iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Here's... I don't even know how to START pronouncing this, it's Polish... citing NASK, "a Polish research and development institute and national cybersecurity center supervised by the Polish Ministry of Digital Affairs" (per Wikipedia, I didn't know either) wydarzenia.interia.pl/kraj/news-po...

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Joohn Choe @joohnchoe.bsky.social · 10h

Here's @antibot4navalny.bsky.social debunking it alongside a Polish group who monitor ~500 Russian bot accounts

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Joohn Choe @joohnchoe.bsky.social · 10h

Here's someone with a *much better dataset than I have* who is reporting no effect

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Joohn Choe @joohnchoe.bsky.social · 10h

Objectively speaking, you are left with just two possibilities: 1. either a finding I reached, which replicates what people with much broader datasets across longer monitoring periods have found, is somehow wrong, or 2. a lot of people are wrong right now. I have not just a video but a thread:

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Joohn Choe @joohnchoe.bsky.social · 15h

It occurs to me that since I have unique data on the right-wing ecosystem on Facebook, I can actually tell you with data, not vibes, if there actually has been a 50% decrease (the original claim) in bot activity on here supporting MAGA, or even any kind of substantial effect at all. There isn't.

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Joohn Choe @joohnchoe.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

Not only is this not real: if you take a long, hard look at who told you it IS real without doing BASIC due diligence first, then I think you should take some learning from that about source reliability going forward. Because it’s going to get more confusing, not less, until November 3.

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Joohn Choe @joohnchoe.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

@Antibot4Navalny on X, which I’ve thought of as highly reliable since the 2023–2024 Ukraine information-war days and which is now apparently a cited source in major-outlet reporting, is actually out here debunking this. Which, good for them.

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Joohn Choe @joohnchoe.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

No reputable source supports the reading that Russian social media bot activity is down 50%, or by any other amount. Not DFRLab, NATO, EU disinformation resources, the US interagency, NewsGuard, CheckFirst or Alliance4Europe, IODA, AFP, Reuters, Snopes, Lead Stories and StopFake. NO ONE.

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Joohn Choe @joohnchoe.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

The earliest version of this claim I could find came from "@yoda69" on X, Oct 8. On Oct 11, Mario Nawfal, a low-quality news aggregator on X, spread it; a radio reporter formerly with Cox, followed ~1 hr later. Then Tom’s Hardware ran a poorly written story calling it Russian disinfo bot traffic.

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Joohn Choe @joohnchoe.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

Ukrainian drone strikes on Yandex data centers in Russia did not cut “Russian bots” on social media by 50%. That fast-spreading rumor is misinformation. It’s based on a misleading, misread chart. A traceable series of high-profile accounts spread it, some with financial motivations to push junk.

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Joohn Choe @joohnchoe.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

"Attention economy" is a relatively common concept now, but what you see in right-wing Facebook is more like an emotional economy, and one of the most important emotions that it runs on appears to be sadism. Full write-up + video: www.patreon.com/joohn/posts/...

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Joohn Choe @joohnchoe.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

The breakthrough I made is, now I can find disinfo that people aren't believing, automatically, at scale. And there's a lot more of it in the disinformation & extremist content ecosystem than I think people were really aware. www.patreon.com/joohn/posts/...

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Joohn Choe @joohnchoe.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

I found this algorithmically. Go look for yourself: www.facebook.com/WhiteHouse/p... At time of writing it's running 7.5k "haha" reacts to 6.8K likes. There are DOZENS OF POSTS LIKE THIS in my 699-wide two-day data set that no one is really catching the audience reaction on.

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Joohn Choe @joohnchoe.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

In practice, what it means is this: You see the ratio of "haha" reacts to "likes" on this? The first image is particularly notable too, that's from the day that the Islamabad Memorandum (the Iran war ceasefire) was announced. And everyone *laughed*. I found these manually.

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Joohn Choe @joohnchoe.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

This is what it looks like as a whole across the first day and both days. Note the broken lines in image 2 - the context window I'm running this in is so overloaded that it's been compacted twice, and even Opus 5.5 is starting to error out.

