15th March 2022
Being an experienced Twitter user is like being what comedian Jasper Carrott once said of Ed Doolan: “world-famous in Birmingham”.
You have a great deal of knowledge about a relatively small thing, but one advantage that experience and knowledge give you is an ability to spot fakes.
And earlier today many mainstream media journalists fell for a fake account in the name of Marina Ovsyannikova, the Moscow television editor who bravely interrupted a live broadcast to protest against the invasion of Ukraine.
This what she did:
A woman burst onto Russia’s main live evening newscast today with a sign that says:
“Stop the war
Don’t believe propaganda
They’re lying to you”And chanting: “Stop the war! No to war!”pic.twitter.com/pKVKZFVEM3
— max seddon (@maxseddon) March 14, 2022
And this is a video that was circulated afterwards:
Ovsyannikova also appears to have recorded a video beforehand in which she blames Putin for the war and apologizes for her work on Russian state TV news. pic.twitter.com/VuoqtJWcIY
— max seddon (@maxseddon) March 14, 2022
She was then – unfortunately but unsurprisingly – detained.
And then – this morning – it seemed somehow she was tweeting.
As you can see, the tweets were heavily RTd and favourited.
And the tweets were RTd and favourited by many mainstream media figures.
One even told us, earnestly, that we should take such tweets “at face value”.
But.
The account was fake.
But not only was it fake, it was self-evidently fake.
From the profile alone, it could be seen it was a recent account.
The bio says ‘former editor’ – as if she would have been in a position to change the bio.
The profile pic was a screen-grab from the video circulated after the incident – and one would think there would be better pics available to an authentic account.
The tweets were in English – from a Russian-Ukrainian who was warning Russians about Russian war policy.
Twitter, of course, is blocked in Russia – and although she could be using a VPN, there would be no point in her doing that if she was tweeting under her own name.
And she was being detained anyway.
Scrolling down to before the incident you would see (1) anti-war tweets (2) tagged with the ‘#Anonymous’ tag – both of which would be implausible for someone in her role planning to make a surprise intervention in live news:
All this took a few seconds to check and assess.
(Others clicked into the earlier tweets and could ascertain they were with a different Twitter handle – but I was already satisfied they were fake without this further due diligence.)
Some might say that – notwithstanding all these indications to the contrary – the account could still be authentic – or the tweets were being tweeted on her behalf.
Perhaps – but even taking this at its highest, the numerous indications were such that the account should not have been taken at ‘face value’.
It probably was a frolic of an opportunist rather than anything more sinister, and when mainstream media people RTd the account, others (understandably) thought the account was legitimate.
(And the account has now been suspended. was temporarily deleted – but it has returned with older tweets removed.)
But one should always be critical – some things are true, some things are false, and the job is to work out the difference.
And this critical faculty is maybe required nowadays more than before.
******
Comments Policy
This blog enjoys a high standard of comments, many of which are better and more interesting than the posts.
Comments are welcome, but they are pre-moderated and comments will not be published if irksome.
Thank you.
The account seems to have been deleted by the owner rather than suspended – the handle was immediately taken over by someone trying to make the point that you shouldn’t trust anything from Russia, even things said by dissidents. Which is the sort of thing that the more subtle of the Russian misinformation spreaders say; they don’t want you to believe them, they’re just hoping that you’ll believe nothing.
As you say, spotting that the original account was fake wasn’t difficult for someone with a bit of knowledge about how Twitter works. The key thing to remember, as was pointed out bu one of the first people to spot the fake, is that if something is too good to be true, there’s probably a reason for that.
The much more important point that is made is this: do not trust the authenticity of crap you see on Twitter.
The first casualty when war comes is the truth, Hiram Johnson, (I think.)
I think this is sinister as suggest that is is both well and at liberty sadly neither is likely to be the case.
Why couldn’t Twitter do most of this automatically?
To provide a reliable, automated mechanism to “pre-clear” an individual requesting to set up a Twitter account would require Twitter to mandate some more formal form of identification – i.e. something to link the Twitter Account to a real world person. Because Twitter is a global application, this is immediately hugely complex – because it cuts across all sorts of Privacy laws.
