SoMe – Didaktiske betraktninger

NAFO-fellas: Bekjempelse av russisk feilinformasjon på nettet

NAFO is about laughter, but you are not just a joke.
– Gabrielius Landsbergis, utenriksminister Litauen, 2023

NAFO is a living example of how to disarm Russian disinformation with humor, intelligence, and enthusiasm.
– Kaja Kallas, statsminister, Estland, 2023

Et av mange eksempler på visuelle svar på russisk propaganda,
med Shiba Inu som «hovedperson».
(Fotomontasje: Ukjent)

Hva er NAFO?

The North Atlantic Fellas Organization (NAFO) er en ideell grasrot bevegelse som så langt virker å spille en rolle i å motvirke russisk feilinformasjon rundt konflikten i Ukraina. NAFO er ikke en fasttømret organisasjon, men en gruppe frivillige fra hele den nordatlantiske regionen som er dedikert til å avsløre og motarbeide russisk propaganda og desinformasjonskampanjer.

Bakteppet for NAFO Fellas er det brutale russiske angrepet på Ukraina, og den uttalte hensikten er å motvirke den russiske propagandaen rettet mot et vestlig publikum, samt samle inn penger til Ukrainas forsvar.

NAFO er ikke et nytt fenomen, og kan vel sies å ha sitt utspring i de Litauiske alver.

Selv sluttet jeg meg til NAFO i juli 2023, dels for å gi et bidrag inn i kampen mot russisk desinformasjon og dels for å undersøke hvordan denne type grasrotbevegelse (såkalt «myk makt») kan fungere i kampen mot feilinformasjon i krig.

Den folkerettsstridige og ytterst brutale angrepskrigen Russland fører mot Ukraina, gjorde at jeg fant det vanskelig å holde på ideen om analytisk distanse. Når jeg deltok i, og utforsket, NAFO, så var det ut fra en klar stillingtaken mot Russland og for Ukraina.

Jeg var selvsagt innmeldt som privatperson (min Twitter-konto hadde ingen referanse til Nord universitet og ble heller ikke benyttet i min undervisning), men som de fleste akademikere er mitt primære fagfelt (Social Cybersecurity) ikke bare en jobb, men en «livsstil» og det jeg erfarer som privatperson vil selvsagt danne grunnlag for deler av min undervisning i informasjonssikkerhet.

NAFOs arbeid virker å ha vært spesielt effektivt innenfor sosiale medier. Gruppen har en stor tilhengerskare på Twitter, hvor de jevnlig legger ut faktasjekker og debunker av russisk desinformasjon. NAFOs tweets har blitt retweetet en rekke ganger, og de har bidratt til å øke bevisstheten om russisk propaganda blant deler av Twitters brukere, og via nyhetsmedia deler av offentligheten.

NAFO er også aktiv på TikTok og Facebook.

Den 13. juli 2023 ble NAFO Fellas tildelt the Star of Lithuanian Diplomacy, og blant andre Estlands statsminister Kaja Kallas er en stor tilhenger av NAFO.

I tillegg til arbeidet med sosiale medier, produserer NAFO også multimediejournalistikk. Gruppen har produsert en rekke videoer og artikler som avslører russisk desinformasjon og gir nøyaktig informasjon om konflikten i Ukraina. NAFOs arbeid har vært omtalt i flere medier, inkludert The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post og Sky News.

NAFOs arbeid er altså fokusert på kampen mot russisk desinformasjon, og gruppen har bidratt til å avsløre russisk propaganda og gi nøyaktig informasjon om konflikten i Ukraina. NAFOs arbeid har dermed bidratt til å informere offentligheten (i alle fall den delen som er på Twitter, TikTok og Facebook) om konfliktens sanne natur og motvirke russisk innsats for å så splid og forvirring.

NAFO-plakat som skal vise hvilke land de ulike fellas kommer fra

Hvordan bli en NAFO Fella?

De som ønsker å hjelpe NAFO i deres kamp mot russisk desinformasjon, gjør gjerne følgende:

Følger NAFO på sosiale medier og deler innholdet deres.
Blir en NAFO Fella og bruker tiden sin frivillig til NAFO ved å besvare russisk desinformasjon. Medlemskap oppnås ved å vise til eksempel på egen donasjon til organisasjon/ forening som støtter Ukraina med penger og/eller utstyr. NAFO tar ikke selv i mot donasjoner, men viser til ulike hjelpeorganisasjoner/ foreninger. (Man trenger ikke å donere via NAFO (nettbutikk), eller til organisasjoner NAFO anbefaler, for å bli medlem. Selv ble jeg medlem via utstyrs- og pengedonasjon til Veteran Aid Ukraine.)

