7 ms·

An army of volunteer ‘elves’ fights disinfo in the Czech Republic

67 points by hhs 6y ago

OneGuy123 6y ago
He who controls the definition of "disinfo" controls the world.
- thoraway1010 6y ago
  Yep - when I questioned my local health authorities guidance that if "healthy" I should take off my mask on crowded public transit and when working with the very elderly (adult day health) I was told to avoid "disinformation" (in writing) and to follow surgeon general and their guidance and take off my mask on public transit and while working with the elderly. A month later they flip-flopped on that ironically. I wonder if they started to believe some of the "disinformation" that wearing masks is a low cost though imperfect way to reduce spread. I've found actual scientists working with these diseases are pretty on it for logic, but folks like epidemiologists are sometimes totally horrendous. Is epidemiology less rigorous then other infectious disease educational tracks?
  - Enginerrrd 6y ago
    Honestly, the answer to the question "is field x less rigorous" is almost universally no. Some fields tend to attract smarter people than others, but that doesn't mean there aren't very smart people in pretty much every field who are doing good work and exploration at depth. For this question I think that beyond the politics and what was a deeply ill-advised strategy for managing a limited resource (masks), it may also have to do with the type of studies they tend to use and give authority to. The scientists you're talking about probably are looking at smaller scale things where plausible mechanisms are investigated and confirmed. Epidemiologists though have many examples in their toolkit where such common sense findings don't extrapolate to population level interventions. For whatever reason, epidemiology doesn't seem to embrace a more bayesian approach where you operate with a good guess and try to revise it as you learn more. They tend to stick to confirmed models.
  - dmurray 6y ago
    Epidemiology during a pandemic is about one part science to three parts PR. Sending a consistent message to the public and getting them to change their behaviour at all is more important than getting the details right. In the case of masks, the WHO decided early on that masks for the public were of limited use in slowing coronavirus spread: they'd stop some infections but could be detrimental if misused and could threaten the supply to medical professionals. This was a reasonable conclusion at the time. To communicate that to the public, the party line was: masks no good. Many national organisations took their cue from the WHO. Now the risk/reward tradeoff has shifted: better research shows that masks, even ersatz ones, are good and the supply lines for professionals have improved. So the message has to change: masks good. The actual scientists know that it's not black and white, but pretending it is is a useful tool for health organisations. At some point I expect we'll see a flip-flop on the party line that "there is no evidence that covid-19 infection confers immunity against future infection". It's nonsense - there are hundreds of years of circumstantial evidence - but it's just about defensible in that there haven't been any sufficiently powerful blinded trials to directly demonstrate it specifically for Covid-19. Once it's deemed to be in the public good, they'll accept some study showing exposure does indeed confer immunity.
    - pyuser583 6y ago
      Is it reasonable to ask the public to believe absolute messages that contradict themselves? Maybe what the boy who cried wolf meant was “I am not sure whether a wolf is in the forest. But the potential damage from a wolf a attack, combined with the increased likelihood of a wolf presence due to the observation of fresh wolf droppings, exceeds the damage from sheltering in place.” But the like the epidemiologists, simply said “There’s a wolf in the forest! Run away!”
      - dmurray 6y ago
        That's a question for the PR experts. I expect the majority of people are swayed by the absolute advice and the flip flopping doesn't damage the message too much. After all, we have always been at war with Eastasia.
- throwaway2048 6y ago
  Yeah, I mean, who is to say that reptile shape shifting aliens living in the hollow earth aren't secretly controlling the world government via the Illuminati that are enslaving the population via vaccines and 5G-coronavirus from a secret muslim pizza parlor basement where they murder children. That has every bit as much claim on the truth as Einstein's Theory of Relativity, so much so that people should be in fact forced to publish favorable information about it, (people rightfully cry out every time a private party dare to censor something with equal claims on validity to The Truth) After all how can anyone ever possibly know what truth is?
  - microcolonel 6y ago
