The war for hearts and memes
The role of NAFO in shaping public opinion
If you’ve looked at any Ukraine-related posts on Twitter, you’ve almost certainly come across NAFO, or the North Atlantic Fellas Organisation. I mentioned it in my post about Rolo Slavskiy, only to compare his behaviour to theirs. The name itself is painfully embarrassing to say, but its members delight in calling themselves ‘fellas’, and usually changing their profile pic to a cartoony photoshop of a Shiba Inu or a cat in military garb. It’s an informal group that anyone can join - by changing their profile pic and/or adding #NAFO to their bio - which has taken it upon itself to cheerlead for NATO and Ukraine, and to talk disparagingly about Russia at every opportunity. Accounts look like this:
What seems remarkable about these accounts is how many followers they have (usually a few thousand), considering that all they tweet and retweet are anti-Russia memes and slogans. A cursory glance through the lists of their followers and the accounts that they follow, shows them almost entirely to also be NAFO fellas, probably as a result of the “see a fella, follow a fella” challenge. It’s not possible to see stats on when their NAFO followers started following them or when they started following the accounts they follow, but it seems logical that it would have been around the time they started identifying as a fella and putting #NAFO in their bio. Many of these NAFO accounts were created well before February 2022, so presumably these are real people who were tweeting normal stuff before they became fellas. I haven’t had the patience to slog through all of their tweets to see what they were tweeting about pre-SMO; NAFO accounts generally have lots of tweets.
Most NAFO accounts don’t seem to get much traction on any of their own tweets, but the fact that they have a lot of followers will undoubtedly help to boost more high-profile tweets that a lot of them retweet. NAFO is quite an effective (if cynical) example of gaming the algorithms that control Twitter, to promote content critical of Russia and to denigrate content even slightly critical of Ukraine. It’s a kind of astroturfing for social media: by employing swarm tactics both in retweeting the pro-Ukraine content and commenting negatively on anything related to Russia, they give the pro-Ukraine content more attention than it would otherwise receive and drown out dissenting voices. They half-jokingly treat ‘ruining’ polls as a kind of responsibility - anything to show Ukraine as the more popular party.
That half-joking affect permeates everything NAFO members do. It’s all cartoony and tongue-in-cheek, but done on the understanding that Russia really is evil, and this response is necessary to combat ‘Russian propaganda’. Combating Russian propaganda amounts to dogpiling (geddit?) accounts that dare to present a negative view of Ukraine, NATO or the USA. Tweets from Christelle Néant (Russian-speaking French journalist who has been reporting from Donbass for years and runs the website Donbass Insider), Eva Karene Bartlett, Fiorella Isabel and many others are regularly swamped with NAFO replies, all of which do little more than promote mainstream news stories tangentially related to the original tweet, question the integrity of the tweeter or generally disrupt and derail any conversation.
There really is no point in replying to any of these NAFO tweets because they will never respond to anything in good faith, instead replying with unsubstantiated assertions, irrelevant videos and endless memes, and accusing their antagonist of not providing any proof. Memes are their stock in trade, and they use memes as if the memes provide some sort of proof in themselves. Here are a few examples that I’ve seen recently:
It’s childish and infuriating behaviour, but also deeply demoralising for someone trying to argue sincerely. It makes you wonder if there is any point making a reasoned argument, when dozens of people are prepared to dismiss it because they all seem to dogmatically1 believe the polar opposite of whatever you’re saying. This is all assuming that the NAFO accounts are real people rather than bots, and that they are not being paid to troll the way they do. Given that I’ve come across the same mentality from people on Facebook whom I know in real life, I’m inclined to believe that many NAFO accounts are genuine.
The other reason why there is no point replying to NAFO accounts, is that NAFO’s half-joking affect allows for them to be contemptuous of people simply for taking them seriously. If a high-profile Russian account replies to them, their response will be along the lines of “you’re responding to a bunch of cartoon dogs on Twitter?! Get a grip!”. It’s the internet flame war mindset distilled down to its purest form and weaponised: “if you don’t respond then that’s because you’ve got no comeback, but if you do respond seriously, I was just joking”. It can only work in an environment free of real-world consequences beyond bans, which they will wear as a badge of pride.
Conversely, the mob is giddy with excitement when they receive positive attention from a real celebrity. Just before the NATO summit in Vilnius - which was memorable for leaving Zelensky out of proceedings and letting down Ukraine yet again - there was the ‘NAFO summit’ in Vilnius, which consisted of some quite unattractive people sitting on a small stage in front of a very small number of other unattractive people (who were more interested in their phones, obviously) and failing to be funny or charismatic in real life2.
This included a video address recorded by Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas in which she thanks the fellas for their commitment to “disarming Russian disinformation with humour, intelligence and enthusiasm” - citation needed for ‘humour and intelligence’, but I guess whiny bloody-mindedness could qualify as ‘enthusiasm’.
The Lithuanian Foreign Minister did attend the ‘summit’, but in his Twitter post it’s not possible to see what a dingy room he was addressing. If the beach umbrellas and inflatable shark don’t make sense to you, they are there because the event was a ‘rehearsal of our beach party in Crimea’ (a reference to Zelensky and others talking about vacationing in Crimea once Ukraine retakes it), and the shark is a homage to the shark that killed a Russian citizen on a beach in Egypt in June. After this tragic event a host of tasteless memes appeared, celebrating the Russian civilian’s death:
It almost goes without saying, that this organised online trolling is precisely what they (and the media in general) accuse Russia of doing. They’re doing little more than dutifully regurgitating lines from mainstream media, but with an irreverent social media spin. I think they would like to think of themselves as ironic or sardonic, but it’s really just sarcasm - and that can be effective, if it gets enough popularity.
NAFO is an application of the kind of insecure high-school level bullying that dominates social media: if you’re popular enough, others who value in-group popularity will tend to side with you, even if all you’re saying is “yeah, right” in a sarcastic tone of voice. Social media has simplified and formalised this process, because popularity of people and posts is defined by a number, so you can quickly and easily decide who you like best based on how popular they already are. NAFO members reciprocally inflate each other’s apparent popularity to lend credence to the things they say in the eyes of Twitter users unaware of the NAFO scam.
Hopefully enough people will get wind of what NAFO is doing, that they will lose whatever credibility they have in the general population. I imagine that this will probably coincide with the unravelling Ukrainian military defeat, at which point they will no longer serve a useful purpose. Much like NATO will disown Ukraine as soon as it outlives its utility and the truth begins to surface, NAFO too will go the way of Anonymous masks, JeSuisCharlie and Kony 2012. Some people might continue posting, refusing to admit that they were tricked into following the mass psychosis, but I think a lot of those accounts that existed before 2022 and then ‘went NAFO’ might find that they don’t have nearly as many friends as they thought they did.
Is their ‘dogma’ another pun? I hadn’t even thought of it until I wrote that.
There is a punishing five hour livestream of the event, that no one should watch.