algorithm, that whether the algorithms are promoting or suppressing some given content. For example, again, on Twitter...

Ukrainians often complain about being shadow banned or about being suppressed by the Twitter algorithm.

Again, we objectively there's literally no way to tell you we cannot access that data. Only Twitter has that data and it does not share it. No social media company shares this kind of information. This is, again, industry secret, but it is quite. However, it feels to Ukrainians that we're being suppressed. We can kind of tell that Ukrainian sources are.

are not prioritized at the very least by the Twitter algorithm, lowering the amount of people engagement that Ukrainian posts get. And you can expand this to absolutely anything on TikTok. If you want to promote a trend, the algorithm can promote it. Now, is this something that they're doing on a regular basis? We don't know. There is literally no way to tell whether what you're seeing on your social media feeds

are being deliberately actively manipulated or not. You cannot tell, no one can tell, except for the people working at those companies.

Regarding algorithms, that is one that likely can be regulated in some way if they have to. Because even though this is trade secrets, trade secrets can be submitted to law, to regulatory bodies in order to look at them. We can say that certain things are dangerous and steer against them, though this hard approach is often fraught with all kinds of problems.

including who decides what is considered fake news and what is not. That's always going to be the major problem is who decides what is fake. And another major problem is the fact that

non, for example, non-U.S. entities would not be bound by these laws. And even if they are bound, the capability of the United States to enforce this is almost nil. For example, Telegram. Telegram is also a social media platform. It's not simply a messenger. Telegram groups and Telegram channels are some of the main ways people obtain news in Ukraine, in Russia and other countries. And

Despite all of the U.S.'s laws against hate speech and against child pornography, for example, it doesn't apply to Telegram because it's not a U.S. entity. It can operate in the U.S. Anyone can download the app. And short of banning the app, which is, as Anthony mentioned, incredibly fraught, there's pretty much no way to regulate it.

France has arrested Pavel Durov, the founder of Telegram, accusing him of not cooperating with French authorities to turn over data from Telegram, not following anti-child pornography statutes to limit and remove the spread of child pornography on his platform. But this is, again, not a systemic solution. It's a personal solution that just targets Durov. And it

it is not clear whether or not it will have an effect on Telegram's operations. And for companies like TikTok, again, they're a Chinese company. They're, again, short of banning it. There is no way to regulate the content that it shows people. And on top of this, a lot of the oligarchs that own these platforms, we've already mentioned Musk, are fundamentally disinterested or incentivized to not limit the spread of

misinformation or to spread it themselves. Mark Zuckerberg, the owner of Facebook, now Meta,

recently sent a memo to the United States government where they said that they would resist further government attempts to limit the spread of misinformation on their platforms. They cited COVID-19 pressure as being a big thing. They were pressured quite heavily, according to Facebook, by the U.S. government to limit the spread of COVID-19 vaccine misinformation. And they were also

pressured to limit the spread of misinformation about Hunter Biden's laptop. According to Zuckerberg, they have decided that the fake news of Hunter Biden's laptop was actually true and factual and contains real things that are important to the public interest. Side note, no, it's all fake. It's all bullshit. It's all made up bullshit. However, Facebook has decided that this is a true story.

And they cited that as a specific example of why they will fight government attempts to regulate the content that they share and spread on their platforms. So they are actively working to promote more slop, to promote more misinformation and disinformation to people instead of the opposite.

Though to cap out this social media segment by saying that if anyone has done it okay, it has been YouTube, I'd say that once upon a time, about 10 years ago, you would watch a video about a video game review. Then as the algorithm selects a next video to watch, you are about four to five videos away from seeing outright white nationalist neo-Nazi content talking about how the Jews are importing Africans to wipe out the European race.

This was a serious problem that people picked up on, and the people in charge of YouTube noticed this, and that's no longer the case anymore. Recently, I saw someone do this similar challenge themselves of, how long do I have video audio play on before I hit Nazis? And it took over a thousand, or several thousands before...

Such content started to steer in that direction. Still not a deal. It should not be on there at all. But they went through serious attempt to limit disinformation on their platform. I would say that another issue that arose was one that we'll get into more in this formal media segment that will come up next, is that during the initial...

parts of the full-scale invasion, if you wanted to watch something about Ukraine, the next video that would show up was a lecture by international relations scholar, I force that word on my mouth, John Mearsheimer, who gave a lecture on why the West was responsible for escalating conflicts with Russia. And that was, whatever you watch about Ukraine, that's what you saw next. That was very clearly deliberate.

someone was able to play around with the algorithm, which is not easy to do in order to push that in front of people who wanted to hear about Ukraine. Thankfully, that ended as well. And if you see pro-Ukrainian content on YouTube, the next thing you'll see will probably also be pro-Ukrainian content. They have gone through the steps of fighting that. So it is possible to do if the people in charge haven't.

have the motivation to do so. And I do think some of that motivation should come from actual laws. The next way to combat disinformation is the one that we've talked about most so far when covering the actual events that took place, which was, I guess you'd call it the classical media. And I'd say the biggest problem with classical media is wanting to give everything a nice neutral coverage of

fair shake to everything, even when it's complete and utter nonsense. We already mentioned how a lot of papers ran with the story of Iman Khalif being a man, even though it being nonsense, and eventually having to retract. Also, if you look at the British press during the time of the riots, what they saw was a lot of people are saying right now that people are mad about immigration, so let's talk about immigration. Now, this may be

an important part of the British political discourse or whatever. But in the context that they were discussing it in was giving credence to actual neo-Nazis on the street committing violence. The way they were discussing it as a reason behind the riots made it so that it was a valid thing to talk about. And that's a very dangerous thing to do. When you talk about the causes of

very noxious actors. You cannot talk about them in such a way that gives credence to what they believe.