    We get your point, that you expect the public to be more wrong than the authorities. Except in this case, all of the foremost authorities have been wrong repeatedly and in ways that delayed productive caution, and extended unproductive policy. More of WHO's early guidance was dangerously misleading or false than was true; they actively denied every important observation which turned out to be critical to getting a handle on the virus. Ordinary members of the public were ahead of the WHO for months in disseminating factual information and productive advice.
    - throwaway2048 6y ago
      Its completely possible for the authorities to be wrong, its also completely possible for charlatan opportunists and insane people to make a bad situation much worse.
      - microcolonel 6y ago
        > Its completely possible for the authorities to be wrong, its also completely possible for charlatan opportunists and insane people to make a bad situation much worse. In this case, the foremost authority was so wrong that no charlatan opportunist with reach outside the “maybe I should drink bleach” set of the public did any worse than them, and a majority of the “non-authoritative” sources I consulted this year got the important facts (evidence of human-to-human spread, a long tail of very long incubation periods, difficult-to-ascertain asymptomatic carriers, asymptomatic transmission, unlikely to have been transmitted in a purely natural setting) straight as soon as information was available, while WHO was still denying these things without evidence to back up their denials. Added to clarify: For example, if you watched Tim Pool's (political commentator, often struggles to read and understand things he's covering) podcast, he was able to tell you early this year that some reports saw the virus incubating for upward of two weeks, and transmissible during at least some of that time; and if I recall correctly, at that same moment, the WHO's official position was that there was “no evidence of human to human transmission”, a statement that would be irresponsible even if it were true at the time. While the WHO was denying early concerns that it could spread through aerosols, the same podcast was presenting the evidence for this, and cautioning people to be aware of it (but not to panic). If you ask me, this random independent podcast handled this subject so much more responsibly than the mainstream media (who were at the time saying that it was no worse than the flu, making fun of people for being concerned about it) and the WHO (who were basically advising people to ignore evidence entirely, and not take precautions, until they deemed it sufficient).
FriendlyNormie 6y ago
“Elves”? Cool it with the antisemitic remarks.
jimhefferon 6y ago
Any similar organizations in the US?
colordrops 6y ago
I'm sure there are organizations that earnestly and in good faith fight disinformation online, but whenever I hear the term "online army to fight disinfo" it's almost certainly another group also trying to put their own spin on things rather than asserting some objective ground truth.
- klenwell 6y ago
  That was my first cynical thought, too. How many Orcs are out there on the other side? Actually, it was worse: How long before the Elves become the Orcs? Anyway, go Elves! I guess.
  - maxfromua 6y ago
    "Orcs" isn't very popular, but "Mordor" is one of the most popular synonymous for russian state here in Ukraine as well.
- slightwinder 6y ago
  It's always just a matter of perspective. What are one sides freedom fighters, are the other sides terrorist. This will never change as long as people are fighting for "truth and justice".
  - seph-reed 6y ago
    > It's always just a matter of perspective Straight-up lying does exist. And to quote the article: “We must persuade the general public that fake news and disinformation are simply not a question of different opinions, but a planned campaign organized by foreign actors,” Kučík said. “This is a serious matter.”
    - thinkingemote 6y ago
      Straight up lying does exist, and it exists alongside bias and propaganda. The irony is to combat fake news and lies is also to combat bias, persuasion and tactics to influence. None of those with power or in the media game want to do this really because it makes them weaker.
billfruit 6y ago
Perhaps it is better usage now to call them Czechia rather than the Czech Republic. We usually speak of France, not the French Republic.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- kanox 6y ago
  Not clear why you're being downvoted, I remember the Czech government explicitly requesting this.
- arler 6y ago
  As a Czech person I disagree and prefer our country to be called Czech Republic. "Czechia" sounds similar to "Chechnya" and in the case of the terrorist attacks during Boston Marathon in 2013 (in which at least one Chechnyan was involved), people confused Czech Republic with Chechnya. I can for example remember people from USA threatening Czech Republic on Twitter for something that has not been committed by a Czech person. Moreover, the words "Czech Republic" sound better to me than just "Czechia". But that is just my opinion.
