Apparently, the U.S. military has been concerned about fake Russian Twitter accounts. Also, fake YouTube accounts. And fake TikTok accounts.
Those Russians. They seem to be social media friends with pretty much everyone. But not really ‘friends’. More like, ‘fake friends’. The worst kind of friends.
The Washington Post got a hold of some leaked classified documents through a social media site called ‘Discord’ which is a social media platform popular with Gen Z gamers, and where we might assume games are being played with people’s heads. Including our heads.
The Russians probably have fake Discord accounts. Just guessing, since they have them everywhere else.
So the classified documents leaked on Discord might be fake leaked classified documents.
You would think the U.S. government would do something about the situation, but they probably don’t know, any more than we do, what’s fake and what’s not. Plus, the U.S. government has a history of screwing up everything they touch.
They did manage to arrest a Massachusetts Air National Guard member named Jack Teixeira, and charged him with “retention and transmission of national defense information” and “willful retention of classified documents”. So somebody thinks the documents were real. The story, as told by the mainstream media, is that the Russians are claiming, among other things, that only 1% of their fake social media accounts have been discovered and deleted. These fake accounts are reportedly the work of the Russian agency ‘GlavNIVT’.
Here’s one of the images posted by the Washington Post, which they claim were obtained from a “Discord chatroom”.
I got pretty fired up about this, last week.
I normally don’t get involved in politics. Whenever I visit YouTube, for example, I am usually looking for a casserole recipe, or maybe a way to stop my toilet from running constantly.
But when I learned that the Russians were creating fake accounts, I found myself wondering if those casserole recipes were authentic?
So, knowing that the U.S. government was going to fall down on the job, I decided to take matters into my own hands, as a red-blooded American citizen. Turns out it’s fairly easy to create a fake Twitter account and pretend you live in Russia. I set right to work posting Twitter messages like this:
Владимир Путин носит шелковое белье
Which, translated, says “Vladimir Putin wears silk underwear.” (According to Google Translate.) The idea here was to start rumors. Get people in Russia questioning their government.
But while I was getting started on this project — undermining the Russian government — I started thinking.
Could the Discord documents have been leaked by fake Russians? Heck, the documents could just as easily been “leaked” by the U.S. military. Who knows? Everything seems to be fake nowadays. It could be, the U.S. military would like to stir up a war, just so they have something to do.
And now that I know how easy it is to become a ‘fake’ person, I don’t know who to trust.
Most definitely, I can’t trust myself. That’s pretty clear.
But I’ve known that for a long time.
Underrated writer Louis Cannon grew up in the vast American West, although his ex-wife, given the slightest opportunity, will deny that he ever grew up at all.