Council libraries have distributed pro-migrant bookmarks that praise the work ethic of refugees and say they aim to help people "embrace new cultures" as the area will "naturally become more diverse".
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In the information war, the most effective message is rarely the one a government delivers directly.
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An ancient but ever-effective technique
In the information war, the most effective message is rarely the one a government delivers directly. A ministerial statement is taken at face value – as the position of a vested party – and the reader weighs it accordingly. When the same argument comes from the mouth of a professor, a retired general, or a researcher at an institute with a reassuring name, its nature changes. It ceases to appear as someone’s position and begins to seem like a description of reality. It is this transformation – rather than the spread of fake news – that is the true subject of these pages: the use of experts as multipliers of credibility, and the selection of experts as a tool of power over public opinion.
It is worth clarifying right away what is not being argued. It is not being argued that experts are manipulators, nor that expertise is an invention of the elites: those who reason this way end up handing the debate over to whoever shouts the loudest, which is a worse outcome. The argument is more limited in scope and, I believe, more difficult to refute. The expert’s authority is a resource, and like any resource, it can be produced, acquired, concentrated, or denied to the opponent. Those involved in strategic communication have known this for a century. The public, for the most part, is unaware of it.
Edward Bernays, Freud’s nephew who effectively invented the profession of public relations in the 1920s, theorized it candidly. In Propaganda, published in 1928, he explained that in a mass society, opinions are not formed through direct persuasion but through the groups and leaders whom people trust. This led to a method he would call the “third-party technique”: do not tell the public what you want, but have someone the public considers impartial say it. In his memoirs, he recounted a classic example. Hired by a bacon manufacturer, he did not buy advertising space; instead, he had a doctor opine on whether a hearty breakfast was healthier than a light one, gathered the endorsement of thousands of colleagues, and had it reported in the newspapers as news. The product was barely mentioned. The doctors were.
The tobacco industry brought this method to its full maturity. On January 4, 1954, as early research was linking smoking to lung cancer, the major American tobacco companies published a “frank statement to smokers” in hundreds of daily newspapers, announcing the creation of an independent research committee. For decades, that committee funded studies, conferences, and scientists whose primary function was not to prove that smoking was harmless, but to keep the controversy alive. Doubt was the product. And doubt, to be credible, needed white coats.
The Cold War transferred this technique to the geopolitical arena, and it did so on both sides. Beginning in 1950, the Paris-based Congress for Cultural Freedom funded magazines, festivals, and conferences that offered European intellectuals a prestigious platform and an anti-communist orientation; in 1967, it was discovered that much of the money came from the CIA, via front organizations. Many of those intellectuals were unaware of the source of the funds, and this is the point: their sincerity was essential to the operation’s success. On the other side of the Iron Curtain, the KGB put forward the theory in 1983 that the AIDS virus had been created in an American military laboratory. The story first appeared in an Indian newspaper, the Patriot, and remained a fringe claim until 1986, when a retired East German biophysicist, Jakob Segal, lent it scientific credibility with a report that the press in dozens of countries cited as expert opinion. The lie had been circulating for three years. It was a scientist’s signature that propelled it forward.
The Pentagon’s “democratic” model
One might think that these methods belong to authoritarian regimes or the darkest phases of the Cold War. The best-documented case of the past few decades, however, concerns the world’s most powerful democracy – and was brought to light by a newspaper from that very democracy.
On April 20, 2008, the New York Times published an investigative report by David Barstow, based on approximately 8,000 pages of internal documents obtained through a lawsuit. It detailed a program launched by the Pentagon in 2002, on the eve of the Iraq War: dozens of retired officers, who regularly appeared on television networks as military commentators, were summoned to confidential meetings, given talking points to promote, and taken on organized visits to Guantánamo and Iraq. In public, they appeared as independent analysts. According to the investigation, many of them had ties to defense contractors seeking contracts from the Pentagon itself – a connection that the television networks were largely unaware of and, in any case, did not disclose to viewers. A subsequent investigation, focusing on General Barry McCaffrey, revealed how a single commentator could simultaneously serve as a television pundit, a consultant to defense contractors, and a privileged interlocutor with the military leadership. Barstow’s work won the Pulitzer Prize in 2009.
That case deserves attention for three reasons. The first is that none of the analysts needed to lie: all they had to do was repeat, with their own faces and their former uniforms, the narrative provided by the Department of Defense. The second is that the system relied on an information asymmetry, because the public knew those men were generals but did not know who they worked for the day after the broadcast. The third is the most important. Those who ran the program did not consider it a covert operation but rather a normal communications activity, and when the scandal broke, the television networks largely responded with silence. The expert as a tool of influence was not an anomaly in the system; it was part of it.