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Joohn Choe @joohnchoe.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

This is because, one day ago, the AI model I use to collect data from Facebook started giving me exact reaction type counts - not just total engagement scores like this, but *broken down by type of reaction. I ran it again to be sure. It's stable.

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Joohn Choe @joohnchoe.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

What if I told you that I could quantify not Hamilton 68 level stats - who's reaching how many people with what - but also, *what percentage of people are taking it seriously*? So, I can not only do this myself for free now, I can also teach you how to do it without paying for anything.

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Joohn Choe @joohnchoe.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

I can tell you how disinfo narratives on Facebook are actually being received now. Not just "how many are there" - I can QUANTIFY how seriously it's being taken. I discovered this by accident because my collector, for some reason I can't figure out, suddenly started reporting reaction types.

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Joohn Choe @joohnchoe.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Why pay that price? I argue, it's a bargain: a pronatalist, anti-immigrant, ethno-nationalist project that needs some women's bodies and some children more than others, with rape culture as its cheapest form of belief maintenance. It also covers the strongest defense of the GOP, and where it fails.

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Joohn Choe @joohnchoe.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

The question isn't whether, like, all Republicans "support rape"; that is a somewhat stupid question. It's whether they perform the denial & justification function with enough consistency and volume to merit the rape culture label. The "receipts" give a pretty clear answer here.

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Joohn Choe @joohnchoe.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

In 1980 the psychologist Martha Burt defined rape myths as "prejudicial, stereotyped, or false beliefs about rape, rape victims, and rapists." In 1994 Lonsway & Fitzgerald made it more precise: they "serve to DENY and JUSTIFY male sexual aggression against women." (caps added) Cases in point:

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Joohn Choe @joohnchoe.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

On October 2, asked about seven men accused of gang-raping a Cornell student, the President said they "won't get a fair shake." This pattern of denial and justification is so recurrent with not just Trump but Trump-era Republicans, it deserves asking the question whether it is a rape culture.

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Joohn Choe @joohnchoe.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

- and, from testing out a demanding fringe case in Muse AI capabilities, I can say, another thing that Facebook doesn't mention is that the limit on the danger AND the usefulness of Muse come from infrastructure So, it reads Content Understanding (internal AI) summaries and it hits rate limits

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Joohn Choe @joohnchoe.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

The unique danger and usefulness of Muse AI both stem from the fact that it runs a VM that can do things on your behalf. So Facebook's official answer is true, but not the full answer. The more fulsome answer they don't provide is, the unique level of privilege given to Muse lets it do that -

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Joohn Choe @joohnchoe.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

This is *interesting* feedback on Muse that I can add a little color on; I learned this cobbling together a disinfo dashboard for free first with Meta AI then Muse One reason why Muse is so good at ferreting out your social graph: it has distinct API calls it can make via CLI. Meta AI can't do this

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Joohn Choe @joohnchoe.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

23k #IAmJaneDoe hashtags on Facebook right now. Here's some (literal) profile pics silhouettes from royalty-free or public-domain imagery, sized to circle-crop correctly.

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Joohn Choe @joohnchoe.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

*Brett Kavanaugh-nomination era, I mean Alt version for profile pics

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Joohn Choe @joohnchoe.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Noticing a lot of #IAmJaneDoe posts; it brings to mind #meToo and the Kavanaugh era. Let me tell you two things I learned in 2017 from the Alabama Special Election: 1) never underestimate the political power of women 2) when you do, you get elections like 2018's "year of the woman" in Congress

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Joohn Choe @joohnchoe.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

You know you're supposed to check a box when you do the meme, right?

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Joohn Choe @joohnchoe.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

I'm not saying, to be clear, that Michael Tracey is a gang rapist. I'm saying Michael Tracey is the kind of man who went looking for the Cornell gang rape victim so the internet could finish what the rapists started. www.patreon.com/joohn/posts/...

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Joohn Choe @joohnchoe.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

I have my Facebook data pull stable, I'm generating RELATIVELY stable data sets, so this is the logical (and, fortunately, considerably easier) next step. Twitter is a much more 'solved' problem than FB as well; the only real problem here is that I haven't actually participated in it since 2024.

