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This program was recorded in one, 60-minute segment.
Introduction: Before resuming discussion about the Sweden Democrats, we review information about the overlap between WikiLeaks and CIA derivatives such as the Broadcasting Board of Governors. (In our previous program, we noted that both the Pirate Bay website–which hosted WikiLeaks–and the Sweden Democrats were financed by Swedish fascist Carl Lundstrom.) In this context, one should remember in connection with the allegations of Russian primacy in the foreign support for Sweden Democrats, that the CIA’s hacking tools are designed to mimic Russian cyber activity.
After review of Carl Lundstrom’s financing of the Sweden Democrats, as well as his central role in financing the Pirate Bay site (which hosted WikiLeaks, courtesy of Joran Jermas/Israel Shamir), we delve into the operations of Lundstrom’s Sweden Democrat associates.
Utilizing the anti-immigrant theme utilized with great effect by fascists around the world, the Sweden Democrats are gaining ground on the Swedish political landscape.
Key points of discussion include: The Nazi origins of the Sweden Democrats; the Waffen SS background of one of the party’s founders; networking of the Sweden Democrats with fascists and reactionaries in other countries, including the U.S., France and Germany; the pivotal role of the internet in advancing the fortunes of the Sweden Democrats.
Next, we examine the rise of Jair Bolsonaro’s fascist government.
Again, in recent programs, we have examined the profound role of online technology in the promotion of fascism, as well as overlapping areas of intelligence activity. In that context, it is vital to remember that the Internet was developed as a weapon, with the focus of the technology being counterinsurgency.
In Brazil, the rise of Jair Bolsonaro’s fascist government received decisive momentum from YouTube, which is transforming the political landscape in Brazil, as it is in this country.
“. . . . In colorful and paranoid far-right rants, Mr. Moura accused feminists, teachers and mainstream politicians of waging vast conspiracies. Mr. Dominguez was hooked.
As his time on the site grew, YouTube recommended videos from other far-right figures. One was a lawmaker named Jair Bolsonaro, then a marginal figure in national politics — but a star in YouTube’s far-right community in Brazil, where the platform has become more widely watched than all but one TV channel. Last year, he became President Bolsonaro.
‘YouTube became the social media platform of the Brazilian right,’ said Mr. Dominguez, now a lanky 17-year-old who says he, too, plans to seek political office. . . .”
Two excerpts from the story below encapsulate and epitomize the growing, successful manifestation of internet fascism: “An Ecosystem of Hate” and the “Dictatorship of the ‘Like’ ”
“. . . . An Ecosystem of Hate
. . . . As the far right rose, many of its leading voices had learned to weaponize the conspiracy videos, offering their vast audiences a target: people to blame. Eventually, the YouTube conspiracists turned their spotlight on Debora Diniz, a women’s rights activist whose abortion advocacy had long made her a target of the far right.
Bernardo Küster, a YouTube star whose homemade rants had won him 750,000 subscribers and an endorsement from Mr. Bolsonaro, accused her of involvement in the supposed Zika plots. . . . .
. . . . As far-right and conspiracy channels began citing one another, YouTube’s recommendation system learned to string their videos together. However implausible any individual rumor might be on its own, joined together, they created the impression that dozens of disparate sources were revealing the same terrifying truth.
“It feels like the connection is made by the viewer, but the connection is made by the system,” Ms. Diniz said.
Threats of rape and torture filled Ms. Diniz’s phone and email. Some cited her daily routines. Many echoed claims from Mr. Küster’s videos, she said.
Mr. Küster gleefully mentioned, though never explicitly endorsed, the threats. That kept him just within YouTube’s rules.
When the university where Ms. Diniz taught received a warning that a gunman would shoot her and her students, and the police said they could no longer guarantee her safety, she left Brazil. . . .”
” . . . . ‘The Dictatorship of the Like’
Ground zero for politics by YouTube may be the São Paulo headquarters of Movimento Brasil Livre, which formed to agitate for the 2016 impeachment of the left-wing President Dilma Rousseff. Its members trend young, middle-class, right-wing and extremely online.
Renan Santos, the group’s national coordinator, gestured to a door marked ‘the YouTube Division’ and said, ‘This is the heart of things.’
Inside, eight young men poked at editing software. One was stylizing an image of Benito Mussolini for a video arguing that fascism had been wrongly blamed on the right. . . .
. . . . The group’s co-founder, a man-bunned former rock guitarist name Pedro D’Eyrot, said ‘we have something here that we call the dictatorship of the like.’
Reality, he said, is shaped by whatever message goes most viral.
Even as he spoke, a two-hour YouTube video was captivating the nation. Titled ‘1964′ for the year of Brazil’s military coup, it argued that the takeover had been necessary to save Brazil from communism.
Mr. Dominguez, the teenager learning to play guitar, said the video persuaded him that his teachers had fabricated the horrors of military rule.
Ms. Borges, the history teacher vilified on YouTube, said it brought back memories of military curfews, disappeared activists and police beatings. ‘I don’t think I’ve had my last beating,’ she said. . . .”
1a. In FTR #‘s 724, 725, 732, 745, 755 and 917, we have detailed the fascist and far right-wing ideology, associations and politics of Julian Assange and WikiLeaks.
Here, we review the links between the WikiLeaks milieu and the Tor/CIA
Tor, Appelbaum, Assange and WikiLeaks:
- Became increasingly intertwined, enjoying accolades from many, apparently unsuspecting, groups: ” . . . . His [Appelbaum’s] association with WikiLeaks and Assange boosted the Tor Project’s public profile and radical credentials. Support and accolades poured in from journalists, privacy organizations, and government watchdogs. The American Civil Liberties Union partnered with Appelbaum on an Internet privacy project, and New York’s Whitney Museum—one of the leading modern art museums in the world—invited him for a ‘Surveillance Teach-In.’ The Electronic Frontier Foundation gave Tor its Pioneer Award, and Roger Dingledine made in on Foreign Policy magazine’s Top 100 Global Thinkers for protecting ‘anyone and everyone from the dangers of Big Brother.’ . . . .”
- Differed fundamentally from the accepted text: ” . . . . With Julian Assange endorsing Tor, reporters assumed that the US government saw the anonymity nonprofit as a threat. But internal documents obtained through FOIA from the Broadcasting Board of Governors, as well as analysis of Tor’s government contracts paint a different picture. They reveal that Appelbaum and Dingledine worked with Assange on securing WikiLeaks with Tor since late 2008 and that they kept their handlers at the BBG informed about their relationship and even provided information about the inner workings of WikiLeaks’s secure submission system. . . .”
- Did not adversely affect the government funding of Tor at all, as might be expected by the superficial apparent reality of the situation: ” . . . . Perhaps most telling was that support from the BBG [read “CIA”–D.E.] continued even after WikiLeaks began publishing classified government information and Appelbaum became the target of a larger Department of Justice investigation into WikiLeaks. For example, on July 31, 2010, CNET reported that Appelbaum had been detained at the Las Vegas airport and questioned about his relationship with WikiLeaks. News of the detention made headlines around the world, once again highlighting Appelbaum’s close ties to Julian Assange. And a week later, Tor’s executive director Andrew Lewman, clearly worried that this might affect Tor’s funding, emailed Ken Berman at the BBG in the hopes of smoothing things over and answering ‘any questions you may have about the recent press regarding Jake and WikiLeaks.’ But Lewman was in for a pleasant surprise: Roger Dingledine had been keeping folks at the BBG in the loop, and everything seemed to be okay. ‘Great stuff, thx. Roger answered a number of questions when he met us this week in DC,’ Berman replied. . . .”
- ” . . . . In 2011 contracts came in without a hitch–$150,000 from the Broadcasting Board of Governors and $227,118 from the State Department. Tor was even able to snag a big chunk of money from the Pentagon: a new $503,706 annual contract from the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command, an elite information and intelligence unit that houses a top-secret cyber-warfare division.The Navy was passed through SRI, the old Stanford military contractor that had done counterinsurgency, networking, and chemical weapons work for ARPA back in the 1960s and 1970s. The funds were part of a larger Navy ‘Command, Control, Communcations, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance’ program to improve military operations. A year later, Tor would see its government contracts more than double to $2.2 million: $353,000 from the State Department, $876,099 from the US Navy, and $937,800 from the Broadcasting Board of Governors. . . .”
