Mediaboss Marketing

Hours after Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, the Chinese Communist Party tabloid, Global Times, posted a video saying that a large number of Ukrainian soldiers had laid down their arms. Its source: the Russian state-controlled television network, RT.

Two days later, Chinas state broadcaster Central Television Station (CCTV) flashed a breaking news alert, quoting Russias parliamentary speaker, that President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine had fled Kyiv. CCTV then created a related hashtag on the Twitter-like platform Weibo that was viewed 510 million times and used by 163 media outlets in the country.

On Feb. 28, as Russia became an international pariah, the Russian state-owned news agency Sputnik shared a message of strength with its 11 million Weibo followers. The Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman, Sputnik said, said Russia still had friends in the world, especially a real giant like China.

Add oil, Russia, Sputniks Weibo follower @fengyiqing cheered on, using a Chinese expression of support. All the people in the world who love justice are friends of Russia.

As European and American officials press Facebook, Twitter, TikTok and other online platforms to clamp down on Russian disinformation, China has embraced Russias propaganda and lies about the war. Chinas state-owned media outlets quoted their Russian counterpartss coverage without verification, helping to magnify their disinformation on the Chinese internet. They put Russian officials on state television networks with little pushback on their claims.

When it comes to information, the Chinese government is a control freak, dictating and censoring what its 1.4 billion people consume. Beijing has silenced and jailed its critics and journalists. It has coerced and co-opted the biggest Chinese online platforms to enforce its censorship guidelines. It blocks nearly all major western news and information websites, including Google, Twitter, YouTube, Wikipedia, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and the BBC.

Yet as the world faces one of its most serious geopolitical crises since the end of the Cold War, China let down its digital defenses and allowed Kremlins propaganda machine to help shape public perception of the war. No wonder the Chinese internet is overwhelmingly pro-Russia, pro-war and pro-Putin.

If China wants to remain officially ambiguous about whether it supports Vladimir V. Putins war refusing to call it an invasion and abstaining from a U.N. vote to condemn the invasion its state-controlled media nonetheless makes very clear where China stands.

The China-Russia information alliance is forged over a shared worldview of two leaders, Xi Jinping and Vladimir V. Putin, who, out of deep distrust of the United States, are determined to challenge the Wests dominance in the competition for public opinion.

In a 2013 speech, Mr. Xi urged the countrys propaganda workers to enhance the countrys international discourse power under the notion of telling Chinas story well. During a visit to RTs headquarters in the same year, Mr. Putin said the network was created to break the Anglo-Saxon monopoly on the global information streams.

In 2015, Mr. Xi and Mr. Putin decided the two countries should strengthen their cooperation in media. Since then, theyve held a Sino-Russian media forum each year, aiming to redefine the map of the international discourse.

Last November, a RT executive said at the forum that major Chinese media outlets quoted RT.com on average 2,500 times a week in 2021.

Many Chinese media organizations admire RT and Sputnik, which they believe have broken the Wests information monopoly, or at least muddied the water. Many media experts have analyzed what Chinas state-owned media could learn from their successes. One academic paper detailed RTs coverage of Russias annexation of Crimea in 2014 to illustrate how the Russian network carefully planned its reporting strategy to increase its seeming credibility and accessibility so it could set its own agenda.

When Russia invaded Ukraine, Kremlins media machines worked well in China. Combined with Beijings censorship of pro-Ukraine content, they wove a web of disinformation that proved difficult for most Chinese online users to escape.

The message they are trying to drive home: Russias military actions are anti-West, anti-NATO expansion and anti-Nazi thus justified and popular.

In Chinas state media, theres very little about the international condemnation of Russia; Ukraines success in the battle for public opinion, led by President Zelensky; or antiwar protests in Russia.

The one-two punch is working, keeping the Chinese public from facts while sowing confusion.

On the Chinese social media platforms, many people adopted Mr. Putins and Russian medias language, calling the Ukrainian side extremists and neo-Nazis.

They kept bringing up the Azov Battalion as if it represented all of Ukraine. The battalion, a unit of the Ukrainian National Guard, is known for having neo-Nazi sympathizers but remains a fringe presence in the country and its military.

President Zelensky himself is Jewish and won the presidential election in 2019 with 73 percent of the votes. His approval rate soared to over 90 percent recently for his wartime leadership.

Gas supplies. Europe gets nearly 40 percent of its natural gas from Russia, and it is likely to be walloped with higher heating bills. Natural gas reserves are running low, and European leaders have accused Russias president, Vladimir V. Putin, of reducing supplies to gain a political edge.

