False cards as a tool of anti-Russian propaganda

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Recently, I noticed something strange on Google Maps: photos related to the war in Syria were attached to the location of the Russian diplomatic missions. Instead of the usual photographs of buildings and architectural complexes, photos of interiors or stories about these places, the locations included photographs of destroyed Syrian cities, images of injured civilians and residents of houses removed from the rubble of these houses, as well as insults to the Russian and Syrian presidents.

On closer inspection, it turns out that the locations belong to Russian embassies and consulates in Europe, North America and the Middle East. And we are not talking about one or two photographs, but about several dozen files uploaded under the guise of public photos of Russian diplomatic departments.

Dirty play

Similar photos can be found attached to the location of the Russian Consulate in Istanbul:

This is what accompanies the location of the Russian embassy in Berlin:

Here's what you can find at the location of the Russian consulate in New York:

And the Russian embassy in Ottawa:

The number of uploaded photos and videos makes it clear that random selection of the wrong location or accidental pressing of the wrong button has nothing to do with it. We are talking about targeted and coordinated actions of a hostile nature.

A simple analysis of the situation shows that this is an attempt to discredit the image of Russia in the global information field through the use of multiple Google accounts. After all, attaching such materials to the locations of diplomatic missions is vandalism, akin to painting graffiti on walls or throwing objects into restricted areas.

However, when it comes to foreign missions of the country, such actions undoubtedly bear the character of a political demarche, comparable to pickets, demonstrations and whole complexes of political events of this kind.

However, most countries have laws regarding pickets and demonstrations near diplomatic buildings. This is due to the measures to ensure their protection (especially from the clearly hostile behavior of the demonstrators), enshrined in international treaties.

There are no such rules on the Internet. And while Internet services infiltrate every aspect of our daily lives, Google and other information technology giants are doing everything to prevent such rules from being created. They argue that these rules will jeopardize the rights and freedoms of people, but in reality it is nothing more than the protection of their own commercial and strategic interests. After all, any rules lead to restrictions and lost opportunities, both in terms of profit and in terms of spreading influence.

Human Rights Defenders vs. Google

Over the past few years, the number of lawsuits against Google has increased significantly in various countries where the company has violated economic laws. In December 2019, a French court fined Google for violating competition rules. This happened immediately after the corporation paid the French authorities a billion euros to end the investigation of fraud cases. In January 2019, the European Commission ordered Google to pay almost one and a half billion euros for abusing its dominant market position.

Most surprisingly, at the end of 2019, so-called human rights defenders took up arms against Google and Facebook: “The Google and Facebook business model threatens human rights,” according to the Amnesty International report. "This all-out surveillance business model offers users the Mephistopheles Deal, under which the enjoyment of human rights online is only possible if they are returned to a system built on their violations." The report contains a number of recommendations to states regarding strict legal restrictions on the operation of companies in order to avoid violations of human rights.

This leads us to the question of why an organization that has fought so vehemently against violations of human rights by states throughout its history is already calling on states to introduce Internet regulations, access to the principles of internal policies of companies and a thorough analysis of the algorithms for the operation of media platforms.

It is no secret that Amnesty International has often been used by American intelligence agencies as an element of American soft power. The same goes for Greenpeace, WWF and other "human rights" and "environmental" organizations. Therefore, if the intelligence community launched an attack on key figures in the IT industry inside the United States, this must have significant reasons.

It is unlikely that human rights advocates did not read Edward Snowden's revelations a few years ago, or that they didn’t hear about widespread CIA surveillance or the Vault 7 series published on WikiLeaks. They defend Julian Assange, locked in the embassy and extremely conveniently accused of rape.

They even mention Snowden's 2013 discoveries. But they started their campaign only at the end of 2019. Where were they before?

Yes, Google, Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp, and YouTube are keeping a close eye on the world. Of course. In addition, they manipulate their audience by creating "information bubbles" and locking their audience in them. But this was also known ten years ago. It was also known that they tracked users and transmitted the results of the surveillance to the US government in accordance with the Patriot Act of 2001 and the Freedom Act of 2015.

Over the past decade, very few people in the United States have worried about this.

But over the past two or three years, it has become clear that the Internet is beyond the control of its American creators. Freedom of speech, proclaimed one of the key values of the West, still exists on the Internet. After being hijacked by Western media, it has surfaced so uncomfortably and unexpectedly on the Internet. Each editor and journalist was explained how to do their job, and those who did not get it were squeezed out of the profession. Now the central media are more or less controlled and do what they are told: they are pushing for LGBT rights, global warming, Greta Thunberg, the arrival of migrants in Europe, chemical attacks in Syria, Russian interference in the American elections, protests in Hong Kong, and in general everything that falls into framework of the current political agenda.

Against the backdrop of a series of failures of "soft power" and the collapse of Western liberalism, we see a tightening of censorship in the name of protecting such a long and carefully constructed propaganda machine.

Censorship or the fight against fake news

There is a reason why censorship is not called censorship. There is a taboo hundreds of years old. We need allegories, euphemisms. For example, out of nowhere, there has been a massive fight against fake news spread by “bad” media backed by “bad” governments. But the Western media are in fact the main producers of fake news and use this label to stigmatize anything that does not fit their ideological model. Under the pretext of fighting fake news, censorship and control over the information field are introduced in the Western media.

IT giants are by no means ideological enemies of the United States. They are American to the core in their own right, they are extremely loyal to the US government and act as carriers and disseminators of liberal ideology around the world. Their top managers are involved in any enterprise of the American intelligence services where secrecy is involved, they have a huge network of contacts and enjoy the patronage of the Pentagon, CIA and NSA, they transfer terabytes of user data to intelligence services every second, and they are involved in acts of information aggression outside the United States. They are part of the arsenal of American strategic means of attacking China, Russia, Iran, Syria, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, North Korea, Venezuela and many other countries.

But within the United States there is a split, the country is divided. Trump's "unexpected" (contrary to all predictions and offline polls) victory in 2016 and the prospect of a repeat in 2020 only exacerbates this split. The battle is raging for the Internet as the most powerful platform for spreading political influence.

The players in the media market also understand this and are struggling to get ahead, earning the favor of the special services. Their zeal became especially evident at the end of last year. Facebook announced its "close cooperation" with the FBI, which apparently allowed the social network to expose and destroy 50 networks of "coordinated inappropriate behavior". Google is also trying to prove itself worthy of new challenges. It turned out that since at least February 2019, the company has been implementing a program to combat disinformation. Google also has its own team to disclose and remove accounts spreading this misinformation. In addition to this, the search giant intends to fight fake news by displaying plaques with information from Wikipedia.

But it seems that even Wikipedia is unable to help Google fight fakes on their own map service.