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

And this is the racial dimension, which overlaps with the administration's white nationalist project, as well as historical anti-Black racism in America When I posted a preview of this someone was like, wait, isn't race orthogonal to this? Like, no, actually, historically, it's *aligned*

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

I understand the oddness of saying "President" and meaning "Trump" but I meant "President Trump", not the President of Cornell :) The Cornell president's statement was this www.npr.org/2026/10/04/n...

npr.org

Cornell president calls gang rape allegations 'deeply disturbing'

Cornell president Michael I. Kotlikoff said his university "must do better" in a video statement. "This is a defining moment in Cornell's history," he added.

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

And since rape myths run on repetition, they can be out-repeated. Gisèle Pelicot said it in four words: shame must change sides. I think the nascent, modern-day Jane Doe movement is precisely the danger that rape culture is afraid of. Full essay, 66 sources (and like a weekend of reading) linked:

patreon.com

On Republican rape culture in the age of Trump | Joohn Choe

Using the scholarly definition of rape myths as beliefs that deny and justify male sexual aggression, I examine how Republican elected offic

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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

So, thanks to the literature, we can say, objectively speaking, that a rape culture is one that centers and repeats those myths: deny-and-justify sits near the center of public talk, said again and again by the people with the most reach. That's measurable, verifiable and falsifiable.

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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

That means, in short: - the danger of Muse AI is "baked-in" to its very essence as a unique value proposition - the limits on its usefulness and its danger arise from its design as a free agentic AI offered by a company whose primary product is ads, not frontier AI models

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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, it's almost annoying how often the same disinfo sources I first encountered in information war around the Ukraine war with NAFO have ended up being like this

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

It's too little, too late, I think. "Narrative thrashing" - when people have a weak basic position so they start shifting narratives rapidly when you pressure it. The Trump admin is doing this with the economy I think we're looking at a - small yet, but developing by the hour - #meToo moment.

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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

This isn't like Hamilton 68 insofar as I'm just, like, scraping accounts who say things that originate in Russian disinfo. My monitoring lists and data are public (👇) But this IS like Hamilton 68 in that it'll show a unified picture on a regular basis as a political and counter-disinfo resource.

patreon.com

Bring Out Your Disinfo! (Twitter Edition) | Joohn Choe

I'm tracking 48 accounts on X. I want 50+. Some of these accounts are easy picks; DFRLab and Bloomberg traced several of the accounts below

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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 · 02/10/2026

It took a surprising amount of work but I finally have a disinfo intelligence system that looks like Hamilton 68 now, only automatic. www.patreon.com/posts/171137...

patreon.com

Disinformation dashboard: Oct 1 2026 | Joohn Choe

For the 24 hours ending at midday Pacific on October 1, 2026, I tracked public posts from 14 high-traffic right-wing Facebook pages. I ran t

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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 net effect of the March sanctions easing was to supply Belarus' government more money to support Russia in the Ukraine war, which they are still most definitely doing. united24media.com/war-in-ukrai... There is little reason to expect this latest action on Belarusian potash to be any different.

united24media.com

Belarusian Ground Infrastructure Still Powers Russian Aerial Attacks on Western Ukraine

On September 14, 2026, Ukrainian officials stated that Russian strikes on Rivne, Volyn, and Lviv relied on Belarusian signal relays.

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

Belarusian potash producers were originally sanctioned because they prop up the authoritarian Lukashenko regime with hard currency and tax revenue. In March 2026 sanctions were eased because of fertilizer price crises brought on by the Iran war; this proved ineffective for a series of reasons -

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Joohn Choe @joohnchoe.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

more MAGAs having a totally normal reaction

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Joohn Choe @joohnchoe.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

The thing about this one is, this false claim came from a PRIVATE group for MAGAs; so, 'who is this even for?' but also, this is really what they're saying to each other nowadays.

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Joohn Choe @joohnchoe.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

I keep my Patreon these days to current events analysis using intelligence-community-style briefings on complex topics of interest like election threats, wars, and disinfo in politics but "Audience-maxx With Joohn!" *is* a topic of interest to some readers and I was writing about Meta AI anyway so

patreon.com

"Social-maxxing With Joohn!" or, Facebook's Best-kept Secret For Data Analysis (Which Is Also One Of Its Worst Products) | Joohn Choe

Why is it so difficult to get a daily run-down of the top right-wing narratives circulating on social media at any given moment, and what do

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Joohn Choe @joohnchoe.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Gotta get those crocs right, they make or break the entire ensemble

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Joohn Choe @joohnchoe.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

And this is a post-type breakdown of a right-wing spammer's content across 7 days. This takes some *doing* - there are issues here with data reliability, with duplicate postIDs/URLs throughout the dataset, but the simple ability to FETCH social media URLs at scale, for free, goes INTERESTING places

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Joohn Choe @joohnchoe.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

it's terrible for most tasks but there is one game-changing thing Meta AI does: It reads Facebook & Instagram. This is a non-trivial advantage for disinfo researchers too poor/unimportant to have access to MCL (like me!). For instance, this is how much a right-wing spammer makes.

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