Selv små handlinger kan utgjøre en stor forskjell, så ved å følge og dele NAFO tvitring kan man bidra til å motvirke russisk desinformasjon.

Eller kan man det?

Tanken om å holde russiske propagandakontoer opptatt med «mot-trolling» minner om «Counter Scamming» (også kalt «Scam Baiting»), som var populært på begynnelsen av 2000-tallet og som også jeg tok del i. Da var motstanderne de såkalte «Nigeria-svindlerne». Hensikten med «mot-svindelen» var å latterliggjøre 419-svindlerne og få dem fra å forsøke igjen.

Akkurat som man kunne spørre seg hvor mye «mot-svindelen» mot Nigeria-svindlerne egentlig hjalp, må man også stille spørsmålet om NAFO Fellas egentlig oppnår noe vesentlig når det gjelder kampen mot russisk propaganda.

Propagandaplakat for NAFO. Legg merke til WW2 motivet. Flere av plakatene fra NAFO er montasjer med utgangspunkt i WW1 og WW2 plakater. (Fotomontasje: Ukjent)

Noen spørsmål

Så langt har, som pekt på tidligere i dette innlegget, NAFO fått mye positiv omtale, men det er ikke gitt at en slik bevegelse er uproblematisk.

Oberstlt. Steve Speece ved the Modern War Institute, West Point, har påpekt at «Meme content shared in NAFO channels … is almost exclusively English language and presumably not intended for Russian audiences … These fora exist to generate content for the entertainment and status of their own members.»

Speece sin uttalelse setter fingeren på et viktig punkt med bruk av sosiale medier; når man virkelig ut til «alle» eller kun til egen menighet? Og blir denne type aktivisme først og fremst selvforherligelse av egen fortreffelighet, eller er det en effektiv form for informasjonskrigføring?

Devana, en Ukrainsk Twitter-bruker, har advart mot å angripe personer kun fordi de har et annet syn på krigen i Ukraina og påpeker at pro-russiske Twitter-brukere bør møtes med fakta da dette er en reaksjon som er mer «…effective to drive this person into a corner with facts, destroying all the fakes with which this person operates. This is a more intelligent attack by way of discussion.»

Dette er etter min mening et godt og viktig poeng. Desinformasjon bør møtes med saklige fakta. Men samtidig er et av de viktigste våpen i NAFOs kamp svart humor og latterliggjøring av russiske medier, politikere og nett-troll. Humor, selv den svarte varianten, kan være et både effektivt og legitimt våpen i kampen mot russisk desinformasjon. Men «mobbing» av personer som kun har et annet syn, er ikke bare forkastelig men kan også medvirke til å kvele reell demokratisk diskusjon.

Noen spørsmål jeg umiddelbart stiller meg etter å ha fulgt NAFO Fellas en stund, er:

Hvor stor del av Internetts brukere blir egentlig nådd med denne type aksjoner, og hvor stor del av verden er nedslagsfeltet?
Er NAFO-bevegelsen effektiv i kamp mot desinformasjon eller er det digitale slag i luften uten virkning?
Kan NAFO utvikles til å bli en form for nett-vigilanter som ukritisk mobber og forfølger enhver som er uenig? Kan den utvikle seg fra å være en positiv motstand mot den russiske krigføringen i Ukraina, til å bli en «hatbevegelse»?
Hvordan vil den stadige utviklingen av Internett (og derigjennom sosiale medier) påvirke denne form for «myk makt»? Vil f.eks. Elon Musk sine endringer av Twitter gjøre det vanskelig for NAFO både å «tvitre» og å få oppmerksomhet?
Kan NAFO memes og hashtags, samt NAFO-svar til russiske nett-troll og offentlige instanser, utnyttes til å spre russisk desinformasjon?

Dette er bare noen av flere spørsmål som kan reises mot denne bevegelsen.

Oppsummert

NAFO virker å være en gruppe dedikerte og uorganiserte frivillige som muligens utgjør en viktig faktor i kampen mot russisk desinformasjon. Under denne «paraplyen» kan brukere av sosiale medier være med å bidra i kampen mot russisk desinformasjon på Internett. Men som alle typer sosiale media-bevegelser gir den grunnlag for flere kritiske spørsmål, og bør utforskes nøye av alle som har interesse for politisk bruk av sosiale medier.

