@elonmusk Challenge: add a public “follower history” chart per account (since creation, aggregated daily/weekly). No opt-out.

A senior Russian diplomat once lost an argument to a cartoon dog. Not metaphorically. On Twitter, in June 2022, with the internet watching. Here's why that matters more than it sounds. Every modern war has a second front with no trenches. It's fought over what millions of people believe: who started it, whether aid should continue, whether you should just give up trying to tell truth from noise. Russia industrialized that front. Troll farms, fake news sites, paid accounts flooding reply sections 24/7. Democracies can't answer in kind. A ministry can fund analysts and fact-checkers. It cannot manufacture thousands of fake "ordinary citizens" to swarm and ridicule critics without torching its own credibility. Also, government press offices are terrible at shitposting. So the gap got filled by a guy with Photoshop. In May 2022, Kamil Dyszewski, a Polish Twitter user, started pasting a Shiba Inu into images from the war. People wanted their own. His price: donate to the Georgian Legion, a volunteer unit fighting for Ukraine, and he'd draw you one. The dogs became "Fellas." When someone compared the growing crowd to a new NATO, he swapped the T for an F, put a dog on the emblem, and the North Atlantic Fella Organization was born. Pro-Kremlin accounts accused them of being a CIA front. The Fellas set their location to Langley, Virginia. Remember the diplomat? Mikhail Ulyanov tried to end an argument with them: "You pronounced this nonsense. Not me." The Fellas made it a meme. Then a motto. Then merchandise. That's the trick they call "bonking." You're not trying to convince the troll. You're playing to the thousands silently reading. A claim delivered with total authority looks different when the replies contain evidence. It looks different again when a hundred cartoon dogs are laughing at it. And the asymmetry underneath it all: Russian trolls say what they are paid to say. The Fellas donated to say what they believe. Every one of those avatars started as a receipt for money sent to Ukraine. No one approves the memes. No one sends talking points. That makes them faster than any government. And the same crowd keeps raising money, so attention online turns into trucks and drones for the front that does have trenches. Miracle cure? No. Swarms make mistakes, and nobody can measure how far a Shiba Inu moves public opinion. But watch how the other side reacts. Russian state media and the foreign ministry's own spokeswoman have gone after a meme by name, with something close to desperation. You don't waste official breath on something that isn't hurting you. The Kremlin can buy a million posts. What it can't buy, and what it clearly fears, is a crowd of real people who believe what they say and say what they believe. Russia showed up with institutions and budgets. The other side showed up with a dog. That's the absurdity of NAFO. It's also the point.

"There is plenty of room for us to work together." - That's what Xi said.

Why doesn't the world trust Russia's election results? Start with who is allowed to watch. 🇬🇧 UK 2024: invited OSCE/ODIHR monitors. Mission deployed. 🇫🇷 France 2024: invited them, even for a snap vote called three weeks out. 🇩🇪 Germany 2025: invited them. Mission deployed. And ODIHR didn't flatter them. Its Germany report criticised opaque campaign finance (AfD as example), criminal defamation law and weak election dispute resolution. Germany invited the scrutiny anyway. That's the point. The detail people miss: Russia is one of the OSCE's 57 participating States. ODIHR missions draw their members from citizens of those states, and Russians are eligible like anyone else. These countries opened their elections to a body Russia itself sits in. Now Russia: • 2021 Duma vote: restrictions so tight ODIHR couldn't deploy • 2024 presidential vote: no invitation • 2026 Duma vote (18–20 Sept): no invitation Three nationwide elections in a row with no OSCE observation. ODIHR and the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly call it a breach of the 1990 Copenhagen Document, a commitment Moscow itself accepted. Moscow says ODIHR is biased. But you don't prove bias by locking the door. Countries confident in their elections let the critics in and take the report card, flaws and all. Trust isn't declared. It's verified.

Women for the drone factories. Men for the trenches. Gold for the mercenaries. Moscow calls its Africa policy a "partnership." Here is what investigators have documented: MALI: UN investigators found more than 500 people killed in the village of Moura in 2022, most summarily executed, by Malian troops and foreign fighters widely identified as Wagner. CENTRAL AFRICAN REPUBLIC: The Sentry documented Wagner campaigns to drive miners and villagers away from gold and diamond sites it then seized, including Ndassima, a deposit valued at about $2.8 billion. MALI, AGAIN: Forbidden Stories identified six sites where Wagner held civilians. Survivors described beatings and burns. One recalled being forced to load sand and dig holes. Wagner has since been absorbed into the Defence Ministry's Africa Corps. Refugees say the abuses did not stop. TATARSTAN: African women aged 18 to 22 were recruited with promises of hospitality jobs and study. Investigations by AP and others found many assembling Shahed-type attack drones instead, on 12-hour shifts under constant surveillance. UKRAINE: Investigators at INPACT counted more than 1,400 Africans from 35 countries on Russian army contracts. Over 300 were dead within months. Many had been promised work as cooks, drivers or guards. Moscow denies illegal recruitment. Host governments call the fighters "instructors." The brochure says partnership. The record says otherwise.