Viral “Manspreading” video is said to be staged Russian propaganda

https://euvsdisinfo.eu/viral-manspreading-video-is-staged-kremlin-propaganda/

by BerislavLopac • 8 years ago

115 79 8 years ago

euvsdisinfo.eu

ssijak• 8 years ago

Why is this on the front page of HN?

isostatic• 8 years ago

It's a sad indictment of the tools we create being used to destroy the world we live in

gammateam• 8 years ago

Because troll factories are a SaaS opportunity

pencilcode3• 8 years ago

Why not? But of course if you prefer to be entertained by latest tech gadget that you absolutely must must must buy here it is https://www.bestproducts.com/tech/g864/cool-tech-products-yo...

Marazan• 8 years ago

Do you honestly not understand why?

guipsp• 8 years ago

Because I (and other people) found it interesting

aedron• 8 years ago

Indeed.

Since we're here, this is just counter-propaganda. There are thousands of organizations doing similar things. The whole "Russia is creating strife on Facebook!" thing is ridiculous too if you think about it for just a few seconds.

darawk• 8 years ago

...Why wouldn't it be? Russian (and state-level generally) propaganda is a huge issue in tech right now.

gsich2• 8 years ago

Not really

mothsonasloth2• 8 years ago

The West is weak now and to make matters worse our leaders are openly showing their weaknesses.

Therefore Russia sees us as fair game (which I agree in) and is attacking us over the best medium; the internet.

In my opinion its not going to be territorial wars that will dominate our future, but cultural wars.

You might maintain your national borders but you will lose in the cultural war, whether that's political ideology, identity, civil morale.

In a way the policies or slogans you hear like "One China", "New Russia", "Europe United" are cultural campaigns. Yes they might involve territory and resources but they all have different cultural identities packaged with them.

In science fiction they have entertained this idea. If you look at Blade Runner you can see that the world has been dominated by a hybrid of Sino-American culture with rampant capitalism.

Exciting but scary times ahead!

mothsonasloth2• 8 years ago

Guess the Putinbots know I am on to them

pencilcode3• 8 years ago

And that's how the public is duped into voting for incompetent corrupt, but manly!, politicians who promise they'll put things back in order!! Seed rage and you'll get politicians like Orban (Hungary), Bolsonaro (Brazil, on his way to power), and Trump. All Putin lookalikes who have their own oligarchies (call them friends) and everyone else is f*ed poor. And that is how nations/systems fail.

chrisco2553• 8 years ago

Kind of laughable to think that Trump is the oligarchist. What did that make Clinton, with her decades of American power and connections?

By the way, I'm not sure that Russian propaganda had a sizable impact on the American election. From what I remember of the 2016 election, we were discussing Trump 24/7 because of one outrageous Tweet, debate, rally, or press conference after another.

Another point the article makes is that both pro-Trump and anti-Trump propaganda was run by Russia. My guess is that Russia is either trying to sow the seeds of discord, or trying to test the waters to see how much influence they can garner. I definitely don't like it either way, and this sort of thing can obviously get worse from here, but it would seem to me that the biggest message is that a divided America might be an easier target for Russian disruption down the line.

mmjaa2• 8 years ago

Yeah, if we could harness the energy that Americans' use to run away and hide from Clinton's history, we'd have world peace, probably. /s

Does nobody remember the wars this woman started, in her reach for power? Are we really going to ignore the victims of her involvement in American foreign policy?

This is the danger of the whole "mah Russian Trolls!" narrative - the trolls might actually be telling the truth about a few things (i.e. America really is run by a hidden oligarchy of families networked throughout the military-industrial-pharmaceutical complex), and .. because "mah Russia!", we end up reinforcing the very actors who need to be eradicated from the scene.

This is very dodgy territory. I can only hope that the average citizens' heavy dependence on "being told what to think by an authoritarian figure on TV" is going to be weaned as this proceeds ..

cabraca• 8 years ago

you did not get trump because of putin alone, you got trump because hillary did a poor job. insulting voters that elected and reelected obama as "basket of deplorables" and "nazis" was shit. accepting leacked cnn questions from dona brazil was shit. booting bernie sanders was shit. instead of attacking his policies the democrats just shouted racist, sexist, homophob and xenophobe over and over again.

dont get me wrong, i'm against trump. but you have to accept hillary f*ed up big time.

pencilcode3• 8 years ago

She did but she's no longer the issue. And in voting against Hillary, people voted for Trump, a worse alternative - morally corrupt. People fight over whether Hillary was really corrupt or not, with Trump that's not the issue. We know he's a compulsive liar, exaggerator, we know that he's mean and petty and vain and that all he cares about are his name/brand and how many millions he has in his bank account. This is not a guy who'll fight for the masses, me or you, this a guy who'll fight to keep himself and his friends rich and makes no apologies for that. So not being a Clinton but being a Trump is not better, it's so much worse. It's the same in Brasil, voting against PT, Bolsonaro might be president, but he's so much worse. Despite absolutely hating someone you still have to keep your eyes open to what the alternatives are and if they're worse or better. Or you might end up with someone that'll make you more worse off.

xc1001• 8 years ago

That's a small part of the divisive propaganda. In our industry - software - the divisive money comes from U.S. corporations looking to sell ads and get cheap labor from all over the planet.

And in some cases destroying open source is a welcome side effect.

tomp• 8 years ago

The problem is, there's plenty of equivalent "propaganda" promoted by the actual Western institutions... James Damore, Rosetta Tshirt accident, Tim Hunt firing, A Rape On Campus, anti-fa, conservatives being blocked on Twitter... Even "manspreading" is a Western feminist idea, it's not like Russians "invented" it.

tumetab1• 8 years ago

No. Bolsonare is the expected outcome with or without the Internet.

close04• 8 years ago

So... a fake and polarizing viral video on the internet? No way!

It's as if someone noticed that staging something extremely divisive on topics that everyone has an opinion about gets clicks and attention.

dvfjsdhgfv3• 8 years ago

For me it doesn't matter if it's fake or not, what counts are the reactions of some people. Every time I hear "she did very well" I get upset. As if violence become the new normal in making a change.

cyborgx72• 8 years ago

Violence was always an important factor in making change. Many times for very good change. This is not a new thing.

dvfjsdhgfv3• 8 years ago

Like when was the last time violence resulted in a very good change? Because I have plenty of examples where it went completely wrong, bringing only the death of millions. This way of thinking ("the end justifies the means") is one of the most dangerous concepts and the cause of suffering of many people in the world right now.

lixtra• 8 years ago

While in certain situations violence is appropriate, here it clearly isn't. If you don't agree on its inappropriateness here it would be indeed upsetting.

edit: added comma

raffomania• 8 years ago

I find it interesting that this is financed by the EU.

My first reaction to this was a lot of skepticism - the article makes a lot of bold claims without backing any of them up. I was ready to write this off as another sleazy mud-throwing operation when I found the official EU site [0] describing the team and their goals - including "Effective communication and promotion of EU policies towards the Eastern Neighbourhood". The biased writing and this "promotion of policies" really make me think this is no better than the "fake news" everyone complains about.

[0] https://eeas.europa.eu/headquarters/headquarters-homepage/21...

coldtea14• 8 years ago

"Kremlin Propaganda", no. But TFA is indeed playing into the anti-Russia climate with sub-par journalism.

I was suspicious of it being real (not because "activists" wont do any kind of shit these days, but because she would have easily got beaten up if it was real).

It took like a few searches to find that the video is indeed fake, and it was made as a viral video to boost the career of Anna Dovgalyuk, a ho-hum model/minor celebrity that does such BS.

She has done such viral videos in the past, e.g.: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwdmPnJDvp0

Note how the BS TFA doesn't provide this info (it just mentions some magazine who found one of the actors in the video), and jumps to the "Kremlin propaganda" with tons of handwaving and no evidence at all, as opposed to one of the tons of BS YouTube stuff produced every day to be viral.

Also the name of the site "EU VS DISINFO" points to a website created to cater to the paranoid crowd, if not itself the work of some state agent or another [1].

[1] Addition: Oh, as someone else points out in the comments, this is EU financed.

lawlessone7• 8 years ago

this is EU financed.

Great, i was getting worried the EU was just going to sit on it's arse. I am glad the EU is finally taking this issue seriously.

coldtea14• 8 years ago

Sit on its arse? Of course not. As a collection of many client states, the EU will do whatever the US tells it to do to help stir up the old Cold War climate.

oytis2• 8 years ago

jumps to the "Kremlin propaganda" with tons of handwaving and no evidence at all

The video is promoted by RT, there is enough evidence for it (like, you know, links to a page on RT website containing the video). Even if it wasn't created as Kremlin propaganda, it is used as such now.

coldtea14• 8 years ago

The video is promoted by RT, there is enough evidence for it

RT is a popular website.

Of course it will link to a viral video. It's no more "Kremlin Propaganda" than anything posted on BBC is automatically "British propaganda".