Bruk av sosiale medier i krigstid – både som verktøy for desinformasjon og Fake News, og verktøy for bekjempelse av det samme – er interessant å ta inn i min undervisning i bruk av sosiale medier innen utdanningsfeltet (IKT og Læringsstudiene), og utforskning av NAFO Fellas vil kunne gi en praktisk bakgrunn for en slik undervisning.

Oppdatering

Den aktive deltakelsen via Twitter ble avsluttet i mai 2024, og resten av arbeidet vil foregå via gjennomgang av vitenskapelig og populærvitenskapelig litteratur som behandler NAFO.

De siste års endring av Twitter har gjort tjenesten til en plattform for mer aggressiv kommunikasjon, ikke minst i form av desinformasjon/ falske nyheter ol. Det ble rett og slett for slitsomt å opprettholde en tilstedeværelse der, og jeg ble også stadig mer i tvil om dette arbeidet rent faktisk hadde en virkning. Jeg avsluttet derfor min Twitter-konto i mai 2024.

Bakgrunnsbilde vanlig på mange NAFO-profiler, også min

Leseliste

Academic Social Media – reaching out to the public, or Maskirovka the Academic Way?

…not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.

– William Bruce Cameron, 1963

Climbing the Social Media Pole

I’ve been fooling around on Internet since 1994 and most of the time in a professional capacity. Seriously influenced by people like Howard Rheingold, and curiously exploring the various possibilities for academic use of WWW, I’ve built quite a presence online over the years using every Social Media (or Web 2.0 as it was once called) tool as soon as it appeared. But as everyone that have been active users of Internet know, keeping track of multiple profiles, and keeping them alive and updated, is exhaustingly time consuming. At a certain moment, I reached a point where I felt nauseated and tired of everything connected with the Net and withdrew from almost all online tools.

But it is not easy to keep completely away from social media. As a conscripted officer in the Norwegian Civil Defence with staff duties, Facebook was the main source of information on what went on within my Civil Defence district. And truth be told; I also missed the online contact with my old team mates from the Home Guard School and Training Centre. So back I went, creating a new profile. As a dean, I had some lecturing so Twitter became, again, a useful tool. But that was it, I thought. No more profiles on the Net.

And then I went back to full time lecturing and everything changed. Because now, having papers publicised in international peer reviewed journals is no longer enough. Our university managers, as well as our lords and masters from the Ministry of Education, speaks of reaching out to a broader audience and that as much as possible of our work are to be open access. And suddenly one is urged to go back on the Net and immerse one selves in various online services.

The tools and all the work that follows

There are infinite possibilities of reaching far and wide using various social media services, and let’s face it; it is difficult to reach out to a large audience from a scientific journal. Not only are these journals mostly read only by our colleagues, but the possibility of having our journal entries cited by fellow researchers are slim. Not because we necessarily write badly or that our work is uninteresting, but because so many of us works within small niches. I have my selves spent most of my academic career pondering how to get computer science students enthusiastic about Social Informatics, or how to motivate students of asynchronously online courses to carry on. While this is important enough for me, and hopefully also for my students, it is neither rocket science nor is it the most popular scientific field in the world. But will enrolling in various Social Media services help you to reach out to a larger audience? Not necessarily.

Let’s have a look at some of the things you might do to be visible as an academic online. Many university managers will point you in the direction of ResearchGate.net and Google Scholar. The last one in order to create an overview of where and how often your papers are cited by others, and the first one because… well, I guess because “everyone else” is there and this is the only academic profiling tool they know of (a part from Google Scholar). So, by creating profiles on these two services, all your troubles are over right? Wrong! To utilise both Google Scholar and ResearchGate demands quite an effort. Like most social media profiles, they need constant updating to stay interesting and/or correct as for your list of publications, and preferably they should be paired with other tools like Twitter, ORCID, Impactstory, Mendeley, Web of Science and Quora. This will increase your online presence and could work favourably as for your so called “impact score”.

ResearchGate have developed into a well-known social networking site for researchers, where they may share papers, ask and answer questions, and find collaborators. In order to use the site, you need to have an email address at a recognized institution or to be manually confirmed as a published researcher in order to get an account. After signing up you create your user profile and might start uploading research papers, data, chapters, presentations, etc. You may also follow the activities of other users and engage in discussions with them, and this way start building a network and perhaps even enter into research cooperation with one or more of your contacts.

