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Tag: propaganda

  • Twitter Adding Warning Labels to Russian Propaganda Posts

    Twitter Adding Warning Labels to Russian Propaganda Posts

    Twitter is working to combat Russian propaganda, adding warning labels to tweets linked to such propaganda in the midst of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

    Tech companies are increasingly being drug into the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, with many implementing their own sanctions against Russia in the face of its attack. In the meantime, social media has become an all-too-common battleground between facts and misinformation.

    Twitter is working to address that, with warning labels attached to propaganda Russia may be working to propagate. The news was announced by Yoel Roth, Head of Site Integrity at @Twitter.

    Today, we’re adding labels to Tweets that share links to Russian state-affiliated media websites and are taking steps to significantly reduce the circulation of this content on Twitter.

    We’ll roll out these labels to other state-affiliated media outlets in the coming weeks.

    Twitter’s action is just one of many Russia is facing as it embarks on the biggest invasion in Europe since World War II.

  • Kim Jong-Un Stars in ‘Glorious Leader!’ Video Game

    Independent video game developer Moneyhorse has announced a title for PC and mobile called Glorious Leader!, which stars North Korea’s Great Successor Kim Jong-un as the main playable character.

    Players can guide the rotund despot through seven levels in the old-school shoot-’em-up, in scenarios that describe Kim Jong-un life-facts generated by the propaganda machine of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

    These faithfully reproduced side-scrolling facts include the time when the Dear Leader thwarted the United States when it attacked his homeland with an aircraft carrier and the Statue of Liberty.

    Other playable trials (the game recalls Konami’s classic Contra series) include the the time when Kim Jong-un was involved in the epic unicorn battle of North Hamgyong, where the puppet dictator vanquished 10,000 invading imperialists and destroyed 200 drones. Here the plump leader rides his faithful flaming unicorn:

    kim jong un

    Here is a shot of the aforementioned Statue of Liberty invasion scenario:

    kim jong un

    Here is the Glorious Leader! teaser trailer, which features NBA Hall of Famer and Kim Jong-un BFF Dennis Rodman:

    Rodman, seen below singing happy birthday to Jong-un during a bizarre basketball exhibition in North Korea in January, reportedly entered alcohol rehab soon after returning to the U.S.

    Kim Jong-un has held the titles of the First Secretary of the Workers’ Party of Korea, the Chairman of the Central Military Commission, First Chairman of the National Defense Commission of North Korea, the Supreme Commander of the Korean People’s Army and presidium member of the Politburo of the Workers’ Party of Korea. He was officially declared the Supreme Leader following the state funeral for his father Kim Jong-il on December 28, 2011.

    Here the people of North Korea cry hysterically over the passing of Kim Jong-il:

    Moneyhorse hasn’t set a release date, and the CEO of that company commented that his team has tried to “carefully walk the line of satire without being an apologist for the (North Korean) regime.”

    Images via YouTube

  • North Korea’s State Owned News: “Obama is a monkey”

    Propaganda is usually more eloquent, combined with images of gallantry and false promises through meaningless slogans; a rhetoric that allows for no free thought or discussion – ‘you’re either with us or against us.’

    North Korea spares no elegance when it tries to make a point, whether it’s a myriad of empty threats, execution by flamethrower, or bombardments from its state-run media front; Pyongyang’s Korean Central News Agency (KCNA), currently threw out some bigoted comments describing President Barack Obama as a “wicked black monkey.”

    “Divine punishment to the world’s one and only delinquent Obama”, published in Korean on May 2nd, came just in time with Obama’s state visit to South Korea. The article is composed of essays penned by four different people, despite the style being indistinguishable. If it wasn’t labeled a government publication, it’d pass as satire:

    “You can also tell this by his appearance and behavior, and while it may be because he is a crossbreed, one cannot help thinking the more one sees him that he has escaped from a monkey’s body,” it stated.

    The written diatribe lists Obama as a monkey four times, as well as calling him a “clown”, “dirty fellow” and somebody who “does not even have the basic appearance of a human being”; it geared towards the United States as “paper tiger” – its strength as a nation being largely a “myth.”

    “It would be better for him to live with other monkeys at a wild animal park in Africa … and licking bread crumbs thrown by onlookers,” wrote steel worker Kang Hyok at Chollima Steel Complex, author of one of the four essays.

    Another author, a military officer named Han Jin-Sung, wrote with more madness:

    “These Yankees have no idea who they are dealing with, and we will teach them the true taste of fire and war. Our nuclear strikes of justice and our powerful baptism by fire will decimate America, that devil’s den, without a trace — that is our resolution.”