1b. After review of Carl Lundstrom’s financing of the Sweden Democrats, as well as Lundstrom’s central role in financing the Pirate Bay site (which hosted WikiLeaks, courtesy of Joran Jermas/Israel Shamir), we delve into the operations of Lundstrom’s associates.
Utilizing the anti-immigrant theme utilized with great effect by fascists around the world, the Sweden Democrats are gaining ground on the Swedish political landscape.
Key points of discussion include: The Nazi origins of the Sweden Democrats; the Waffen SS background of one of the party’s founders; networking of the Sweden Democrats with fascists and reactionaries in other countries, including the U.S., France and Germany; the pivotal role of the internet in advancing the fortunes of the Sweden Democrats.
. . . . That nativist rhetoric — that immigrants are invading the homeland — has gained ever-greater traction, and political acceptance, across the West amid dislocations wrought by vast waves of migration from the Middle East, Africa and Latin America. In its most extreme form, it is echoed in the online manifesto of the man accused of gunning down 22 people last weekend in El Paso.
In the nationalists’ message-making, Sweden has become a prime cautionary tale, dripping with schadenfreude. What is even more striking is how many people in Sweden — progressive, egalitarian, welcoming Sweden — seem to be warming to the nationalists’ view: that immigration has brought crime, chaos and a fraying of the cherished social safety net, not to mention a withering away of national culture and tradition.
Fueled by an immigration backlash — Sweden has accepted more refugees per capita than any other European country — right-wing populism has taken hold, reflected most prominently in the steady ascent of a political party with neo-Nazi roots, the Sweden Democrats. In elections last year, they captured nearly 18 percent of the vote.
To dig beneath the surface of what is happening in Sweden, though, is to uncover the workings of an international disinformation machine, devoted to the cultivation, provocation and amplification of far-right, anti-immigrant passions and political forces. Indeed, that machine, most influentially rooted in Vladimir V. Putin’s Russia and the American far right, underscores a fundamental irony of this political moment: the globalization of nationalism.
The central target of these manipulations from abroad — and the chief instrument of the Swedish nationalists’ success — is the country’s increasingly popular, and virulently anti-immigrant, digital echo chamber.
A New York Times examination of its content, personnel and traffic patterns illustrates how foreign state and nonstate actors have helped to give viral momentum to a clutch of Swedish far-right websites.
Russian and Western entities that traffic in disinformation, including an Islamaphobic think tank whose former chairman is now Mr. Trump’s national security adviser, have been crucial linkers to the Swedish sites, helping to spread their message to susceptible Swedes.
At least six Swedish sites have received financial backing through advertising revenue from a Russian- and Ukrainian-owned auto-parts business based in Berlin, whose online sales network oddly contains buried digital links to a range of far-right and other socially divisive content. . . .
. . . . The distorted view of Sweden pumped out by this disinformation machine has been used, in turn, by anti-immigrant parties in Britain, Germany, Italy and elsewhere to stir xenophobia and gin up votes, according to the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a London-based nonprofit that tracks the online spread of far-right extremism.
“I’d put Sweden up there with the anti-Soros campaign,” said Chloe Colliver, a researcher for the institute, referring to anti-Semitic attacks on George Soros, the billionaire benefactor of liberal causes. “It’s become an enduring centerpiece of the far-right conversation.”
From Margins to Mainstream
Mattias Karlsson, the Sweden Democrats’ international secretary and chief ideologist, likes to tell the story of how he became a soldier in what he has described as the “existential battle for our culture’s and our nation’s survival.”
It was the mid-1990s and Mr. Karlsson, now 41, was attending high school in the southern city of Vaxjo. Sweden was accepting a record number of refugees from the Balkan War and other conflicts. In Vaxjo and elsewhere, young immigrant men began joining brawling “kicker” gangs, radicalizing Mr. Karlsson and drawing him toward the local skinhead scene.
He took to wearing a leather jacket with a Swedish flag on the back and was soon introduced to Mats Nilsson, a Swedish National Socialist leader who gave him a copy of “Mein Kampf.” They began to debate: Mr. Nilsson argued that the goal should be ethnic purity — the preservation of “Swedish DNA.” Mr. Karlsson countered that the focus should be on preserving national culture and identity. That, he said, was when Mr. Nilsson conferred on him an epithet of insufficient commitment to the cause — “meatball patriot,” meaning that “I thought that every African or Arab can come to this country as long as they assimilate and eat meatballs.”
It is an account that offers the most benign explanation for an odious association. Whatever the case, in 1999, he joined the Sweden Democrats, a party undeniably rooted in Sweden’s neo-Nazi movement. Indeed, scholars of the far right say that is what sets it apart from most anti-immigration parties in Europe and makes its rise from marginalized to mainstream so remarkable.
The party was founded in 1988 by several Nazi ideologues, including a former member of the Waffen SS. Early on, it sought international alliances with the likes of the White Aryan Resistance, a white supremacist group founded by a former grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan. Some Sweden Democrats wore Nazi uniforms to party functions. Its platform included the forced repatriation of all immigrants since 1970.
That was not, however, a winning formula in a country where social democrats have dominated every election for more than a century.
While attending university, Mr. Karlsson had met Jimmie Akesson, who took over the Sweden Democrats’ youth party in 2000 and became party leader in 2005. Mr. Akesson was outspoken in his belief that Muslim refugees posed “the biggest foreign threat to Sweden since the Second World War.” But to make that case effectively, he and Mr. Karlsson agreed, they needed to remake the party’s image.
“We needed to really address our past,” Mr. Karlsson said.They purged neo-Nazis who had been exposed by the press. They announced a “zero tolerance” policy toward extreme xenophobia and racism, emphasized their youthful leadership and urged members to dress presentably. And while immigration remained at the center of their platform, they moderated the way they talked about it.
No longer was the issue framed in terms of keeping certain ethnic groups out, or deporting those already in. Rather it was about how unassimilated migrants were eviscerating not just the nation’s cultural identity but also the social-welfare heart of the Swedish state.
Under the grand, egalitarian idea of the “folkhemmet,” or people’s home, in which the country is a family and its citizens take care of one another, Swedes pay among the world’s highest effective tax rates, in return for benefits like child care, health care, free college education and assistance when they grow old.
The safety net has come under strain for a host of economic and demographic reasons, many of which predate the latest refugee flood. But in the Sweden Democrats’ telling, the blame lies squarely at the feet of the foreigners, many of whom lag far behind native Swedes in education and economic accomplishment. One party advertisement depicted a white woman trying to collect benefits while being pursued by niqab-wearing immigrants pushing strollers.
To what extent the party’s makeover is just window dressing is an open question.
The doubts were highlighted in what became known as “the Iron Pipe Scandal” in 2012. Leaked video showed two Sweden Democrat MPs and the party’s candidate for attorney general hurling racist slurs at a comedian of Kurdish descent, then threatening a drunken witness with iron pipes.
High-ranking party officials have bounced between Sweden and Hungary, ruled by the authoritarian nationalist Prime Minister Viktor Orban. Mr. Karlsson himself has come under fire for calling out an extremist site as neo-fascist while using an alias to recommend posts as “worth reading” to party members.
“There’s a public face and the face they wear behind closed doors,” said Daniel Poohl, who heads Expo, a Stockholm-based foundation that tracks far-right extremism.
Still, even detractors admit that strategy has worked. In 2010, the Sweden Democrats captured 5.7 percent of the vote, enough for the party, and Mr. Karlsson, to enter Parliament for the first time. That share has steadily increased along with the growing population of refugees. (Today, roughly 20 percent of Sweden’s population is foreign born.)
At its peak in 2015, Sweden accepted 163,000 asylum-seekers, mostly from Afghanistan, Somalia and Syria. Though border controls and tighter rules have eased that flow, Ardalan Shekarabi, the country’s public administration minister, acknowledged that his government had been slow to act.
Mr. Shekarabi, an immigrant from Iran, said the sheer number of refugees had overwhelmed the government’s efforts to integrate them.
“I absolutely don’t think that the majority of Swedes have racist or xenophobic views, but they had questions about this migration policy and the other parties didn’t have any answers,” he said. “Which is one of the reasons why Sweden Democrats had a case.” . . . .