Impactstory is an open source, non-profit and web-based tool that provides altmetrics to help researchers measure the impacts of all their research outputs—from traditional ones such as journal articles, to alternative research outputs such as blog posts, datasets, and software. You may use your Twitter account to sign up, but how much this site uses your Twitter activity to measure your impact score is unclear to me. Signing up to Impactstory quicly pushes you to ORCID, as this is the key tool Impactstory uses to gain an overview of your publications. According to ORCID its aim is to aid «the transition from science to e-Science, wherein scholarly publications can be mined to spot links and ideas hidden in the ever-growing volume of scholarly literature». They also give the researcher a possibility to have «a constantly updated ‘digital curriculum vitae’ providing a picture of his or her contributions to science going far beyond the simple publication list».

Mendeley is a desktop and web program produced by Elsevier for managing and sharing research papers, discovering research data and collaborating online, and Twitter I guess does not need much of an introduction. To use Twitter as a dissemination tool you must have followers, preferably many. Your follower count is considered a measure of your influence. The more followers you have, the more you’ll attract, and – in theory – the more you can use your influence to reach your peers, students and other interested parties. But to get followers you have to put in a lot of time of strategic actions, and at the end of the day you might not really know if any of this had any effect or mattered at all. There are no free lunches in the world of Social Media, and just creating some profiles and then sit back and relax is not really an option.

Since all this is mainly about creating and measuring “impact”, utilising digital tools, the more activity you have online, the better. But most of these tools give poor results if you do not already have international papers. So, if you are an academic who so far have been content with focusing on excellent lecturing and close contacts with students, you will have to make quite an effort in order to have any significant use of these tools. And as soon as you have created all these profiles you are trapped in a never ending story of continuously updating them.

The not so open access, legal problems and some unsettling thoughts

ResearchGate have a strong focus on getting their members to upload scientific papers, and many comply with this, thus creating a notion that this service is an open access provider. There are two challenges with this; one – uploading your journal papers will in most instances constitute a copyright infringement, and two, in order for others to read the papers they have to sign in to ReserachGate. So, this is in fact a closed access service, with a potential high number of violations of copyright law. These same issues are shared by another similar Social Media site; Academia.edu.

A third problem with ResearchGate is its use of scores. They are giving you scores that supposedly show your impact. But this score is not transparent and therefore highly difficult to figure out on what data it is based on. With statements like “Your score is higher than 30% of ResearchGate members” it provides, in my humble opinion, an unhealthy focus on dubious numbers and could even encourage a “gaming of metrics”.

But what is «impact»? Normally we are concerned with how highly ranked the various journals are or how often our work is cited by others. But sites like RG and Impactstory are trying to create a new and wider impact factor, but without giving any meaningful definition of the word “impact”. Will you have a higher score if you start following researchers with large networks and high RG score? What if someone is visiting your RG profile while using a proxy that changes his or her country identification (IP-number) randomly? Does mentioning of one’s work in a Wikipedia article with an anonymous author and likewise anonymous editors, really show any real impact? Will placing a link to your RG profile in your Twitter profile increase visitors to your RG profile, and if so will this impact your RG score? In fact, Twitter, might be a good way to lead curious followers and “passers-by” to your Reserachgate profile. But does this mean that we are disseminating our work to a larger audience? I do not think so. Curious clicks on a profile link does not necessarily constitute real interest, and then of course you have the question of who your followers on Twitter are. Are they representatives of the public, or fellow professionals and your own students? If it is the last, then we are back to the old problem of journal papers being read only by a small sample of our peers.

In 2017 some of my metrics looked like this:

Twitter

2. Impactstory:

3. ResearchGate

The statistics for my tweet are rather straight forward, at least to a certain extent. It seems that 180 persons interacted with it in various ways. But of course, on the Net the systems can only count IP-addresses, and therefore what may seem like individual interactions might not necessarily be so. How the number of 9, 357 is figured out is not clear, neither what «impressions» really entail or why it should matter in the «real world». Impactstory uses the gamification element of badges. Since this tool also focuses on open access, you might get an Open Access badge. I did not get it as I have my papers in ordinary journals, but by uploading a large number of drafts, or even just resumes of papers in for instance ORCID I would not be surprised if Impactstory considers this an adherence to the principles of open access, and award you a badge. And in ReserachGate I achieved the score of 6.49, but have absolutely no clue as to how RG calculated this.

