What do you think?
Rate this book
Vatnik Soup. The Ultimate Guide to Russian Disinformation
Do your friends believe Ukraine is full of neo-Nazis and secret biolabs? Do you feel overwhelmed by propaganda and lies every time you go online? Does your mom think Tucker Carlson sounds reasonable?
If so, this book is for you!
Vatnik Soup. The Ultimate Guide to Russian Disinformation is based on the popular Twitter series by Finnish social media researcher Pekka Kallioniemi. You will learn about how misinformation works, how to identify a fake Russian narrative, and get a thorough introduction to the people spreading them. It is a must-read for anyone who spends time on social media.
If so, this book is for you!
Vatnik Soup. The Ultimate Guide to Russian Disinformation is based on the popular Twitter series by Finnish social media researcher Pekka Kallioniemi. You will learn about how misinformation works, how to identify a fake Russian narrative, and get a thorough introduction to the people spreading them. It is a must-read for anyone who spends time on social media.
304 pages, Hardcover
Published September 20, 2024
20 people are currently reading
139 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
October 24, 2024
Essential for balance in the political swirl.
I first became alarmed by what I now think of as Putin propaganda in 2016, when a previously relatively sane environment – believe it or not – on Jack Dorsey’s Twitter suddenly went mad. The trending topics and hashtags of the day became besieged by accounts, mostly anonymous, hammering on themes like American Democrats as Satan-worshippers, blood-drinking pedophilia in the Hillary Clinton campaign, buses of sex victim children being brought to Hollywood parties, Lady Gaga wearing secret marks of the Illuminati, and so on.
As a long-time gay/LGBT liberationist, I knew that when people started making up lurid phoney stories involving something sexual, some sort of conservative interest group was getting up to funny business, as in one of the founding episodes of gay liberation, the “Boise homosexuality scandal” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boise_h...) of 1955. This famous moral panic, which mainly imprisoned men for sex with other adult men, was framed as ‘protecting children from homosexuality’ on the basis of finding some teenaged boys involved in sexual meeting with some adults. Author John Gerassi, in his book The Boys of Boise: Furor, Vice and Folly in an American City, suggested that the impetus to start the police crackdown may have been an attempt to get at a closeted gay millionaire who was irritating the city’s elite.
In the ‘Democrats as blood-drinking pedophiles’ story, the connection of Julian Assange publicizing a stream of hacked emails from Russian contact ‘Guccifer 2.0’ in his Wikileaks website (https://thismoonlesssky.wordpress.com...) provided one clue as to what was going on. Another came from a hugely energetic online campaign, on multiple sites including Twitter, in which briefly semi-famous American influencers like Liz Crokin presented Vladimir Putin as a Christian crusader who, together with Donald Trump, would rid the world of the sanguinary pedophiles as well as their master conspiracy, the New World Order. Many luminaries of this movement, like once-obscure regional broadcaster Ben Swann, became increasingly well established in anti-mainstream-media circles through direct connection to Russian networks like RT. Eventually, I began to understand that Vladimir Putin had declared an information war on the Democratic Party in the US, ultimately based on his wrath at Barack Obama for aiding the Syrian democratic movement and its inherent threat to Russia’s vast naval base on the Syrian coast. Putin had launched armies of keyboard employee-soldiers to spread his message and to co-opt others through influence and money to spread it further. He had a long history of framing opponents as pedophiles (though his opponents had also accused him of the same disposition), and was also an exponent of the pre-scientific 1950s militarist (https://medium.com/@summerbelr/how-va...) superstition that lesbians and gays were a dangerous contagion that needed to be shut up so they couldn’t propagate their heterodox preferences. As part of his war against the Democrats, he was out to have his proxies silence LGBT people worldwide, and he was recruiting and/or inspiring American conservatives to help him. I realized he was a potent enemy not just of the LGBT community, but of the other community I was active in, the scientific community. Political evasion of the biological component of sexual orientation followed the model of Trofim Lysenko's decade of forcing Mendelian genetics out of discourse - something I'd encountered directly in many Russian forest ecology papers I'd read through for my thesis. Putin, an old KGB hand, is not afraid to come back to old tactics for his new campaign.
