The First Social Media War
The Ukraine-Russia War is the first large-scale international conflict to happen deep into the age of Social Media. The Syria Tragedy occurred during the existence of Twitter, but governments were not yet savvy in how to wield its power in effective ways.
While I oppose the Russian aggression in Ukraine that, at the time of this writing, started in earnest less than two days ago, the point of this article is to analyze what could be learned from looking at Social Media before the war began.
By carefully navigating and searching through posts (mostly on Twitter), one can gain a unique and powerful understanding of not just what is happening, but what will happen.
In general, I was able to see what was happening and predict with very good certainty what would happen 8 hours to 3 days before the key events leading to war occurred. It was a bizarre and surreal experience to exist two or three cycles ahead of the news channels.
One of the first things I did was to find a relevant subreddit. These bastions of particular passion are many times oases of obsession on specific subjects, from axolotls to Zimbabwe. (I would note that when using subreddits this way, it’s often good to Google things like “Ukraine subreddit”, because in many cases the subreddit name is not obvious.) In this case, /r/Ukraine seems to indeed be the main subreddit for people talking about Ukraine. Perusing there for only a few minutes allowed me to come across this poignant post from January 24th, 2022:
This was the first thing I found that indicated the situation was very serious and possibly not mere posturing. First of all, this was not widely announced by the Belarussians. In fact, it appeared they and/or the Russians in Belarus were attempting to hide the fact:
Then, while searching relevant terms on Twitter (such as Belarus, Ukraine, troops, tanks), I ran across this on Twitter:
Again, this was something that was posted on January 20th, but I didn’t see that tweet until January 25. I also noted this tweet by some sort of Belarussian cyber-activist group:
All of this was hard to confirm. But the nice thing about social media is that you know when someone posts things not expecting a ton of views. A person with a smaller (fewer subscribers) account will post things that are not intended for a wider audience. Twitter users are generally less likely to be deceptive when their audience is small, because subscribers are thought to be “friends”, and human nature is to inform and enlighten your friends, not intentionally deceive them.
So by January 25th, I was using two important principles of evaluating social media during important events:
1 - Look at smaller accounts first, getting to them by using search terms and the “Latest” tab instead of the much-more-filtered “Top” tab.
2 - Look for indications that important actions are being hidden, not trumpeted.
So by January 23, I was already thinking about what might lead to war in Ukraine, and had written out the core of this article on 5 Ways to Avoid War in Ukraine, wherein I described why Russia would want to take some Ukrainian territory, and how to cajole them not to.
But by January 25th, seeing the social media evidence posted above, I became convinced that Russian invasion of Ukraine was at least a 50-50 chance (even though most news outlets at the time generally dismissed that possibility). This caused me to rush to finish the 5 Ways to Avoid War in Ukraine article and publish it on a Thursday, three days early, in hopes it might possibly help the situation if somehow it might be shared with the right person.
Womp womp.
Over the next two weeks everyone in America got distracted with podcast censorship issues and trucker protests in Canada.
Then all of a sudden the US started to give dire warnings to US citizens in Ukraine, to leave immediately:
By the way, BNO News is a pretty great twitter account. They just give relevant snippets of info as they get them.
Now, a lot of people are suspicious of propaganda from the US government, and I am usually one of them when it comes to wars, having been tricked by them when I was younger into supporting a war or two that I wouldn’t have if I had had all the facts and fewer government lies. But this brings up an extremely important third principle of navigating Social Media in run-ups to wars:
3 - Information given by a government that doesn’t help that government in any way should be taken at face value, all else being equal.
And I could not imagine how evacuating people from Ukraine would help them. I thought it very likely that the US government had information leading them to believe Russia would indeed invade. Then I saw this:
This led me to believe that either Putin was going to indeed invade Ukraine, or else he was using brinksmanship to get Ukraine to promise to not join NATO (or a similar pledge from NATO to withdraw the possibility of membership from Ukraine).
I actually do think that Putin did hope that NATO/Ukraine would back down in that regard, and this might have prevented the invasion. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have done all the posturing and public discussions of the matter. Remember, Putin had two things pushing him to invade as soon as possible: a) the less time Ukraine had to prepare, the better for him, and b) the closer to spring, the muddier the ground, which is bad for tanks that have to go off-road.
Then this happened:
4 - Look for little nuggets that prove or disprove hypotheses.