Grue33• 8 years ago

Yeah no. You (intentionally?) forget to mention that she is a huge Putin supporter. And that this video is made in the wake of legalisation of domestic violence in Russia specifically to undermine feminist movement.

coldtea14• 8 years ago

Yeah no. You (intentionally?) forget to mention that she is a huge Putin supporter

I guess a Kanye video is also "Whitehouse propaganda" because he is a Trump supporter...

And that this video is made in the wake of legalisation of domestic violence in Russia specifically to undermine feminist movement

"In the wake" as meaning "almost two years later"?

fiala__• 8 years ago

I think the reason why a lot of this stuff is being called "Kremlin Propaganda" is that real Kremlin propaganda isn't really propaganda anymore. It's not necessarily coming from an evil troll factory in an imposing Petersburg tower. It's a lot more subtle and indirect – more of a cultural practice than a directed media effort – and it might not always be intentional, but people still need a way to link it to the power that benefits from it.

That said, there's a lot of this stuff being produced in western countries, including the EU. It just so happens that the plague of neoconservatism + political division has become state policy in Russia, so it makes sense for EU institutions (whose objective is political unity and inclusive welfare-oriented policy) would link it to the Russian state.

loco5niner• 8 years ago

I would appreciate a NSFW warning on that youtube link. I 'noped' out as soon as I saw "upskirting" in the title.

nkkollaw2• 8 years ago

When there is such thing as having to combat men being able to sit how they want, you know society has hit the bottom.

lawlessone7• 8 years ago

its fake

nkkollaw2• 8 years ago

The article is fake, "manspreading" is an actual thing. I was referring to that, not the article.

netcan• 8 years ago

..Provoking a clash of extreme views..

It's just hard to delineate between "legitimate" provocations from hostile operations. FB optimize for this stuff by default, because it provokes shares and clicks. Media does it for click-bait. People do it for fun an politics.

I guess that's why it works.

larkeith• 8 years ago

Warning: Stream-of-consciousness rambling ahead.

FB and media sites are especially egregious offenders, but are symptomatic of the modern internet as a whole. I'm not really sure how we change this - the web is based around user interaction and sharing, and people will always prioritize that which they care about, which encourages more extreme views in any discussions among more general groups.

Dividing into sub-communities can reduce discord and increase legitimate discussion and less-extreme views, as moderate community members will not be suborned by unrelated topics they care about, but why join the sub-communities? Also, as seen on some Subreddits, this can instead lead to an echo-chamber, with dissident views discouraged.

Perhaps forums with a ranking system unlike current like/upvote, share, freshness, and number-of-response based systems could assist - Having longer-lasting, even permanent, threads for each topic might encourage novel discussion over rehashing the same arguments repeatedly, while prioritizing long-form replies could at least provide more grounds for debating views, but none of that fixes the essential problem of moderate apathy.

I wonder if moving to a more mercenary web could help - while it feels as though it would be losing something essential, if there were a cost to responding and payment for valuable contributions, moderate feedback could be encouraged financially, rather than by passion alone. You would still need an essentially different ranking system, especially to prevent response repetition, else I suspect you would see the opposite of the desired result - people posting extreme views to get a quick buck.

Additional elements would likely be necessary to create a network entirely successful in encouraging discussion from a full spectrum of views (while repetition may be deadly to discussion, stagnation is also fearsome), but it's a starting point for consideration. I'll have to think on this more later - I might give building a prototype a try.

This digressed fairly significantly from the original topic, but I'd be interested in thoughts regarding diversification of views on the internet.

throw2016• 8 years ago

This is like saying fake pick up videos on youtube are funded by the CIA. This is a witch hunt and an insult to informed discussion.

There are attention seeking groups like Femen who are known for staging stunts. This group has a fake upskirt video, now this mansplaining video and presumably they will keep trying.

If it works out you get tons of media interviews, attention, become a media personality and spin it into some serious income.

0xfeeddeadbeef• 8 years ago

It's Russia: that woman would be beaten into a pulp by now if it was real.

edoloughlin2• 8 years ago

If this is indeed propaganda then, based on the discussion on this page alone, it has achieved it's objective perfectly, which is to sew confusion and argument from polarised perspectives over misleading, trivial nonsense.

anon7429• 8 years ago

Not "sew," it's not ripped clothing; "sow" as in the seeds of revolution.

edoloughlin2• 8 years ago

Hmm, unnoticed autocorrect...

Viral “Manspreading” video is said to be staged Russian propaganda

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