Shortages of essential metals. The price of palladium, used in automotive exhaust systems and mobile phones, has been soaring amid fears that Russia, the worlds largest exporter of the metal, could be cut off from global markets. The price of nickel, another key Russian export, has also been rising.

Financial turmoil. Global banks are bracing for the effects of sanctionsintended to restrict Russias access to foreign capital and limit its ability to process payments in dollars, euros and other currencies crucial for trade. Banks are also on alert for retaliatory cyberattacks by Russia.

The fog of disinformation thickens when Chinese state media portrays Russias war as an anti-fascism effort. After Russias defense minister announced this week that his country would host the first international anti-fascism conference in August, the CCTV posted a one-paragraph story, then created a Weibo hashtag. Within 24 hours, it had 650 million views and was used by 90 media outlets. Many commenters called Ukraine and the United States fascist countries.

Chinese media is also propagating Russian disinformation that Ukraine has been using civilians as human shields. In its prime-time news program on Feb. 26, CCTV quoted President Putin as making that allegation. A few days later the nationalistic news site, guancha.com, ran a banner headline that said the Russian military was going only after military targets, while the Ukrainian military was using civilians as human shields.

Taken collectively, Chinese online users are seeing a quite different war from much of the world.

While videos circulated outside China purportedly showing Ukrainians kind treatment of Russian prisoners of war, the trending social media topic in China was that captured Russians had endured Nazi-like torture. Both CCTV and the Peoples Daily, the official newspaper of the Communist Party, created hashtags echoing the same, based on a briefing by the Russian defense ministry. They had combined views of more than 200 million.

Sputnik, with 11.6 million followers on Weibo, has been posting more than 100 items a day lately, populating its timeline with words like criminal Zelensky, empire of lies, fake news and Nazi.

We must stand with Russia! Weibo user @qingdaoxiaowangzi commented on one of Sputniks posts, using a popular line on the Chinese internet. If Russia falls, NATO and the neo-Nazi United States will bully China!

At the same time, Weibo and other platforms are censoring pro-Ukraine content. The Weibo account of the actor Ke Lan, which has 2.9 million followers, was suspended after she retweeted a video and a photo about an antiwar protest in Russia with the emoticon . So was the account of a transgender celebrity, Jin Xing, with 13.6 million followers. Respect all lives and resolutely oppose the war!!! her last post said.

But as the war continues and China recalibrates its position, some Chinese online users have begun to scrutinize the Russian news media reports. Under a Sputnik Weibo post contending that the Ukrainian military murdered civilians, a user with the handle @jialalabadededashen wrote, Is this another news item that was tailor made by the Russian news agency for China?

In a social media discussion, some people called out Russia for waging an information war in China. Russias external propaganda has infiltrated China out-and-out, wrote a Weibo user called @juediqiangshou. Thats why all the excuses to justify the invasion are popular here.

Some people are also raising questions about whether the flood of pro-Russia information would be detrimental to the interests of China and its people.

Even Wang Xiaodong, a famous nationalist writer, suggested on Weibo that the Russia-Ukraine war was more complicated than it seemed. The Chinese people should have access to comprehensive and diversified information, he wrote on Wednesday.

Continue reading here:
China Embraces Russia's Propaganda on the War - The New York Times

If the idea of truth, in the United States as elsewhere, appeared to have been lost in the disorienting bombardment of social media, with the line between fact and falsehood ever fainter, the sheer enormity of Russian lies the denial of the existence of a war, for example appears to have done something to restore its value and importance.

Who else but us? said Zakhar Nechypor, a Ukrainian actor, as he armed himself with a rifle. Who else indeed and what truth more raw?

A Ukrainian city falls. Russian troops gained control of Kherson,the first city to be overcome during the war. The overtaking of Kherson is significant as it allows the Russians to control more of Ukraines southern coastline and to push west toward the city of Odessa.

Ivan Andronic, a plumber who moved from his native Moldova to France 18 years ago, said in an interview that he felt his mother and mother-in-law back in Moldova were now at risk. Mr. Putin could do anything, even embark on nuclear war. He is very dangerous, Mr. Andronic said. We must fight him together, and his own population must turn on him.

Togetherness is a word enjoying a revival. The Ukraine war appears to have dented a cycle of growing loneliness in which Covid-19 played a significant part. The unbearable lightness of online being has given way to the unbearable gravity of a European war.