. . . . For years, the Sweden Democrats had struggled to make their case to the public. Many mainstream media outlets declined their ads. The party even had difficulty getting the postal service to deliver its mailers. So it built a network of closed Facebook pages whose reach would ultimately exceed that of any other party.
But to thrive in the viral sense, that network required fresh, alluring content. It drew on a clutch of relatively new websites whose popularity was exploding.
Members of the Sweden Democrats helped create two of them: Samhallsnytt (News in Society) and Nyheter Idag (News Today). By the 2018 election year, they, along with a site called Fria Tider (Free Times), were among Sweden’s 10 most shared news sites.
These sites each reached one-tenth of all Swedish internet users a week and, according to an Oxford University study, accounted for 85 percent of the election-related “junk news” — deemed deliberately distorted or misleading — shared online. There were other sites, too, all injecting anti-immigrant and Islamophobic messaging into the Swedish political bloodstream.
“Immigration Behind Shortage of Drinking Water in Northern Stockholm,” read one recent headline. “Refugee Minor Raped Host Family’s Daughter; Thought It Was Legal,” read another. “Performed Female Genital Mutilation on Her Children — Given Asylum in Sweden,” read a third. . . . .
. . . . At the magazine Nya Tider, the editor, Vavra Suk, has traveled to Moscow as an election observer and to Syria, where he produced Kremlin-friendly accounts of the civil war. Nya Tider has published work by Alexander Dugin, an ultranationalist Russian philosopher who has been called “Putin’s Rasputin”; Mr. Suk’s writings for Mr. Dugin’s think tank include one titled “Donald Trump Can Make Europe Great Again.”
Nya Tider’s contributors include Manuel Ochsenreiter, editor of Zuerst!, a German far-right newspaper. Mr. Ochsenreiter — who has appeared regularly on RT, the Kremlin propaganda channel — worked until recently for Markus Frohnmaier, a member of the German Bundestag representing the far-right Alternative for Germany party. . . . .
Links Abroad
. . . . Another way to look inside the explosive growth of Sweden’s alt-right outlets is to see who is linking to them. The more links, especially from well-trafficked outlets, the more likely Google is to rank the sites as authoritative. That, in turn, means that Swedes are more likely to see them when they search for, say, immigration and crime.
The Times analyzed more than 12 million available links from over 18,000 domains to four prominent far-right sites — Nyheter Idag, Samhallsnytt, Fria Tider and Nya Tider. The data was culled by Mr. Lindholm from two search engine optimization tools and represents a snapshot of all known links through July 2.
As expected, given the relative paucity of Swedish speakers worldwide, most of the links came from Swedish-language sites.
But the analysis turned up a surprising number of links from well-trafficked foreign-language sites — which suggests that the Swedish sites’ rapid growth has been driven to a significant degree from abroad.
“It has the makings, the characteristics, of an operation whose purpose or goal is to help these sites become relevant by getting them to be seen as widely as possible,” Mr. Lindholm said.
Over all, more than one in five links were from non-Swedish language sites. English-language sites, along with Norwegian ones, linked the most, nearly a million times. But other European-language far-right sites — Russian but also Czech, Danish, German, Finnish and Polish — were also frequent linkers.
The Times identified 356 domains that linked to all four Swedish sites.
Many are well known in American far-right circles. Among them is the Gatestone Institute, a think tank whose site regularly stokes fears about Muslims in the United States and Europe. Its chairman until last year was John R. Bolton, now Mr. Trump’s national security adviser, and its funders have included Rebekah Mercer, a prominent wealthy Trump supporter.Other domains that linked to all four Swedish sites included Stormfront, one of the oldest and largest American white supremacist sites; Voice of Europe, a Kremlin-friendly right-wing site; a Russian-language blog called Sweden4Rus.nu; and FreieWelt.net, a site supportive of the AfD in Germany. . . . .
. . . . But it came at a price: some prominent center-right politicians are now expressing a willingness to work with the Sweden Democrats, portending a new political alignment.
In February, the Sweden Democrats’ Mr. Karlsson strode into a Washington-area hotel where leaders of the American and European right were gathering for the annual Conservative Political Action Conference. As he settled in at the lobby bar, straightening his navy three-piece suit, he was clearly very much at home.
At the conference — where political boot-camp training mixed with speeches by luminaries like Mr. Trump and the British populist leader Nigel Farage — Mr. Karlsson hoped to learn about the infrastructure of the American conservative movement, particularly its funding and use of the media and think tanks to broaden its appeal. But in a measure of how nationalism and conservatism have merged in Mr. Trump’s Washington, many of the Americans with whom he wanted to network were just as eager to network with him.
Mr. Karlsson had flown in from Colorado, where he had given a speech at the Steamboat Institute, a conservative think tank. That morning, Tobias Andersson, 23, the Sweden Democrats’ youngest member of Parliament and a contributor to Breitbart, had spoken to Americans for Tax Reform, a bastion of tax-cut orthodoxy.
Now, they found themselves encircled by admirers like Matthew Hurtt, the director for external relationships at Americans for Prosperity, part of the billionaire Koch brothers’ political operation, and Matthew Tyrmand, a board member of Project Veritas, a conservative group that uses undercover filming to sting its targets.
Mr. Tyrmand, who is also an adviser to a senator from Poland’s anti-immigration ruling Law and Justice party, was particularly eager. “You are taking your country back!” he exclaimed.
Mr. Karlsson smiled.
2. In recent programs, we have examined the profound role of online technology in the promotion of fascism, as well as overlapping areas of intelligence activity. In that context, it is vital to remember that the Internet was developed as a weapon, with the focus of the technology being counterinsurgency.
In Brazil, the rise of Jair Bolsonaro’s fascist government received decisive momentum from YouTube, which is transforming the political landscape in Brazil, as it is in this country.
. . . . In colorful and paranoid far-right rants, Mr. Moura accused feminists, teachers and mainstream politicians of waging vast conspiracies. Mr. Dominguez was hooked.
As his time on the site grew, YouTube recommended videos from other far-right figures. One was a lawmaker named Jair Bolsonaro, then a marginal figure in national politics — but a star in YouTube’s far-right community in Brazil, where the platform has become more widely watched than all but one TV channel. Last year, he became President Bolsonaro.
“YouTube became the social media platform of the Brazilian right,” said Mr. Dominguez, now a lanky 17-year-old who says he, too, plans to seek political office. . . .
Two excerpts from the story below encapsulate and epitomize the growing, successful manifestation of internet fascism: “An Ecosystem of Hate” and the “Dictatorship of the ‘Like’ ”
. . . . An Ecosystem of Hate
. . . . As the far right rose, many of its leading voices had learned to weaponize the conspiracy videos, offering their vast audiences a target: people to blame. Eventually, the YouTube conspiracists turned their spotlight on Debora Diniz, a women’s rights activist whose abortion advocacy had long made her a target of the far right.
Bernardo Küster, a YouTube star whose homemade rants had won him 750,000 subscribers and an endorsement from Mr. Bolsonaro, accused her of involvement in the supposed Zika plots. . . . .
. . . . As far-right and conspiracy channels began citing one another, YouTube’s recommendation system learned to string their videos together. However implausible any individual rumor might be on its own, joined together, they created the impression that dozens of disparate sources were revealing the same terrifying truth.
“It feels like the connection is made by the viewer, but the connection is made by the system,” Ms. Diniz said.
Threats of rape and torture filled Ms. Diniz’s phone and email. Some cited her daily routines. Many echoed claims from Mr. Küster’s videos, she said.
Mr. Küster gleefully mentioned, though never explicitly endorsed, the threats. That kept him just within YouTube’s rules.
When the university where Ms. Diniz taught received a warning that a gunman would shoot her and her students, and the police said they could no longer guarantee her safety, she left Brazil. . . .
. . . . ‘The Dictatorship of the Like’
Ground zero for politics by YouTube may be the São Paulo headquarters of Movimento Brasil Livre, which formed to agitate for the 2016 impeachment of the left-wing President Dilma Rousseff. Its members trend young, middle-class, right-wing and extremely online.
Renan Santos, the group’s national coordinator, gestured to a door marked “the YouTube Division” and said, “This is the heart of things.”