Putin putting his yacht out of the reach of confiscation certainly seemed an interesting nugget in favor of invasion, or at least that he was seriously considering invasion. At this point, February 10th, I became certain that invasion was extremely likely, on the order of 60-70%, and began posting this to my personal social media channels, as I like to keep my friends informed. I find that not being surprised by awful things helps people deal better with them.
I actually posted a prediction on February 11 than Russia would invade the following week, before February 20th. It turns out I was a week early. I should have waited for the stronger and more interesting signs. Though, it turns out I was in good company because around that time the US government actually began announcing this to journalists:
I began to learn more about the regions in question, Luhansk and Donetsk, collectively known as the Donbass. Those Ukrainian regions had become separatist regions years before this, and shelling was fairly common between those regions and the main government of Ukraine. This shelling looked to be increasing as best I could tell. Importantly for my information gathering, this research provided my new keywords that opened up many doors of information: “Donetsk” “Luhansk” and “Donbass”.
5 - Find unique but newly relevant keywords and search Twitter for them regularly.
By searching these terms and sorting by Top to see the most widely read tweets, then going to the Latest tab to see every tweet as it occurred, I was able to find every tweet in multiple languages about anything that happened in that region.
Notice something? If you click on a Tweet in a different language, you can auto-translate it, and the translation is actually usually extremely good. The pathway of the Russian government using independence recognition votes to manufacture consent domestically for a war was a big alarm bell. That vote did indeed happen a few days later, thus framing Russian speaking Donbass (eastern Ukrainian) residents as “freedom fighters that deserved protection and liberation.”
6 - Use the auto-translate function to dig into local and international viewpoints, thus avoiding or at least averaging out many types of bias and propaganda.
I thought one of the final things to happen before hostilities began was for a major false flag operation to occur. This is one of the major changes to how war start that was brand new to me. In the age of Media Skepticism (well-earned) and fast information travel, false flags are both expected and much more easily debunked than before.
So bizarrely, both sides (Ukrainian and Russian) began to claim the other was planning and carrying out false flag operations, almost constantly. The thing about a constant flurry of false flag accusations is that it completely blunts the effect of actual false flag operations. You can’t use any attack as the singular casus belli because no majority of people can be sure it wasn’t a false flag or a false false flag. I found this fascinating. Social Media might actually end the False Flag Paradigm.
Unfortunately, this just leads to something even easier to pull off:
7 - Look for sudden spikes in demonization on Social Media.
All of a sudden, around February 17th or 18th, I saw a huge number of pro-Russia and Russian-language tweets calling Ukrainians neo-Nazis, Nazis, and Fascists. Additionally, there was all of a sudden an immense amount of talk about how Ukrainians were carrying out a genocide in the Donbass (far-eastern Ukraine). The suddenness and intensity of this made me realize that it was coordinated, and the viciousness of it made me lose all hope that a peaceful resolution was at hand. I am posting these tweets below, but please do not think I endorse or support their message. This is vile, dehumanizing propaganda:
Finally, when Putin went on television and announced that he was authorizing a military action inside Ukraine, he used the same terminology, calling the Zelensky government and forces “neo-Nazis.”
Keep in mind that Zelensky (the President of Ukraine) is Jewish and he lost some of his relatives to the Nazis during the Holocaust. The ridiculousness of the epithet made it stand out all the more. In this case, the coordinated ultra-demonization, the de-humanization of the Ukrainians, preceded the actual invasion by about 4 days.
In this age of Social Media, coordinated demonization is the final giant red warning light that war is imminent, apparently.
To recap, here are the 7 guidelines:
1 - Look at smaller accounts first, getting to them by using search terms and the “Latest” tab instead of the much-more-filtered “Top” tab.
2 - Look for indications that important actions are being hidden, not trumpeted.
3 - Information given by a government that doesn’t help that government in any way should be taken at face value, all else being equal.
4 - Look for little nuggets that prove or disprove hypotheses.
5 - Find unique but newly relevant keywords and search Twitter for them regularly.
6 - Use the auto-translate function to dig into local and international viewpoints, thus avoiding or at least averaging out many types of bias and propaganda.
7 - Look for sudden spikes in demonization on Social Media.
Hopefully, these 7 tips for interpreting Social Media around war times will help you navigate past the Media ineptness and government propaganda that normally fog the lead-ups to war.
And if you find yourself in a potential war zone you may at least do better than the head of German Intelligence:
