REGISTRATION: Bette’s Speakeasy with Disinfolklore's Stephen Douglas on the EU's New FIMI Report
Bette members: please register for our Sunday Speakeasy with cultural archeologist Stephen Douglas of Decoding Trolls/Disinfolklore as he walks us through a new EU report on information threats
***Bette members will find the registration link below the paywall. To join us, please upgrade to a paid membership here.***
As I am making my way through the new EU report on Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference Threats, put out annually by the European External Action Service, the EU’s Diplomatic Service, I am asking myself: why doesn’t the EU indict Vladimir Putin and his regime for war crimes against the European Union? For what is cyber war but a way to take down democratic nations through camouflage…
The 4th Annual EEAS FIMI report documents how Russia is at the center of the attacks, and as I wrote in my recent Camouflage report:
No one questions the use of camouflage in a declared war, which can potentially save lives, but here, the moral violation is Russia is using this military-grade deception without a declaration of war.
So with no declaration of war, democratic nations are being dismantled one by one, except of course, those that resist.
I have asked our resident excerpt on disinfolklore and global troll decoder, Stephen Douglas, who did a deep dive on the report, to walk us through his findings at Bette’s Speakeasy this Sunday, 11 am, March 22.
You can read the full report here:
A heartfelt welcome to all new, returning, and Founding members. Your renewals of Bette Dangerous are very meaningful to me. I also hope many new members begin attending our wonderful community events.
Cultural archeologist Stephen Douglas of Disinfolklore, Decoding Trolls, and Power of Mana is a wealth of knowledge on how to fight back against incoming trolling.
More about our guest here:
As an international lawyer and diplomat, Stephen found himself on a bridge in Ukraine, ensuring safe passage of civilians from 2015 through 2018, while listening to narratives coming from the Russian side that sounded folkloric to him.
He would then find the same narratives planted in Facebook and the media, and he began to dive into the origins of what he calls disinfolklore. He discovered that what we are experiencing is a power grab by oligarchs trying to destroy the post-World War II human rights gains through narrative warfare — they’re trying to get rid of constraints on their power. That it led him to a Pat Buchanan column from a decade ago on Putin’s Paleoconservative moment is nothing more than jaw-dropping. He manages to connect the dots in his work to show how it’s all about coercive control through story-telling, where the trolls like Putin and Trump — in their telling — never lose. As he described in my Byline Supplement Witch Switch article, they smuggle their bad policies in through made-up culture wars, which is cover for their incompetence.
Of his time in Ukraine, Stephen said he was a witness to a stealth genocide and didn’t know it because of disinfolklore — he now is dedicating his time to exposing the techniques so we can protect ourselves and and our world. I first learned of his work through the brilliant team at Byline Supplement:
You can learn more about Stephen’s work here:
He’s at “DecodingTrolls” on Twitter, Bluesky, Mastodon
And you can follow his substacks at Disinfolklore, Decoding Trolls, and Power of Mana.
Our Speakeasys are open to all levels of membership, and I look forward to seeing many of you in the squares. And don’t forget: on Tuesday. 11 am Pacific, we’ll be meeting with Jim Stewartson and Josef Holy for our Happy Hour AI Series. Look for registration coming over the weekend.
Keep scrolling to register for this Sunday’s event.
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More info about Bette Dangerous - This magazine is written by Heidi Siegmund Cuda, an Emmy-award winning investigative reporter/producer, author, and veteran music and nightlife columnist. She is the cohost of RADICALIZED Truth Survives, an investigative show about disinformation and is part of the Byline Media team. Thank you for your support of independent investigative journalism.
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Begin each day with a grateful heart.
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