Despite the many anonymous online accounts chanting ‘Russia, Russia, Russia’ and pooh-poohing all ideas around Putin trying to influence democracies through social media, I now see that I underestimated the full scope of the campaign Putin and his henchmen and -women had pulled together. Thanks to the efforts of diligent investigators like Pekka Kallioniemi, Jim Stewartson and Heidi Cuda, a pattern has been laid bare that encompasses far right figures like Alex Jones as well as more left wing figures like Roger Waters. A new book that brings it all home is Pekka Kallioniemi and Morten Hammeken’s Vatnik Soup. The Ultimate Guide to Russian Disinformation.
Kallioniemi is a Finn whose grandmother who fled eastern Finland in 1940 after the Soviet Red Army had staged a fake attack on a Russian town in order to manufacture a pretext to invade Finland. He has the ideal background to see the parallels – as well as the divergences – that characterize the current Russian invasion of Ukraine, with its many phony stories about denazification and threatening ‘biolabs.’ It is, indeed, extenuation of Russian’s Ukraine depredations that brings together nearly all of the 94 ‘vatniks’ (unreasonably avid devotees of Putin’s propaganda lines) who are given witty and incisive profiles in this book. You can see just where personalities as diverse as Glenn Greenwald, Elon Musk and Marjorie Taylor Greene became unsprung from realistic democratic values and ended up in the same psyop funnel, wittingly or unwittingly, but uniformly, passing on the lies-of-the-day emanated by Putin’s hybrid warfare bafflement machine.
Besides profiling individual vatniks, including top-ranking brothers-in-scheme Trump and Putin themselves, Kallioniemi and Hammeken also compile a sterling guide to the modern psychological operations and classic propaganda techniques used by Putin’s spin warriors and online verbal missile launchers. ‘Firehose of falsehood,’ trolls and bots, people on Twitter who call you ‘stupid’ whenever you say something reasonable – it’s all there.
If you feel the world has gone off its rocker but you haven’t given up – you feel you still have some capacity to understand and right the rocking canoe of democracy before it flips into autocracy and oligarchy – this book will provide valuable gravity as you strive to keep things in balance.
I first became alarmed by what I now think of as Putin propaganda in 2016, when a previously relatively sane environment – believe it or not – on Jack Dorsey’s Twitter suddenly went mad. The trending topics and hashtags of the day became besieged by accounts, mostly anonymous, hammering on themes like American Democrats as Satan-worshippers, blood-drinking pedophilia in the Hillary Clinton campaign, buses of sex victim children being brought to Hollywood parties, Lady Gaga wearing secret marks of the Illuminati, and so on.
As a long-time gay/LGBT liberationist, I knew that when people started making up lurid phoney stories involving something sexual, some sort of conservative interest group was getting up to funny business, as in one of the founding episodes of gay liberation, the “Boise homosexuality scandal” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boise_h...) of 1955. This famous moral panic, which mainly imprisoned men for sex with other adult men, was framed as ‘protecting children from homosexuality’ on the basis of finding some teenaged boys involved in sexual meeting with some adults. Author John Gerassi, in his book The Boys of Boise: Furor, Vice and Folly in an American City, suggested that the impetus to start the police crackdown may have been an attempt to get at a closeted gay millionaire who was irritating the city’s elite.
In the ‘Democrats as blood-drinking pedophiles’ story, the connection of Julian Assange publicizing a stream of hacked emails from Russian contact ‘Guccifer 2.0’ in his Wikileaks website (https://thismoonlesssky.wordpress.com...) provided one clue as to what was going on. Another came from a hugely energetic online campaign, on multiple sites including Twitter, in which briefly semi-famous American influencers like Liz Crokin presented Vladimir Putin as a Christian crusader who, together with Donald Trump, would rid the world of the sanguinary pedophiles as well as their master conspiracy, the New World Order. Many luminaries of this movement, like once-obscure regional broadcaster Ben Swann, became increasingly well established in anti-mainstream-media circles through direct connection to Russian networks like RT. Eventually, I began to understand that Vladimir Putin had declared an information war on the Democratic Party in the US, ultimately based on his wrath at Barack Obama for aiding the Syrian democratic movement and its inherent threat to Russia’s vast naval base on the Syrian coast. Putin had launched armies of keyboard employee-soldiers to spread his message and to co-opt others through influence and money to spread it further. He had a long history of framing opponents as pedophiles (though his opponents had also accused him of the same disposition), and was also an exponent of the pre-scientific 1950s militarist (https://medium.com/@summerbelr/how-va...) superstition that lesbians and gays were a dangerous contagion that needed to be shut up so they couldn’t propagate their heterodox preferences. As part of his war against the Democrats, he was out to have his proxies silence LGBT people worldwide, and he was recruiting and/or inspiring American conservatives to help him. I realized he was a potent enemy not just of the LGBT community, but of the other community I was active in, the scientific community. Political evasion of the biological component of sexual orientation followed the model of Trofim Lysenko's decade of forcing Mendelian genetics out of discourse - something I'd encountered directly in many Russian forest ecology papers I'd read through for my thesis. Putin, an old KGB hand, is not afraid to come back to old tactics for his new campaign.
