WE’RE ALL VICTIMS OF THE INFORMATION WARS
Posted: 11th July 2022
Vladimir Putin’s propaganda in the Ukraine war feeds on the growing distrust among Western audiences of their own official and mainstream narratives. The generalised culture of lying has been fuelled by the West’s own disinformation.
6 JULY 2022
Moscow calling: Vladimir Putin talks on a telephone during an election. (Photo: Kremlin)It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Digital technologies of communication were supposed to liberate us from the effects of propaganda, censorship and the ‘fog of war’.
And yet, from the outset, the war in Ukraine has produced a catalogue of demonstrable falsehoods and questionable truths on all sides.
Of course, there’s nothing new about states waging information wars. What is relatively new though is the way in which the term disinformation has itself become intensely weaponised, with far reaching implications for press freedom in Russia, Ukraine and the West.
There’s perhaps no better illustration of the kind of hysterical and knee-jerk posturing on this issue than the US government’s new Disinformation Governance Board, which wasdisbanded last month almost as quickly as it was established a few weeks prior.