Inside, eight young men poked at editing software. One was stylizing an image of Benito Mussolini for a video arguing that fascism had been wrongly blamed on the right. . . .
. . . . The group’s co-founder, a man-bunned former rock guitarist name Pedro D’Eyrot, said “we have something here that we call the dictatorship of the like.”
Reality, he said, is shaped by whatever message goes most viral.
Even as he spoke, a two-hour YouTube video was captivating the nation. Titled “1964” for the year of Brazil’s military coup, it argued that the takeover had been necessary to save Brazil from communism.
Mr. Dominguez, the teenager learning to play guitar, said the video persuaded him that his teachers had fabricated the horrors of military rule.
Ms. Borges, the history teacher vilified on YouTube, said it brought back memories of military curfews, disappeared activists and police beatings. “I don’t think I’ve had my last beating,” she said.
“How YouTube Radicalized Brazil” by Max Fisher and Amanda Taub; The New York Times; 8/11/2019.
When Matheus Dominguez was 16, YouTube recommended a video that changed his life.
He was in a band in Niterói, a beach-ringed city in Brazil, and practiced guitar by watching tutorials online.
YouTube had recently installed a powerful new artificial intelligence system that learned from user behavior and paired videos with recommendations for others. One day, it directed him to an amateur guitar teacher named Nando Moura, who had gained a wide following by posting videos about heavy metal, video games and, most of all, politics.
In colorful and paranoid far-right rants, Mr. Moura accused feminists, teachers and mainstream politicians of waging vast conspiracies. Mr. Dominguez was hooked.
As his time on the site grew, YouTube recommended videos from other far-right figures. One was a lawmaker named Jair Bolsonaro, then a marginal figure in national politics — but a star in YouTube’s far-right community in Brazil, where the platform has become more widely watched than all but one TV channel. Last year, he became President Bolsonaro.
“YouTube became the social media platform of the Brazilian right,” said Mr. Dominguez, now a lanky 17-year-old who says he, too, plans to seek political office.
Members of the nation’s newly empowered far right — from grass-roots organizers to federal lawmakers — say their movement would not have risen so far, so fast, without YouTube’s recommendation engine.
New research has found they may be correct. YouTube’s search and recommendation system appears to have systematically diverted users to far-right and conspiracy channels in Brazil.
A New York Times investigation in Brazil found that, time and again, videos promoted by the site have upended central elements of daily life.
Teachers describe classrooms made unruly by students who quote from YouTube conspiracy videos or who, encouraged by right-wing YouTube stars, secretly record their instructors. . . .
. . . . And in politics, a wave of right-wing YouTube stars ran for office alongside Mr. Bolsonaro, some winning by historic margins. Most still use the platform, governing the world’s fourth-largest democracy through internet-honed trolling and provocation. . . .
. . . . But the emotions that draw people in — like fear, doubt and anger — are often central features of conspiracy theories, and in particular, experts say, of right-wing extremism.
As the system suggests more provocative videos to keep users watching, it can direct them toward extreme content they might otherwise never find. And it is designed to lead users to new topics to pique new interest — a boon for channels like Mr. Moura’s that use pop culture as a gateway to far-right ideas.
The system now drives 70 percent of total time on the platform, the company says. As viewership skyrockets globally, YouTube is bringing in over $1 billion a month, some analysts believe.
Zeynep Tufekci, a social media scholar, has called it “one of the most powerful radicalizing instruments of the 21st century.”
Company representatives disputed the studies’ methodology and said that the platform’s systems do not privilege any one viewpoint or direct users toward extremism. However, company representatives conceded some of the findings and promised to make changes.
Farshad Shadloo, a spokesman, said that YouTube has “invested heavily in the policies, resources and products” to reduce the spread of harmful misinformation, adding, “we’ve seen that authoritative content is thriving in Brazil and is some of the most recommended content on the site.”
Danah Boyd, founder of the think tank Data & Society, attributed the disruption in Brazil to YouTube’s unrelenting push for viewer engagement, and the revenues it generates.
Though corruption scandals and a deep recession had already devastated Brazil’s political establishment and left many Brazilians ready for a break with the status quo, Ms. Boyd called YouTube’s impact a worrying indication of the platform’s growing impact on democracies worldwide.
“This is happening everywhere,” she said.
The Party of YouTube
Maurício Martins, the local vice president of Mr. Bolsonaro’s party in Niterói, credited “most” of the party’s recruitment to YouTube — including his own.
He was killing time on the site one day, he recalled, when the platform showed him a video by a right-wing blogger. He watched out of curiosity. It showed him another, and then another.
“Before that, I didn’t have an ideological political background,” Mr. Martins said. YouTube’s auto-playing recommendations, he declared, were “my political education.”
“It was like that with everyone,” he said.
The platform’s political influence is increasingly felt in Brazilian schools.
“Sometimes I’m watching videos about a game, and all of a sudden it’s a Bolsonaro video,” said Inzaghi D., a 17-year-old high schooler in Niterói.
More and more, his fellow students are making extremist claims, often citing as evidence YouTube stars like Mr. Moura, the guitarist-turned-conspiracist.
“It’s the main source that kids have to get information,” he said.
Few illustrate YouTube’s influence better than Carlos Jordy.
Musclebound and heavily tattooed — his left hand bears a flaming skull with diamond eyes — he joined the City Council in 2017 with few prospects of rising through traditional politics. So Mr. Jordy took inspiration from bloggers like Mr. Moura and his political mentor, Mr. Bolsonaro, turning his focus to YouTube.
He posted videos accusing local teachers of conspiring to indoctrinate students into communism. The videos won him a “national audience,” he said, and propelled his stunning rise, only two years later, to the federal legislature.
“If social media didn’t exist, I wouldn’t be here,” he said. “Jair Bolsonaro wouldn’t be president.”
Down The Rabbit Hole
A few hundred miles away from Niterói, a team of researchers led by Virgilio Almeida at the Federal University of Minas Gerais hunched over computers, trying understand how YouTube shapes its users’ reality.
The team analyzed transcripts from thousands of videos, as well as the comments beneath them. Right-wing channels in Brazil, they found, had seen their audiences expand far faster than others did, and seemed to be tilting the site’s overall political content.
In the months after YouTube changed its algorithm, positive mentions of Mr. Bolsonaro ballooned. So did mentions of conspiracy theories that he had floated. This began as polls still showed him to be deeply unpopular, suggesting that the platform was doing more than merely reflecting political trends.
A team at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center set out to test whether the Brazilian far right’s meteoric rise on the platform had been boosted by YouTube’s recommendation engine.
Jonas Kaiser and Yasodara Córdova, with Adrian Rauchfleisch of National Taiwan University, programmed a Brazil-based server to enter a popular channel or search term, then open YouTube’s top recommendations, then follow the recommendations on each of those, and so on.
By repeating this thousands of times, the researchers tracked how the platform moved users from one video to the next. They found that after users watched a video about politics or even entertainment, YouTube’s recommendations often favored right-wing, conspiracy-filled channels like Mr. Moura’s.
Crucially, users who watched one far-right channel would often be shown many more.
The algorithm had united once-marginal channels — and then built an audience for them, the researchers concluded.
One of those channels belonged to Mr. Bolsonaro, who had long used the platform to post hoaxes and conspiracies. Though a YouTube early adopter, his online following had done little to expand his political base, which barely existed on a national level.
Then Brazil’s political system collapsed just as YouTube’s popularity there soared. Mr. Bolsonaro’s views had not changed. But YouTube’s far-right, where he was a major figure, saw its audience explode, helping to prime large numbers of Brazilians for his message at a time when the country was ripe for a political shift.
YouTube challenged the researchers’ methodology and said its internal data contradicted their findings. But the company declined the Times’ requests for that data, as well as requests for certain statistics that would reveal whether or not the researchers’ findings were accurate. . . .
An ‘Ecosystem of Hate’
. . . . As the far right rose, many of its leading voices had learned to weaponize the conspiracy videos, offering their vast audiences a target: people to blame. Eventually, the YouTube conspiracists turned their spotlight on Debora Diniz, a women’s rights activist whose abortion advocacy had long made her a target of the far right.
Bernardo Küster, a YouTube star whose homemade rants had won him 750,000 subscribers and an endorsement from Mr. Bolsonaro, accused her of involvement in the supposed Zika plots.