The market for opinions
To understand why this technique works, we must look at how opinions are selected, and here the problem is not limited to governments.
Take the monumental work of Philip Tetlock, who collected predictions from some 300 political and economic experts over nearly twenty years – tens of thousands of forecasts verified over time. The results, published in 2005, showed that, on the whole, experts performed only slightly better than simple statistical rules, and that those most frequently featured in the media tended to be more wrong than the others. Tetlock offered a convincing explanation: television rewards certainty, brevity, and soundbites – precisely the qualities that make an analyst less capable of correcting himself. The format selects a type of expert even before it selects a type of opinion. And it is a format that anyone wishing to influence the debate can study and exploit.
Alongside the format is money. In September 2014, another investigation by the New York Times revealed that dozens of foreign governments were funding Washington’s leading think tanks, often without the public’s knowledge when researchers from those institutions participated in the debate or testified before Congress; Qatar, to cite the most talked-about case, had contributed nearly fifteen million dollars to the Brookings Institution over four years. In June 2023, a study by the Quincy Institute – itself an institution with a specific foreign policy agenda – argued that in American media coverage of the war in Ukraine, think tanks funded by the defense industry were cited significantly more frequently than those without such ties. This finding should be interpreted with the caution due to any analysis produced by one side of the debate. But the phenomenon it describes is recognizable to anyone who follows the international press: those who speak out on the need for new arms supplies often work for an institute that receives funding from the very companies that produce those weapons, and this fact is rarely mentioned in the byline.
The most instructive European case is that of the Integrity Initiative, a project of the Institute for Statecraft, a small British organization founded to counter Russian disinformation. In November 2018, a group of hackers leaked internal documents describing a network of national “clusters” of journalists, academics, and officials in various European countries. The British government confirmed that it had funded the project with nearly two million pounds from the Foreign Office. The controversy centered on a few specific incidents: messages posted from the project’s account targeting Labour opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn and, according to the documents, a campaign by the Spanish group against the appointment of Colonel Pedro Baños as head of the Department of National Security – an appointment that ultimately did not go through. It is not necessary to accept the most conspiratorial interpretation that was offered, nor to forget that the source of the documents was itself opaque and, in all likelihood, hostile. The confirmed fact remains that a democratic government was funding a network of ostensibly independent experts with the aim of influencing public debate in other allied countries.
Four roles of the expert
When considered together, these cases allow us to distinguish the various roles that the expert plays within the framework of information warfare. Distinguishing them is useful because each requires a different defense on the part of the reader.
The first is validation. The expert takes a thesis originating from an interested party and lends it his or her apparent neutrality: this is the case with Segal regarding the KGB and with military analysts regarding the Pentagon. Russian military theory has a name for the ultimate effect of this type of operation: “reflexive control” – that is, the art of conveying to the adversary the premises from which the adversary will, believing himself to be acting freely, derive the desired decision. A credible expert is the ideal vehicle for those premises, because the recipient accepts them as knowledge rather than as a message.
The second function is the creation of doubt, pioneered by the tobacco industry. Here, the expert does not need to convince anyone; they need only make it seem plausible that a controversy exists, and that controversy alone is enough to paralyze decision-making.
The third function is the most subtle and, in democracies, the most widespread: the delineation of boundaries. The expert is not used to assert a thesis but to determine which theses are admissible. On October 19, 2020, two weeks before the U.S. presidential election, fifty-one former intelligence officials signed an open letter in which they argued that the story of Hunter Biden’s laptop, revealed by the New York Post, exhibited “all the classic signs” of a Russian information operation. The letter clarified that the signatories had no evidence of Russian involvement. Nevertheless, it was enough to justify the caution – or silence – of many news outlets and platforms. In 2022, the New York Times and the Washington Post verified the authenticity of at least part of that material. In 2023, testifying before Congress, one of the letter’s initiators, former CIA Deputy Director Michael Morell, stated that the initiative had been prompted by a contact from Joe Biden’s campaign – a circumstance that those involved interpreted in different ways. Whatever the correct account may be, the mechanism is clear: collective authority – which, by its own admission, lacked evidence – was used to place a news story outside the bounds of what could be discussed.
The same function can be exercised in reverse, by stripping authority from those who possess it. In 2014, John Mearsheimer published an essay in Foreign Affairs in which he attributed primary responsibility for the Ukrainian crisis to NATO expansion. This thesis is legitimately contested by many scholars, who offer serious arguments. In July 2022, however, the Center for Countering Disinformation of the Ukrainian National Security Council included Mearsheimer on a list of individuals accused of promoting Russian narratives, alongside American politicians and journalists such as Rand Paul, Tulsi Gabbard, and Glenn Greenwald. An academic argument was thus transformed into evidence of belonging to the enemy camp. In Italy, a similar dynamic unfolded in June 2022, when the Corriere della Sera reported on the contents of a document regarding Russian disinformation attributed to the intelligence community, which cited, among others, regular talk show commentators; the government and intelligence agencies clarified that this was not a blacklist, but the public perception was that analytical dissent was being conflated with hostile influence operations. A few months earlier, RAI had terminated its contract with sociologist Alessandro Orsini due to his appearances on an in-depth analysis program.
This must be stated clearly, because symmetry is part of the analysis: the same Italian television ecosystem, during the same period, aired an interview in May 2022 with Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov – which was criticized for the absence of effective cross-examination – and gave airtime to commentators whose expertise was far from well-documented. In Russia, meanwhile, prime-time talk shows regularly feature so-called “Western experts.” The difference in severity between these cases is enormous and should not be downplayed: in Russia, a non-aligned expert risks imprisonment; in Italy, he risks losing his contract. This logic – the selection of voices based on political stance rather than expertise – is, however, akin to the method of infowarfare that is typical of this historical phase of warfare.
Finally, the fourth function is the most recent: the fabricated expert.
The Chinese, for example, have long been familiar with an expression, jiè kǒu shuō huà, “borrowing a mouth to speak.” A surprisingly useful and low-cost tactic. In short, all it takes is to identify a subject who can be used as an actor – or, if necessary, to create one digitally.
No actor has a monopoly on this technique. In July 2020, a Reuters investigation revealed that “Oliver Taylor” – presented as a student at the University of Birmingham and the author of articles published by Israeli media outlets – did not exist: the face in his photo was generated by an algorithm, and his primary target was a Palestinian academic living in London. That same month, the Daily Beast revealed that a network of fake Middle Eastern analysts – with fabricated biographies and stolen or fabricated photos – had published commentary in dozens of conservative outlets, expressing views consistent with the United Arab Emirates’ stance and hostile toward Qatar and Turkey. The following month, Facebook and the analytics firm Graphika attributed a fake news outlet, Peace Data, to Russia’s Internet Research Agency; the outlet recruited real, mostly unsuspecting freelance journalists to write about topics related to the American left. The operation reversed the formula: real authors, fictitious publisher. In all cases, the goal was not to produce news but to create a byline.
These cases were uncovered because they were crude: a name with no real-world record, a computer-generated face, a biography with no traceable background. It is reasonable to assume that generative models will make fabrication much cheaper and harder to detect, and that verifying an expert’s existence will become a real problem for newsrooms that already lack the time to check their affiliations. This hypothesis concerns the future and should be treated as such. But if it were to come to pass, the most likely consequence would not be an influx of credible fake experts. It would be widespread distrust even toward the real ones – which, for those waging an information war, is an equally useful outcome.
An expert, yes, but an expert in what? And on whose behalf?
Lippmann, whom we’ve already mentioned – who had worked on American propaganda during World War I and knew its inner workings – placed his hope in 1922 precisely in experts: only bodies of independent specialists, he wrote, could provide citizens and governments with a reliable picture of a world too vast to be known firsthand. A century later, that hope has not proved unfounded, but it has revealed its hidden condition. The expert is useful to democracy only if his or her independence is verifiable. When it is not, the expert becomes the most effective channel through which a particular interest can present itself as neutral knowledge.
This does not imply a call for indiscriminate mistrust. Those who reject all experts end up relying on their own, chosen by even worse criteria, and recent history is full of people who have shifted from blind trust in official sources to blind trust in alternative sources without changing their approach. Rather, it suggests an exercise that every reader can undertake and that every serious newsroom should facilitate.
The first question concerns expertise: an expert in what? A general knows the logistics of a military campaign, but not necessarily the domestic politics of the enemy country; a virologist knows a great deal about viruses but little about the economic consequences of a lockdown. An expert’s authority is local, and its extension to related fields is one of the points where influence most easily creeps in. The second question concerns interests: who funds the institution for which they work, what other roles do they hold outside the television studio, who invited them, and why specifically them. An interest does not invalidate an argument, but it must be disclosed, and the fact that it is kept silent is already a piece of information. The third concerns absence: which competent voices were not invited, and for what reason. This is the most difficult question, because it requires noticing what is missing. Finally, the fourth question concerns the treatment of dissent. A well-founded consensus responds to objections with data and arguments; a manufactured consensus responds with labels. This criterion applies in all directions, and it holds true even if the dominant opinion turns out, in the end, to be the correct one.
In the information war, the target is not only what the public believes, but its ability to understand why it believes it. The expert used as a weapon strikes precisely there, because he replaces the question “Is it true?” with the question “Who says so?”, and then controls the answer to the second.
Restoring to citizens the ability to distinguish between a fact, an expert’s interpretation of it, the interests that interpretation may serve, and the voices that have been left out of the room is not a task that can be delegated to a verification authority – which would itself be an expert in need of verification. It is a habit. It develops slowly, and no one has any interest in teaching it.
The Kremlin has instructed loyal Russian media to describe attacks on Ukraine's energy infrastructure as "Putin's strikes," and to portray them as far more effective than Ukrainian attacks on Russia, according to an Oct. 21 report by Meduza.
So far, few outlets have picked
L’isteria crescente delle classi dominanti – e dei mass media da essi finanziati – ormai buttano tutto nel calderone del “nemico interno”: agenti russi, cittadini pagati dai russi, ingerenze islamiche e, ovviamente, i partiti della sinistra e i comunisti.
E’ stato sufficiente che l’edizione di giovedi del giornale Politico.eu scrivesse qualche riga per mettere in moto una valanga, rivelando che l’Unione Europea ritiene di trovarsi di fronte all’escalation delle operazioni ibride russe e che si sta preparando all’eventualità che, prima o poi, queste azioni provochino delle vittime in Paesi Ue o Nato. Insomma quasi un auspicio che da qualche parte ci scappi il morto da poter strumentalizzare ai fini della propaganda di guerra, sia sul fronte esterno che sul fronte interno.
Si tratta di uno scenario che in Italia abbiamo purtroppo visto e subìto spesso: dalla strage di Piazza Fontana in poi. Su questo, nostro malgrado, potremmo tenere delle lectio magistralis a tutti gli altri paesi europei che non hanno sperimentato tragedie e orrori analoghi
Il giornale Politico.eu riferisce di una riunione di diplomatici della Ue a porte chiuse, senza telefonini e senza assistenti ha valutato il rischio di attacchi gravi, “capaci di provocare vittime su larga scala”. Due fonti diplomatiche hanno confermato a Politico che una riunione degli ambasciatori presso l’Ue, svoltasi mercoledì scorso, ha riguardato proprio questo tipo di scenario.
Per una fonte diplomatica citata dal sito, “data la portata e la vastità dell’azione russa, è inevitabile che prima o poi vi siano delle vittime. È pura fortuna che non ce ne siano ancora state”.
“È abbastanza ovvio che, quando la Russia utilizza strumenti sempre più letali per mettere alla prova la nostra preparazione e la nostra volontà di adottare contromisure, a un certo punto ci saranno delle vittime”, ha dichiarato a Politico la finlandese Teija Tiilikainen, direttore del Centro europeo di eccellenza per il contrasto alle minacce ibride. “Prima o poi, intenzionalmente o meno, questo è ciò che accade”.
Se diversi cittadini di Paesi membri dell’UE o della NATO venissero uccisi in quello che sembra essere un attacco, la pressione ad agire sarebbe enorme per entrambe le istituzioni. “Temiamo fortemente che a un certo punto venga tolta la vita a un nostro alleato”, ha affermato un diplomatico della NATO, il che renderebbe la pressione ad agire “molto alta”, riporta ancora Politico.eu.
Ma l’isteria ormai è talmente dilagante che alcuni Paesi membri della Ue, ritengono che debba essere la Nato e non l’Unione Europea la sede opportuna per trattare di questi argomenti e delle possibili soluzioni, soprattutto perché le riunioni della Ue sarebbero troppo “porose” per la fuga di notizie o di informazioni sensibili.
A rendere il tutto ancora più strumentalizzabile ai fini della mera propaganda di guerra esterna ed interna in Europa, vi è anche il tentativo di leggere le proteste giovanili e popolari in Francia come eterodirette o articolazioni di progetti di destabilizzazione. E in questo gioco sporco tutto fa brodo, dalla guerra ibrida della Russia alle ambizioni dell’islam politico.