A very good historical breakdown of this was recently had on the podcast Behind the Bastards hosted by Robert Evans. They had a pair of episodes called How the Liberal Media Helped Fascism Win, came out just this week. And I highly encourage our listeners to give Behind the Bastards a good podcast in general, but specifically that episode a listen. It's

If you're interested in the topics of disinformation, misinformation, propaganda, because you'll find that a lot of the problems that the classic media has now existed back in the 1920s, it exists in 1910s, it exists in the 1900s and so on. This is not a new phenomenon.

An example of institutional failure that the classic media has never in over a century that we've had the concept of a modern press has never been able to properly combat. To fix this, of course, requires this stage new blood journalists who come into the business not necessarily.

subservient to these ideals, not subservient to this veneer of quote-unquote objectivity, not subservient to the idea that

state institutions, no matter how corrupt and propagandistic, should be treated as valid sources, journalists who are more interested in the truth than making sure everyone looks good on paper. Aside from this kind of generational shift, and I do think that that kind of generational shift is possible, there's

There is classic media will remain here. It will remain failing to educate and inform its readership. But again, I am hopeful about the new generation of journalists. I've met quite a few and they do understand that not all stories are made equal. Not all sources are equally credible. And that objectivity is just another form of bias.

And the other part that the mainstream media has difficulty with is giving too much credence to people they identify as experts when they obviously are not. In the Khalif case, we talked about the International Boxing Association and Kremlev and how they were a bad source, but because they had that veneer of respectability,

the media treated them as a good source. Or with the case of that lecture that I was talking about on YouTube, John Mearsheimer is one of the most famous people in the international relations academia. He's wrote a lot of books, some of which are taught in every political science course. He's very famous. He has a big name. He is also completely full of shit on many, many things. One of them being Ukraine. He has been consistently wrong on Ukraine, and a lot of that has to do with his strongholds

strong familiarity with Russia. There are a lot of academics and so-called experts in DC, in London, in Berlin, who have built up strong reputations as the Russia understanders, who were corrupted by their connections with Russia like Saruman through the Palantir,

who are just completely worthless as experts right now. But because they have that position at Princeton or Columbia or something, they have that name next to them. They'll be brought on to write for Foreign Affairs magazine.

or brought before Congress or into the White House, and they're saying utter nonsense. That is one of the biggest problems on the high-end misinformation, I should say. But the last topic we'll talk about here is what can be fixed on the personal level. We all have to have good information sources.

hygiene. We have to have good sources that are reliable. It's always difficult to find those sources, of course. If you are not familiar with a certain topic and you see someone with, I don't know, news from Donbass or something like that that proclaims to be the voice of the people on the ground,

You are not familiar with Ukraine, you're not familiar with Donbass, you might run into them and think they're reliable when they're absolutely not. You came to this podcast assuming we are reliable. I think we are. I think you can fact check us on a lot of things to confirm that we are. But there's still that level of trust there. And that trust is often abused. And there's a lot of bad actors that know the precise ways in order to abuse themselves.

that trust. So finding that good information from journalists who are respectable, who can be fact-checked, who do their research, and is most importantly, if you go to the people in the country and you ask them, oh, this journalist said this thing, does that make sense? If they say, no, that doesn't make any sense whatsoever, they might not be the best journalist in the world. Of course, not everyone has the ability to

travel to another country and ask the people there what they think the story is. Yeah, it's hard. I recognize that's hard. One of the things you can do, however, is read a variety of sources. Read whatever weird little small thing you found where

Read the mainstream papers. We all have Google Translate. If you are reading something especially about a different country, look at their media and read it through Google Translate. Get a sense of what they are saying. And very importantly, don't treat any one source as definitive. In order to really make sure that you are

reading as close to the facts as possible. The best way to ensure that is to read a variety of sources and synthesize the information from all of them to make sure that at least the common points make sense. Of course, that doesn't always help.

All mainstream media can be spreading false narratives just as well as small publications or websites you've never heard of. Again, like in the Imani Khalif case, where major papers and major outlets were spreading the

lie that she was not a woman. However, at least by playing the field like this, you will lessen your chances of falling for misinformation. And we really can't leave out one of the biggest factors that have led to the spread of misinformation in recent years. And that is just people who are often isolated,

were often lonely. This was a big problem during COVID of people being locked in their homes, sitting in front of their Facebook feeds, sitting in front of their

Telegram channels or whatever it was that they were getting bizarre news from, hitting some conspiracy theorist, getting fed more conspiracy theories through algorithmic shenanigans pushing it towards them, and being dug deeper and deeper into this hole of nonsense. I'm saying this right now, listeners, it's very likely you had a family member this happened to, a family friend, someone that you knew who...

a couple years ago was a normal person. Fast forward five years later, and they have dug so deep into the rabbit hole of conspiracy theory and misinformation that you have no idea what they're talking about, but it sounds super racist.