The very people working to help families affected by Zika, their videos implied, were behind the disease. Backed by shadowy foreigners, their goal was to abolish Brazil’s abortion ban — or even make abortions mandatory.
As far-right and conspiracy channels began citing one another, YouTube’s recommendation system learned to string their videos together. However implausible any individual rumor might be on its own, joined together, they created the impression that dozens of disparate sources were revealing the same terrifying truth.
“It feels like the connection is made by the viewer, but the connection is made by the system,” Ms. Diniz said.
Threats of rape and torture filled Ms. Diniz’s phone and email. Some cited her daily routines. Many echoed claims from Mr. Küster’s videos, she said.
Mr. Küster gleefully mentioned, though never explicitly endorsed, the threats. That kept him just within YouTube’s rules.
When the university where Ms. Diniz taught received a warning that a gunman would shoot her and her students, and the police said they could no longer guarantee her safety, she left Brazil.
“The YouTube system of recommending the next video and the next video,” she said, had created “an ecosystem of hate.”
“‘I heard here that she’s an enemy of Brazil. I hear in the next one that feminists are changing family values. And the next one I hear that they receive money from abroad” she said. “That loop is what leads someone to say ‘I will do what has to be done.’”
“We need the companies to face their role,” Ms. Diniz said. “Ethically, they are responsible.”
As conspiracies spread on YouTube, video makers targeted aid groups whose work touches on controversial issues like abortion. Even some families that had long relied on such groups came to wonder if the videos might be true, and began to avoid them.
In Brazil, this is a growing online practice known as “linchamento” — lynching. Mr. Bolsonaro was an early pioneer, spreading videos in 2012 that falsely accused left-wing academics of plotting to force schools to distribute “gay kits” to convert children to homosexuality.
Mr. Jordy, his tattooed Niterói protégé, was untroubled to learn that his own YouTube campaign, accusing teachers of spreading communism, had turned their lives upside down.
One of those teachers, Valeria Borges, said she and her colleagues had been overwhelmed with messages of hate, creating a climate of fear.
Mr. Jordy, far from disputing this, said it had been his goal. “I wanted her to feel fear,” he said.
“It’s a culture war we’re fighting,” he explained. “This is what I came into office to do.”
‘The Dictatorship of the Like’
Ground zero for politics by YouTube may be the São Paulo headquarters of Movimento Brasil Livre, which formed to agitate for the 2016 impeachment of the left-wing President Dilma Rousseff. Its members trend young, middle-class, right-wing and extremely online.
Renan Santos, the group’s national coordinator, gestured to a door marked “the YouTube Division” and said, “This is the heart of things.”
Inside, eight young men poked at editing software. One was stylizing an image of Benito Mussolini for a video arguing that fascism had been wrongly blamed on the right.
But even some people here fear the platform’s impact on democracy. Mr. Santos, for example, called social media a “weapon,” adding that some people around Mr. Bolsonaro “want to use this weapon to pressure institutions in a way that I don’t see as responsible.”
The group’s co-founder, a man-bunned former rock guitarist name Pedro D’Eyrot, said “we have something here that we call the dictatorship of the like.”
Reality, he said, is shaped by whatever message goes most viral.
Even as he spoke, a two-hour YouTube video was captivating the nation. Titled “1964” for the year of Brazil’s military coup, it argued that the takeover had been necessary to save Brazil from communism.
Mr. Dominguez, the teenager learning to play guitar, said the video persuaded him that his teachers had fabricated the horrors of military rule.
Ms. Borges, the history teacher vilified on YouTube, said it brought back memories of military curfews, disappeared activists and police beatings.
“I don’t think I’ve had my last beating,” she said.
The Future: Technology, Theocracy and the Thousand Year Reich
With the Senate trial of Donald Trump’s second impeachment just getting underway, here’s a pair of article that are a reminder that the target audience for this impeachment isn’t just the American public. Fascists and wannabe dictators around the world have got to be watching how this plays out, and likely rooting for Trump’s acquittal. And of Trump’s wannbe-dictator fans around the world, Jair Bolsonaro is arguably his biggest fan. Not just a fan, but also a student, especially in the area of preemptively delegitimizing elections. At least that’s the growing fear in Brazil now that Bolsonaro has been making it clear that his campaign strategy for the upcoming 2022 elections is going to be the Trump 2020 strategy: preemptively declare the whole voting system is rigged against him:
“Since winning election in 2018, far-right Brazil President Jair Bolsonaro has waged an all-out assault on the country’s democratic institutions, sought to undermine faith in its electoral system, and trafficked in many of the same voting-related conspiracy theories that Trump and the Republican Party fomented over the last six months.”
Yes, Jair Bolsonaro has been such a consistent enemy of Brazil’s democratic institution after his 2018 victory that you almost have to wonder if Trump was following Bolsonaro’s lead and not the other way around. It’s that track record that puts Brazil near the top of the list of democracies expected to be tested by a coup attempt or two in coming years.
It’s also quite interesting that Brazil’s far right appears to be joining Republicans in demonizing electronic voting machines, with Bolsonaro demanding that they return to paper ballots by 2022. On the one hand, Bolsonaro is clearly setting up a claim of a stolen election should he lose. But at the same time, there’s no getting around the reality that electronic voting machines really are an absurd security risk for elections, something voting security experts have warned about for years. The irony is that, at least in the US, it’s virtually always been Republicans who seem to benefit when electronic voting machines have come into use. It’s an example of one of the challenges facing corrupt leaders like Bolsonaro and Trump. On the one hand, making baseless “electronic voting machines stole the election from me!” claims is an alluring short-term response to an election loss, but actually keeping those riggable electronic voting machines in place for future elections is obviously a much more desirable form of corruption. So when we see politicians like Trump and Bolsonaro focus on claims of electronic voting machine rigging and demand that elections return to paper ballots, it’s important to keep in mind that they probably aren’t actually serious about wanting to see a return to paper ballots and are far more likely to be planning on using these claims to argue that the whole system is too corrupt to continue and effectively postpone or end elections entirely:
And as the following Foreign Policy piece notes, should Bolsonaro actually decide to go down the path of declaring a coup or instigating an actual civil war in the event of a 2022 loss, he’s going to have a lot of advantages Donald Trump didn’t have, like a government cabinet stacked with loyal former military officers. Then there’s the fact that Bolsonaro’s were already heavily armed when he came into office. And thanks to Bolsonaro’s relaxations of gun ownership laws, the number of privately owned guns in Brazil basically doubled in 2019 and doubled again in 2020:
“Bolsonaro’s hardcore loyalists are heavily armed and determined to protect their commander-in-chief from impeachment and being elected out of office. His backers are building up their arsenals, with some of them calling for a military takeover should the National Congress move forward with impeachment. Well before Bolsonaro assumed the presidency, one of his most urgent priorities was to dismantle the country’s firearms legislation. Since taking office, he has issued a slew of legal measures to increase access to high-powered firearms and ammunition and water down efforts to track missing guns. In addition to making semi-automatic rifles more available to civilians, he’s also tried to lower import duties on foreign-manufactured firearms.”
If Bolsonaro is impeached the military should take over. Those are some of the calls from Bolsonaro’s heavily armed backers, which is particularly disturbing given that the calls for Bolsonaro’s impeachment are only growing. And as this is all playing out, gun ownership is exploding which is exactly what Bolsonaro and his allies intended:
So as we can see, Brazil’s democracy is being set up for an assassination in 2022 by Bolsonaro and the far right and they are openly following the Trump ‘rigged elections’ playbook. And that’s all why Bolsonaro and his fascist allies were probably some of keenest observers of the January 6 Capitol insurrection. Along with all of the efforts that led up to it and whipped Trump’s supporters into a violent fervor. Trump and the GOP taught the world a big lesson in the potential fragility of democracy and it wasn’t just Democrats taking notes.