“Quello che sta accadendo in Francia non è altro che immigrazione di massa fuori controllo“, ha scritto Donald Trump il 6 ottobre sul suo social Truth riferendosi agli scontri e alle manifestazioni che stanno attraversando la Francia. Per il presidente americano “non si tratta delle scuole”, ma dell’”Islam che vuole prendere il controllo di un Paese un tempo grande“.
A fargli eco è subito arrivato l’eurodeputato lepenista Fabrice Leggeri, esponente del gruppo della destra dei Patrioti al Parlamento di Strasburgo, secondo il quale “sulle proteste in Francia Trump non ha del tutto torto”. Perché, ha affermato durante un punto stampa al Parlamento Europeo, “le rivolte in corso, le rivolte dei cosiddetti studenti o presunti studenti, sono di fatto strumentalizzate dall’estrema sinistra e, come sappiamo, l’estrema sinistra è infiltrata da elementi islamisti”.
L’isteria crescente delle classi dominanti – e dei mass media da essi finanziati – ormai buttano tutto nel calderone del “nemico interno”: agenti russi, cittadini pagati dai russi, ingerenze islamiche e, ovviamente, i partiti della sinistra e i comunisti.
Se al posto degli ebrei mettiamo gli islamici, sono esattamente gli stessi nemici messi all’indice in Europa dai nazifascisti negli anni Trenta.
Articolo originale: contropiano.org
For months, desperate civilians remaining in the southern Ukrainian city of Oleshky have been blockaded inside, as Russia severed food and medicine supplies to the city amid constant shelling, food shop closures, and reports of looting; many of the city's elderly and less mobile residents have been forced
In the Daily Sceptic's final exclusive extract from Chris Morrison's new book on the 'climate crisis': trying to run a modern economy on windmills is insane, but eye-watering sums from green billionaires say it isn't.
The post How Green Billionaires Convinced the World to Build Thousands of Useless Windmills: Final Exclusive Extract From Chris Morrison’s New Book on the Invented ‘Climate Crisis’ appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.
The BBC has pulled material from its Bitesize educational website, used by 1.7 million pupils a week, after it was caught rewarding kids for backing open borders and pushing Left-wing views on migration and Net Zero.
The post BBC Bitesize Pulls Left-Wing Material Pushing Extreme Views on Migration and Net Zero appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.
© Osamah Abdulrahman/Associated Press
By Glenn DIESEN
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Contact us: info@strategic-culture.su
The very public execution of my professorship and reputation continues in Norway. Today’s media article about me makes three claims that are misleading and/or false.
1) The article dismisses my claim that my research is being criminalized as the journalists merely cite the dismissive comments from the university – no arguments are apparently required.
It is not possible for an academic anymore to analyse the policies of rival powers by assessing their security concerns, as it will be smeared by the government, the government’s NGOs and the media as “legitimizing” the enemy and supporting their narratives. The current Defence Minister singled me out with the accusation of spreading propaganda and criticised two podcasters for even speaking with me (as I have already been cancelled by the media in Norway). How was this accusation by the Defence Minister substantiated? I had argued that NATO expansion triggered the war in Ukraine, which the Defence Minister denounce as dangerous “Russian propaganda”, with no need to substantiate his vile accusation. I can cite a sea of evidence and also refer to statements by American and European political leaders, ambassadors, intelligence chiefs, and others to make my case. However, the purpose is not to engage in debate, but to smear, censor, and cancel. By going after an individual academic for challenging official truths, the government has already claimed a monopoly on the truth. Academics should have their arguments scrutinised and criticised, but these are severe personal attacks from the government without the possibility of even defending myself. How is this not criminalising the research of an academic?
I cannot even speak at any events in Norway without the event being cancelled. The last event I agreed to speak at was because I shared the stage with the former CIA officer John Kiriakou. A newspaper had the event at a church cancelled, and when the backup location did not also cancel, the journalist simply printed in the paper that it had been cancelled so people would not show up. Is this normal? I must use my allotted holiday days to attend conferences because any event I attend can be presented as “controversial,” and then the NGOs and journalists will go after the reputation of the university. Is this normal? Every newspaper article about me merely refers to me as “controversial” or “pro-Russian” without ever assigning meaning to these labels or presenting my argument.