And I don't know what to deal with that. There have been a lot of experts that have tried to find ways to deprogram people. A lot of cult experts especially have looked into this because it's the exact same functions of bringing people into literal cults, bringing people into these pockets of conspiracy theory where...

They don't know even how to get good information anymore because they've been told that everything is a lie except for what this small group of people is telling them. The only way to do it is just to kind of keep people engaged. It's a cultural problem. It's a problem of people...

people being connected to their communities. And that is such a major ask that there's no great way for any one person to do that. Keep people engaged with something in the real world, to keep their feet grounded into something real to their community, their people they know. And not just like some weird club of people who share in their delusions, but the broad spectrum of everyone around them. That's so hard to do.

Of course, yeah, unfortunately, in the modern world, alienation is absolutely a major driver of a whole host of problems, not least this. And there is no, again, real solution about this. Personally, I am having had to cut off old friends and so on.

Most of that I did around 2016 when Trump was first elected. My go-to was just to cut these people out. I don't have any interest in educating or converting people or deprogramming them, especially if they're just people that I see online. Maybe if I saw them in person, I would be more encouraged.

inclined to do so. But adults are adults. They make their choices for the sake of your own health. My advice is simply to cut them off and

And again, regulatory measures have to be taken to manage the spread of disinformation online. There's no other solution. Self-regulation doesn't work. Personal measures are at best half measures. The only real way to try and manage this problem is to ensure some sort of accuracy online.

To loop some of this back into Ukraine, if we look at who in Ukraine has believed Russian propaganda, it has often been very elderly people. They stay in their apartments all the time with nothing but Russian TV stations playing in front of them. For example, one of my friend's grandmothers, she watched Russian TV channels, same thing. She was old, couldn't move very well, so that's just where she was, watching TV.

And to be honest, I agree.

My grandmother was the exact same way and resulted in us simply not speaking for three years. We've started to patch up our relationship. But when the full scale invasion started and I saw that she was very much into the Russian information ecosphere, I cut her out of my life because I had no time to deal with that garbage.

I think that it is possible if you have the ability to stop these people, like cut off the flow of misinformation. It sometimes can be done. It often cannot be. And the person has to be receptive to it. In the case of your grandmother, she was less receptive to it. In the case of my other friend's grandmother, she immediately turned around and became a patriotic Ukrainian as soon as she was no longer being filled with lies. It can happen.

Put parental controls on your parents' and grandparents' Fox News channels. All right, folks? Like, really, that has a proven deprogramming effect. It really does. Don't let your parents and grandparents watch Fox News. You walk into a bar and they have Fox News on, ask them to change it to CNN. If they kick you out, don't go back to that bar. Or, you know what? Have them change it to football. That's fine, too.

So that ends our sub segment on the subject of misinformation. I hope you were able to take something away that you can use in your own lives to kind of help prevent the spread of this in the future. If you see yourself falling into these patterns, pay close attention. We all have to do it. We all know, have to know the thing that we are susceptible to. We all have to know the thing that we are more naive about.

than in other aspects of our lives and be well aware of how that can steer us in the wrong direction. We all have something. Figure out what yours is. Guard it tightly. So that ends our segment on misinformation.

To end off our show, I would just like to say that it was the Independence Day of Ukraine, another year that Ukraine still exists. Ukraine is not yet dead. Its glory shall be born again, and may its enemies melt away. President Zelensky gave an excellent address, and I will now play the end of it that he called "The Sounds of Independence." For a trigger warning, this does include sirens, so some

Some people, such as myself, will sometimes get a little bit jumpy at the sound of sirens, so keep in mind. But this next segment will contain what Ukraine sounds like fighting off the Russian invader. Yeah! Yeah!

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So with that, if you would like to get more information about Ukraine, you can go to our link tree for more information and places you can donate money to that very much need it. If you would like to support this podcast, please tell your friends and family about it. We are good information to fight off the bad information. You can trust us because we tell you so. If you'd like to support us financially, you can go to patreon.com/UkraineWithoutHype and join our list of supporters.

So thank you very much to Deborah Grazer, Randy McNerlan, the voices in my head are from Big Pharma, David Shepard, Giorgio, Fana Kokoretskaya, Michael Drucker, Mike Perrone, Anna Karen Person, Anonymous, Barbara, Dennis Napalm, Devi, Dimitri Litvin, Etienne Soleil, James Burke, Jan, Janara, Jenny Louise, Kevin Alberton, Kyle Smith, Marguerite, Michael Wickman, PLM, Shieldwall, Silas Frank, T. Bart,

Thank you.

Thank you all very much for your support. You're what makes this all possible. Until next week, Slava Ukraini. Yeroyim Slava.

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