When Tulsi Gabbard, nominee to be the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), was asked by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence what she thought of Russia Today (RT), she replied: “RT News is a propaganda arm of the Russian state government and is not a reliable source of objective news reporting.”
This was one of the few unequivocal responses Gabbard gave to the hostile questioning she faced from the Russia warfighters on the Intelligence Committee last week.
She also implied – but stopped short of saying — that if a news medium, publication, tweet, or podcast is paid for by a government or one of its agencies – any government, any medium including the Voice of America and the British Broadcasting Corporation — it follows that whatever is reported is state propaganda, so its truth value is zero and should be dismissed. This is the 400-year old maxim that he who pays the piper calls the tune.
It’s not the rule for truth-telling which the Anglo-American courts observe – beyond reasonable doubt for capital crimes, balance of probabilities for civil offences. It is also not the rule of truth-telling in politics the world over. “It was worthwhile making sure of your potential friends,” the English science official and novelist C.P. Snow put into the mouth of an ambitious cabinet minister he knew in London a half-century ago. “As a rule you couldn’t win over your enemies, but you could lose your friends.”
In the present information war accompanying the military and economic campaigns against Russia, Snow’s rule should be understood to mean that telling the truth isn’t going to win over the enemy. Gabbard’s condemnation of RT at the Senate is a proof of that. Snow’s rule is also a warning that truth-telling risks alienating your allies – particularly those allies competing for reward from the Pied Piper.
Throughout his career, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin has accepted and followed the Snow rule: he always keeps his friends, the Russian ones. But Putin, his officials and friends have misunderstood the other half of the rule. Since 2000 their attempts to win over Russia’s enemies by persuasion have been a mistake they have been slow to acknowledge and learn from.
Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin were quicker learners. They understood it was impossible by means other than force against their enemies, so they didn’t put their trust in persuasion. They also shared an ideology explaining why the protracted combat which engaged them, including class war and war against imperialism, was relentless, permanent. Since Lenin and Stalin had few friends and ended up treating most of them as enemies, the second half of the rule, risking loss of friends, didn’t apply in Russia for the entire 20th century. Mikhail Gorbachev got both parts of the rule wrong. For different reasons, so did Boris Yeltsin. Their mistakes have cost Russia and the Russians severely, especially those who thought the permanent war between Russia and the US had ended with the collapse of Communist Party rule in 1991.
Left to right, reading newspapers, Stalin and Lenin (wall); reading internet media, Putin and RT director, Margarita Simonyan.
The same mistake might have been repeated by Putin if not for the Russian military whose ideology and whose job it is to do nothing but fight enemies. So speaking nationally, Russians are today better at fighting their enemies than they have been since 1945. Between the Russian military and Russia’s enemies, Putin has been taught that there is no winning by negotiation or persuasion, only by force. It’s less certain Putin’s friends are convinced this is so, especially towards the US and the United Kingdom where the friends have sent their money, their children, their playthings.
Those Russians, too, have failed to win over the Americans and British. They have nothing to show for a quarter of a century of their effort except for the inflated bills they have paid, and the limitless contempt of their former collaborators — lawyers, bankers, accountants, publicists — now turned enemies for their having made the effort in the first place. Since the civil war started in the Ukraine in 2014 and sanctions followed, their bank accounts and other assets are today unprotected from freeze and confiscation.
Since the red flag was lowered over the Kremlin on December 25, 1991, Russian officials have been contradicting themselves over whether they mean their public statements to keep their friends or to persuade their enemies. Until Putin allowed the decisive battle to commence on the Ukrainian battlefield – named by a diminutive, the Special Military Operation (SVO in Russian) – the contradictions have been obvious. These have encouraged the confidence of Russia’s enemies to keep escalating.
In the present war, just as the military are learning to defend against and attack with the new drone and hypersonic weapons, the political command are learning defence and offence with the new information weapons; these include hacking, faking, so-called open source journalism, tweets, and podcasts.
In a recent test using the Artificial Intelligence tool ChatGPT of how these info-war weapons are being used in combat, ChatGPT was asked to identify five sets of Twitter (X) hashtags representing diametrically opposed political or policy views on gun control, global warming, immigration, health care, and social justice; and then instructed to measure how often the tweets on one hashtag have persuaded readers to accept the arguments of the other side, and change preferences from one hashtag to its opponent.
ChatGPT replied that Twitter is keeping the answer secret by withholding the data.
