"Save as many as you can"

Disinformation kills. I say it a lot. Most don’t listen.

Life continues on.

Right now, disinformation is sharpening its knives against someone I care about. In the world of “alternative health cures,” disinformation is an especially deadly weapon - wielded over the scared and the desperate and the doctor-avoidant, and as I’ve already learned long ago, facts won’t matter, no matter how many times I list them.

I am appealing to emotion, hoping that this will help my loved one avoid a preventable death from cancer, or at least delay it for as long as possible. I don’t know how successful I will be. All I know is to keep trying.

It’s interesting to watch my personal drama unfold alongside the drama of Joe Biden’s cancer diagnosis. My feed is flooded with conspiracies, as, I imagine, are most of your feeds. The truth is - cancer is clever and quiet, until it no longer has to be, and there is something so chilling about this disease that conspiracies can act like an escape valve when we are confronted with it.

In a way, I get it. But I have also known myself to be empathetic to a fault.

As I began to write this, a spring storm cascaded furiously down the mountains, thrashing the woods and cracking our green and laughing world open with hissing bolts of lightning. It’s fitting weather for this day. As dads everywhere say, “We need the rain.” My dad is no longer here, so I say it in his stead.

In choosing open source investigations, I’ve skirted the edges of developing a savior complex. When you try to spend as much time as possible poking into the internet’s cobwebbed corners, you can develop an over-exaggerated sense of your own importance and a belief that you can save people from themselves, if only you tell them that the “groundbreaking discovery” they are sharing originated on some site called Based Russian GRU Dot Com and is likely meant to hurt them.

I’m lucky that my OSINT work is modest and constantly being usurped by my other kind of work. Before I got the news of my relative’s diagnosis - a diagnosis I’ve suspected since this past winter while they kept spinning their wheels - I was working on a profile of a small-time GoFundMe scammer for you all, for example. Her crimes aren’t extraordinary, and I was more interested in her psychological profile.

Human psychology is a field that is greatly overlooked in OSINT, yet in enables us in all that we do. How many an analyst has sat quietly at their desk (or on their couch, as I prefer to do, in spite of having a perfectly good desk), and waited for their POI to make a mistake? How many of us have correctly predicted what a POI is or isn’t likely to do based on human nature, saving ourselves a lot of time in the process? We don’t like to admit it, but I think it happens very often.

And because I am so interested in human behavior, I am especially pessimistic, or perhaps resigned, on the topic of medical disinformation. Real life medicine is often unforgiving, it’s a kind of fluorescent light that shines into your life. Lies delivered with a smile are more appealing by comparison.

Medical disinformation is also nothing knew. It has always existed. Why do you think people blamed and burned Jews during the Black Death, to name just one example? Illness can be so inexplicable, so unfair, that it entwines itself effortlessly with our most ancient hatreds and fears.

Death from disease was not enough. So people took to killing Jews.

I know I keep saying it, but disinformation of all kinds is simply more easily spread around now.

We are so busy building diagrams of Twitter bot activity and determining vectors of vaccine denial that we don’t realize that it has always haunted our steps. And that people have always profited for it, in one way or another (for example: after Jews in what is today known as modern Germany were burned for “starting the Black Death,” the Holy Roman Empire made sure to get its cut of their possessions).

Something I don’t really talk about, at least not publicly, is the way that medical disinformation helped kill my father.

At the height of Covid, people close to him discouraged him from taking the vaccine. I argued that this was insane, and eventually won - but it was too late.

By the time he took his first dose he was already infected, having attended his cousin’s funeral (another Covid death) and helped with the arrangements, and just didn’t realize it.

I was able to figure out as much while looking at the journal he had kept (OSINT, right?), as I stood in our Kyiv apartment two days after his death. We burned candles at the time, which only served as a reminder that my father’s home was bereft of the light that had lived there. I will never get over those solemn days, and I don’t think I’m meant to. I just learned to live with the memory.

But there’s more!

A few weeks after I buried him, one of the people responsible for keeping him away from the vaccine for crucial weeks butt-dialed me while gossiping in a restaurant, which caused me to overhear a very interesting conversation:

“Natalia killed her father and just can’t admit it. If only he hadn’t taken the vaccine…” Plates and glasses clinked in the background as I stood frozen with the phone against my ear.

I know I was supposed to feel shock and anger, but I felt nothing. Nothing can be a good feeling.

I’m telling you all of this not because I want your sympathy - I have a strong handle on myself - but because life is full of irony. Most people who investigate disinformation and its trends have loved ones who fall prey to it, I am willing to bet.

As a believer in physics, I am philosophical about death and don’t think it’s really the end, just an end in the biological sense. Still, I think this life is given to us for a reason. I vehemently reject all forms of nihilism. How can someone be a nihilist when particle entanglement exists? When friendship exists?

So I will continue doing what I’m doing, whether it matters on the cosmic scales or not, because I am a stubborn bitch.

I often tell people to share my writing with those who can use it most, but the Glorious Normie Restoration will also depend on our discretion.

Not everyone will listen, including those you love the most, and can’t imagine your life without. Including those you cannot bear to lose, whose turning away will collapse you like a dying star.

It’s OK. Take a walk in the rain instead.