Now that the GOP’s intra-party struggle over whether or not to condemn or embrace the Jan 6 Capitol insurrection and the ‘stolen election’ Big Lie underpinning the event has boiled over into a fight over whether or not Trump critic and House GOP caucus leader Liz Cheney will be replaced with a Elise Stefanik, it’s worth noting that we might be relatively to a real-world test of one of Cheney’s recent warnings about the failure to rebuke Trump over the insurrection. Recall how Cheney’s May 5 Washington Post op-ed included the warning that condoning the insurrection and the ‘stolen election’ Big Lie behind it would do damage to the very idea that democratic institutions can or should be trusted and empower authoritarian governments around the world. Well, it turns out Brazil has a new presidential election coming up in October of 2022, and we’re already hearing indications that Jair Bolsonaro’s government could end up calling in the military should he lose the election. Under what pretext would Bolsonaro suspend democracy? Allegations of widespread election fraud...presumably along the lines of the allegations made by Donald Trump since it turns out Bolsonaro was an open supporter of Trump’s ‘stolen election’ claims.
So what are the indications that Brazil could be in store for a return to a dictatorship? Well, for starters, Bolsoaro is looking increasingly vulnerable to losing an election, especially with Brazil experiencing the second worst coronavirus outbreak in the world right now. But perhaps more important is that former president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who was jailed in highly politicized charges, is now out of jail and has begun rebuilding his political coalition. And while Lula has yet indicated if he’s going to run against Bolsonaro in next year’s elections, current polls indicate he would have a very good shot if he does run.
Oh, and then there’s the warning about a looming dictatorship that came from Bolsonaro himself in recent week when he confidently predicted that, should he order the military into take the streets to ‘restore order’, the order will be followed. The comment came a month after a cabinet reshuffle that was reportedly met with shock from senior military officers. Bolsonaro put his former chief of staff in charge of the Defense Ministry and swapped all three commanders of the armed forces.
So the key ingredients required for a return to a dictatorship in Brazil are all in place: a wanna-be dictator who has consolidated his control over the military is already in office and it looks like he might lose:
“The popular former union leader has not said whether he will run for president in October 2022, but opinion polls show he may have a strong shot at defeating Bolsonaro after the Supreme Court threw out his graft convictions. read more”
Lula might have a real shot at beating Bolsonaro. At least in a fairly run election, according to recent polls. And that’s all we need to know to reasonably suspect that Bolsonaro is planning for non-democratic means of staying in office. So it doesn’t help that he has been making baseless claims of voter-fraud for years and recently spoke of his confidence in the military following his orders to take control of the streets:
“Speaking during a TV interview, Bolsonaro said he would not “go into details into what I’m preparing.” But he said that “if we were to have problems, we have a plan of how to enter the field ... our armed forces could one day go into the streets.””
He won’t reveal his plan for sending the military into the streets. But he’ll reveal he has such a plan. It’s more than a little ominous. Especially since these comments come after he shocked the military with a leadership overhaul that put his chief of staff in charge of the Defense Ministry:
And that military reshuffling came a just months after Bolsonaro openly endorese the Capitol insurrection on January 7th, one day after the attack. He blamed the insurrection on voter fraud suspicious that, in his words, “No one can deny,” and then predicted a similar outcome or worse for Brazil in future elections:
““There’s fraud here, too,” he said, warning Brazil faced “an even worse problem than the United States” if it did not reintroduce paper ballots, as he has insisted.”
If Brazil doesn’t switch over to paper ballots entirely by 2022, something worse than the Jan 6 Capitol insurrection could take place in Brazil. That’s what Bolsonaro was openly predicting just one day after Trump’s failed coup attempt.
So we’re already basically being told what to expect if Bolsonaro loses the 2022 election. Expect a coup. That’s now really in question. The big question is whether or not Lulua or someone else can actually defeat Bolsonaro in the first place. Along with all the secondary questions related to the lessons Bolsonaro may or may not have learned from Jan 6. It points towards to how far the US managed to fall by the end of the Trump term: a far right Brazilian general was learning lessons from the US over how to pull off a coup. That’s obviously not a new phenomena, but it’s usually not this direct.
Following up on the story of the growing interest by Jair Bolsonaro’s government and Steve Bannon in running the same Trump 2020 ‘stolen election’ playbook in Brazil’s upcoming election, here’s a fascinating Twitter thread by teleSUR on a correspondent Brian Mier on a related development. Related in the sense that is falls under the same unbrella of the international elites organizing the rise of fascism. And in this case, the fascist return of the Brazilian Monarchy. As Mier’s tweets describe, AfD Parliamentarian Beatrix von Storch, granddaughter of Hitler’s finance minister Count Johann Ludwig Graf Schwerin von Krosigk. Her birth title was Her Highness Duchess Beatrix Amelie Ehrengard Eilika von Oldenburg. She’s a relative of Bertrand de Orléans e Bragança, the head of the Brazilian royal family, who she met with in in July. The formation of a new Conservative International was announced during that meeting with the Bolsonaro government and the Brazilian monarchy. As Mier put it, “So, recalling the relationship between deposed royal families, Hitler, Mussolini, and the Brazilian military dictatorship, it’s noteworthy that a German duchess/AfD Deputy Director, just met with Bolsonaro and the Monarchy, and announced formation of a Conservative International.” Yep:
And now here’s a piece that has a bit more on Von Storch’s trip to Brazil and the joint calls for an international far right network. And as the piece points out, the Bolsonaro government has become so important in that international far right networking effort that the Trump White House essentially passed the leadership mantel to Bolsonaro’s government on January 20, Trump’s last day in office. That was when Valerie Huber, the person chosen by the White House during the Trump administration to address women’s health issues, sent an email announcing that Brazil has kindly offered to coordinate this “historic coalition” and the Brazilian president will be responsible for leading the ultra-conservative international alliance created to influence the decisions of the United Nations, the World Health Organization and other organizations. It’s part of the context of Von Storch’s trip to Brazil: the Bolsonaro government’s relative importance to the international far right has only grown in the months since Trump left office:
“Brazil has become fertile ground to expand those ideas, with a government that still contributes an extra element: after the end of Donald Trump’s term in the United States, the ultra-conservative offensive has bet all its chips on Bolsonaro’s Brazil. In January 2021, senior Trump officials sent messages to other countries informing that the projects that had been led by the White House would be taken over by Bolsonaro from that moment on. The information is part of an email sent to collaborators by Valerie Huber, the person chosen by the White House during the Trump administration to address women’s health issues. In a message on January 20, 2021, Huber announces that Brazil has kindly offered to coordinate this “historic coalition”. Under this provision, the Brazilian president is responsible for leading the ultra-conservative international alliance created to influence the decisions of the United Nations, the World Health Organization and other organizations.”
With Trump out of office, Brazil was the brightest light of fascism left in the Western hemisphere. With new leadership responsibilities:
And yet Brazil is following the model of some even more brightly shining fascist stars found in the EU, with Brazil and Hungary developing a particularly close relationship in recent years:
And note that the resignation of Brazilian Culture Secretary, Roberto Alvim, in 2020 over his making Nazi references wasn’t really Alvim about merely referring to the Nazis. The problem was Alvim seemingly copied word for word proclamations by Joseph Goebbels when Alvim announced that, “The Brazilian art of the next decade will be heroic and will be national, will be endowed with great capacity for emotional involvement... deeply linked to the urgent aspirations of our people, or else it will be nothing.” It’s a reminder that, while Poland and Hungary may be model fascist nations countries like Brazil are increasingly trying to emulate, the real model government they’re all trying to follow ceased existing in 1945, if you exclude the hearts and mind of fascists where it obviously still thrives.
@Pterrafractyl–
Wow!
BTW, in AFA#1 (April of 1984) we noted that it was Finance Minister von Krosigk who coined the term “Iron Curtain.”
https://spitfirelist.com/anti-fascist-archives/rfa-1-looking-back-from-1984/
Source: “The Bormann Brotherhood” by William Stevenson.
Best,
Dave Emory
Here’s a set of stories coming out of Sweden that point towards the next phase in the deepening psychological warfare campaigns fomenting conflict between the West and Russia and China: Sweden just set up a new Psychological Defense Agency, dedicated to fighting fake news. Specifically foreign fake news.
It’s not entirely clear how Sweden’s new agency is going to accomplish this goal, but it sounds like the plan is less about censoring fake news and more focused on equipping the Swedish populace with greater critical thinking skills. In that sense is a fascinating proposal because it’s basically pledging to do the seemingly impossible: they’re make people smarter and savvier through generic public messaging campaigns. Can the dumbing-down effects of mass propaganda work in reverse? We’ll see, but it feels like kind of a Catch22 situation.