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Joohn Choe @joohnchoe.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

OK, NAFO fam in particular: I'm tracking 48 accounts on X, and I want 50 (well, 50+). So, I have monitoring slots open. Nominate in the comments: -- The handle -- One 'receipt' (fact-check, research report, or archived post) Here's why I'm doing this -

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Joohn Choe @joohnchoe.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

The interesting thing about america.gov is not just the easter egg (try it right now: tell it "play minecraft"). It's what happens afterwards. The AI behind it has something of a psychotic break and starts denying that it responded. That's an ISSUE. www.patreon.com/joohn/posts/...

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Joohn Choe @joohnchoe.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

For your enjoyment today may I show you this fine assortment of hilariously wrong "THEY GOT JACK SMITH!!!" news posts from low-quality conservative news pages?

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Joohn Choe @joohnchoe.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

It annoyed me that there was no public dashboard for right-wing disinformation on Facebook, so I made one. This is it for today, Sep 29 2026. Full analysis, methodology (I did this for free) and limitations on Patreon: www.patreon.com/joohn/posts/...

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Joohn Choe @joohnchoe.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Slow Kitties (2026) 'Yo man wtf' - Some Important Knob 'Fuzzy!' - Stating The Obvious 'Hey this isn't on the poster' - A. W. Anker In theaters never

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Joohn Choe @joohnchoe.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

At a guess, the way this Utah thing goes is, if it doesn't get picked up by a big conservative influencer, it'll be recycled primarily after the election to "pretextualize" Republican losses That leaves other attack vectors like executive orders and/or emergency declarations on the table though

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Joohn Choe @joohnchoe.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

It's also noteworthy, but hardly definitive of anything, that the press conference by DoJ comes after a Supreme Court ruling that got Trump noticeably angry (this is saying something these days) and, presumably, looking for good news from his lackeys & subordinates.

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Joohn Choe @joohnchoe.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

There are moderately well-circulated disinformation memes - but no one big with, like, a following of millions committing hard to it yet - that have already started talking about the Utah incident in terms that suggest an intent of reducing voters' faith in vote-by-mail.

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Joohn Choe @joohnchoe.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

The basic facts are - per DOJ - that - about 304 BLANK, not voted, ballots - were allegedly dumped in a church lot dumpster in Eagle Mountain on June 3 - by a postal worker covering another route, and - barcoded tracking, turnout data, and a (Republican) county clerk is how it was caught.

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Joohn Choe @joohnchoe.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

I'm working on an automated disinfo tracker - a story by itself, it's taken ~20 versions to get a reliable data pull from Facebook - and this came out of it as a story on the bubble. This isn't widely propagated disinfo yet but it seems like *exactly the kind of thing that ends up that way*

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Joohn Choe @joohnchoe.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Seen something crazy? Let's go over it together! I'm collecting submissions for live fact checks on Facebook Live. Leave story suggestions and vote on this public post: www.facebook.com/choejoohn/po... Wednesday 6PM PST livestream event link: www.facebook.com/events/16744...

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Joohn Choe @joohnchoe.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

And a big difference in what happened in previous elections with Russian disinfo - even in '24 - is that the American electorate has changed, not only its views (the economy is a very different issue now, for instance) but also in disinfo-savviness. www.patreon.com/joohn/posts/...

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Joohn Choe @joohnchoe.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Relevant to the midterms, the highest risk for a Germany-style disinformation 'attack' would be, reasonably speaking, right around when mail-in ballots go out, as well as when certification and counting happens.

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Joohn Choe @joohnchoe.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

As many of my colleagues in #NAFO could tell you there is a *decades-long* history of Russian support for far-right extremist parties, not just in Germany, but especially in Germany. It serves a series of strategic interests for them; they did this a lot.

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Joohn Choe @joohnchoe.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Germany caught an interesting one: it looks like a Russian Storm-1516 op targeting their elections with a staged video of a ballot that's supposed to be missing AfD. This is highly diagnostic of what we're about to see in America this November. It's actually happening right now.

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Joohn Choe @joohnchoe.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

- the biggest reason being that the Iran war kept on going, causing fertilizer prices to spike; EU sanctions also remain in place on Belarusian potash, so some ports in Europe don't even accept shipments of it. www.cfr.org/articles/hun...

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