We all know the Ukrainians are winning the infowar, and we also know they haven’t always been honest about their claims. But I don’t think everyone is necessarily familiar with the mechanics and techniques they are using. Or the role we, as consumers of news and social media, play in the propaganda strategy. Or, for that matter, for how long this has been happening.
To try and get to grips with what’s going on in international propaganda wars, it’s important to note the Ukrainian propaganda war itself has been active for many years now. Here are some early examples c. 2014/2015 — a time when propaganda as a concept was only just beginning to to re-emerge as a concept:
The longstanding legacy of such propaganda programmes is hugely relevant in contextualising the general confusion that has been engulfing most of us online this past decade.
Overall, journalists have been incredibly slow to understand the topography of this new information haze. They’ve also been pretty naive as to their own role in propagating disinformation (whether it be white or black) or in adding to the noise more generally.
This is almost certainly because most journalists don’t appreciate the lawless nature of the information environment they operate in. This is particularly the case for the younger generation of journalists, who are far more inclined to blur journalism with activism. This has made most of us targets for disinformation from all sorts of sides, from many different groups, with many different agendas. Private sector groups, NGOs, foreign governments, liberation movements, activists and so on.
Contrary to what the mainstream media would have you believe the market for disinformation is pretty liberalised. It’s not just a function of Russian hackers or Russian state-sponsored agents. Absolutely everyone is at it because absolutely anyone can be a player in the field with little to no entry cost. And anyone with a power agenda tends to want to be represented.
An early reflection of this weaponisation of digital content, at least in the context of boots on the ground conflict, came in the shape of the Syrian Electronic Army, which successfully targeted and hacked the Financial Times in 2013.
At the time we at the FT (and I remember the incident well) didn’t see it coming. Nor did we understand the scale of the potential repercussions when a hostile agent accesses a reputable newspaper’s social media accounts — these at the time were still considered a funny curio rather than a serious mechanism for distributing news.
Things have changed since then. And many protocols have been added. But by and large I think newsroom naivety persists — not least because so many journalists themselves have been unconsciously recruited into the cause of one-sided journalism.
If you really care about information integrity and if you really care about not pushing nation states blindly into a global confrontation that might lead to absolutely tragic loss of life, it’s important not to fall for the “you’re either with us or against us” trap. You have to remain discerning. You also have to make some effort to understand the broader battlefield.
In the current conflict a good start is reading this announcement from the Ukrainian Ministry of Culture regarding the formal creation of the ₩AW information regiment to counter Russia’s disinformation. And no I don’t have a clue why they’re using the Korean Won symbol in that acronym. Won for win? Who knows. There’s a lot of mysterious esoterica doing the rounds in the conflict.
But here is a key bit:
Ukrainians are observing an enormous amount of information generated and created by volunteers from various fields. And this is extremely important, because they all increase the information resistance of our country and show the truth to the whole world. Today, any video or photo is not just content. This is an increase in morale and evidence against the criminal actions of the Russian Federation against Ukraine. And we must raise their number so as not to leave the enemy any chance of propaganda lies,” commented Oleksandr Tkachenko, Minister of Culture and Information Policy of Ukraine.
And:
Thus, the information troops will create videos and texts in different languages, designed for different audiences: the world, Ukraine, Russia. We encourage Ukrainians to distribute videos and texts on all available platforms.
₩AW’s activities are authorized by the Office of the President and the Ministry of Culture and Information Policy. Therefore, all the information on their resources cannot contain either false appeals or propaganda.
The above would suggest Ukraine is only now recruiting a volunteer digital army designed to promote Ukrainian info and diffuse or obfuscate Russian info across many different platforms from Instagram to Youtube.
But the sophistication of this “official” effort — which boasts professionally packaged promotional materials provided for distribution to lazy journalists as well as a long list of additional resources — pales in comparison to the sophistication of the broader info-material that has been put out for so many years now.
Nor does it compare all that well to other overt state backed propaganda efforts. Compare this Ukrainian morale boosting video from the official resources named above to this far superior effort from the Azeris.
The variance in the quality of the propaganda doesn’t add up to me. Which leads me to suspect that the sophistication of the wider Ukrainian propaganda effort is down to other factors.