Wanting to understand how ResearchGate counts impact points I repeated the experiment done by professor Kjetil Haugen in 2015. Cloaking my identity using various proxies I viewed my own profile, read and downloaded selected works, and additional shared selected works using one of the Social Media tools RG have made available for this purpose. This was made easy since my selected tool let me share links by simply creating an account with no checking for authenticity. When I started the experiment 1th of March 2017 my RG score was 4, but by the end of the experiment on 10th of March the same year it had increased to 6.49. My conclusion therefore is that nothing has changed since Haugen did his experiment in 2015. In my opinion this renders RG useless as a valid system for measuring individual researchers academic impact. The same goes for Impactstory, and I suspect it will also be true for most of the sites that claims to measure your impact.

My main problem with these Academic Social Media tools is why should these scores matter? They are easy to manipulate, and does not give any real evidence of scientific impact or the individual researchers willingness to be part of the open access movement. Neither do they necessarily give a clear picture of a researcher’s true network. Twitter, who as such is not an Academic Social Media, but might be used as a tool for dissemination, is a great tool to use with students in specific settings, but so far I have found little to prove that my use of it had any impact outside my lectures. But this might be my fault entirely.

Despite (or perhaps because of) having participated in various Social Media for years I again deleted most of my social media profiles in 2017 and 2021. The amount of work you must put into these tools far outweigh any gains they might have and only provides an unnecessary distraction. So far, my most successful international contacts and cooperation’s have been the result of personal acquaintance, not any presence on Academic Social Media.

I re-entered Twitter in 2020 and this time I decided to focus on Preparedness and Cyber Security. My motivation for getting back to Twitter was primarily to keep me informed on various Cyber Security and Preparedness matters. Most of my tweets are done automatically via my Paper.li newspaper. Looking at my Twitter Analytics now in 2022, I am still left with the same questions as before; Of what use is this? Twitter has its merits as a tool for discussing topics of interests with other professionals , but not as a tool for dissemination to a broader general public.

Nice that my tweet above got 11 retweets and 17 likes and earned "impressions" but I doubt that it had any impact on parliamentary politicians will to invest in Civil Defence.

Another example of how a Twitter account tries to create attention to an article is this from Alltinget.no:

According to Alltinget.no my article created a lot of engagement. There is no data on the web page of Alltinget that gives any information verifying the statement. But as we see from the engagement details of this tweet, it did not stir much interest on Twitter.

In May 2024 I again deleted my account on Twitter (now rebranded as X), on the grounds that it had become a «dark» area for constant disinformation and fake news. I enrolled myself in the work of NAFO, but in the end the whole platform seemed irrelevant as a serious arena for communication and with few or little possibilities for actual combating Russian propaganda.

My profile background picture on Twitter (Now X)

What remains of my social media presence outside blogging is a private account on Instagram, an account on Pinterest (both no longer in use, but not deleted), and a Flickr account linked to the Getting Involved project. And I have kept my main YouTube account, but only as documentation of my use of trigger videos in teaching.

Some last ponderings

It all comes down to trust, but even so if we absolutely must be counted and measured, I think the most sensible is to forget about metrics offered by so called Academic Social Media tools and rather focus on papers in scientific journals (though, we have to deal with dubious impact factors also here), newspaper articles (that might reach the general public), and student assessments (that will tell us if we reached our students or not). Also, I think it would be worthwhile to establish a system for peer reviewing of online lecture resources, like the former Intute project. This might encourage researchers to utilise blogs, wikis, etc. as parts of their lecturing, as well as potentially reaching a larger audience than just via journals. Though, again, we do not really know if the public actually search for such blogs, or that our particular field will generate any public interest. In fact, a small study done in 2013 concludes that most academic blogs are made for our professional peers, rather than for the general public. So perhaps we should be more than happy if we just manage to reach our students hearts and minds through our blogs and other social media tools?

While I am sure that the majority of academics are using the various Academic Social Media tools in a proper way, online services like ReserachGate and Impactstory might encourage “Facebook behaviour”, i.e. presenting a glorified picture of healthy research activities and pure happiness, and thereby be a nice set of tools to secure one’s academic operations and the daily activities of being noticed; a complexity of measures, directed to mislead the management regarding the presence and impact of one’s work – in short; Maskirovka the Academic Way.

Some interesting links for further reading

Første gang publisert på LiveJournal.com 03.10.2017. Redigert og lagt ut her 23.06.2021, oppdatert 02.11.2022 og 08.05.2024.