- bduerst 6y ago
  My wife is Czech and just said nobody cares.
galfarragem 6y ago
How about educate people to make that filtering by themselves? Nobody owns the truth. It's the last thing I want is an horde of elves making that filtering for me.
- burkaman 6y ago
  That's what they're doing. They don't have any power to filter anything. I recommend reading the article, it's pretty short.
jkadlec 6y ago
It's interesting that they're targeting chain emails first. I would say comments on the Czech news sites are a bigger problem. Usually the Russian trolls are easy to spot (they use words and terms that people just don't normally use, like "demoblok" to denote the political parties which are critical to Russia), but sometimes it can be quite subtle. Then again maybe the news sites themselves should regulate this.
aleyan 6y ago
Normally I am highly supportive of volunteer based efforts. However for political causes volunteers tend have political biases, which make the results less than authoritative. According to this [1] article from University of Manchester researchers, even EU supported volunteer anti-disinformation campaigns seems to produce more of it themselves. And yes, I did confirm that the "reframingrussia.com" domain does belong to a University of Manchester group[2]. [1] https://reframingrussia.com/2020/04/06/covid-19-disinformation-two-short-reports-on-the-russian-dimension/ https://reframingrussia.com/2020/04/06/covid-19-disinformati... [2] https://www.research.manchester.ac.uk/portal/en/projects/reframing-russia-for-the-global-mediasphere-from-cold-war-to-information-war(12ff514a-6b46-4b0c-b190-76754ccb0033).html https://www.research.manchester.ac.uk/portal/en/projects/ref...
- JChase2 6y ago
  That's super interesting. It's hard to imagine what a legitimately authoritative anti-disinformation campaign would look like. Back when Operation INFEKTION was big, in the 80's iirc, the U.S. Department of State was involved in trying to counter claims of AIDS being of U.S. origin by sending out letters to many news outlets. Mostly the details of these letters were worked out by a group known as the "Active Mea-sures Working Group". As far as I know, they were basically underfunded and understaffed, but worked hard to try to tease out the truth and track down the origins of disinformation. These days I'm not sure if it would help or hurt to have the likes of the CIA, FBI, DoD, etc running these groups considering peoples lack of trust in them. It's a tough problem for sure.
  - ColanR 6y ago
    That's why independent media is so important. The government will always be assumed to have a spin on things: can you imagine if Trump had the US department of state doing what you described? No democrat would ever believe it was unbiased. It's unfortunate that the government is not the only powerful player in town. Doesn't help that even Amazon owns a news outlet these days.
seph-reed 6y ago
This seems awesome and it weirds me out how many anti posts there are... is it better this whole thing just be one sided? Maybe nobody read the article, it's not like they're filtering anything. They're just doing the opposite of spreading disinformation, to the best of their abilities.
igammarays 6y ago
If you want to hear the other side of this story, I can recommend Gilbert Doctorow's books or blog. Thoroughly fascinating readings. He's a fiercely independent yet diligent fact-based writer, a (Harvard-graduate) international affairs specialist based in Belgium and Russia. His non-conformist books "Does Russia Have A Future?" and "A Belgian Perspective on International Affairs" are eye-opening as it gives a rarely seen Russian perspective on the information wars. He doesn't deny Russian malfeasance, but he claims that the Russians are often acting in reaction to a vicious, calculated anti-Russian information campaign in the West which often operates under the guise of human rights activism. Far from being opinion pieces, he does some excellent investigative journalism with first-hand reports of people, events, press conferences, statements and sometimes blatant falsehoods attributed to Russia, providing evidence of Western "propaganda". Really helps to see the current media situation as an information war or New Cold War, rather than a simple case of "the Russians are evil and they lie all the time and hate us for no reason" which is the narrative that seems to run in the West. That Western narrative really makes no sense to the independent thinker.
- burkaman 6y ago
  This is interesting, but it's a sort of tangentially related story, not "the other side of this story". Whether or not Russia is a victim itself or has been provoked or whatever is not relevant as to whether these volunteers are doing a good thing.

67 points by hhs 6y ago

OneGuy123 6y ago

He who controls the definition of "disinfo" controls the world.

thoraway1010 6y ago
Yep - when I questioned my local health authorities guidance that if "healthy" I should take off my mask on crowded public transit and when working with the very elderly (adult day health) I was told to avoid "disinformation" (in writing) and to follow surgeon general and their guidance and take off my mask on public transit and while working with the elderly. A month later they flip-flopped on that ironically. I wonder if they started to believe some of the "disinformation" that wearing masks is a low cost though imperfect way to reduce spread. I've found actual scientists working with these diseases are pretty on it for logic, but folks like epidemiologists are sometimes totally horrendous. Is epidemiology less rigorous then other infectious disease educational tracks?
- Enginerrrd 6y ago
  Honestly, the answer to the question "is field x less rigorous" is almost universally no. Some fields tend to attract smarter people than others, but that doesn't mean there aren't very smart people in pretty much every field who are doing good work and exploration at depth. For this question I think that beyond the politics and what was a deeply ill-advised strategy for managing a limited resource (masks), it may also have to do with the type of studies they tend to use and give authority to. The scientists you're talking about probably are looking at smaller scale things where plausible mechanisms are investigated and confirmed. Epidemiologists though have many examples in their toolkit where such common sense findings don't extrapolate to population level interventions. For whatever reason, epidemiology doesn't seem to embrace a more bayesian approach where you operate with a good guess and try to revise it as you learn more. They tend to stick to confirmed models.
- dmurray 6y ago
  Epidemiology during a pandemic is about one part science to three parts PR. Sending a consistent message to the public and getting them to change their behaviour at all is more important than getting the details right. In the case of masks, the WHO decided early on that masks for the public were of limited use in slowing coronavirus spread: they'd stop some infections but could be detrimental if misused and could threaten the supply to medical professionals. This was a reasonable conclusion at the time. To communicate that to the public, the party line was: masks no good. Many national organisations took their cue from the WHO. Now the risk/reward tradeoff has shifted: better research shows that masks, even ersatz ones, are good and the supply lines for professionals have improved. So the message has to change: masks good. The actual scientists know that it's not black and white, but pretending it is is a useful tool for health organisations. At some point I expect we'll see a flip-flop on the party line that "there is no evidence that covid-19 infection confers immunity against future infection". It's nonsense - there are hundreds of years of circumstantial evidence - but it's just about defensible in that there haven't been any sufficiently powerful blinded trials to directly demonstrate it specifically for Covid-19. Once it's deemed to be in the public good, they'll accept some study showing exposure does indeed confer immunity.
  - pyuser583 6y ago
    Is it reasonable to ask the public to believe absolute messages that contradict themselves? Maybe what the boy who cried wolf meant was “I am not sure whether a wolf is in the forest. But the potential damage from a wolf a attack, combined with the increased likelihood of a wolf presence due to the observation of fresh wolf droppings, exceeds the damage from sheltering in place.” But the like the epidemiologists, simply said “There’s a wolf in the forest! Run away!”
    - dmurray 6y ago
      That's a question for the PR experts. I expect the majority of people are swayed by the absolute advice and the flip flopping doesn't damage the message too much. After all, we have always been at war with Eastasia.
throwaway2048 6y ago
Yeah, I mean, who is to say that reptile shape shifting aliens living in the hollow earth aren't secretly controlling the world government via the Illuminati that are enslaving the population via vaccines and 5G-coronavirus from a secret muslim pizza parlor basement where they murder children. That has every bit as much claim on the truth as Einstein's Theory of Relativity, so much so that people should be in fact forced to publish favorable information about it, (people rightfully cry out every time a private party dare to censor something with equal claims on validity to The Truth) After all how can anyone ever possibly know what truth is?
- microcolonel 6y ago
  We get your point, that you expect the public to be more wrong than the authorities. Except in this case, all of the foremost authorities have been wrong repeatedly and in ways that delayed productive caution, and extended unproductive policy. More of WHO's early guidance was dangerously misleading or false than was true; they actively denied every important observation which turned out to be critical to getting a handle on the virus. Ordinary members of the public were ahead of the WHO for months in disseminating factual information and productive advice.
  - throwaway2048 6y ago
    Its completely possible for the authorities to be wrong, its also completely possible for charlatan opportunists and insane people to make a bad situation much worse.
    - microcolonel 6y ago
      > Its completely possible for the authorities to be wrong, its also completely possible for charlatan opportunists and insane people to make a bad situation much worse. In this case, the foremost authority was so wrong that no charlatan opportunist with reach outside the “maybe I should drink bleach” set of the public did any worse than them, and a majority of the “non-authoritative” sources I consulted this year got the important facts (evidence of human-to-human spread, a long tail of very long incubation periods, difficult-to-ascertain asymptomatic carriers, asymptomatic transmission, unlikely to have been transmitted in a purely natural setting) straight as soon as information was available, while WHO was still denying these things without evidence to back up their denials. Added to clarify: For example, if you watched Tim Pool's (political commentator, often struggles to read and understand things he's covering) podcast, he was able to tell you early this year that some reports saw the virus incubating for upward of two weeks, and transmissible during at least some of that time; and if I recall correctly, at that same moment, the WHO's official position was that there was “no evidence of human to human transmission”, a statement that would be irresponsible even if it were true at the time. While the WHO was denying early concerns that it could spread through aerosols, the same podcast was presenting the evidence for this, and cautioning people to be aware of it (but not to panic). If you ask me, this random independent podcast handled this subject so much more responsibly than the mainstream media (who were at the time saying that it was no worse than the flu, making fun of people for being concerned about it) and the WHO (who were basically advising people to ignore evidence entirely, and not take precautions, until they deemed it sufficient).

FriendlyNormie 6y ago

“Elves”? Cool it with the antisemitic remarks.

jimhefferon 6y ago

Any similar organizations in the US?

colordrops 6y ago

I'm sure there are organizations that earnestly and in good faith fight disinformation online, but whenever I hear the term "online army to fight disinfo" it's almost certainly another group also trying to put their own spin on things rather than asserting some objective ground truth.

klenwell 6y ago
That was my first cynical thought, too. How many Orcs are out there on the other side? Actually, it was worse: How long before the Elves become the Orcs? Anyway, go Elves! I guess.
- maxfromua 6y ago
  "Orcs" isn't very popular, but "Mordor" is one of the most popular synonymous for russian state here in Ukraine as well.
slightwinder 6y ago
It's always just a matter of perspective. What are one sides freedom fighters, are the other sides terrorist. This will never change as long as people are fighting for "truth and justice".
- seph-reed 6y ago
  > It's always just a matter of perspective Straight-up lying does exist. And to quote the article: “We must persuade the general public that fake news and disinformation are simply not a question of different opinions, but a planned campaign organized by foreign actors,” Kučík said. “This is a serious matter.”
  - thinkingemote 6y ago
    Straight up lying does exist, and it exists alongside bias and propaganda. The irony is to combat fake news and lies is also to combat bias, persuasion and tactics to influence. None of those with power or in the media game want to do this really because it makes them weaker.

billfruit 6y ago

Perhaps it is better usage now to call them Czechia rather than the Czech Republic. We usually speak of France, not the French Republic.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
kanox 6y ago
Not clear why you're being downvoted, I remember the Czech government explicitly requesting this.
arler 6y ago
As a Czech person I disagree and prefer our country to be called Czech Republic. "Czechia" sounds similar to "Chechnya" and in the case of the terrorist attacks during Boston Marathon in 2013 (in which at least one Chechnyan was involved), people confused Czech Republic with Chechnya. I can for example remember people from USA threatening Czech Republic on Twitter for something that has not been committed by a Czech person. Moreover, the words "Czech Republic" sound better to me than just "Czechia". But that is just my opinion.
bduerst 6y ago
My wife is Czech and just said nobody cares.

galfarragem 6y ago

How about educate people to make that filtering by themselves? Nobody owns the truth. It's the last thing I want is an horde of elves making that filtering for me.

burkaman 6y ago
That's what they're doing. They don't have any power to filter anything. I recommend reading the article, it's pretty short.

jkadlec 6y ago

It's interesting that they're targeting chain emails first. I would say comments on the Czech news sites are a bigger problem. Usually the Russian trolls are easy to spot (they use words and terms that people just don't normally use, like "demoblok" to denote the political parties which are critical to Russia), but sometimes it can be quite subtle. Then again maybe the news sites themselves should regulate this.

aleyan 6y ago

Normally I am highly supportive of volunteer based efforts. However for political causes volunteers tend have political biases, which make the results less than authoritative. According to this [1] article from University of Manchester researchers, even EU supported volunteer anti-disinformation campaigns seems to produce more of it themselves. And yes, I did confirm that the "reframingrussia.com" domain does belong to a University of Manchester group[2]. [1] https://reframingrussia.com/2020/04/06/covid-19-disinformation-two-short-reports-on-the-russian-dimension/ https://reframingrussia.com/2020/04/06/covid-19-disinformati... [2] https://www.research.manchester.ac.uk/portal/en/projects/reframing-russia-for-the-global-mediasphere-from-cold-war-to-information-war(12ff514a-6b46-4b0c-b190-76754ccb0033).html https://www.research.manchester.ac.uk/portal/en/projects/ref...

JChase2 6y ago
That's super interesting. It's hard to imagine what a legitimately authoritative anti-disinformation campaign would look like. Back when Operation INFEKTION was big, in the 80's iirc, the U.S. Department of State was involved in trying to counter claims of AIDS being of U.S. origin by sending out letters to many news outlets. Mostly the details of these letters were worked out by a group known as the "Active Mea-sures Working Group". As far as I know, they were basically underfunded and understaffed, but worked hard to try to tease out the truth and track down the origins of disinformation. These days I'm not sure if it would help or hurt to have the likes of the CIA, FBI, DoD, etc running these groups considering peoples lack of trust in them. It's a tough problem for sure.
- ColanR 6y ago
  That's why independent media is so important. The government will always be assumed to have a spin on things: can you imagine if Trump had the US department of state doing what you described? No democrat would ever believe it was unbiased. It's unfortunate that the government is not the only powerful player in town. Doesn't help that even Amazon owns a news outlet these days.

seph-reed 6y ago

This seems awesome and it weirds me out how many anti posts there are... is it better this whole thing just be one sided? Maybe nobody read the article, it's not like they're filtering anything. They're just doing the opposite of spreading disinformation, to the best of their abilities.

igammarays 6y ago

If you want to hear the other side of this story, I can recommend Gilbert Doctorow's books or blog. Thoroughly fascinating readings. He's a fiercely independent yet diligent fact-based writer, a (Harvard-graduate) international affairs specialist based in Belgium and Russia. His non-conformist books "Does Russia Have A Future?" and "A Belgian Perspective on International Affairs" are eye-opening as it gives a rarely seen Russian perspective on the information wars. He doesn't deny Russian malfeasance, but he claims that the Russians are often acting in reaction to a vicious, calculated anti-Russian information campaign in the West which often operates under the guise of human rights activism. Far from being opinion pieces, he does some excellent investigative journalism with first-hand reports of people, events, press conferences, statements and sometimes blatant falsehoods attributed to Russia, providing evidence of Western "propaganda". Really helps to see the current media situation as an information war or New Cold War, rather than a simple case of "the Russians are evil and they lie all the time and hate us for no reason" which is the narrative that seems to run in the West. That Western narrative really makes no sense to the independent thinker.

burkaman 6y ago
This is interesting, but it's a sort of tangentially related story, not "the other side of this story". Whether or not Russia is a victim itself or has been provoked or whatever is not relevant as to whether these volunteers are doing a good thing.