But there is an even bigger picture to consider too.
A cool objective and dispassionate analysis of the information battlefield will immediately clock that each side is currently calling each other’s info “disinformation” and their own side’s information the truth. Whose truth is the real truth in this context is very hard to figure out.
So much of it pertains to fundamental unknowables and ambiguities centred on individual intent, subjective value judgments and information we can’t possibly have access to without special clearance or eyewitness status. Ambiguous scenarios (such as the dual use nature of research being conducted at Ukrainian biolabs) make for the best ingredients in propaganda campaigns precisely because the truth remains so hard to prove objectively.
The adage that one man’s freedom fighter is another man’s terrorist remains extremely relevant in that context.
It’s worth reminding that both the West and Russia have documented and verified history of using porkie pies for political end.
Now, I have no intent of becoming an apologist for Putin or feeding his propaganda, which is ample, sinister and expertly distributed. But it seems to me that as it stands our side is actively sabotaging itself in the information war thanks to some major schoolboy errors that risk us losing a lot of trust. Errors that really have no reason for being if we are indeed the good guys and Putin is as evil and contemptible as we are being told.
Here a few of the things that are irking me most in our communications:
- White propaganda is supposed to be based on truth. If larger than life stories are instead quickly being proven false, staged, or downright wrong this doesn’t exactly work in our favour. Lying to your own public so egregiously only causes “boy shouts wolf” syndrome. People eventually stop believing the positive stories and start suspecting the worse. Worse still, they start distrusting their leaders — the worst possible scenario in a conflict scenario. Rule number 1 of good propaganda: you’re not supposed to lie to your own people, just the enemy.
- The continuous positive affirmation at the end of all Ukrainian communiques that “We will definitely win” and “Glory to Ukraine!” is intended to boost morale, I get it. But it reads like something straight out of George Orwell or a “how to do totalitarianism” manual. We’re supposed to be fighting for liberalism – this messaging doesn’t sit well with me. Why are we blindly repeating it?
- If our propaganda is supposed to be white, why does it routinely make everyone feel anxious, disempowered and confused?
- Continuous corrections to the narrative and/or narrative collapse scenarios are happening all the time. But when they happen these shifts in popular perception don’t ever seem to be acknowledged publicly. Why? Instead policy makers, officials and media mouthpieces seem to resort to gaslighting tendencies focused on making us think they never pushed for the totally conflicting things they now distance themselves from. This only generates further distrust.
- In my little WW2 wartime propaganda book, sourced from publicly released National Archive documents, it says very clearly that if you lie too much the lies you engineer will eventually catch you out.
This is because reality always squares up against false narratives in the long run. Hence why spies and undercover agents are usually advised to base fake personalities or “legends” on as much truth as possible. Continuous inconsistencies and contradictions are usually a sure sign that someone is lying to you and eventually it’s hard to keep up with the lies you tell. Yes, it’s okay to change one’s mind and be up front about that change of heart, or to see complex nuance in a certain situations, but that’s very different to pushing two contradictory yet extremely decisive narratives at the same time. Doing that is either a sign of great incompetence or lying. So why does “our side” keep doing this? It makes no sense to me. We’re either being caught out by other people’s lies (and hence incompetent), lying or self-sabotaging on purpose. - Real journalists loathe the idea of simply repeating what other journalists say. Their natural inclination is to add to any story and/or angle it in a new way. That is why I am always very suspicious of mass-repeat pack journalism that simply echoes the same line all day long. Especially when it makes extremely confident assertions about scenarios journalists can’t possibly have had time to research properly yet.
- We either have principles or we don’t. Being okay with ethno nationalism in one context but not the other implies a lack of over-riding ideology or commitment to any particular cause. Adam Curtis did a great little doc that spoke to this point. It explained how Surkovian political technology on the Russian side strategically exploited Putin’s belief in nothing to keep everyone confused and powerless, and Putin himself in control. Are we just emulating the same process? Or did Surkov learn it from us?
The Ukrainians may be ahead on the information war for now, but unless the above points are addressed, I’m not convinced we “the West” will win the information war as a whole. The whataboutism force is too strong on both sides. The only way to cut through it, I think, will be to openly dedicate ourselves to some core principles, ideology and transparency again.
