By Miltos Sakellaris
The not so distant 2014, when the Moscow invaded Ukraine for the first timea group of anonymous volunteers in the small Baltic state of Lithuania, on the doorstep of the Russian “Bear”, decided to roll up his sleeves and start working hard enough. They chose the name for their team “The Elves”. After all, these mythical creatures make sure to “whistle” behind the scenes in each movie and move magically. Their goal? To “break” her status Moscow misinformation in their country.
The difficult mission
«NATO is a conqueror, the EU is a failed project and Lithuania is a failed country». According to the leader of the group under the pseudonym The Hawk, these are the main lies that have been spread on the internet in recent years, targeting the Lithuanians. The team leader, who has a nickname like the other members, so that no one can find them, he spoke to Euronews, explaining that he and his companions move like … shadows in the invisible world of the internet. «We had the feeling that many troll farms started operating against Lithuania, spreading the usual lies“, He said in the interview he gave on condition of anonymity. As he explained his country was particularly “vulnerable” to the disinformation machine of the Kremlin, especially since the former Soviet state of Lithuania seceded when socialism collapsed.
The “Elves” – all of them unpaid volunteers, who in their normal life work as accountants or even media or IT specialists – have developed their own strategy to deal with the threat. From the moment they made the decision for action started operating by monitoring fake profiles and pro-Kremlin social media pages, particularly Facebook.
Their goal today is – as they say – to keep away the coordinated efforts of Russian trolls to “contaminate” the internet world – or at least minimize its influence. «We do it on a level that is understood by the average person – we try to explain what misinformation is. We fight toxic trolls by trying to remove them from social networks and reporting them in an organized way“The Hawk” team leader said in an interview with Euronews.
The cyber war
Since the beginning of the “cyber war”, the Lithuanian “Elves” have been actively involved in denial of service or DDOS attacks on Russian and Belarusian state institutions, propaganda centers and infrastructure sites. These attacks, in which celebrities also took part Anonymous, blocked access for days to the sites of private banks up to RT and Sputnik but also the Russian Ministry of Defense. The “war” has another goal according to The Hawk: “to support our brothers in Ukraine».
“This is an additional incentive – to spread information about what is really happening, and to somehow get to Russia, to inform the Russian people that this is a real war, not a bloody ” special operation ” as they call it.” , he mentioned characteristically.
Ever since the Russian invasion began on February 24 The “Elves” noticed that a huge effort was made on social media to overturn the real facts and even spread conspiracy theories about Ukraine. «Τhour they spread completely crazy lies. They do not even think about how to do it in a professional way, it is just a completely wild misinformation“, Said The Hawk, while regarding the Russian trolls he said that:”They are quite disorganized and quite desperate. But that does not mean they are not aggressive. They still invest a lot of money in misinformation and cyber attacks».
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