A break has occurred in the world where people are corralled into herds by social media algorithms, trolls and bots. Where they forsake community to become tribes with megaphones. Where they turn in circles, succumbing to technological neuroticism. Above all, where they grow lonelier, caught in a vortex, starved of connective tissue, hungry for status, often bereft of moral conviction.

In their place, quite suddenly, a life-and-death struggle presents itself with its moral imperatives. As Europe initially hesitated, Donald Tusk, a former Polish prime minister and the president of the European Peoples Party, tweeted:

In this war everything is real: Putins madness and cruelty, Ukrainian victims, bombs falling on Kyiv. Only your sanctions are pretended. Those EU governments, which blocked tough decisions (i.a. Germany, Hungary, Italy) have disgraced themselves.

Very soon, almost overnight, Europe did what it is rarely capable of doing. It united to end that disgrace and face down Mr. Putin.

Read more:
How Ukrainians Are Using Social Media to Speak Out About the War - The New York Times

But while Twitter has given developers like Ms. Chou the data they need to build custom experiences, the company has also yanked it away. It has locked down the kinds of data that developers use several times, most recently in 2018, when it limited access to its application programming interface, or A.P.I., effectively breaking a number of smaller companies apps.

Anil Dash, who helped found ThinkUp, a company that relied on data from Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, recalled telling Twitter executives that they had effectively killed his company by cutting off data access.

Developers do not trust them, Mr. Dash said. You are Lucy with the football and we are Charlie Brown, and you have pulled the football away 100 times.

Mr. Dash, who is now the chief executive of Glitch, said Twitters decentralization strategy hinged on its ability to woo developers back. Its not insurmountable, but its the fundamental condition of this entire strategy succeeding: Convince the most skeptical audience to trust them again.

Amir Shevat, Twitters head of product for developers, got the job by offering similar criticism to Mr. Dorsey and Mr. Agrawal. At the time, he was a top executive at Reshuffle, a developer platform. But after discussions about developer access, the Twitter executives agreed to acquire Reshuffle last March.

Talking to Jack and Parag, they recognized that Twitter before was a lot more open, Mr. Shevat said in an interview. He added, I think what youre seeing is a move back into that.

If you decentralize your platform and you give developers more powers to make richer experiences and better, safer timelines, then everybody benefits from this, he also said.

Read the original here:
Twitter Wants to Reinvent Itself, by Merging the Old With the New - The New York Times

WASHINGTON As the invasion of Ukraine continued on Friday morning, including near the capital city, Kyiv, one of Russias leading television stations aired a history lesson on an 18th century battle between German and Russian forces in Poland.

It was the kind of nationalistic propaganda typical of media coverage in a nation where the Kremlin exercises near-universal control. That control is evident in print, radio and television. However, it also appears to be slipping, which could present Russian President Vladimir Putin with a fresh challenge as he faces domestic and international opprobrium for his attack on Ukraine.

The Kremlin is clearly grappling with ways to keep the cracks in that dam from forming, said Gavin Wilde, an expert on Russia who formerly served on the National Security Council. Those cracks have come mostly in the form of internet outlets. "China was able to seal off its so-called sovereign information space in a way that Russia simply failed to do.

Russian President Vladimir Putin at a meeting with members of Russian business community in the Kremlin. (Alexei Nikolsky/Tass via Getty Images)

Lacking a firewall like the one erected by Beijing, Putin and his propagandists can do only so much to keep reality from smartphone and laptop screens which makes his control of traditional outlets all the more urgent.

Control of classic media is already pretty complete, Janis Kluge of the German Institute for International and Security Affairs told Yahoo News. It is hard to find truth about the war there.

On the radio station Komsomolskaya Pravda its very name an unabashed reminder of Soviet propaganda, since it means "Young Communist League Truth" a host on a Thursday evening program amplified anti-Ukrainian sentiments. He seemed to suggest that the sympathies of the Russian people lay entirely with Putin, who has claimed his invasion has been necessary to demilitarize and de-Nazify Ukraine.

We need to take Kyiv the sooner the better, one Komsomolskaya Pravda listener said in an email the host read on air with the somber tone of an endorsement. Meanwhile, the host on another Moscow-based radio talk show promised that once Russia occupied the country, right-wing Ukrainian nationalists whose influence Russia has vastly exaggerated in an effort to justify war would be sorted out.

Story continues

Rousing history lessons about World War II and vituperative attacks on Ukraine and its Western allies have filled Russian media in recent days, as the Kremlin resorted to tactics it uses whenever it needs to convince the Russian populace and quell any dissent. But the antiwar protests that have broken out in St. Petersburg and Moscow, as well as many smaller cities, are evidence that even media highly biased toward Putin cannot bend the narrative in his favor.