    The articles have drawn criticism from the White House’s National Security Council, which said they were “particularly ugly and disrespectful.”

    State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf said on Thursday that the North Korean dispatch was “offensive and ridiculous and absurd.”

    “I don’t know how many words I can use up here to describe the rhetoric … It’s disgusting,” Harf told reporters at the Foreign Press Center in Washington.

    Yoo Ho-yeol, a professor of North Korea studies at Korea University in South Korea said that North Korea is trying to garner attention by publicizing such controversy, and that the government will distance themselves from it, attributing the remarks to their citizens who ultimately penned the piece.

    “If it was to publish such a report in the voice of the authorities it would entrap them, whereas reporting the story under some ordinary citizen’s name will give them leeway,” said Yoo.

    The published pieces are particularly a response towards President Obama’s recent visit to South Korea, where he and South Korean President Park Geun-hye held a summit in Seoul last month. During his visit, Obama said at a joint news conference with Park that he’s considering further sanctions against North Korea, and that the U.S. will not hesitate to engage in military action to defend its allies.

    Politics explode.

    Images via Wikimedia Commons (1), (2)

  • Washington Post Masthead On A Chinese Government Publication

    Freedom of speech — and thus, consequently, freedom to advertise — are fundamental principles of a free democracy and a thriving capitalist democracy, right? That’s what we’re told in this country from a young age. Well it turns out those freedoms are also employed by the Chinese Communist Party. In America. Namely, in The Washington Post.

    This is the source of an ethical controversy that has sprung up recently in the arena of journalism. Each month, the Post runs a paid supplement called China Watch, along with a regularly-updated website of the same name. The “paid” part gets done by the Chinese government. In return, China gets to publish articles produced by China Daily, the house organ of the Chinese government, in the Post, and using its masthead. Articles in China Watch portray China and its government in the way you might expect–that is, positively, or else with a particular diplomatic glibness. Ad copy, some call it. Others call it propaganda.

    It’s a hard boundary to find, that line between advertising and propaganda. People who don’t like being sold to are quick to label all advertising as propaganda of a kind, while free market advocates might suggest that if you pay for it, and if you make it clear that you paid for it, then even a government can simply advertise. The Washington Post says that it makes no attempt to conceal the paid nature of China Watch. Both print editions of the publication and its corresponding website bear a small disclaimer box in their top right corners. But critics of the Post’s partnership with China Daily argue that the disclaimer is not nearly as prominent on the page as the Post’s masthead at the top of the insert. While readers have technically been informed that China Watch has been paid for, critics argue that the prominence of the Post’s masthead makes a bigger statement, confusing readers who might think the Post at least officially endorses China Watch content. The web-edition of the pro-China publication is hosted under the Washington Post domain name. Moreover, the Post neglects to disclose who pays for the ads.

    (image)

    Of course, there’s no law generally requiring companies to disclose details about their advertising partners to the general public. However, things are a bit different when you’re dealing with a representative from a foreign government. The Post’s dealings with China Daily could run afoul of the Foreign Agents Registration Act, which requires that foreign agents and their activities be properly identified to the American public. Such disclosure involves more than a box in the upper-right-hand corner.

    Nor is this the only instance of dealings where The Post has been accused of serving as a mouthpiece for the Chinese government. In an editorial last month, Patrick Pexton, The Post’s own Ombudsman, lambasted the newsroom for at the very best, lazy journalism, and at the worst, kowtowing to the Chinese PR machine. Particularly at issue in the editiorial was the February 13 publication in The Post of an “interview” with Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping. It was later revealed that the “interview” was hardly an interview at all — Post reporters submitted written questions to Jinping, and in return they received a response to questions that had been modified, deleted, and added. Pexton disagreed with the newsroom’s decision to print the reponse:

      So, The Post submits written questions — already a far cry from a live face-to-face unscripted interview with journalists — and the Chinese say, thanks, but we don’t like your questions, so we’ll provide our own questions and answers. Take it or leave it.

      The Post took it. I think it should have left it.

    Of course, Pexton pointed out, this is a complicated issue. While both the printing of the interview propaganda and the lack of transparency regarding China Watch suggest the Post is soft, even misleading, in its coverage of China, The Post also does its fair share of reporting that embarrasses the Chinese government and others. It’s a difficult world to navigate, especially when dealing with China, which often withholds press visas, or grows mum around reporters asking too many uncomfortable questions.

