Meta Disinfolklore (1)
Meta Disinfolklore (1)
Meta Disinfolklore is an occasional newsletter on the mechanics of producing Disinfolklore
As a small child one of my first encounters with folklore was through Tolstoy’s Village Tales, one of my late mother’s favourite texts. As a law student at Cambridge, I read Crime and Punishment more than once. And at Georgetown as a post grad, I wrote a term paper on The Brothers Karamazov.
On the bridge in eastern Ukraine and its surroundings (where I worked as a diplomat between 2015 and 2018), I was often struck by the family resemblance between the lore I heard each day from the Russian occupier bridge trolls guarding access and egress from their rebel troll kingdom of Russia-occupied Luhansk and what I knew of Russian folklore through Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. Out of my daily encounters there, Disinfolklore as a publication, and as an analytical method for parsing disinformation was born.
Lore is what is taught and what is learned. “Folk Lore” as a term has been invented twice in the English language. Folc-lār in Old English signified sermons, what is preached. Then, in 1846 “folk-lore” was coined again. War Lore (Telegram is filled with it!) is what most of us have experienced a lot of since 24th February 2022 - since my arrival in eastern Ukraine as a diplomat in early 2015, though, without using that term, I was embedded inside Russian and Ukrainian War Lore.
Disinfolklore, as a publication and as a new analytical method to parse disinformation, is a species of War Lore. Russian Disinfolklore uses (consciously and unconsciously) folkloric motifs, methods, and resonances to embed trolls in others’ minds. Trolls are emotionally resonant activities of body, speech and mind which smuggle memes into our unguarded minds. Russia has operated a (what I term in Disinfolklore (2)) "Stealth Genocide" in eastern Ukraine, under the radar since 2014 - today without using that nomenclature the New York Times wrote about the problem of propaganda in eastern Ukraine. The mayor of Stanitsia Luhanska where much of the action of Disinfolklore takes place said to me in 2015 that his biggest problem was Russian domination of the info space. I remember being surprised by his request then: television broadcast aerials to outpower Russian kit. This is one of the first times I have seen western media identify and describe a phenomenon I and many of my former colleagues (and indeed Ukraine) have been dealing with for almost a decade. Russian Disinfolklore hacks our System 2 deliberative thought processes1. Counter Disinfolklore engages with Russian (and other forms of) Disinfolklore to neutralise its power to hack our consent.
I set out the model here:
Lore —> War Lore —> Disinfolklore ← Counter Disinfolklore.
Disinfolklore (16) (Naming Russian Disinfo -What Mythology Teaches Us - here’s a sneak preview) and Disinfolklore (17) (War Magic) are in the works! Thank you for your patience. It means a lot to me to know that when these episodes are ready, there’ll be a large number of readers.
A lot of work is going on in the background. After Twitter changed ownership, @DecodingTrolls Counter Disinfolklore Twitter operation went down from 5.5 million “Impressions” in October 2022, to less than 500,000! @DecodingTrolls is back up to 2 Million Impressions/month now. Many of the components of Disinfolklore appeared first @DecodingTrolls on Twitter. War Magic, for example, is an early idea first Tweeted about in May 2022:
War Magic is what leaders use to disarm their enemies. It’s one thing to neutralise an enemy with force. War Magic operates mainly on the linguistic and emotional plane. When Putin threatens nuclear annihilation, he is practising War Magic. When Putin claims the West has only one objective - to destroy Russia - Putin is, among other things, giving lines to those who support Ruschism, and he’s trying to put us - the West - on the defensive. Disinfolklore such as Putin’s bogus folk history is a form of War Magic. And so is Counter Disinfolklore - for example, when President Zelenskyy stands in the middle of Kreshatyk in central Kyiv and declares that Putin is doomed, President Zelenskyy as one of the world’s preeminent communicators is consciously employing War Magic to bewitch his opponent who, by the way, is highly superstitious.
So in the background, I am still going through each of the fifteen episodes so far published online again and again, tweaking bits here, and adding elements here and there. Yesterday I focussed on the Lenses of Gender episode. Disinfolklore mainstreams a gender perspective throughout. This is not to be politically correct. It’s because we can’t understand wholly what Russia is up to unless we take a gender perspective and filter its nonsense through our own evolving lenses of gender. Russian propagandists constantly talk about Ukraine in gender terms. For example here is what Putin said of Ukraine on February 8th, 2022, dipping into folklore:
Without mainstreaming a gender perspective, we would miss the significance of these utterances which have important emotional resonances in his audience. They also form part of the legal argument that demonstrates Russia’s genocidal intent.
My vision for Disinfolklore includes publication of the project in book form. I am also preparing this content in the form of a manuscript, and book proposal.
I am very grateful to @InfoAgeStrategy on Twitter for the notice of Disinfolklore. It means a lot to get a shout-out from such a distinguished anti-disinformation practitioner and teacher.
Look out for Disinfolklore (16) (Naming Russian Disinfo -What Mythology Teaches Us - here’s a sneak preview) and Disinfolklore (17) (War Magic) when they drop!
“Dual Process Theory: The view that cognitive processes divide into two main kinds. One type is fast, automatic, associative, impulsive, effortless, and emotional. The other is slow, controlled, reflective, conscious, effortful and cool-headed. The first gives us snap judgements, or instant emotional reactions, whereas the second permits conscious thought, inferences, rival hypotheses, and the weighing of conclusions. The first buys speed at the expense of gullibility; the second potentially corrects it. The distinction became widely known with the publication of psychologist Daniel Kahneman’s book Thinking Fast and Slow in 2011. It has been argued that the distinction corresponds better to that between Plato’s charioteer (the slow process, or user of logismos) and the unruly horses which need his control (the fast process, which is alogistikos) than the traditional model of emotions under the authority of rationality.” from