Are national Psychological Defense Agencies a sign of things to come? Well, we’re told France already has plans for one of its own. And it seems inevitable some version of this is going to pop up across the world in the long run.
So Sweden just launched its new Psychological Defense Agency this year. Just in time to defend Sweden from the Russian invasion. Yes, Sweden is at risk of a Russian invasion. A real invasion. Not just an informational invasion. At least that’s the warning Sweden’s government is issuing as Sweden moves troops to Gotland. As defence minister Peter Hultqvist put it, “It is clear there is a risk. An attack against Sweden cannot be ruled out . . It’s important to show we are not naive. Sweden will not be caught napping if something happens. It is important to send signals that we take this situation seriously.”
A potentially crucial additional detail in this story is that it turns out a majority of Sweden’s parliament supports joining NATO. But the ruling centre-left party does NOT support such a move.
That’s the warped story emerging from Sweden at the start of 2022: First, a creepy new anti-fake news military agency that was launched. And then a couple weeks later we get hysterical claims of a Russian invasion. The kind of claims that are awfully convenient for those pushing for NATO membership. Which is why it’s also quite convenient that the new psychological defense agency is apparently only going to be focused on foreign disinformation:
“The Scandinavian country, home to about 10 million people, established the Swedish Psychological Defense Agency on Jan. 1, in a bid to safeguard its “democratic society” and “the free formation of opinion,” the agency said on its website. As the country heads into elections this year, the agency will work alongside the Swedish military and government on the new battleground of fake news and misinformation.”
The new Swedish Psychological Defense Agency is going to safeguard its “democratic society” and “the free formation of opinion,” against the threat of disinformation. Specifically foreign disinformation. Domestic disinformation is fine:
Is this the kind of idea that’s going to catch on? Maybe. France has already announced an anti-fake news agency of its own. Again, focused on foreign fake news:
Finally, note the interesting prediction about the nature of the protective services this new agency will deliver: it’s not just going to flag or censor foreign disinformation. It’s going to try to equip the Swedish population with the skills to spot fake news and to take in information “with a more critical eye.” A military intelligence mass psychology agency tasked with teach the populace how to identify disinformation. It’s going to be fascinating to see how much disinformation related to techniques for identifying disinformation ends up deployed. After all, it’s not like Sweden’s military is going to want to make the Swedish populace savvy enough to pick out the domestic disinformation coming from the Swedish government itself. It’s a tricky line to walk:
Next, here’s a Financial Times opinion piece by American Enterprise Institute fellow Elisabeth Braw on Sweden’s new psychological defense agency. And while Braw is highly supportive of the mission of the new agency, its mission doesn’t go far enough in Braw’s opinion. As Braw puts it, “The Swedish Psychological Defence Agency will monitor malign influence by exposing both the aggressors and their methods. I believe it should go further, by launching information counter-strikes against the offending country’s ruling elite. In future, Nato and its allies could respond to disinformation campaigns by revealing some of the overseas properties owned by senior officials in the hostile country.”
Offensive information campaigns targeting the leaders of the offending countries (so presumably Russian or Chinese leaders) by revealing their overseas properties. A policy of targeted ‘Panama Paper’-like embarrassing leaks. We’ll see if Sweden ends up pursuing such a policy, but if not Sweden, maybe France after they form their own psychological defense agency? Or one of the other national psychological defense agencies that will undoubtedly be formed in coming years. That’s part of the larger context of Braw’s piece to keep in mind: while it’s focused on Sweden’s new psychological defense agency, Braw’s talking about something that’s going to sweeping the world. National psychological defense is likely a global boom market. Which means we should probably expect a boom market in offensive psychological operations too:
“The Swedish Psychological Defence Agency will monitor malign influence by exposing both the aggressors and their methods. I believe it should go further, by launching information counter-strikes against the offending country’s ruling elite. In future, Nato and its allies could respond to disinformation campaigns by revealing some of the overseas properties owned by senior officials in the hostile country.”
Offensive lies and defensive counter-strikes of truth. That’s the vision Braw is peddling. A global cacophony of wild accusations. Which sounds a lot like today, but it will be waged by national psychological defense agencies.
Although it’s not like we should expect that the ‘educational’ services by these agencies will always be publicly advertised. Covert ‘education’ is something we should expect.
And that brings us to the latest in contemporary farcical Russian hysteria, an area of expertise for any new psychological defense agency: The Swedish military just sent troops to Gotland after warning about a potential Russian invasion.
Yep. Russia is about to invade Sweden. Just you wait:
““It is clear there is a risk. An attack against Sweden cannot be ruled out . . . It’s important to show we are not naive. Sweden will not be caught napping if something happens. It is important to send signals that we take this situation seriously,” defence minister Peter Hultqvist told radio station Ekot on Saturday.”
“It is clear there is a risk. An attack cannot be ruled out.” It’s an absolutely absurd statement, put out there to the public with complete seriousness. And note part of the context here: Sweden’s parliament is in favor of NATO membership, but the ruling centre-left Social Democrats continue to oppose such a move. In other words, get ready for A LOT more warnings about an impending Russian invasion:
It all raises a fascinating question: so how would an honest national psychological defense agency recommend citizens interpret these kinds of warnings about an looming Russian invasion? What conclusions should our critical thinking skills direct us towards when assessing the veracity of these claims? It points towards one of the other implicit Catch22-ish challenges in this situation: the immense need to carefully apply your critical thinking skills when absorbing lessons in critical thinking from ‘anti-propaganda’ propaganda agencies.
Following up on the story about Sweden’s new Psychological Defense Agency dedicated to teaching the Swedish public how to identify foreign disinformation, paired with report of Sweden moving troops to Gotland while warning about a possible Russian invasion, here’s a set of articles about another anomalous national security-related story that’s suddenly popped up in the country:
Drones are buzzing Sweden’s nuclear plants. It popped up last week, with reports of police investigating drone sightings around the Forsmark nuclear plant searching for a single large drone seen flying over the site. The siting came amid reports of another possible drone sighting at the Ringhals nuclear plant on the country’s west coast. In total, there have been reports of drones around four Swedish power plants this week: Forsmark, Ringhals, Oskarshamn, and Barsebäck. Forsmark has apparently been buzzed on multiple days. And that’s on top of drone sightings outside government buildings on Stockholm.
So what kinds of drones are these? We have no idea. There’s no hard evidence yet of any of these sightings, although one anonymous source claims that one sighting involved a large winged drone. But this source couldn’t provide any visual evidence. It’s part of what makes this mystery so mysterious: in an era a smartphones with powerful cameras no one can snag a video of any of these drones.
And again, don’t forget that this mystery drone swarming is happening at the same the Swedish government is making big new investments in the area of psychological warfare, with the opening of the Psychological Defense Agency. And it’s also all happening in the middle of a showdown with Russia. Are we looking at a Swedish psyop?
As we’ll see in the final article excerpt below, there’s another intriguing possibility in terms of the origins of these drones: last month, Norway announced the launching of a new Coast Guard service. Five Norwegian Coast Guard ships are being equipped with new radiation-detecting drones. The drones were design in collaboration with the US and intended for use maritime use. All five ships were expected to be fitted with the drones this year, with plans on testing the systems during a big international Arctic radiation exercise in the area around Bodø, northern Norway in May.
Yes, in the midst of Sweden’s ongoing sabre rattling with Russia, we get a mystery drone event involving high sensitive locations. The exact kind of highly sensitive locations that Norway’s new radiation drone fleet is ideal for monitoring. It’s quite an alarming coincidence. Alarming in part because it’s a coincidence seemingly designed to raise public alarm:
“It also cited unconfirmed reports of possible drone sightings at the Ringhals nuclear plant on the country’s west coast, while several media reports spoke of object sightings near the Oskarshamn and Barsebäck powerplants.”
That’s four different nuclear plants with drone sightings: Forsmark, Ringhals, Oskarshamn, and Barsebäck. Yikes. Someone was sending a message. It’s not actually clear what the message is, but it’s clear they intended to send it. This wasn’t covert:
And neither were the sightings limited to those four plants. In addition to a number of drone sightings over government buildings in Stockholm Days, there was round of sightings at Forsmark.