I have argued, much like former CIA director Burns, that if the West attempts to pull Ukraine into the NATO orbit, then there would be war and Ukraine would be destroyed. This is considered a “pro-Russian” argument. Arguing that we should respect the will of most Ukrainians who want negotiations to end the war is also considered a “pro-Russian” argument, while in contrast, boycotting diplomacy, deporting Ukrainian refugees, and calling for the conscription of Ukrainian women is “pro-Ukrainian”.
2) To avoid addressing any of my arguments, the journalists go on to uncritically cite personal attacks against me, pointing out that I have been called a propagandist by the Norwegian Helsinki Committee. This is a “non-governmental organisation” financed by the government and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which was set up by Reagan and the CIA director in 1983 to manipulate the civil society of other states. The Norwegian Helsinki Committee has been relentless in its smears on social media to have me fired, writing hit pieces in the media, pushing to cancel my speaking events, writing a letter to my university, and even posting a picture of my house on social media. This is a governmental “human rights organisation” that cites human rights concerns to build the case for war.
3) Lastly, to further avoid addressing my actual arguments, they simply cite the fact that arguments I made at a debate last year have been “wholly or partially debunked” by a fact-check. The state-run media (NRK) invited the state-run military defence institute (FFI) to fact-check three of my claims. What claims did they “debunk”?
My first claim was that only 20% of Ukrainians wanted NATO membership between 1991 and the regime change in February 2014. The fact-checker argued that the number went up by the middle of 2014 (after Russia responded by seizing Crimea), which is a completely meaningless comment intended to muddy the waters, as my argument was about the previous era.
My second claim was that Zelensky had argued in an interview with The Economist in March 2022 that there were some Western countries that would like a long war with Russia to weaken a strategic rival, even if it would result in the destruction of Ukraine. The fact-checker argued that not all Western countries wanted a long war and that it was not an official policy. I never claimed it was an official policy, as it was primarily the US and UK pushing for a long war.
My third claim was that the US and UK sabotaged the Istanbul peace agreement in April 2022. The fact-checker claimed this was incorrect and suggested that it could only be based on one statement by David Arakhamia. The fact-checker did not want to mention that both mediators also confirmed it: Turkey’s foreign minister and the former Israeli prime minister both said that Russia and Ukraine were close to a deal, but the US and UK saw an opportunity to weaken Russia by fighting with Ukrainians. Zelensky’s former adviser Arestovych confirmed it, and the Ukrainian ambassador Chaly, who participated in the negotiations, confirmed that Putin was willing to do almost anything to end the war. The former head of the German armed forces confirmed that Boris Johnson sabotaged it, and Boris Johnson himself wrote articles warning about a “bad peace” and arguing for “strategic patience.” I am being fact-checked by war propagandists.
Unfortunately, none of my arguments matter because in Norway there is no debate and no interest in any arguments. Reality means nothing anymore as war narratives must be defended against inconvenient truths. I used to be naïve and think that the endless smears were caused by misunderstanding, as I had simply not been able to convey my arguments properly. However, the endless articles with smears and labels are deliberate lies and deceptions.
Original article: glenndiesen.substack.com
Russia is ready to resume three-way talks with Ukraine and the US, Russian President Vladimir Putin claimed in an interview with Pavel Zarubin of state broadcaster VGTRK, published on 22 October. He said they should settle security for both countries after a final peace deal, not a brief pause.
Putin spoke a day after he hosted US envoy Steve Witkoff in St. Petersburg and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said he would accept freezing the war along the front line. In May, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov named Ukraine’s withdrawal from Donbas and Zaporizhzhia and Kherson oblasts as the only condition for peace. Any new round would start from that gap: Kyiv offers to stop where the armies stand, while Moscow’s last stated terms demanded more land.
Putin stated that Moscow and Washington had agreed Russia was ready to resume trilateral contacts. He added that he generally agreed with a US point that European security architecture should also be discussed.
On 21 October, Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov stated that the sides had settled on mid-November, with Abu Dhabi as the likely venue.
In a 21 October Fox News interview, asked about a freeze leaving Ukraine 75% or more of its land, Zelenskyy answered: “Yes, right now, we have to freeze.”
Asked about the land Ukraine would give up, Putin replied that the occupied regions were not Ukraine’s but "historical Russia." He claimed their residents had voted for independence and then to join Russia, and called any talk of territorial losses inappropriate.
Putin linked Russia’s readiness to negotiate to Ukrainians being a people very close to Russians. He claimed the latest genetic studies show they are one people. Independent outlet Meduza noted it is unclear which studies he meant. Putin’s 12 July 2021 essay on the historical unity of Russians and Ukrainians made the same case, which Ukraine’s national memory institute rebutted.
