World wide war on truth
Peter Pomerantsev brilliantly exposes how the internet is being used to to win elections, destroy reputations and forge new realitiess, writes Oscar Rickett
In October 2014, a drug gang in the Mexican town of Reynosa was caught in a shoot-out and one of their men was badly hurt. They kidnapped some doctors to treat the man and discovered that one of them – a middle-aged woman – was behind a Twitter account that had been attacking and exposing the gang.
They blew her face off, took some pictures and posted a couple of final messages, including this: “I realised that I found death in exchange for nothing. They are closer to us than you think.”
Social media once promised to right wrongs by shining light into dark corners. The truth would be a disinfectant. Information would set us free. In Reynosa, the free flow of information was staunched crudely and brutally.
Across the world, from the UK to the US, Russia to China, the Philippines to Syria, the truth – a fragile concept at
the best of times – is being drowned in information. This world is the subject of Peter Pomerantsev’s second book, This Is Not Propaganda. It comes after the Soviet-born journalist and London School of Economics fellow’s account of his life in Russia during the first decade of the century, Nothing is True and Everything is Possible, which was concerned with the often surreal ways in which the Kremlin looks to distort and manipulate reality.
In this new offering, Pomerantsev melds on-the-ground reporting with personal memoir – his parents were Soviet dissidents who ended up being forced to leave for the West – and philosophical investigation into a compelling account of how the internet is being used systematically by powerful actors to win elections, fight wars, destroy reputations and forge new realities.
In 2019, propaganda is not propaganda. Very often, there is no vision of the world being promoted. Instead, reality is undermined. Competing narratives are pumped into the atmosphere until you cannot be sure what is real and what is generated for the purposes of destabilisation.
In Ukraine – the site of an ongoing conflict between Ukraine and Russian-backed separatists following the Maidan uprising and the deposing of the pro-russian president, Viktor Yanukovych – Pomerantsev finds that war “used to be about capturing territory and planting flags, but something different was at play out here.” In the Donbass, a longneglected region in the country’s east, neither Moscow nor Kiev actually seems to want to govern.
Instead, Pomerantsev writes, “What actually happened on the ground was almost irrelevant; the two governments just needed enough footage to back their respective stories… It would be like a heavily scripted reality TV show if it weren’t for the very real deaths.” Or, as Vladimir Putin’s former spin doctor, Gleb Pavlovsky, says of the Russian state’s cyber campaigns: “It’s all just theatre for a world audience.”
Social media platforms are the perfect vehicle for such theatre and across the world it can be provided in industrial quantities. Pomerantsev’s reporting takes him to China, with its mass surveillance; the Philippines, and the city of trolls who put Rodrigo Duterte into power; and Mexico, where a campaigner who regularly receives death threats is told not to worry about it, because they come from teenagers who treat the online world as a game in which they can try on different personalities at will.
We hear, too, from some of the architects of Vote Leave’s information strategy, but if there is a weakness in this book it is that Pomerantsev ignores or glosses over the long history of propaganda produced in the name of “liberal democracy,” particularly in Britain and the United States.
Pomerantsev is very good at exposing the campaigns of disinformation carried out in the name of authoritarian nationalism or Soviet communism, but he shies away from drawing the reader’s attention to the propaganda produced by large corporations – the repression of climate science by oil companies, for example – or capitalist democracies. n
From the UK to the US, Russia to China, the Philippines to Syria, the truth is being drowned in information