The shit-posting, dog deploying social media army taking on Putin one meme at a time.

NAFO: The North Atlantic Fellas Organization

The group — which includes ordinary foot soldiers like Stradner, as well as political heavyweights like U.S. Congressman Adam Kinzinger, former Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves and, as of this week, Ukraine’s Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov — uses as its weapon of choice a badly-drawn image of Shiba Inu, the Japanese dog breed that became an internet sensation a decade ago and is referred to as a “doge” in internet culture.

NAFO “fellas,” as they prefer to be called, emblazon their Twitter accounts with the Shiba Inu avatar. They overlay the image on TikTok-style videos of Ukrainian troops set to dance music soundtracks. They pile onto Russian propaganda via coordinated social media attacks that rely on humor — it’s hard to take a badly-drawn dog meme seriously — to poke fun at the Kremlin and undermine its online messaging.

Whenever a NAFO fellas spots a Russian official or sympathizer posting a pro-Kremlin take on Twitter, for instance, they can use the hashtag #Article5 — a nod to the part of the NATO treaty that calls for collective defense — to bombard these accounts with support for Ukraine. They’ve also flooded Twitter with viral memes attacking Russian President Vladimir Putin and videos mocking the Kremlin’s war effort. On an average day, there are now more than 5,000 Twitter posts linked to NAFO versus a mere handful in May, according to an analysis shared with POLITICO by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a think tank that tracks online activity.

The coordinated shit-posting is ultimately deployed in the service of Kyiv’s war effort. NAFO started in late May as an online fundraising tool for Ukrainian troops. Anyone who donates money via PayPal (NAFO never touches the actual cash) to groups like the Georgian Legion, a military unit created soon after Russia invaded Crimea in 2014, can ask the group for their own doge avatar.

https://www.politico.eu/article/nafo-doge-shiba-russia-putin-ukraine-twitter-trolling-social-media-meme/

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