    It’s not just The Post that faces this difficultly. China is sitting on a billion citizens, nuclear weapons, the world’s fastest-growing economy, and $1.2 trillion of U.S. debt. So it has a lot of weight to throw around with governments and major corporations, let alone media outlets. But is it right for The Post to lend its masthead and domain name to China Watch? Pexton observes:

      That’s the thing about China, whether you are The Washington Post, the U.S. government or Apple computers. There is interdependence in the relationship, and constant negotiation and compromise. The Chinese know it, and they take advantage of it.

    Right might not always come into play these days.

    Hat Tip: The Washington Free Beacon

  • Kony 2012: The Anatomy Of A Viral Success

    Funny thing about the internet: you can’t smell anything on it, but certain stories sure can cause a stink.

    Two days ago, we told you about the meteoric rise of the latest viral video, Kony 2012, that didn’t make the rounds on the internet so much as it grabbed the internet by the eyeballs and forced everybody to look directly at it. In the four days since it was uploaded to YouTube, the video has amassed nearly 58 million views while viral news of it has no doubt permeated your Facebook and Twitter feeds.

    The video, in the impossible case it that hasn’t yet osmosis-ed itself into your brain from at least one kind of media outlet, was created and released by Invisible Children, an organization that’s been trying for years to draw worldwide attention toward Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony and his Lord’s Resistance Army. The Lord’s Resistance army is a special breed of awful because, aside from being Kony’s personal army, it’s made up of kidnapped children-turned-soldiers responsible for horrors ranging from hacking apart victims’ bodies to using abducted girls as sex slaves.

    At any rate, you can see how there’s high emotional appeal that would likely resonate with most people containing even a sliver of sympathy. More, as with all things that finally have A Moment in the media, there is now the inevitable backlash against Kony 2012 criticizing Invisible Children’s approach.

    So it goes.

    What’s odd about Kony 2012’s success, though, isn’t that it went viral so quickly but rather why it went viral in the first place. Invisible Children has been trying to raise awareness about Kony since 2004 when the eponymous “Invisible Children” film was released, the group’s first attempt to bring attention to Kony’s atrocities. Invisible Children have released 11 films in all yet this is the first one to truly achieve a viral, nigh-zeitgeist status. In fact, it’s taken Invisible Children so long to finally land a hit with their films that Joseph Kony isn’t even in Uganda anymore (he reportedly left in 2006).

    Some of the success has been attributed to Invisible Children’s goal of enlisting the help of “culturemakers.” Others have asserted that Kony 2012 succeeded due to clever marketing on social media. Both of these belie Invisible Children’s previous efforts by assuming such endorsements and technologies weren’t used to propel their videos into the limelight. For one, Lady Gaga endorses a ton of things but not nearly all of them catch on the way Kony 2012 has. She and others have got a magic, but it’s far from being a true Midas touch.

    The most salient difference between Kony 2012’s world and the world of Invisible Children’s previous videos, I believe, is something far more simple: timing. The towering success of the anti-SOPA movement, Planned Parenthood supporters organizing to turn back Susan G. Komen’s decision to de-fund the organization, or even the recent backlast that has sent supporters fleeing from Rush Limbaugh due to his misogynistic remarks about Sandra Fluke – all have helped build and fortify the edifice of social media’s power. It could be argued that Kony 2012 was a beneficiary of those previous campaigns that, one, established the social media political infrastructure, and two, demonstrated that it works.

    As these movements cycle more regularly and enjoy an ever-quickening ascent-descent with the world’s favor, though, do we run the risk of diminishing the potency of the viral campaign-as-political device the more these campaigns happen? I’m in no way saying that it’ll be Invisible Children’s fault were viral campaigns to falter in the future – whatever your feelings about the group’s methods, good on IC for finally getting the world to pay attention to how horrible Kony is – but rather highlighting the fact that these viral campaigns seem to be happening an awful lot lately.

    Indeed, you can have too much of a good thing and so I fear that, after eventually growing tired of the endless parade of Next Big Things from the internet, instead of catching wind of political campaigns that really deserve our attention, the public will begin to simply hold their breath until the trend passes along and disappears into the trunks of internet fads.

    Then again, maybe that’s how we’ll define success from now on: brief but explosive attention on subjects that, after a few days, are quickly supplanted by the Next Big Thing all while we reload our interest from one to another.

    Why do you think Invisible Children finally succeeded in amassing massive media attention on Joseph Kony only now after trying for nearly a decade? Feel free to chime in below with your thoughts.