The Lying Game
Putin’s online mischief uses an old playbook
‘FAKE news” isn’t new. It’s just our down-market term for propaganda. And the Russians have been the reigning masters of propaganda since Catherine the Great.
Indeed, the most-destructive and most-enduring single work of fake news was Russian in origin, linked to the czar’s secret police and spies: “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” a toxic anti-Semitic concoction embraced by Hitler yesterday and by Hamas today — as well as by our own ugliest extremists.
Last Sunday, The New York Times Magazine published a vital article explaining how Vladimir Putin’s regime used overt resources, such as government TV station RT, to disseminate fake news during the last US election campaign. But the Times reporting lacked historical context.
The uniquely Russian brew of mystical nationalism, fantastic lies and canny focus has been fermenting for centuries. The only thing that’s different now is the technology — a proliferation of global-reach, blink-of-an-eye dissemination means, from phony Facebook feeds to Internet trolls.
First printed in 1903, “The Protocols” was slow to catch on until spurred by the Russian Revolution and a shockwave of antiJewish fervor fanned by a perceived association with revolutionaries.
Today’s lies can span the world in seconds, get picked up by third-party sites in minutes and mainstream headlines in hours.
Russian mastery of propaganda — of lies promoted for strategic advantage — has been impervious to regime change, too. When Vladimir Lenin took power, key security players just changed uniforms. The term “Bolshevik” itself was grand propaganda: It means “of the majority.” The Bolsheviks were, in fact, a small minority, but they managed to label their far-more-numerous opponents “Mensheviks,” “of the minority.”
Lenin was the original Don Draper.
By the 1930s, as millions of Ukrainians starved to death, Soviet fake news peaked. The New York Times’ Russia correspondent, Walter Duranty, wrote glowing tributes to the benevolent progress of Stalin’s regime — complete fabrications, all — and got a Pulitzer for his “reporting.” Fake news has a distinguished pedigree.
In the depths of the Cold War, Russian propaganda intensified, abetted by naïve Westerners parading to “ban the bomb.” But Moscow’s Cold War fake news was a harder sell, as the Iron Curtain descended and the world witnessed brutal Soviet interventions in East Germany (1953), Hungary (1956), Czechoslovakia (1968) and Poland (several times).
By the 1980s, Soviet propaganda shifted its focus from proclaiming the threadbare glories of Communism to simply attacking the United States. One of its ugliest gambits was planting the lie that the CIA had developed AIDS to kill blacks.
Then the Soviet Union collapsed, and fake news stalled. Until Putin arrived.
Last year, we got The Protocols of the Elders of Putin, a broad, deep-reaching assault on our electoral system and a triumph that only went bad when Western intelligence services and the much-maligned “mainstream media” exposed it.
Yet, Russia was so successful in manipulating our system that a number of conservative media figures derided our intelligence agencies and insisted reports of Russian activities were “fake news.” Even today, a few career conservatives dismiss Russian chicanery as “a nothingburger.” Walter Duranty is back.
We needn’t have been surprised. Longtime Russia watchers warned of interference early on. But no one listened. We allowed angry partisanship to blind us.
So what can we do to prevent further Russian manipulation of our people and system of government?
We need revolutionary thinking about the Internet. Instead of prostituting every last shred of principle to add billions in profits to billions, the tech industry needs to shift to “provenance transparency,” unmasking the sources of all public Internet postings. No more “TrueRebel69” posing as an Arkansas mom from a keyboard in Archangelsk.
If Big Tech is too greedy, Congress must legislate. We need to know who’s peddling that incendiary story about a race-charged gang-rape that never happened.
And Big Tech needs to go to war on bots. Internet companies want the pings, even if it undercuts our elections and system of government. Regulation may get a bad name, but the Internet needs it badly.
And the USA needs to get back in the business of telling our story. We’re the ones with the great — and true — tale to tell.
Unlike Putin and his legions of Russian trolls, we don’t need to push fake news to win.