READY TO TROLL ...
As the world gets sucked into the false binary of Russia vs the colonial West, other sources of mis- and disinformation are waiting in the wings. We’d do well to pay attention to them
t’s at times like these that people say things like, “As George Orwell wrote in 1984, ‘the most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history’”.
It’s a really appropriate quote for two reasons. First, it makes such sense. If we look at the information warfare that Russia and its allies, official and opportunistic alike, have unleashed upon us as part of the invasion of Ukraine, we can see it in stark action.
The most egregious example is Russian President Vladimir Putin’s rambling history lesson about how Ukraine isn’t really a country, and that Russia was forced to “step in” to protect the people of the Donbas from the deadly threat posed by the “neo-Nazis and drug addicts” of Kyiv.
There are many example of Russia’s attempts to rewrite history as it happens. They’re trying to get us to call the invasion a military operation, and to paint Ukraine as the aggressor.
One of the more egregious claims is that Nato is an immediate threat because it encircles Russia. In reality, only 1,215km of Russia’s 20,000km-plus land border is shared with Nato members. And of the 14 countries that border Russia, only five are Nato members.
The second reason is that the quotation itself doesn’t appear in 1984, Orwell’s classic dystopian novel (or utopian, depending on whether you’re reading it from, say, a democratic perspective or a dictatorship’s). In fact, it appears he didn’t actually say it.
This is deliciously appropriate to its meaning. Indeed, obliterating an understanding of history entirely is even more effective a dictatorial device than merely rewriting it.
IWhen you see the responses from some South Africans to things like the removal of Russian state-owned television channel RT from DStv’s platform, you can only wonder just how much damage our broken education system has done to our country.
The ANC, for one, has condemned MultiChoice, apparently unable to grasp that the feed had been cut off by the supplier due to EU sanctions.
In response to this perfectly reasonable explanation, the party appeared to imagine that the
What it means: There are many examples of Russia’s attempts to rewrite history as it happens: to call the invasion a military operation, and to present Nato as an immediate threat
EU needs to answer to SA, and that MultiChoice was making it all up.
“The reasons conveyed by MultiChoice in seeking to justify this censorship act are quite bizarre and lack any legal and humane justification,” the ANC said. “Stifling the plurality and diversity of views undermines internationally agreed principles on freedom of speech, choice and association. The ANC condemns any form of bias by media conglomerates in SA which limits the plurality and diversity of views. Even at this late hour, the EU must still provide legal justification for this course of action.”
“Even at this late hour …” I’m not even sure what that means.
And just to underscore how weak the ANC’s understanding of reality is, the organisation’s national spokesperson, Pule Mabe, said: “The ANC also calls on MultiChoice to reconsider its decision and immediately reinstate Russian TV on its platform.”
Can the party not grasp that it wasn’t MultiChoice’s decision and that, given Naspers’s Russian
holdings, conspiracy theorists would suggest it may have been more likely the group would have kept RT broadcasting?
But as many have pointed out, information influence operations are not just a characteristic of one side in a conflict, but all the sides. The ideological landscape in SA has become one where it’s either side with Russia because you mistrust the West, or vigorously defend the
West because you realise that letting the Russian Economic Transformation factions dominate the conversation means their mission to erode our democratic values will get a boost.
But while we’re concentrating on making sense of the most obvious sides of the information war, like Russia, the US and assorted European nations, we might be taking our eye off the vultures circling and waiting to pick over the inevitable corpses.
One such vulture — metaphorically speaking, I hasten to add — is China.
You’re likely to have been following the narrative of how the Brics nations have responded to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Those responses have been mixed. The Brics bloc’s New Development Bank, established by Brazil, Russia, India, China and SA to mobilise resources for infrastructure and sustainable development projects in Brics countries, for example, has put on hold all its projects in Russia and Belarus.
Doublethink Lab, an organisation that maps online information operation mechanisms and digital authoritarianism, has a digital observatory dedicated to documenting Chinese misinformation that is deployed within that country. As Doublethink describes it, the group presents “important observations from the Mandarin-language information environment pertaining to the Ukraine-Russia conflict that may involve public opinion manipulation or information operations”.
It presents some fascinating examples of how the Chinese government’s propagandists are apparently using the flow of information around the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Before we delve into that, it’s worth remembering why China’s response to the Russian invasion is important. Russia launched the invasion only weeks after President Xi Jinping hosted Putin at the Winter Olympics in Beijing, where he publicly declared their friendship had “no limits”.
And as Fortune magazine puts it, Russia’s “strategic partnership” with China meant “the sight of Russian tanks rolling towards Kyiv invited anguished speculation that Taiwan — an independently governed island over which Beijing claims sovereignty — might be next”.
The relationship between Russian propaganda about Ukraine, and how Chinese propaganda about Taiwan takes advantage of it, can sometimes be blatant. On Chinese social media platform Weibo, which has about 450-million active users, the top 15 items on the hot search list almost all pertain to the Ukraine-Russia conflict.
But as Doublethink points out, they include tags such as “Little Taiwan boy [an account name] repeatedly insists they will forever love the ancestral motherland”. And posts and videos claim the People’s Republic of China (PRC) government “is flying PRC nationals out of Ukraine, and that Taiwanese will be taken care of if they have a ‘Taiwan compatriot visa’ (issued by the PRC government to Taiwanese who travel to the PRC)”.
Obliterating an understanding of history entirely is even more effective a dictatorial device than merely rewriting it
To set the scene: where other major world leaders have all commented on the war, Xi has made no public remarks, except for one report referencing him speaking to Putin just after the war started.
The Chinese media has been more overt, consistently pushing Russian narratives about the war, and restricting what sort of information gets put in front of the Chinese people.
For example, the address by Paralympic chair Andrew Parsons at the opening ceremony of the Beijing Winter Paralympics, which highlighted a call for peace and opposition to the Russian invasion, was not translated live on air by China Central Television, and was later taken down altogether.
Chinese online video-sharing platform Xigua Video, which has 131-million monthly users, ran a video accusing the BBC of falsifying a video of Russian artillery hitting a Ukrainian residential area. In an echo of how some of our own local trolls are accusing Western media of being a cause of the conflict, the Xigua video claimed Western news and social media are invested in keeping the crisis going.
And in a stark reminder of how fact-checking of its own media can be turned against ethical media, Chinese media is using fact-checked results conducted by Western media to attack the integrity of information shared by Western sources.
There are many other examples, but these few illustrate how vast is the ocean of misinformation, disinformation and just plain propaganda. While we’re being co-opted into the entirely false binary that is the “Russia vs colonial West” narrative, many other actors are getting their troll armies lined up and ready to go.
And if we have a governing party and civil society that choose to misunderstand simple reality, or are too naive to understand when they’re being played, we’re going to be sitting ducks when the (metaphorical) invasion kicks into gear.