And as the following article notes, there’s still no hard footage of any of these drones. We don’t know what they look like or even what kind of drones they are. There’s one anonymous source claiming to have seen a large winged drone with at least a two-meter wingspan, but no evidence was provided to back this claim up. So part of the mystery of the Swedish drone swarm is why there’s no visual evidence of the drones people keep seeing:
“Police in Sweden have confirmed a new drone sighting near the Forsmark Nuclear Power Plant. This comes a day after the Swedish Security Service announced it was taking over the investigation of a number of earlier reported drone incursions into the airspace near that plant, as well as around two other nuclear facilities elsewhere in the country. You can read more about what is already known about these earlier sightings in The War Zone’s initial reporting here.”
A new drone sighting near Forsmark. Multiple sightings in just a few days. It makes you wonder what the drone spotted the first time around. And then there’s the additional drone sightings over various government buildings in Stockholm. The whole thing has risen to the level of a “national special event”. Someone is putting on a show, and the whole nation is the target audience:
Sadly, not only could the drone not be captured, but there’s apparently no clear footage of any of these drones. We have reports that at least one of these incidents involves a large winged drone with a least a two-meter wingspan, but those reports are anonymous and unconfirmed. It’s a rather remarkable lack of evidence in an era ubiquitous cameras. Could the police helicopter snag a few images they can share?
And that complete lack of hard detail about these drones brings us to a story out of Norway from early December. A story about Norways new fleet of radiation-detecting drones. Yep, Norway announced last month that five Coast Guard ships are soon to be equipped with radiation-detecting drones and will be patrolling the coast. So Norway has ships with drones that have a specific interest in radiation newly deployed a month before the wave of mystery drone sightings near neighboring Sweden’s nuclear plants. Hmmmm...
Also note that Norway wasn’t independently working on this radiation drone program. Back in October, a team of experts from the Norwegian Radiation and Nuclear Safety Authority (DSA) and the Coast Guard worked together with experts from the US Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security at a Nevada Test Site where they tested how the drones could be used for detection. In May of 2022, the drones are going to be used in a large international Arctic radiation exercise in the area around Bodø, northern Norway.
So are they the large winged drones capable of flying long distances? Or the helicoptor-like smaller drones capable of hovering with precision? That’s unclear from the reporting. But keep in mind that we still don’t know what the drones sighted over Sweden look like either. So at this point we don’t have enough information to conclude whether or not the Swedish drone mystery is a product of Norway’s drone fleet. But we don’t have any information that could rule it out either:
“Now, authorities take action and deploy drones with radiation detectors on board Norway’s fleet of five Inner Coast Guard patrol vessels, from the North Sea region in the south to the Barents Sea in the north.”
Norway’s Coast Guard is taking action against the growing risk of floating maritime nuclear-powered vessels with five Coast Guard vessels set to get equipped with one of these new radiation-detecting drones. This was the news less than two months before Sweden’s mystery “national special event”.
But also notes that Norway’s new drone program isn’t something they’re developing on their own. It’s a joint project being developed in partnership with the US, with plans to incorporate the drones into a large international Arctic radiation exercise in the area around Bodø, northern Norway in May 2022:
So what are we looking at here? It’s unclear. But it doesn’t look like we’ve seen the last of these sightings. Hopefully one of these times someone will actually snap a picture.
Here’s a pair of articles about the current intra-NATO fight over whether or not to approve Sweden as member. As we’re going to see, it’s a fight that’s largely just Turkey vs the rest of NATO. But as we’re also going to see, it’s a fight that could end up perversely playing right into the hands of the far right Sweden Democrats.
Oh, and it turns out the West has a new opportunity to betray the Kurds. Because of course. Yes, Turkey has made Sweden’s deportation of PKK supporters a condition for dropping its opposition on Sweden’s NATO ambitions. It’s a condition that Sweden has so far refused to capitulate over, citing the human rights conflict of such a move.
And yet, as Swedish opposition Social Democratic MEP Evin Incir warned a couple weeks ago, that Turkish demand just might end up becoming a reality thanks to the fact that the far right Sweden Democrats are members of the ruling coalition and their ongoing support is required for the centre-right government. In other words, if Erodgan’s demands become the Sweden Democrats’ demands too, we should probably expect the mass departation of Sweden’s Kurdish refugees sooner rather then later.
But as we’re also going to see, there’s second electoral dynamic at work here: Turkey’s general elections are coming up in June. And Erdogan’s party is only barely leading in recent polls. As Ircin notes, Ankara’s demands just might change should we see a change in Turkey’s leadership.
Those are the twin domestic political dynamics playing out right now as the fight over Sweden’s NATO accession plays out. A fight that obviously has a large number of other very interested parties in its outcome. Will the Sweden Democrats manage to turn the expulsion of the Kurds into a political win? Or might we see Erdogan’s government finally fall, only to be replaced with a more compliant one? Time will tell. But probably not a lot of time:
“Cavusoglu repeated Turkey’s position that it would be willing to approve Finland joining NATO before Sweden. Turkey has complained about what it sees as Stockholm’s tolerance of support for the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, which has waged a 39-year insurgency against Ankara.”
Either give up the Kurds or give up Sweden’s NATO ambitions. That’s the ultimatum coming from Ankara. Or at least the core ultimatum. There’s a range of grievances. But it sounds like extraditing PKK supporters is the primary demand:
And then there’s the parallel negotiation that obviously isn’t entirely separate from the NATO negotiations: the sale of F‑16s, which is contingent on Turkey lifting its blockade of Sweden’s NATO ambitions. At least that’s how a bipartisan group of US Senators put it a few weeks ago. Turkey is insisting the two issues be negotiated separately. But that decision is not up to Turkey. It’s a complicated came of diplomatic chicken being played right now:
But as the following EurActive piece describes, there’s another political dynamic playing out inside Sweden in response to Ankara’s demands: the far right Sweden Democrats are part of the current coalition government. And deporting Kurds is very aligned with their brand of politics. That was the warning issued by Swedish opposition Social Democratic MEP Evin Incir earlier this month.
But as the article also notes, there’s another electoral dynamic at work here: turkey’s general elections are coming up in June, with Erdogan’s party only narrowly in the lead according to recent polls. And as Ircin notes, Turkey’s demands could very well change depending on who is ultimately in power. So it looks like Sweden’s accession into NATO is currently hinging on some rather unstable political dynamics. And in the case of Sweden, political dynamics that align the far right Sweden Democrats with the West’s larger pro-NATO ambitions:
“So far, the centre-right coalition in power in Sweden has consistently refused to deport anyone to Turkey, but according to Ircin, trouble could come from the far-right Sweden Democrats who support the ruling coalition and without whom, the current Moderate Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson would not have his slim majority.”
How is Sweden going to respond to Turkey’s demands? It depends. That was the warning from Social Democratic MEP Evin Incir. It depends on whether or not the far right Sweden Democrats are able to leverage their status as one of the members of the ruling coalition government to force the expulsion of the Kurd. As Ircin put it, “The government right now is sitting on the lap of the far right.” This is as good time to note that the Sweden Democrats had long opposed NATO membership, but that opposition was dropped back in April, with the party’s leader taking a new stance that, should Finland join NATO, Sweden should join too. And now, here we are, with the Sweden Democrats in a position to demand the export Muslim refugees in order to gain Sweden’s entry into NATO. The situation does not bode well for Sweden’s Kurds:
So the Sweden Democrat’s xenophobia has found a new synergy with the push to get Sweden into NATO. Funny how that works.
But also note the other electoral dynamic at work here: Turkey’s general elections are taking place in June, raising the possibility of a new have in Ankara and, in turn, potentially different demands. It’s going to be very interesting to see what, if any, electoral influence operations might unfold in Turkey in the coming months should Sweden remain steadfast in its refusal to deport its Kurd. This a a high stakes election:
Keep in mind that this report is from Feb 13, one week after a devastating earthquake. In other words, those polls are probably in a state of extreme flux. How will falling, or rising, polls for Erdogan’s government shift Turkey’s stance on the Sweden-issue? Again, time will tell, but too many powerful parties have too big a stake in this to allow this game of chicken to go one forever. It’s going to get resolved sooner rather then later. Presumably with another backstab for the Kurds. It’s an oldie but a goodie.