Despite the many anonymous online accounts chanting ‘Russia, Russia, Russia’ and pooh-poohing all ideas around Putin trying to influence democracies through social media, I now see that I underestimated the full scope of the campaign Putin and his henchmen and -women had pulled together. Thanks to the efforts of diligent investigators like Pekka Kallioniemi, Jim Stewartson and Heidi Cuda, a pattern has been laid bare that encompasses far right figures like Alex Jones as well as more left wing figures like Roger Waters. A new book that brings it all home is Pekka Kallioniemi and Morten Hammeken’s Vatnik Soup. The Ultimate Guide to Russian Disinformation.
Kallioniemi is a Finn whose grandmother who fled eastern Finland in 1940 after the Soviet Red Army had staged a fake attack on a Russian town in order to manufacture a pretext to invade Finland. He has the ideal background to see the parallels – as well as the divergences – that characterize the current Russian invasion of Ukraine, with its many phony stories about denazification and threatening ‘biolabs.’ It is, indeed, extenuation of Russian’s Ukraine depredations that brings together nearly all of the 94 ‘vatniks’ (unreasonably avid devotees of Putin’s propaganda lines) who are given witty and incisive profiles in this book. You can see just where personalities as diverse as Glenn Greenwald, Elon Musk and Marjorie Taylor Greene became unsprung from realistic democratic values and ended up in the same psyop funnel, wittingly or unwittingly, but uniformly, passing on the lies-of-the-day emanated by Putin’s hybrid warfare bafflement machine.
Besides profiling individual vatniks, including top-ranking brothers-in-scheme Trump and Putin themselves, Kallioniemi and Hammeken also compile a sterling guide to the modern psychological operations and classic propaganda techniques used by Putin’s spin warriors and online verbal missile launchers. ‘Firehose of falsehood,’ trolls and bots, people on Twitter who call you ‘stupid’ whenever you say something reasonable – it’s all there.
If you feel the world has gone off its rocker but you haven’t given up – you feel you still have some capacity to understand and right the rocking canoe of democracy before it flips into autocracy and oligarchy – this book will provide valuable gravity as you strive to keep things in balance.
January 28, 2025
Great package on Russian disinformation, what are its main narrativies and tactics, but the most interesting are the 200 profiles of Russian disinformation pedlers, from Russian elite to Twitter trolls.
The only critizism that i give is the inconsistent sourcing and that there is only vatniks with a international reach. So no Finnish vatniks in this book, even if Kallioniemi himself is Finnish.
The only critizism that i give is the inconsistent sourcing and that there is only vatniks with a international reach. So no Finnish vatniks in this book, even if Kallioniemi himself is Finnish.
December 17, 2024
A "Vatnik" is a person who believes or spreads Russian propaganda. This book is a freak show with mini-biographies of the 100 most prominent purveyors of Russian propaganda globally. Delves into each vatnik's motives for spreading Russian narratives or anti-western conspiracy theories.
This collection of mini biographies is an excellent antidote to Russian propaganda.
This collection of mini biographies is an excellent antidote to Russian propaganda.
May 4, 2025
Information is one of the battlefields where the russian imperialism spreads its mortiferous filth. From corrupt fascist politicians to useful idiots wanting to expand their reach on social media, this book exposes their propaganda and the roots of their allegiance to the Kremlin's war criminals.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews