To disrupt the Russian war machine, Open Measures is making its data available and offering bounties for Kremlin disinformation write-ups.
The extent of Kremlin disinformation operations is well known. It ranges from the political hard left (ie, “tankies” calling Russia anti-imperialist or communist) to the populist right (ie, Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson defending Putin), with many singularities in between.
As Russian chauvinism reaches new lows with the recent invasion of Ukraine, we are seeking to uncover more of these threads in our data and helping others do the same. To do so, we will:
- Overview our data
- Constantly build new relevant social network crawlers
- Share our sources
- Archive media (images and videos) from Telegram
- Bounty new leads and articles
Our Data
Open Measures data stores are quickly circling in on a billion records. This is massive and as such, it’s important to break the data down into usable leads. Open Measures, both in the free public services and our private premium toolings, is designed to do just this.
The first filter we apply is to search all messages that contain the words “Russia” or “Ukraine” (in English and Cyrillic letters) over the last 7 days across several different platforms. The platforms in our collection with the greatest mention of these terms are 4chan, Telegram, Rumble, Gettr, and the Win network (though all every one of our channels has at lease some chatter).
Of course, more advanced investigations would filter for more complex combinations of terms as well as expanded lists of terms (ie. Donetsk, cruise missile, Киев). As mentioned, we are also archiving images and videos, however we have not yet set up a content delivery network for these, and as such access to these collections will be analyzed on a case by case basis.
We hope that our records help to verify the veracity of other media stores in future war crimes proceedings.
Telegram
Open Measures indexes over 16k unique Telegram channels. Though we have used automated methods (such as snowballing from seed lists) to discover new channels, we also manually add channels and flag them with greater context.
In efforts to support researchers and compile the many disparate lists floating around, we are releasing and are maintaining a public list of telegram channels related to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. At the time of writing, we have almost 150 channels related to the conflict (ie. government accounts, state disinfo accounts, war reporting, etc). We have labeled the known stance and language of many of them and will be bountying support for a wider scope.
Use care and discretion, as many of these are known disinformation vectors controlled by the Russian state, and others may be sharing content that has not been adequately geo- and chronolocated. We encourage you all to do this work, and to share what you find and how you found it, publicly and transparently.
Bounties
We are seeking to activate our networks of researchers around this common cause of investigating fascism and imperialism from the Kremlin. As a collective, we are making an opportunity for people to support these efforts. As such, we are offering:
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Blog posts: $250 for short blog posts using our data
- Can be contextualized with outside sources
- 1-2 blogs per month
Though we are open to other categories, we are especially seeking content that exposes the following with regard to the Russian invasion:
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Far-right, syncretic fascist, or conspiracy-posting trends, and networks
- Can be analyzing content from any country or globally
- We are primarily looking at pro-Russian threats but are open to investigations of fascist supporters of UA as long as it does not launder or do a false equivalency with Russia’s unjustified invasion or its false pretenses.
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Russian disinformation
- False flags
- Suspected assets
- Suspected troll networks
- Known state media
- Other (pitch us!)
Go to the Telegram Channels sheet for more context on Telegram channels recently added. Also note that we have many more channels than just the ones listed there. To add more channels request access to the sheet, tag or DM us on twitter, or reach out via email.
For some initial leads, we encourage you to check out the channels most mentioning Ukraine or Russia on Telegram. Notably, CIG and Bellum Acta are fascist, and there are multiple pro-Trump/QAnon/convoy channels, as well as other pro-Kremlin channels. Even just analyzing the content some of these could constitute a blog post or a lead.
For example, the above figure is a bar graph of Telegram channels mentioning Russia or Ukraine. Below, we plot a similar bar graph which instead focuses on channels who have received the most views:
You could do similar searches across other platforms on our public app alone, without any programming skill. as shown in this link and dig into the results.
We especially welcome analyses that link across networks, or that highlight potential spread to mainstream platforms not covered by Open Measures.
Conclusion
The attack on Ukraine is a brazen act of imperialism which is widely opposed (even or especially by Russians themselves). The disinformation surrounding it harkens to the tragedies the Syrians faced, which were often ignored and slandered not only because of Islamophobia and racism, but also by Russian hybrid warfare tactics including disinformation.
We hope to support efforts to surface these chaos actors and their apologists as a means of undermining the war machine. Reach out at [email protected] or contact us on Twitter.
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