As Russia wages disinfo war, Ukraine's cyber chief calls for global anti-fake news fight As a hybrid offline and online war wages on in Ukraine, Viktor Zhora, who leads the country's cybersecurity agency, has had a front-row seat of it all. Zhora is the deputy chairman and chief digital transformation officer at Ukraine's state service of special communication and information protection. Cyber aggression from …
I can see the fake news info war has made its way to this sleepy Internet backwater as well. Helpfully marked with distinctive handles to aid identification though. ..... Anonymous Coward
El Reg, a sleepy Internet backwater ????? Now there's a novelty only the seriously misinformed and severely undereducated would proffer.
And that also identifies you as one of the new intakes of Anonymous Coward, AC.
Take care the revolving resolving doors inside this sleepy Internet backwater don't hit you whilst travelling through and knock you out and for six and head over heels on your way out of its myriad doozy stealthy compartmentalisations.
Soviet Union/Russian Federation disinformation is nothing new. You have to understand the Russian mindset - "vranyo" is a long established, accepted, well understood Russian practice and as such, lying, (as we understand it and deprecate it), is not viewed in the same way by the Russian mindset. Fortunately it is easily detected if the speaker is visible - if his lips are moving than he is almost certainly lying and the higher up the command chain you go, the more likely that is to be true.
- and lost (almost) everywhere else, at least where it matters.
on the subject: Zhoras statements are just empty farts, same as any public platititudes (generally pedalled by politicians), that we must 'strive for a fairer society', 'fight against injustice / racism / aggression / climate change / oppression / discrimination / deforestration / defenestration (last one doesn't apply to Russia of course) / etc.
It'd be _vaguely_ interesting to get to the bottom (sorry, no pun unintended) as to why he farted. Was it because he had to say something in public and what do you say other than bleedig obvious, or was it meant to be a usual, not-very-subtle suggestion: give us more money.
And now, because I dare to criticise a Ukrainian in the course of a just war, etc, etc., I'm proud to have signed up to the Kremlin-troll pay-roll brigade.
Overall, I would much rather see a _genuine_ evaluation of whether it's _really_ possible to combat mis-information, because all I've heard about it, in the course of several years is that no, you can't, fakes can not be effectively fought against, because it takes little time to come up with a fake (and they don't need to be sophisticated, to 'work', so you can keep producing them, effectively flooding the infosphere), while it takes a huge amount of time and effort (thus money) to repair the damage, and even then the chances of success are limited, because once spread, you can't target the full fake audience. One failed example of such 'war on fakes' would be a radio programme on one of the Ukrainian radio statations, where they prepare a list of Russian fakes of the day, and the only way they 'combat' them is by deriding them as 'fake! And this one - an obvious fake! And this one too, all fakes! Trouble is, when you deny one claim, by claiming something else, it only works on your own infobubble, but then, it only serves some of the purpose, i.e. to re-assure your core audience your / their cause is just. Those with an opposite view won't even listen, and those who have doubts, still go away unconvinced, because you substitute one empty claim with another empty claim.
... and lost (almost) everywhere else
yes, this is rarely said, that in most of the world this war hardly registers on the radar, and where it does the people are quite happy the self-righteous "West " gets a bleeding nose. And they also make fun of the self-inflicted damage to cut us off from cheap Russian gaz while buying expensive fracking gaz from the US, which is obviously pulling the strings from behind
In any dispute -- in fact in just about every political situation -- you have groups putting out their point of view. We all know that. What's not a good idea is to believe that 'our' group doesn't spread disinformation but 'they' do.
Even this article's headline is a typical example of how this works. It builds on presuppositions that have been carefully ingrained in us.
In case you've not noticed it information from UA is tightly controlled. In fact just recently a US military person commented that they have might tighter 'operational security' than the Russians which they use to their advantage. We in the US learned from the Vietnam war that its not a good idea to give journalists free access to the conflict, we need to tightly control and curate any information being given out for security and also to curate public opinion, hence the use of embedded journalists. The result is often disinformation, the impression planted in the public mind of the country and the conflict often bears little resemblance to the actual place and events. It would be naive to think that the same thing isn't happening in Ukraine, especially as we don't actually see very much hard information (and all too often the same recycled photographs).
Precisely, martinusher, quite so.
Therefore, then logically and beyond any question of reasonable doubt, nothing is as it would popularly seem, and the realities one presumes oneself to be living in are remotely, relatively anonymously constructed, media delivered, fake existences ....... and it is not absolutely necessary for such exercises and perceptions management programs and projects to be in extremis and in exclusive elite executive command and control to be almightily effective and attractive and addictive at one one end of the NEUKlearer HyperRadioProACTive IT spectrum or mightily disruptive and destructively chaotic and depressive at the other end ‽ .
And .... to not realise nor accept that as a matter of true and honest universal fact has one condemning oneself to be energised as nothing more powerful or important than an expendable pawn to be considered for roadkill to that and/or those who do realise and accept and would continually script it with stealthy instruction sets for puppeteers to follow and render their thoughts shared in relatively secure and safe secret spaces today as proxy actions and decisions for resulting planned future outcomes tomorrow ..... with that modus operandi/vivendi cycle exercised every day, time and time again, in excelsis and to XSSXXXX.
Who/What does that for/to you today, with you following their plans for tomorrow in a bleak future land and seescape?
A global fight on fake news - well, not really global, more targeted at the populations of any supporting yet government, or in other words predominantly Westerners (given the majority of the global population doesn't care) - which is really business as usual because most of the media content being offered has already been heavily manipulated to appeal to the prejudices of the audience, hence why we have multiple "news" providers managing to produce dynamically opposing narratives for the same story.
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