Episode Details

Welcome to the Disinfolklore podcast!

Hi there, my moniker is Decoding Trolls. This is the Disinfolklore podcast. This is the first Disinfolklore podcast, so thank you very much for being here. Today I want to look at the newest addition to the arsenal of the Disinfolklore analytical method for parsing Russian, MAGA,and in fact any form of disinformation which is communicated through stories.

So I invented disinfolklore and have elaborated upon disinfolklore since February, 2023. I marked its invention with a tweet.

I was trying to find a moniker to communicate all of the work which I had done since first being posted on a bridge in eastern Ukraine in early 2015. as a diplomat, as a monitor, as what I now understand myself to be a Counter Disinfolklorist. So I'd had an intuition that on this bridge... surrounded by a biosphere zone of forestry and a bridge guarded on one end by Russian occupying bridge trolls and on the other end by Ukrainian armed forces defending their their land from the Russian occupiers.

I had had an intimation that there was something folklore about the whole situation. And after seven years, eight years almost after that, after I had begun in earnest in early 2022, after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, to communicate publicly everything that I was seeing and interpreting through the Disinfolklore lens.

After in February 2020, around the time COVID struck, I began in earnest to try and interrogate what was it of this scene on this bridge with little green men on one end of the bridge, a folkloric dimension which is used in russian propaganda to disarm us into for instance tolerating as we did as a civilization the march 2014 occupation of ukraine's Crimea Crimean peninsula and so from March 2020, I began in earnest to try and explore what was folklore about it.

And the unit of analysis I settled upon primarily was trolling and trolls and this idea of energy, this idea of a character in a story protecting the bridge. From three goats wanting to cross the bridge.

In this case, they were Russian occupiers, armed Russian occupiers. And every day, as an OSCE diplomat in charge of a patrol group of 25, senior police, army and human rights professionals, we would cross this bridge. We would test what we call our freedom of movement to move between this other land, this other world, this folklore kingdom where the monarch, the troll king monarch, Prigozhin, the chef of disinfolklore, disinfolklore apparatus, this massive multi-channel communications infrastructure, which at the time I was very curious about and I wrote a lot about.

And communicated a lot about it, but I didn't know what it was or what it was doing, and it was only after the full-scale invasion I realised that this dis-folklore apparatus, this multi-channel, so multiple TV channels, TV channels for every personality type, TV channels with the production values of CNN or major American stations, Newspapers which resembled the kind of really low production values and on the other end of the scale very high production values. Websites, hundreds of different websites in this little troll kingdom which I call the house of lies which I take from Iranian, early Iranian, early Indo-European mythology. where at the time of death, we cross a bridge. And this is conceptualized as meeting.

We meet Daena, who is guarding the entrance to this bridge. And if Daena appears to us as a witch, then we will fall over the steep, long the side of the bridge into an eternal ravine, and we will cross into the house of lies. However, if Daena appears as a beautiful woman, then we know we will pass across the bridge into the house of songs.

Crossing this bridge into the rebel troll kingdom, the Russian-occupied Luhansk, I always knew I was going into a house of lies, But I didn't have a moniker for it and I didn't really understand totally what was folklore about the whole situation. I knew the Bro