Those of us who have followed early social media will remember the importance of Milner's DST investment in Facebook. Facebook received $100M at the time, and this allowed them to scale up and dominate social media. He also invested in a variety of other Silicon Valley companies.
Then, many years later, a piece of news from years ago that few people seem to know about. When those rounds happened, Yuri Milner was described as an oligarch, but the reality is that he was Kremlin.
It's been a judo move: use the openness of Western society against itself, along the lines of what Yuri Bezmenov described as ideological subversion.
Interesting story but what do you think they got out of this concretely other than a good investment? "This guy who owns shares in this is also a member of that it's all connected man the illuminati/russians/ZOG are everywhere" is a genre but usually not a good one without more details. Was facebook bad for the west? Did the kremlin get a back door into facebook?
>>2801 Good questions. The very least what Kremlin got was an insight into how decisions are made within Silicon Valley -- and this informed (and ensured the viability of!) strategic decisions like:
> "January 2012, the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service opened three classified bids for research projects to perform intelligence-related tasks in Internet centers and regional social networking sites, covertly control Internet content, and form means for distributing information in social networks. The SVR said the bids won were for the project to “develop software to automatically disseminate information in large social networks and set up methods of organizing and managing virtual Internet communities of experts and creates tasks with workflow. The virtual army would be tasked with disseminating information in some social networks through existing user accounts to influence public opinion, collect statistics and analyze the efficiency of information sharing and measure how popular the information eventually becomes”"
>>2808 > The very least what Kremlin got was an insight into how decisions are made within Silicon Valley ...
This rounds down to nothing. More precisely, it's no more than one could get through good open source intel, supplemented by a few guys hanging out in the Bay Area attending the right parties. It justifies none of the conspiratorial suggestion of OP.
>>2810 > It justifies none of the conspiratorial suggestion of OP.
OP here, can you please clarify what was my suggestion that sounds 'conspiratorial'? I don't think influence operations or vested interests are typically conspiratorial. In this particular case, I don't think there's anything conspiratorial at all - other than DST that has been proven to be a Potemkin front for Kremlin through the evidence I have provided. So, can you give counter-evidence, that DST was not a Potemkin front?
>>2816 There's a failure of transitivity. Whether DST is under Russian influence isn't the important fact. In itself, that tells us nothing about Facebook, which is what people actually care about. You suggested that: > The very least what Kremlin got was an insight into how decisions are made within Silicon Valley ... but I explained that: > This rounds down to nothing. More precisely, it's no more than one could get through good open source intel, supplemented by a few guys hanging out in the Bay Area attending the right parties.
Look, OP, the title of your post was "Kremlin's role in the creation of social media." I think it's fair for us to assume that your post was supposed to support that thesis, and I don't think you've done that.
I'm not going to argue about the word "conspiratorial." But I do think we should be suspicious of narratives that overreach based on guilt-by-association, especially when they fit into common partisan tropes.
>>2817 > Look, OP, the title of your post was "Kremlin's role in the creation of social media." I think it's fair for us to assume that your post was supposed to support that thesis, and I don't think you've done that.
$100M investment into Facebook and more is pretty relevant evidence that Kremlin had a much greater degree of both influence in and stake in social media -- supported by research that somehow failed to spread in social media.
I think you might be politically invested in rejecting Kremlin's role. I'm sorry about that.
>>2827 > I think you might be politically invested in rejecting Kremlin's role.
Lol that's not a argument. I'm invested in our best efforts to understand all the relevant bits of reality, and you narrative doesn't contribute to that.