Demonstrators march with a banner that reads: "Ukraine peace, Russia freedom," in Moscow on Thursday, after Russia's attack on Ukraine. (Dmitry Serebryakov/AP Photo)

Dozens of leading Russian journalists have signed an open letter denouncing a war. War never was and never will be a means of resolving conflict, the letter says. In a country where 58 journalists have been assassinated since 1992, mostly for holding opposition views, putting ones name on such a condemnation amounts to an act of personal and professional courage.

The Russian people dont want a war, Ukrainian-American foreign policy expert Olga Lautman of the Center for European Policy Analysis told Yahoo News in an interview, as she watched the protests in Russia from New York. She described the Russian populace as weary with the coronavirus, suggesting that Putin simply does not have the popular support he enjoyed when he first invaded Ukraine eight years ago, seizing two eastern regions and the peninsula of Crimea.

"It's not that nationalistic feel from 2014," Lautman said, as Western TV outlets broadcast footage of young Russians crowding the streets of the nations two biggest cities, chanting antiwar slogans.

As during the Soviet era, Russian media is effectively a branch of the Kremlin tasked with carrying out its imperatives.

Theyre not independent, and arent there to hold government accountable, Peter Adams of the News Literacy Project told Yahoo News in an interview. Adams, who has tracked Russian media, described outlets there as trying to maintain the barest semblance of fairness and independence while avoiding pointed criticism of the Kremlin.

As if to underscore that very point, a Russian media regulatory body known as Roskomnadzor told outlets that they are required to use information received exclusively from official Russian sources on the military operations in Ukraine. Violating that order could result in a $60,000 fine.

Many outlets dont need the reminder. On the television network Rossiya 1, grim-faced pundits lashed out at the Ukrainian morons whom the network blamed for starting the conflict, ignoring the fact that it was Putin who pushed Eastern Europe into war.

Veterans of the Ukrainian National Guard Azov Battalion conduct military exercises for civilians in Kyiv on Feb. 6. (Gleb Garanich/Reuters)

In an act of classic Soviet script-flipping, they depicted Russian aggression as having been instigated by reactionary elements in Ukraine like the Azov Battalion, a troubling but small nationalistic outfit that has been controversially embraced by the military establishment.

A correspondent in Donetsk, one of the two eastern border provinces now under Russian control, described the ethnic Russian residents there as welcoming the assault because of the supposed oppression they had been facing from Ukrainians. Now they have confidence in the future and that the years-long war will finally come to an end, the correspondent said.

There would never have been a war if Russia had not invaded a sovereign nation whose own president, Volodymyr Zelensky, has pleaded emotionally for peace. Some believe that Putin miscalculated in launching the invasion, a view seemingly supported by the scale of protests that broke out on Thursday.

Ukrainian forces which have been bolstered by American and Western European matriel have thus far put up a determined resistance, depriving Putin of an easy victory and raising the possibility of a much more protracted conflict than he had anticipated.

"I dont think the Russians really reckoned with how fierce of a fight they were going to get from Ukraine," said Michael Weiss, an expert on Russia who is writing a book on the nations intelligence services. Now news outlets are essentially forced to sell a war many of them did not expect, Weiss told Yahoo News, against a neighbor who shares a similar culture and history but is also proudly independent.

"This is Slav on Slav, Weiss said. Russians don't want to see Kyiv on fire.

Police officers detain a demonstrator in Moscow on Thursday during a protest against Russia's invasion of Ukraine. (Alexander Nemenov/AFP via Getty Images)

Media outlets have resorted to showing the displacement of refugees from the Russia-controlled regions of Luhansk and Donetsk, which had been part of Ukraine until pro-Russian separatist forces with Kremlin backing seized them in 2014. Earlier this week, Putin sent peacekeeping forces there, triggering a first round of sanctions from the United States and signaling the beginning of what has been an ever-widening conflict.

Meanwhile, the extent to which mainstream Ukrainian society has harbored nationalist and outright Nazi elements has been greatly exaggerated. Kremlin emphasized need to liberate Ukraine from neo-Nazis, went a Thursday headline from Tass, the official Russian news agency, which dutifully proffered the narrative without proper context.

The art of their propaganda is often in the framing, Adams of the News Literacy Project told Yahoo News.

Ukraine does have a legacy of nationalism and antisemitism, as well as other forms of intolerance, but so do many other nations that Russia has not invaded. And Zelensky, the democratically elected Ukrainian president, is Jewish.

