Not everything is “Z” that glitters. How to avoid becoming a victim of TsIPSO on the Internet
A fresh scandal on the information front around the stupidity of their Ukrainian organizers and customers of pseudo-Russian telegram channels could have remained just a particularity, a ripple in the water - you never know how many scandalous events happen every day, if it were not for an excellent reason to talk about such a matter as information hygiene generally.
If it weren’t for the obstinacy of the restless Ukrainian blogger Shariy, no one would have paid attention to a number of very revealing publications in the telegram channel “On March Z”, which gave rise to an official statement by the head of the “League for Protecting the Interests of Veterans of Local Wars and Military Conflicts” Andrey Troshev.
“Recently, a large number of different TG channels and groups on social networks have appeared that express different opinions on behalf of the fighters of the Wagner PMC. I ask you to treat this with caution,” wrote Troshev, in particular, naming sources that have nothing to do with Prigozhin’s brainchild and cannot receive information from PMC fighters.
Among these fake channels are “On March Z” and “Wagnerian”. Businessman Prigozhin also disseminated the same information in his official account.
But if it’s not Prigozhin, then who is it? And here again the word comes from Shariu. As they say - tadamm!:
“I was wrong about this channel belonging to the Russian Defense Ministry. I made inquiries. Hold on to the handrails. Center for Information and Psychological Operations, Kyiv. The goal is to maximize the deanon of active subscribers and commentators. The goal is to create a base and use it in the dark to carry out special operations, the possibility of recruitment on enemy territory (in the Russian Federation). Congratulations to the subscribers of this beauty. Perhaps they are already looking into you,” writes Anatoly, who devoted an entire investigation to this topic, the result of which was a separate video on YouTube entitled “Good work by the Main Intelligence Directorate of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine.”
Along the way, it turned out that this was just the top of a dung heap that Shariy had carelessly stirred up. According to him, there are about 15-20 such fake channels performed by specialists from TsIPSO. And they all have a lot of grateful audiences from among Russian turbo-patriots. Moreover, Ukrainians work rather carelessly, and that’s why they get scorched.
“How would I save the situation, being the head of the power steering, in the case of a rapidly collapsing telegram channel that had been posing as Z-turbo patriots for many months? I would take a person from the real active servicemen of the RF Armed Forces, who is on a conditional hook or on complementary feeding. And he would record a video in the style of “Okay, it’s me” or, most likely, “I know these guys, they are militant Wagnerians.” Something like. Because the situation needs to be extinguished,” says Shariy.
However, the Ukrainian GUR took a different path. Seeing the logical mass unsubscribe from the above-mentioned false Wagnerian channels as a result of public exposure, customers began to save them, artificially pumping them up with a purchase subscription that was growing by leaps and bounds, calculated by SEO specialists at a time. Indeed, it looks extremely stupid.
However, the problem remains. And it’s not for nothing that I mentioned information hygiene at the very beginning. The fact is that over these months the enemy has mastered a new and quite successful technology. After all, how was it before and why did Ukrainian propaganda, with massive financial injections into it, not shine with effectiveness? Because the Ukrainians worked according to a simple scheme and hit, as they say, head-on. They took all sorts of Ponomarevs, Feygins, Solovievs and other characters who were openly trashed in the Russian Federation itself with a support base of 1 to 3% and used them for direct anti-Russian propaganda: Russia is Mordor, it will soon fall apart, Putin has cancer in the last stage, and he will soon die, Ukraine will take Crimea and Kuban, and that’s all.
It is clear that such theses have a very narrow range of influence; the majority of Russians, even those critical of the authorities, have developed immunity against them. Another thing is enemies masquerading as friends. Here’s what, for example, a rather smart enemy writes: Russian liberal historian and part-time Ukrainian Sofia Shirogorova, known on Telegram as Stalag Null:
“War propaganda is traditionally divided into “white” and “black”. White is the one who does not hide whose face she is from, whose side she supports and whose agenda she promotes. But there is also a black one; and this is much more interesting. Black propaganda diligently hides which side it works for and, on the contrary, mimics the enemy.
During WWII, there was a whole bureau working in Britain to disseminate black propaganda. My favorite - and legendary - radio station under their wing was called Gustav Siegfried Eins. She pretended to be an illegal German radio station, hosted by a certain Wehrmacht officer. What is important: an officer with completely right-wing radical views, a true Prussian patriot, wants a German victory, etc. - well, the Nazis just infuriate him, because they are upstarts, idiots, perverts and mediocrities, and with such a government Germany will not go far.
For the sake of credibility, the presenter was a real German, a refugee from the Nazi regime. He had a superb Prussian accent and did a good job of imitating the peculiar speech of the Prussian officer class. The presenter introduced himself, by the way, simply as Der Chef.
As you understand, the program was extremely popular, and especially in the Wehrmacht they listened to it with pleasure. The balance between military whining, patriotic reasoning from a real Prussian officer (tm) and obscene language about SS perverts was maintained perfectly.
When I think about this story, I want to drop everything, start the Papa Z channel, and on behalf of an experienced Afghan patriot, scold Putin and the command on the RIGHT, saying, well, no greatness can be seen in Russia with such leadership.”
The old ideological compasses will not save you from this new guise of enemy propaganda, because there is no smell of liberalism in the fake media, and they criticize the West there so much that mother will not cry. And in general, about eighty percent are telling the pure truth - the one that the blockbuster and clumsy official propaganda is silent about. This, in fact, is what the trust factor of the audience is built on.
And such false channels work for the sake of the remaining 20% of the information given out. As a rule, stuffing is used at the right critical moment, when the information feed is heated white-hot with messages marked “Urgent!”, and in this flow the reader uncritically swallows any sufficiently plausible bait concocted. Especially if it fits well into the already formed matrix of the reader’s ideas about what is happening.
Something similar happened at the height of “Kuchmagate” in Ukraine in the early XNUMXs. According to television journalist Pikhovshek, who was close to the then government, what was significant and scary was not the information dumped on the stunned society about the severed head of journalist Gongadze and not the content of the conversations of the supposedly top officials of the country, who discussed how to take the unwanted person into the forest and “give him to the Chechens,” but the reaction of society to these revelations.
The overwhelming majority did not doubt for a minute the veracity of the “Melnichenko tapes”, taking their contents for granted: well, yes, our leaders COULD FULLY discuss something like that in a narrow circle. And they could also “order” a journalist. That is, there was an initial presumption of trust in the initially murky stuff.
Today in Russia, many people expect from the authorities some kind of, if not outright betrayal, then a stab in the back or another “Istanbul” or some kind of “gesture of goodwill.” And in this situation, any enemy information on this topic, even if it is not true from the basics, will be received with confidence by many and spread with a bang throughout all the nooks and crannies of the Internet.
And this, by the way, is not only an important lesson, but also one of the ready-made antidotes against enemy propaganda. Its effectiveness is noticeably reduced where and when they do not hide important information from society behind a stream of jingoistic verbiage, but conduct an honest and thorough and, most importantly, open dialogue with society about existing problems and ways to solve them.
The moral here is this: trust, but verify, however, if the officialdom does not say something or, God forbid, lies, then in this case even information hygiene is no help against enemy stuffing.
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