Episode Details

Here, Decoding Trolls speaks about hunting for patterns in data. Disinfolklore is one such pattern that recurs in multiple different voices in forms of geopolitically relevant discourse that we do not associate with folklore or child-like emotionally resonant story-telling.

Yeah, part of what helped me see this pattern, this is what I really do. I hunt for patterns in data. And I assimilate, as many of us do, who participate in X. And X, as we now know from the third report on foreign information manipulation and interference by the European Union, which was released recently.

I highly recommend anyone to read, along with the first two reports, which was published a couple of weeks ago. X is where on a data set, I think it was over 40,000 FIMI instances of FIMI that were collected by the European Union. X was involved in 86% of them. So this is where we all are.

And I know many of us have ethical dilemmas about should we be here, should we not? And most of us are also part of BlueSky and other places. But the fight is here and the examples are here of whether it's, I saw Maid Marion Simonyan, Russia’s chief government propagandists, tweeting again in her folksy Disinfolklore way where she does this a lot, where she tells these folksy stories as indeed does Donald. they tell these stories of, frankly, horrifying things. Like for instance, the way Donald communicated in, I think it was March, 2024, that if the head of a major NATO country said to him we can't pay for our NATO membership. Would you protect us?

And he said, I'd say, you know, to do whatever the hell they want with you. And then this unit of information was then reported by CNN as a fact that Donald had told this head of state that America wouldn't protect him.

But we're not clear whether this ever, ever happened, but it was reported as a fact by CNN. And so you see these folksy stories get taken up.

Simonyon tonight, she's talking about how people in the offices in Moscow saying this or saying that, and these terms really interest me - “folk in the offices.”

I've seen them for years now. And if it's a pattern, which is what, along with the horror of what they're saying, it's a pattern that made me suspicious, something methodical was going on here, which I use Disinfolklore to explain and to interpret.

She says, oh, people in the offices in Moscow are saying that if Germany gives their weapons to Ukraine, that they will, Ukraine won't be able to do anything with them without Germany's help. Therefore, Germany is complicit, and so we'll have to strike Berlin. And so this is a classic piece of Disinfolklore. There's a distancing in the narrative form.

It's presented as a folksy story.

People in the offices of Moscow, as if she's just been, and the image in our head is she's just heard this gossip.

And she said this before when she's spoken, the St. Petersburg Economic Forum in June 2022. Many of us will remember this here.

Where she said, people in Moscow are saying that all our hope is in the famine. And then she interprets what these folksy people are supposedly saying. And she's sitting beside the head of state. She's sitting beside Duncey Putin himself on the dais at St. Petersburg Economic Forum, dressed in green, which is why I call her Maid Maryon.

Like a reverse Robin Hood. And this is an aspect of the Disinfolklore analytical method that we can use these folklore archetypes to interpret those who are themselves using these folksy archetypes to combat them.

And she said, the people in Moscow are saying “all our hope is in the famine.” And what they mean by that is, this is her saying that she understands what the folk what the ordinary folk in Moscow are saying, they are saying that there will be famine in Africa and the migrants will come to Europe and then the European Union will release the sanctions because it's impossible for us not to be friends.

So