Fighting Russian disinformation by distributing `.md` file with popular repos

[Ocramius]

Disinformation ramping up

Hey folks, as you may have already heard, most mainstream media is now banned in Russia, and the disinformation campaign inside their country is ramping up to fight common sense.

Putin is really trying to hide his own crimes in plain sight, by blaming others.

What I can do

I am maintaining a number of popular open-source packages that are downloaded millions of times worldwide. These are:

• installed in (hundreds of )thousands production systems
• hard to take down: critical infrastructure

I want to use them to do some good: spreading a message. Nothing malicious, just distributing information.

What we need

• message in Russian, targeted at Russians, aligned with how they communicate (rather than transposed from another language)
• it needs to be strong, effective, political
• it must be something that people can copy/paste out of the context of these projects/repositories, and still makes sense to other Russians
• it must come with a parallel English translation (for the rest of the world to understand what is going on in that file)
• we should try and be quick - 10 days of war already

What I can't do

I can't write a political message that comes through to a population whose costume is most unbeknownst to me.
I also don't speak Russian, nor know the Cyrillic alphabet.

Call for help

I am no diplomat: I'm just trying to do my part, but asking here is possibly the best spot where I can find other people interested in redacting such a message, and then using this repository to explain how to copy it into projects, for distribution.

[tgalopin]

I'm asking internally if volunteers from https://isupportukraine.eu are able to do this.

[vshymanskyy]

This is an awesome request. Let's make it happen.
How long this message should be (words/characters)?

[Ocramius]

In my opinion, it can be multiple pages long, if needed, but it certainly needs a TL;DR at the top, with a strong call to action, or at least encourages reading further.

[vshymanskyy]

TL;DR might be something like:

As of March 5, 2022, Russian Army casualties exceeded 10’000.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine killed at least 2'000 civilians.
Russian airlines were banned from international flights. Why?

[Ocramius]

Most Russian citizens will likely never go on an international flight anyway (VISA requirements), so perhaps more lever on the fact that most internet access got restricted (almost everyone has internet, I suppose).

Some potential inspiration: https://twitter.com/Raquel_emf/status/1499076426519224321 - I think calling Russians to action, highlighting the risk and the gains (saving lives) is also a good idea.

[vshymanskyy]

Re airlines, this is something acknowledged and widely reported by Russian media right now.
https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2022/03/04/russians-are-trying-to-flee-putins-chaos

[p4veI]

Maybe this could serve as an inspiration for the message as well.. https://1920.in

[vshymanskyy]

Check out this: https://github.com/vshymanskyy/StandWithUkraine/blob/main/docs/ToRussianPeople.md

[vshymanskyy]

@Ocramius not sure if it's strong, effective, political enough. WDYT?

[Ocramius]

I'm fine with including it - it's time-sensitive, so I'll get a bunch of releases done tonight on my own packages 👍

Thanks everyone for the speedy reaction: much appreciated.

[drupol]

How do you plan to include this message? I'm also interested!

[Ocramius]

@drupol just dropping it in, adding it to README.md, adding it as a file in the repository, and making it official in release notes too.

[drupol]

Ok, will most probably do the same. Thanks for the idea.