More importantly, there is significant value to us as citizens from allowing compatriots to have the ability to create what are in essence “anonymous” Twitter accounts [just like anonymous Hotmail or GMail accounts]. Sometimes these are the most effective or reliable ways to allow a whistleblower to go public with critical information.
And, because I’m a libertarian at heart, I also find such anonymous accounts to be particularly valuable at “bursting the bubble” of pomposity or loutish behaviour on the part of others.
For example, in I think 2019 someone with a particularly sharp sense of humour create a Twitter account named “Devin Nunes Cow”, which poked a great deal of fun at the former Republican Congressman. Nunes sued – and lost – an entire series of events that would not be possible if Twitter had the power to “stop this sort of thing”, if only because the means they would need to have to do so would likely discourage the owner of that account from posting in the first place.
It should not be lost on us, either, that of all the people that Donald Trump could have chosen to become the CEO of the company behind, “Truth Central”, the former President chose Mr. Nunes, who left politics to take the job as CEO. It may be a reflection of his experience on running a putative global media platform that Mr. Nunes has overseen what amounts to a shambolic start to operations.
But here’s the compromise we are going to have to figure out: either we allow anonymity on platforms like Twitter – and have to contend with fake accounts – or we don’t – and have to content with the society that creates. I don’t think there is an easy solution that would permit us to “have it both ways”.
Yeah, I think that actions such as a recently changed profile or a new account suddenly going viral should be flagged for review. But that might reduce engagement…
Yet another reason, if one were needed, not to guano one’s life with Twitter and Facebook. It’s enough to keep up with DAG, Private Eye and the FT.
Two out of those three are ok, but DAG is over-rated
A good print journalist – a writer for a newspaper or magazine – will as a matter of routine disregard any fact or claimed fact unless they are able to obtain separate corroboration of any claim, story or “fact” they come across.
I get the sense – important here to claim that this is a baseless gut instinct beyond what I see with my own eyes – that there is to some degree a softening of this principle with respect to broadcast news, much of which can happen “in the moment”, circumstances which make it harder to secure that vital corroboration.
But Twitter, like Farcebook, sorry, Facebook, creates a direct connection between *anyone* wishing to make a claim and their willing audience. The fact that many/most of us have grown up with the implicit understanding that we can “trust” the news in print only makes it easier for would-be deceivers to play tricks like this. It’s that un-spoken code that because this is “in print” then it somehow attracts more credence than if it is a conversation you overhear on a train or bus or on a crowded high street.
But beyond a prankster like this, there is a huge and somewhat sinister “misinformation ecosystem” out there. Most worryingly, you don’t have to look far to find it. For example, there are topical reports in broadcast television news at the moment – including via the BBC – that shows that Russia’s premiere news program is broadcasting excerpts from US Fox News host, Tucker Carlson who gives the impression (I’m a long way short of being old enough to know) seems to be channeling “Lord Haw Haw”.
Or we could reference ‘news’ agencies like Brietbart, or perhaps ‘influence’ operations like Cambridge Analytica. The digital age has elevated information and disinformation to unsettling levels of significance in our lives. Curiously, it isn’t so much that an insignificant person like myself might be taken in that concerns me, but that someone with the authority to make highly impactful decisions – like elected representatives voting for/against military intervention, for example. We like to think that lawmakers are fully briefed on such matters, but I can’t help but wonder how much influence such external and baseless sources as social media might have on the policies that shape our lives.
A couple of years ago I created a fake Twitter persona and how it was received was alarming. Its shtick was a kind of ludicrous parody of Remain Twitter who didn’t like Corbyn Labour and the gimmick was entirely fictional claims about Corbyn being a Kremlin asset. I ended up stopping the exercise when Rory Stewart followed it and I realised that a significant number of people were taking it seriously. I wanted it to be funny but quickly learned that when people have strong feelings about something, it clouds their judgement.
From the morass of impassioned illogicality, pseudonymous immunity, dopamine-addiction, hunger for media influence, and grammatical sparsity, it takes either significant skill or sheer dumb luck to draw any kind of credible narrative from Twitter. Nevertheless, we persist.