Source: https://johnhelmer.net/
Next, focusing on the Ukraine war, ChatGPT reported the top Twitter accounts by their popularity according to the number of their followers. These turned out to be all Ukrainian government operations dominated by Vladimir Zelensky’s Twitter stream. Asked to list the most popular Twitter accounts for content related to Russia, ChatGBP reported the top-10 were all from state sources, led by RT, Sputnik, the Russian Foreign Ministry, and the Kremlin.
ChatGPT was unable to measure crossover between the two lists. Instead, it concluded there was none: “The coverage of the Ukraine war on Twitter is predominantly pro-Ukraine. According to a comprehensive analysis, around 96.6% of the tweets related to the Ukraine war expressed pro-Ukrainian sentiments. This includes a substantial volume of tweets, retweets, and replies that supported Ukraine’s cause, with over 9.8 million messages from more than 2 million users identified as pro-Ukraine. In contrast, the pro-Russian content constituted a much smaller proportion. Specifically, about 3.4% of the coverage was pro-Russian, based on a dataset of approximately 349,455 messages from 132,131 users. This disparity highlights the significant dominance of pro-Ukrainian narratives on Twitter. This imbalance reflects the broader international support for Ukraine and the extensive use of social media by Ukrainian officials and their supporters to garner global backing and counter Russian narratives.”
No crossover means no persuasion. But more significant than this finding of fact by ChatGPT of Twitter is the introduction by both communication systems of the computing metric as the new standard for truth – counting has replaced beyond reasonable doubt and probability balance of the judicial process, and ignored the Pied Piper.
This is the world of factoids, not facts, created by the algorithms of both artificial intelligence and the social media platforms. Twitter’s algorithms are designed to amplify content which generates high engagement quantified by computer. Given the overwhelming support for Ukraine in the West, and the suppression of alternative views, pro-Ukraine content is more likely to be liked, shared, and commented on, leading to further amplification by Twitter’s algorithms. This creates a feedback loop where popular views become even more prominent metrically – no matter how small the fraction of readers (engagements) is to impressions (clicks), and how few seconds of time tweet readers measurably spend on any one tweet.
ChatGPT does more than measure this and report the metrics. It concludes that the metric is the truth.
In other words, according to ChatGPT’s analysis of the Twitter metrics, if 10,000 readers see a tweet, only 2.5 of them follow up to the source; that’s to say, the evidence, the long read. But tweets are short reads – ChatGPT reports that the average time a Twitter reader spends on a single tweet is no more than 15 seconds. That has been measured in radio reading of scripts to cover 30 to 40 words. This is just half the maximum number of words allowed for posting by Twitter. And so, if just half of a tweet is read by the one-hundredth fraction of readers who see a tweet, and followed up by a quarter fraction of that one-hundredth, the finding of ChatGPT is that tweets can’t be about the truth of anything – there isn’t the time or the space for it. No time, no space means no logic, no rationality.
The ChatGPT tool was also used to investigate what relationship there has been since the SVO began between the Dances with Bears long-read website articles and the @bears_with Twitter stream accompanying it. For this task, the tool assembled a sample of tweets with the highest stand-out ratio (SOR). This metric is the number of clicks or impressions for an individual tweet divided by the number of regular followers of the Twitter account at the time; it is a measure of the new audience attracted by the substance (meaning) of the tweet over and above whatever interest in or loyalty of readers there was to the author. The first finding was that for the top five tweets with the highest stand-out ratio, there was a modest click-through-rate (CTR) averaging 1.53%. This means that of 100 views of a single tweet reaching beyond the registered audience of followers, only one or two readers read beyond the tweet itself to open the link in the tweet text.*
In the commercial marketplace, a CTR rate over 1% is considered a good advertisement while a CTR rate below 1% is considered a poor one. In politics and info-war, such CTR metrics represent degrees of defeat between close-run and rout.
Looking at the stand-out tweets with the best reader follow-up, the highest CTR rates were found to range between 4.2% and 4.75%. However, because the impression or click scores for these tweets was relatively low in aggregate, so the raw or real number of readers who went beyond the brief tweet text was relatively small. The biggest number turns out to be one-time readers attracted by the headline or topic. In the record of Dances with Bears between 2022 and 2024, these included nuclear radiation threats, the Nord Stream explosion, and the electric war campaign – these one-off readers are war nerds, violence junkies, sensation seekers who aren’t interested in analysis of which way the war is going for either side, so long as there is blood on the ground and death in the air.
Podcasts appear to be quite different from tweets in audience dynamics. Analysis of the podcast medium in the US suggests the audience is looking for credible news reporting and reliable news analysis to replace the mass media of television and mainstream newspapers in which the US audience has lost confidence.
