CNBC: Democratic lawmakers ask Musk for info on possible Chinese manipulation of Twitter. “Three Democratic House members are calling on Twitter’s new owner and CEO Elon Musk to provide information about a possible ‘platform manipulation campaign’ on the social media platform that ‘restricted access to news about the protests in the People’s Republic of China (PRC)’ in recent weeks.”
US Naval Institute: Ukraine Lessons for Naval Intelligence’s Next War. “The lessons learned in this conflict will directly affect how the U.S. military understands its Russian competitor, which will drive planning assumptions and force employment. For U.S. naval intelligence, identifying the lessons is an easy first step, but applying them and creating a cultural shift to adapt to future conflicts requires deliberate action and intention.”
New York Times: Russia Intensifies Its Propaganda Campaign Against Ukraine. “Since before the war, Russia has spread disinformation about its need to stamp out Nazism in Ukraine. But in recent days, Moscow’s propaganda has shifted, arguing that it is battling terrorism and falsely accusing Ukraine of planning a dirty bomb attack as part of that narrative.”
BBC: How Ukraine is winning the social media war. “After almost eight months, the war in Ukraine hangs in the balance. Ukrainian counter-offensives continue to make progress, while Russian forces are still pressing elsewhere. But on the internet, it’s a very one-sided affair.”
Naval Technology: OSINT in Ukraine: Global Defence Technology 137. “A war has perhaps never been covered in such details as seen in Ukraine, with the creation of a new class of open-source intelligence (OSINT) analysts, harvesting and examining content posted on social media for intelligence into orders of battle, equipment and personnel losses, and more.”
Foreign Policy: Russia Wages Winter Information War Against the West. “Russia is waging renewed influence operations in Europe designed to undermine Western support for Ukraine in an attempt to turn the tide in a war that has shifted decisively in Kyiv’s favor over the past month, top Estonian defense officials told reporters during a visit to Washington this week.”
Defense Daily: Army Officials Detail Information, Cyber, Space Importance In Ukraine War, Counter-Drone Help . “Army officials on Tuesday told reporters they have seen more interest from allies and partner countries to learn techniques to resist occupation and use information warfare if invaded in the wake of Ukraine’s resistance to its invasion by Russia.”
Riddle Russia: Firehose of (useless) propaganda . “To better understand the link between Kremlin propaganda and the mass sentiments of Russians, we put together a corpus of messages in the Russian traditional and social media that were in one way or another related to the war in Ukraine. The corpus comprises about 18,000 messages broadcast from February to July on television and about 400,000 messages that appeared in social media in July 2022.”
Associated Press: Experts: Russia finding new ways to spread propaganda videos. “Russia has devised yet another way to spread disinformation about its invasion of Ukraine, using digital tricks that allow its war propaganda videos to evade restrictions imposed by governments and tech companies.”
Grid News: Fighting Russia with a laptop: Meet the women on the front lines of Ukraine’s information war. “When it comes to the information war over Ukraine, Russia has President Vladimir Putin, the Kremlin’s well-resourced propaganda machine, and a hammerlock on Russian television and radio. It also has laws Putin put in place in the early days of war, which made any counternarratives a crime. For its part, Ukraine has a charismatic president and a ministry for digital information. And it has a few dozen women who run an organization called Dattalion.”
Brookings Institution: U.S. podcasters spread Kremlin narratives on Nord Stream sabotage. “Using a new Brookings dashboard and database, we are able to more systematically study how popular political podcasts shape the information environment. By spreading the idea that the United States was in fact responsible for the explosions, several leading U.S. podcasters have advanced the Kremlin’s preferred narrative while staying under the radar of researchers—until now.”
The Conversation: US and Russia engage in a digital battle for hearts and minds. “Key government-sponsored media outlets in the current battle are Russia Today, often known as RT, and two U.S. government-backed operations, Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. But it can be hard for many people to tell the difference between these outlets and independent news. As a propaganda scholar, I believe citizens of all nations deserve to know how their media have been filtered and when governments are seeking to influence their views.”
International Press Institute: MFRR monitoring report documents attacks on media in Ukraine. “As the war drags on and with no end to hostilities in sight, Ukrainian media continue to adapt to a challenging new economic reality while also navigating the multiple challenges posed by information warfare. MFFR began monitoring Ukraine when the invasion began in February 2022. During the reporting period Ukraine became a candidate country in June 2022. During the first six months of 2022, the platform documented 94 attacks and violations of media freedom involving 142 targets.”
Reuters: Man embroiled in Russia and Ukraine’s propaganda war over nuclear plant. “A former deputy spokesman for Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhya nuclear power plant who helped tell the world that Russian troops occupied the strategic site is now in exile, no longer in his job and his former According to a document from the employer, it is suspected by Ukrainian intelligence to cooperate with Russia.”
Lieber Institute West Point: Ukraine Symposium – Data-rich Battlefields And The Future LOAC. “Russia continues to deploy its formidable ‘information war machine’ to ‘confuse and disable’ while Ukraine and non-State actors such as news organizations, think tanks, and NGOs counter these tactics through the use of ubiquitous, open-source battlefield data. In effect, we are watching the future of warfare—data-rich battlefields in which information is a critical component of military operations—emerge in real time.”
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