Russian media has also reported on its own journalists allegedly being shot at in Donetsk. It is difficult to know if those reports are true, but they stand in stark contrast to the acquiescence that has accompanied two decades in which journalists critical of the Kremlin have been hounded, jailed and sometimes murdered.

An independent media existed when Putin came to power two decades ago, but he has steadily closed off most avenues of dissent, creating a flattened media ecosystem whose contours he has shaped almost entirely on his own (with help from pro-Kremlin oligarchs eager to stay in his good graces).

Still, not even an authoritarian leader can entirely shape reality, or how people respond. Given the scope of protests across Russia on Thursday, it was inevitable that even some mainstream outlets would acknowledge basic facts about what the Kremlin was doing.

Perhaps the starkest of those acknowledgments appeared on the front page of Novaya Gazeta, a left-leaning newspaper, on Friday. Russia. Bombs. Ukraine, a towering headline said.

See more here:
What the Russian media is saying about the war in Ukraine - Yahoo News

While programmatic advertising has made it easy for marketers to buy ads at scale, the nature of the ecosystem makes it challenging for buyers to see exactly where their ads are appearing. Because of this opacity, advertisers lose a degree of control over the end results, which can lead to ads being shown on fake sites to bots, or on websites that do not align with the brands values.

Fortunately, there are steps media buyers can take to ensure their ads are being shown on legitimate websites to real people. Here are five questions marketers can ask themselves to gain greater control over their ads and improve ROI.

With challenges such as digital ad fraud and supply chain transparency hampering advertisers ability to reach the right audience with their message, its more important than ever for marketers to know exactly where their ad investment is being spent.

Marketers that buy directly from publishers likely have established relationships founded on trust and communication, but these relationships are harder to achieve in the programmatic ecosystem. To maximize ROI and achieve positive outcomes, marketers need to partner with publishers that adhere to industry standards and best practices and have integrated multiple solutions designed to increase transparency in the buying process and throughout their websites.

Many media buyers have a process in place to vet potential media partners, such as visiting websites to determine whether the publisher has a recognized brand, quality content or a legitimate advertising environment. But its also important to take additional steps to understand whether the site provides legitimate human traffic.

The industry has developed several solutions to give buyers greater insight into their media partners and transactions, and to detect and mitigate fraud. IAB Tech Labs Ads.txt is a framework that allows publishers to list all authorized sellers of their inventory. Buyers can cross-reference this file with Sellers.json, another tool developed to list authorized sellers and resellers of inventory. Partnering with an MRC-accredited ad fraud detection company offers a way to detect and measure IVT from an ad delivery perspective, while digital publisher audits allow advertisers to find publishers have taken steps to verify the quality of their website traffic through a third-party audit.

Another tactic is to select KPIs that determine real interaction and tailor campaigns to meet these goals. High numbers of impressions and clicks might give the appearance of engagement, but since bots are programmed to mimic human behavior, clicks dont necessarily translate into genuine interactions. Building a media plan that values conversions over clicks helps marketers optimize their campaigns by basing media buying decisions on metrics that matter and investing in partners that deliver results.

The next step is to find partners that have integrated these industry solutions into the selling process. Several organizations have created ways to make it easy for buyers to find partners that have taken such steps.

The IAB Tech Lab Transparency Center helps buyers and sellers learn more about their advertising partners including the industry standards they adhere to and compliance program certifications.

The Trustworthy Accountability Group (TAG) brings together companies to set standards that promote greater transparency. The TAG Registry is a database of companies that have agreed to adhere to TAGs standards and guidelines.

Publishers that have participated in a third-party digital publisher audit are included on the AAM Audited Domain List, which can be downloaded and used to prioritize publishers in DSPs and direct buys.

Many of these tools can be implemented during the vetting process when selecting media partners or can be used to create inclusion lists. By accessing resources and lists that have been compiled by trusted industry organizations, media buyers can save time in their vetting process.

Ad fraud drains billions each year from advertisers budgets and steals revenue from legitimate publishers. By investing in quality media, advertisers will not only protect their budgets and achieve greater ROI, but they will help sustain a safe, transparent advertising ecosystem. Marketers will also avoid unknowingly investing in sites that convey misinformation or harm brand safety by publishing content that does not align with their values or mission. By seeking out and investing in partners that have taken steps to provide greater transparency through industry-backed solutions and standards, marketers will gain control over where their ads are shown, achieve greater ROI and help elevate transparency in the industry.

More here:
The 5 Ws of media buying for better control and ROI - The Drum