Episode Details

Disinfolklore is Russia using First Person View Drones on human prey to train its drone pilots.

Then the Russian state publishes the footage of these murders, from the perspective of the First Person view drone pilots as they close in on their human prey.

This is archetypal Disinfolklore: create the event (in this case murder), then publicise it using different memes and means of storytelling. Russia’s only in Ukraine to create social media content, which it uses to troll its own population and America’s leaders into perpetuating Ukraine’s annihilation. Disinfolklore always has a purpose. Infolklore (such as this podcast), by contrast, has an opposite purpose.

After detailed investigations into 200 of the 2,800 murders of civilians by Russia using First Person View drones in Kherson, the UN Commission of Inquiry has determined these are Crimes Against Humanity.

The UN Commission of Inquiry based in Vienna has issued a report on the human safaris in Kherson that all of us are aware of, which have been going on since July 2024. It has established that these are crimes against humanity.

Part of the indictment of Russia and those participating in the prosecution of these crimes against humanity — interesting to use the word “prosecution” there — is that Russia, the Russian state, is sharing these videos of their human safaris, of the 140 people they’ve murdered using first-person-view drones. The Commission of Inquiry determines that because they are first-person-view drones, the operators are hunting individuals, chasing them, watching as they murder them, and then sharing these on what I call the Disinfolklore apparatus: Telegram, X, Facebook, Instagram, and now sadly the White House press room.

These videos themselves are a perfect example of Disinfolklore. They breach all ethical guidelines — which is the second of the six criteria I use to determine whether a story constitutes Disinfolklore. The second criterion is “right” or ethical discipline. Obviously it’s morally wrong to engage in human safaris. There’s no law anywhere, moral or otherwise, which allows this.

Now we have a determination by a UN commission specifically established by 184 UN member states to inquire into Russia’s war crimes in Ukraine. It determines that these are crimes against humanity — there is no greater crime in the human family. Therefore, the breach of the second element in the Code of Positive Trolls, which I use to distinguish between a unit of Disinfolklore and a unit of folklore or any other kind of story or narrative form — now we have this determination. That’s a perfect example of Disinfolklore.

Much of what is on Telegram — and of course Telegram features in Russian combat propaganda, in Russian military strategy, where you have this concept of “information confrontation” in which informational units and the environment are engaged in a confrontation — here we have Telegram, specifically leveraged by the Russian state, to communicate Disinfolklore into the inner minds of humanity. Very successfully. It is acting in concert with the military apparatus in Kherson.

It’s not just killing these people. It is spreading the stories, spreading the images of these people being murdered, as part of its plan to dominate the inner minds of humanity and create terror — not just in the minds of the people of Kherson (and this is not me, this is the inquiry), but inside the minds of humanity as people gradually become aware of what’s going on.

That’s a good example of what Disinfolklore is in practice.

What helped me see this pattern — this is what I really do, I hunt for patterns in data. I assimilate, as many of us do who participate in X, because X, as we now know from the third report on Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference by the European Union, released a couple of weeks ago — I highly recommend reading it along with the first two reports — X is where, on a dataset o