Zelensky: Time's 2022 Man Of The Year

Time |  The call from the President’s office came on a Saturday evening: Be ready to go the next day, an aide said, and pack a toothbrush. There were no details about the destination or how we would get there, but it wasn’t difficult to guess. Only two days earlier, on the 260th day of the invasion of Ukraine, the Russians had retreated from the city of Kherson. It was the only regional capital they had managed to seize since the start of the all-out war in February, and the Kremlin had promised it would forever be a part of Russia. Now Kherson was free, and Volodymyr Zelensky wanted to get there as soon as possible.

His bodyguards were urging him to wait. The Russians had destroyed the city’s infrastructure, leaving it with no water, power, or heat. Its outskirts were littered with mines. Government buildings were rigged with trip wires. On the highway to Kherson, an explosion had destroyed a bridge, rendering it impassable. As they fled, the Russians were also suspected of leaving behind agents and saboteurs who could try to ambush the presidential convoy, to assassinate Zelensky or take him hostage. There would be no way to ensure his safety on the central square, where crowds had gathered to celebrate the city’s liberation, within range of Russian artillery.

 

MIT Has Become A World Economic Forum "On Script" Disinformation Source...,

This is my third rapid test in 24 hours. SMH. It’s routine to take c19 test before a livestream broadcast for all band and crew. Earlier I took 2 and one was positive the other neg in separate nostrils ?? We need to investigate these tests further. I want my $ back . pic.twitter.com/AFIfX9Kg1q

— ErykahBadoula (@fatbellybella) November 13, 2020

technologyreview  |  Hundreds of thousands of Americans are dead in a pandemic, and one of the infected is the president of the United States. But not even personally contracting covid-19 has stopped him from minimizing the illness in Twitter messages to his supporters. 

Meanwhile, suburban moms steeped in online health propaganda are printing out Facebook memes and showing up maskless to stores, camera in hand and hell-bent on forcing low-paid retail workers to let them shop anyway. Armed right-wing militias are patrolling western towns, embracing online rumors of “antifa” invasions. And then there’s QAnon, the online conspiracy theory that claims Trump is waging a secret war against a ring of satanist pedophiles. 

QAnon drew new energy from the uncertainty and panic caused by the pandemic, growing into an “omniconspiracy theory”: a roaring river fed by dozens of streams of conspiratorial thinking. Researchers have documented how QAnon is amplifying health misinformation about covid-19, and infiltrating other online campaigns by masking outlandish beliefs in a more mainstream-friendly package. “Q,” the anonymous account treated as a prophet by QAnon’s believers, recently instructed followers to “camouflage” themselves online and “drop all references re: ‘Q’ ‘Qanon’ etc. to avoid ban/termination.” Now wellness communities, mothers’ groups, churches, and human rights organizations are trying to deal with the spread of this dangerous conspiracy theory in their midst. 

When Pew Research polled Americans on QAnon in early 2020, just 23% of adults knew a little or a lot about it. When Pew surveyed people again in early September, that number had doubled—and the way they felt about the movement was split down party lines, Pew said: “41% of Republicans who have heard something about it say QAnon is somewhat or very good for the country.” Meanwhile, 77% of Democrats thought it was “very bad.”

Major platforms like Facebook and Twitter have started to take aggressive action against QAnon accounts and disinformation networks. Facebook banned QAnon groups altogether on Tuesday, aiming directly at one of the conspiracy theory’s more powerful distribution networks. But those networks were able to thrive, relatively undisturbed, on social media for years. The QAnon crackdown feels too late, as if the platforms were trying to stop a river from flooding by tossing out water in buckets.