Patterns in Data: the Disinfolklore narrative form and why I remain on Twitter / X

Here, Decoding Trolls speaks about hunting for patterns in data. Disinfolklore is one such pattern that recurs in multiple different voices in forms of geopolitically relevant discourse that we do not associate with folklore or child-like emotionally resonant story-telling.

Yeah, part of what helped me see this pattern, this is what I really do. I hunt for patterns in data. And I assimilate, as many of us do, who participate in X. And X, as we now know from the third report on foreign information manipulation and interference by the European Union, which was released recently.

I highly recommend anyone to read, along with the first two reports, which was published a couple of weeks ago. X is where on a data set, I think it was over 40,000 FIMI instances of FIMI that were collected by the European Union. X was involved in 86% of them. So this is where we all are.

And I know many of us have ethical dilemmas about should we be here, should we not? And most of us are also part of BlueSky and other places. But the fight is here and the examples are here of whether it's, I saw Maid Marion Simonyan, Russia’s chief government propagandists, tweeting again in her folksy Disinfolklore way where she does this a lot, where she tells these folksy stories as indeed does Donald. they tell these stories of, frankly, horrifying things. Like for instance, the way Donald communicated in, I think it was March, 2024, that if the head of a major NATO country said to him we can't pay for our NATO membership. Would you protect us?

And he said, I'd say, you know, to do whatever the hell they want with you. And then this unit of information was then reported by CNN as a fact that Donald had told this head of state that America wouldn't protect him.

But we're not clear whether this ever, ever happened, but it was reported as a fact by CNN. And so you see these folksy stories get taken up.

Simonyon tonight, she's talking about how people in the offices in Moscow saying this or saying that, and these terms really interest me - “folk in the offices.”

I've seen them for years now. And if it's a pattern, which is what, along with the horror of what they're saying, it's a pattern that made me suspicious, something methodical was going on here, which I use Disinfolklore to explain and to interpret.

She says, oh, people in the offices in Moscow are saying that if Germany gives their weapons to Ukraine, that they will, Ukraine won't be able to do anything with them without Germany's help. Therefore, Germany is complicit, and so we'll have to strike Berlin. And so this is a classic piece of Disinfolklore. There's a distancing in the narrative form.

It's presented as a folksy story.

People in the offices of Moscow, as if she's just been, and the image in our head is she's just heard this gossip.

And she said this before when she's spoken, the St. Petersburg Economic Forum in June 2022. Many of us will remember this here.

Where she said, people in Moscow are saying that all our hope is in the famine. And then she interprets what these folksy people are supposedly saying. And she's sitting beside the head of state. She's sitting beside Duncey Putin himself on the dais at St. Petersburg Economic Forum, dressed in green, which is why I call her Maid Maryon.

Like a reverse Robin Hood. And this is an aspect of the Disinfolklore analytical method that we can use these folklore archetypes to interpret those who are themselves using these folksy archetypes to combat them.

And she said, the people in Moscow are saying “all our hope is in the famine.” And what they mean by that is, this is her saying that she understands what the folk what the ordinary folk in Moscow are saying, they are saying that there will be famine in Africa and the migrants will come to Europe and then the European Union will release the sanctions because it's impossible for us not to be friends.

So this is the folksy banter of the schoolyard. This is you speaking, your seven-year-old child speaking to their seven-year-old friend, best friend, and they've had an argument.

It's impossible not to be friends, but this isn't a micro chat in a schoolyard. It's a conversation sitting beside the head of state of a country at war, which is planning to famine millions of people in Africa in a madcap attempt, which would really only You'd only see it in literature in Don Quixote or in some folktale.

So the madcap plan to win in Ukraine is to starve millions of Africans. That will provoke the Europeans into lifting the sanctions. And then Russia will become friends with Europe and Ukraine will be abandoned. so the way she tells the story it's very solid Russian strategy but it's told in a folksy way and it's absolutely horrifying when you analyse what it's saying but it passes most people by it enters their inner minds.

As indeed does this stuff archetyping the former president of Russia as drunk so many of us, many sensible people tweeting today the content of the former president of Russia's tweet, once again threatening WW3 if something happens.

I think it's related to the Germans.

So these are, um, kind of folk tale archetypes folks and stories, which communicate really horrifying, things when you parse the data and it's a pattern that they use and it's really effective because people like us share these, because they provoke something in us, in our emotions.

Even if we think we're harming the former president by characterizing them, by archetyping them as drunk, we're still repeating the meme. And this horrifyingness is slyly communicated and the energy is continued and it's pinging around the world. Thankfully, now today, as many of us will know, because we're tuned into this, we see great advance in our political leadership over what we have experienced since February 2022.

But this method of communication has had the impact on President Biden's policy, don't poke the bear, is a Disinfolklore meme, probably the most successful one ever, that actually impacts on... foreign policy, it stopped America properly helping Ukraine, and international relations itself, the entire discourse is full of these metaphors and Disinfolklore, “don't poke the bear” being one, but Disinfolklore memes that are represented as being a means of communicating foreign policy and strategy affecting the lives and deaths of millions of people.

Whereas in fact, these strategies are only communicated by means of these memes and through these means.

So what I have spotted, which as far as I'm aware, no one else's or no other writers have really noticed is this continuity across multiple narrative forms, discourses. It's obvious in anthropology or in folklore studies or in psychology, in Jungian psychology, when they're referencing myths and archetypes and storytelling.

But the same dynamic is at place inside international relations discourse, inside the speeches up until recently of many of our leading politicians. And obviously everything Donald says, he speaks this in folklore fluently.

It's these folksy stories from the Jan 6th anthem of the Jan 6th insurrectionists, organized by the current head of the FBI, the songs which were used in his rallies, which many of us, the talk, the folksy way of speaking about Alphonse Capone, the archetyping of Melania as Al Capone's wife, using, wearing this, the clothes, haute couture clothes made by Ukrainian fashion designers in LA, DressX, who supply haute couture interpretations of comic book, chic comic book aesthetics for people like Elon Musk and Melania Trump, who want to archetype themselves as characters in our info space, by referencing through their clothes, superheroes or characters from folklore, from folktale, from our contemporary folklore.

So that's kind of a sample of the scale of what I believe I've identified with distant folklore in this narrative form. But to answer your question, it's at basic, it's a narrative form. which as far as I know, I'm the first person to spot it.

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