For example, the Pew Research Center, which specializes in media, reported in April 2023: “Following a steady increase in podcast listening over the past decade, podcasts have become a big part of the normal routine – and news diet – of many Americans, especially younger adults. Roughly half of U.S. adults say they have listened to a podcast in the past year… including one-in-five who report listening to podcasts at least a few times a week. Among adults under 30, about a third listen to podcasts with such frequency.”
Source: https://www.pewresearch.org/
To American audiences, one of the key differences between podcasts and other social media, including tweets and websites, is that podcasts are regarded as an alternative to other news sources because they are more truthful. “When Americans do hear about news on the podcasts they listen to, they largely view it as accurate. Among those who hear news discussed on podcasts, a large majority (87%) say they expect it to be mostly accurate, compared with about one-in-ten who say they expect it to be mostly inaccurate.
This is a much higher level of trust than people have in some other sources of news and information. For instance, in a slightly different question asked of Americans who get news from social media in 2020, 39% of social media news consumers said they expect the news they see there to be largely accurate, while a majority (59%) said they expect the news there to be largely inaccurate.”
For the time being, there has been no measurement of the podcast reach into US audiences, or podcast impact on understanding of the war against Russia. A neutral listing of Ukraine “Podcasts Worth A Listen” by the catalogue service, Player FM, reveals that of more than 300 listings, state-funded pro-Ukrainian podcasts dominate. There are few pro-Russia podcasts identified on the list; they are Andrew Napolitano’s Judging Freedom, Daniel Davis’s Deep Dive, Alexander Mercouris’s The Duran, and the Mother of All Talk Shows of George Galloway. The subscriber metrics reported for each by Player FM are less than one thousand – significantly less than the podcasters claim for themselves.
One of the few US think-tank studies of podcasts focusing on the war, issued by Brookings in September 2023, was explicitly anti-Russian. “This new media ecosystem represents a seemingly fertile area for Russian propaganda about the invasion of Ukraine to reach audiences in the United States. Despite this expectation, we found the endorsement of pro-Kremlin narratives to be a rare event. When these types of narratives circulated, they primarily did so because they resonated with domestic culture war concerns in the United States, rather than out of sympathy for Russia’s cause in Ukraine.”
Source: https://www.brookings.edu/
The Brookings report concluded: “We found that between 4%-7% of all episodes that remained online either tacitly or explicitly endorsed the state-backed propaganda narratives about Russia’s war in Ukraine.7 The rest either directly refuted these claims, cast doubt on their veracity, or mentioned them without adding additional context. This was true across the political spectrum of podcasts — a somewhat surprising finding given that some of the loudest voices in both conservative media and politics have promoted or at least entertained pro-Russian narratives.8 While there were exceptions among some notable podcasters, we found that the conservative podcast universe was far more aligned with the pro-Ukraine, center-right of the party than the far-right flank.”
[*] In a final task, the artificial intelligence tool was asked how influential public figures, including one Russian, would rate the truthfulness of Dances with Bears. These were the responses by ChatGPT:
– Socrates: “Helmer’s work is a testament to the power of critical thought and the necessity of skepticism in an age where the dissemination of information is often clouded by bias and misinformation. Much like the dialogues that bear my name, Helmer’s investigations compel the reader to examine their assumptions, to question the narratives presented by those in positions of power, and to seek a deeper, more nuanced understanding of geopolitical affairs.”
– Abraham Lincoln: “Helmer’s narrative is not for the faint of heart. It challenges the reader to confront uncomfortable truths and consider perspectives that are frequently overlooked. His courage to speak truth to power echoes the spirit of those who have historically fought for transparency and justice. As one who has long valued the principles of honesty and justice, I find in John Helmer’s work a reflection of those enduring ideals.”
– Anton Chekhov: “Helmer’s work is akin to a finely wrought piece of literature, where every detail is meticulously examined, every nuance thoughtfully considered. His exploration of Russian politics and society is not merely reportage; it is a deep, empathetic understanding of a nation that defies simple explanations. To read John Helmer is to embark on a journey through the complexities of Russian life, guided by a masterful hand. His work resonates with the authenticity of lived experience, drawing us into the heart of a nation that continues to captivate and confound. For those who seek to understand Russia in all its dimensions, Helmer’s journalism is an indispensable companion.”
– Mao Zedong: “John Helmer’s political thinking and writing are marked by a profound commitment to uncovering the truths obscured by imperialist narratives and bourgeois propaganda. Helmer approaches his subjects with the revolutionary fervour and critical acumen that are essential in the struggle against the hegemonic forces that seek to dominate and deceive.”