He closed that answer by asserting Russia would achieve all the goals of what the Kremlin calls its special military operation. He made a similar vow on 17 December 2025.
Sergei Kiriyenko, first deputy chief of staff of the Russian Presidential Administration, set the goals for the Ukraine strand of the operation, launched in early 2023 under the codename "Uganda." Alexander Kharichev, now head of the Kremlin's Directorate for Monitoring and Analysis of Social Processes, oversaw it, according to hacked correspondence published by The Insider on 21 October.
Doppelgänger disguises Russian narratives as local news through cloned media sites, fake accounts, paid ads, and fabricated videos. The FBI named Kiriyenko among its orchestrators in 2024, and its contractor, the Social Design Agency (SDA), run by Ilya Gambashidze, is still expanding, now targeting AI chatbots. The new files go inside the Ukraine campaign and show the operation reporting even exposed fakes to the Kremlin as achievements.
An internal briefing on narratives says the project ran its Telegram channels on the principles of agent work and psychological operations, the Russian version of the investigation shows. Early on, the team decided to disguise all its outlets as Ukrainian and to run its campaigns without direct Russian propaganda. Every channel carried Ukrainian news to look unconnected to Russia. Dropping pro-Ukrainian themes, the briefing warned, would eventually expose the client and wreck the whole plan.
Kiriyenko set four goals: discredit Ukraine's military and political leadership, split its elites, demoralize its army, and disorganize its population. The SDA prepared the project's pitch and carried out the work.
Political strategist Alexander Asafov proposed fakes of his own: in May 2023, that soldiers were bribing commanders to avoid the front, and in January 2024, that Ukraine was pulling air defenses back to Kyiv to protect the authorities.
After an Il-76 military transport crashed in Belgorod Oblast on 24 January 2024, Moscow claimed it had been carrying Ukrainian prisoners of war. Kharichev's subordinate Yevgeny Kazakov, chairing a meeting in his place, proposed sending a fake to the widows of Ukrainian soldiers: "They died for an expensive Il-76—the Russians have few of those." The idea was dropped.
The same meeting produced another fake, and three days later the team launched it: that recruitment centers had sent widows a can of stewed meat with a little flag as compensation. The same producers also oversaw letters falsely attributed to Deputy Defense Minister Nataliia Kalmykova, the Russian version says.
The SDA collected coverage of its work in a folder for the Kremlin. It filed the "Zelensky's yacht" story, which JD Vance, then a US senator and now US Vice President, echoed, together with its debunk. The report also included a TikTok campaign about former Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov's family that the BBC had already exposed.
The Insider concludes that the team has had more failures than successes. The US sanctioned Gambashidze and the SDA in March 2024, and the UK followed in October.
Every year we're fed the same scare story about Britain's Atlantic Puffins all about to disappear, with climate change inevitably blamed. But as so often, it's the reverse that's true, says Paul Homewood.
The post No, Britain’s Puffin’s Aren’t About to Disappear Due to “Climate Change” appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.
© WANA, via Reuters
On the night of Sept. 12, Ukrainian drones attacked Taganrog. Ukraine's Security Service (SBU) reported hits on an FPV drone production facility, two drone storage sites, a Pantsir air defense system, and a radar.
Local authorities, as usual, listed something else: 16 commercial buildings, five cars, a football
Germany’s federal states are proposing that social media platforms reserve at least 20 percent of algorithmic recommendations for content from a pool of approved media outlets deemed important for opinion diversity, according to a draft under public consultation. The proposed measure is already being slammed as a state-mandated propaganda effort that would force German citizens to view content friendly to the ruling establishment parties.
The measure is part of the second stage of a planned Digital Media State Treaty developed by the Broadcasting Commission of the Federal States. Under the draft, public broadcasters such as ARD, ZDF and Deutschland Radio would automatically qualify for certain offerings.
Meanwhile, private outlets would generally need to apply and demonstrate that they meet criteria including news and political reporting, information and educational content, documentaries, local or regional coverage, original journalistic production, editorial staffing and accessibility standards. Approvals would be decided by the 14 state media authorities.
In other words, the state wants to control what people are seeing in their feeds.
As the Berliner Zeitung reports, the media law involves “media quotas with an advantage for ARD and ZDF,” which are two state broadcasters that already have a massive advantage over private competitors. Both outlets, which are notoriously in favor of mass migration and known for their anti-AfD bias, and which employ virtually all left-wing journalists, are already known for not playing on a level playing field.
Austrian remigration activist Martin Sellner, along with other right-leaning accounts, already are warning about the new plans.
— Martin Sellner (@MartinSellner_) October 22, 2026
Public broadcasters like ARD and ZDF would qualify automatically. Private outlets would need "State approval"
You cant make this up.
The rule would apply to algorithmic recommendations shown to users, such as in feeds or under videos on platforms including Instagram and X. Content drawn from the approved pool would still be selected according to the platforms’ algorithms and user interests. Officials have framed the quota as a way to protect journalistic content from being sidelined by engagement-driven material.
However, skepticism is obviously abundant.
“And who gets this golden seal of quality for preferential playback completely automatically? Of course, the public broadcasters. Private publishers, on the other hand, get to play the supplicants and politely apply for the status at the so-called “state-independent” media authorities. A rogue mind thinks evil of it,” wrote commentator Bernd Kaiser.
“If you want to exchange views on X in the future, the algorithm will soon forcibly serve you the curated explainer journalism from Tagesschau — right between your friends’ posts. They’re selling us this unprecedented market intervention as ‘Public Value,’ but it’s a blatant attempt to secure air superiority over online discourse,” he added.
Mündiger Bürger? Dass ich nicht lache! Weil ARD, ZDF und Co. trotz 8,5 Milliarden Euro Zwangsgebühren im Jahr immer öfter an den Interessen der Menschen vorbeisenden, greift der Staat jetzt zur digitalen Brechstange.
— Bernd Kaiser (@Bernd_Kaiser_BD) October 21, 2026
Die neueste Glanzidee der Länder:
Wenn das Publikum freiwillig wegläuft, zwingt man ihm die Inhalte eben per Gesetz auf.
Der geplante Digitale-Medien-Staatsvertrag sieht allen Ernstes eine 20-Prozent-Quote für Social Media vor.
Das heißt: Jeder fünfte Post in Ihrem Feed bei X oder Instagram soll künftig verpflichtend ein „vielfaltsfördernder“ Beitrag sein.
Und wer bekommt dieses goldene Gütesiegel für bevorzugte Ausspielung völlig automatisch?
Natürlich die Öffentlich-Rechtlichen.
Private Verlage dürfen hingegen als Bittsteller auftreten und sich bei den sogenannten „staatsfernen“ Medienanstalten brav um den Status bewerben.
Ein Schelm, wer Böses dabei denkt.
Wenn Sie sich künftig auf X austauschen wollen, serviert Ihnen der Algorithmus bald zwangsweise den betreuten Erklärbär-Journalismus der Tagesschau – direkt zwischen den Beiträgen Ihrer Freunde.
Man verkauft uns diesen beispiellosen Markteingriff als „Public Value“, aber es ist der völlig unverhohlene Versuch, die Lufthoheit über den Diskurs im Netz zu sichern.
Wer exzellenten Journalismus macht, braucht keine algorithmische Rollator-Hilfe durch den Staat.
Wer aber Panik vor der eigenen Irrelevanz hat, flüchtet sich in Zwangsquoten.
Wir dürfen den Elfenbeinturm nicht mehr nur teuer bezahlen, wir sollen ab sofort auch bei jedem fünften Swipe in Demut daraus lesen.
#ÖRR #Meinungsfreiheit
The draft was released for public comment in late September 2026, with submissions accepted until Nov. 13. It builds on an existing “public value” system that already grants preferential placement to certain media apps in app stores and on smart-TV interfaces. Some private broadcasters, such as those already holding “public-value” status, would also be eligible for the pool.
The Berliner Zeitung, a private newspaper, noted that state-funded broadcasters could expand their visibility relative to private competitors that rely on advertising or subscriptions. Critics have also pointed out that the criteria emphasize structural and production features of outlets rather than the range of viewpoints in individual posts, and that there is limited evidence the specific 20 percent threshold would increase actual diversity of perspectives.
The Digital Media State Treaty is being prepared in two parts. The first, focused largely on implementing European Union rules including aspects of the AI Act, has already advanced. Part two remains a discussion draft and would require agreement by the governments and subsequent ratification by the parliaments of all 16 German states before it could take effect.
Media regulation in Germany is primarily a responsibility of the states under the country’s dual public-private broadcasting system.
The post Germany plans to force social media platforms to fill 20% of algorithmic recommendations with ‘state-approved’ content appeared first on Remix News.
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