This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality

by Peter Pomerantsev

“No troll factories exist,” the trolls wrote. “They are all fabrications by journalists paid by the enemies of the motherland.”

The previous methods of censorship had become untenable; unlike in the Soviet Union, few regimes can cut people off entirely from receiving or broadcasting information. However, the powerful had adapted. Now social media mobs and cyber militias harassed, smeared, and intimidated dissenting voices into silence or undermined trust in them. But because the connections between states and these campaigns were unclear, a regime could always claim that it had nothing to do with them, that the mobs were made up of private individuals exercising their freedom of expression.

That was the paradox of the new media. It was meant to take us further, into the future. Instead it had brought back the past: misogyny we had thought conquered; regimes thought laid to rest. The very form of social media scrambles time, place, proportion: terror attacks sit next to cat videos, the latest jokes surface next to old family photos. And the result was a sort of flattening, as if past and present were losing their relative perspectives.

Conspiracy theories have long been used to maintain power. The Soviet leadership saw capitalist and counterrevolutionary conspiracies everywhere; the Nazis, Jewish ones. But those conspiracies were used to buttress an ideology, whether class warfare for Communists, or race for Nazis. With today’s regimes, which struggle to formulate a single ideology, the idea that one lives in a world full of conspiracies becomes the worldview itself. Conspiracy theory replaces ideology with a mix of self-pity, paranoia, self-importance, and entertainment. Erdogan, Trump, Putin, Orbán, and the rest invoke conspiracies to explain events, often hinting at them without going so far as stating them directly, which only strengthens the sense that what they are establishing is a more general worldview than any single theory.

And as a worldview it grants those who subscribe to it certain rewards: if all the world is a conspiracy, then your own failures are no longer all your fault. The fact that you achieved less than you hoped for, that your life is a mess—it’s all the fault of the conspiracy.

Today bots, trolls, and cyborgs could simulate a climate of opinion, of support or hate, that was more insidious, more all-enveloping than the old broadcast media. And this simulation then would be reinforced as people modified their behavior to fall in line with what they thought was reality. An Oxford University analysis of bots calls this process “manufacturing consensus.”10 It is not that one online account changes someone’s mind; it’s that en masse they create an ersatz normality.

What the attacks definitely signaled was that despite entry into NATO, Estonia could not easily get away from its former colonial master. The NATO alliance is predicated on a single phrase, contained in Article 5 of the treaty, which holds that a military attack on one member is an attack on all. For all the invocations of the idea of the West, its practical, geopolitical expression is Article 5, a sentence, a promise. But what if that sentence was rendered meaningless? Russia could not risk a military war with NATO, but what if the attack was non-military and non-attributable?

Ashmanov’s big idea is “information sovereignty,” government control over what information reaches the population, which China is well on the way to achieving, and which the West, he claims, tries to disguise with talk about freedom of speech. Information sovereignty can’t be achieved, he argues, without an ideology to defend your rationale for letting some streams of information through and others not.10

“If your ideology is imported, as with liberalism, then you are always playing to foreign rules, which are always being changed by someone else. You can always be called guilty, breaking the rules of democracy. Ideology should be created inside a country, like operational systems, rockets, insulin and grain. Supported and defended by information sovereignty.”11 Information, in this worldview, precedes essence. First, you have an information warfare aim and then you create an ideology to fit it. Whether the ideology is right or wrong is irrelevant; it just needs to serve a tactical function. Instead of clashing ideas leading to a Cold War, here information war necessitates the creation of ideologies. America, this argument goes, has cynically used democracy as an information weapon to undermine other countries while ignoring much worse behavior in allies.

Defining the argument means winning it. If you tell someone not to think of an elephant, they will end up thinking of an elephant. “When we negate a frame, we evoke the frame… when you are arguing against the other side, do not use their language. Their language picks out a frame—and it won’t be the frame you want.”

If all information is seen as part of a war, out go any dreams of a global information space where ideas flow freely, bolstering deliberative democracy. Instead, the best future one can hope for is an “information peace” in which each side respects the other’s information sovereignty: a favored concept of both Beijing and Moscow, and essentially a cover for censorship.

War used to be about capturing territory and planting flags, but something different was at play out here. Moscow needed to create a narrative about how pro-democracy revolutions like the Maidan lead to chaos and civil war. Kiev needed to show that separatism leads to misery. What actually happened on the ground was almost irrelevant—the two governments just needed enough footage to back their respective stories. Propaganda has always accompanied war, usually as a handmaiden to the actual fighting. But the information age means that this equation has been flipped: military operations are now handmaidens to the more important information effect.

The insurmountable problem is that for all the technology companies’ statements of concern about this problem, it’s the way their platforms are designed and how they make money that create an environment in which accuracy, fairness, and impartiality are at best secondary.

The need for facts is predicated on the notion of an evidence-based future.

One is, perhaps, not very aware in childhood that one is part of vast experiments in the culture, the mindset, the language that make politics possible.

“Populism is not an ideology, it is a strategy,”

The nature of social media encourages “populism as a strategy.” Look at things from the point of view of the spin doctor. Social media users are organized through vastly different interests: animal rights and hospitals, guns and gardening, immigration and parenting and modern art. Some of these interests might be overtly political while others are personal. Your aim is to reach out to these different groups in different ways, tying the voting behavior you want to what they care about the most.

We are living in a time of pop-up populism, when the meaning of “the people” is in flux, we are constantly redefining who counts as an insider or an outsider, and what it means to belong is never certain, as political identities burst and then are remade as something else. And in this game, the one who wins will be the one who can be most supple, rearranging the iron filings of disparate interests around new magnets of meaning.

Soviet demographic categories like “workers,” “collective farmers,” and “intelligentsia” were useless to win elections. Pavlovsky experimented with a different approach to assembling an electorate. Instead of focusing on ideological argument, he targeted different, often conflicting, social groups and began to collect them like a Russian doll. It didn’t matter what their opinions were; he just needed to gather enough of them. “You collect them for a short period, literally for a moment, but so that they all vote together for one person. To do this, you need to build a fairy tale that will be common to all of them.”

“The Cold War split global civilization into two alternative forms, both of which promised people a better future,” he told me when I interviewed him from the BBC’s studios. “The Soviet Union undoubtedly lost. But then, there appeared a strange Western utopia with no alternative. This utopia was ruled over by economic technocrats who could do no wrong. Then that collapsed.” In this identity and ideological flux, political campaigners in the West have ended up adopting strategies strikingly similar to Pavlovsky’s, though enhanced by social media and big data. “I think that Russia was the first to go this way, and the West is now catching up in this regard. In general, the West can be considered to follow a proto-Putinism of sorts,” remarked Pavlovsky, wryly. This is the great paradox of the end of the Cold War: the future, or rather the futureless present, arrived first in Russia. We in the West are just catching up. Maybe there’s a simple cultural logic at work here. If our own ideological coherence was based partly on opposition to the Soviet Union’s, when it collapsed, we inevitably would follow.

I am surrounded by dead words. Or, to be more precise, the association of words and images, stories and meanings that I inherited have lost their power. The sight of a statue of a dictator being pulled down is still important to those people who lived under him, but I don’t instantly connect to a story of ever greater freedom anymore. Millions of people out on the streets of a city à la 1989 don’t immediately signify a happy future. Perhaps it’s not a coincidence that social media’s favorite genre is memes: pictures that can be defaced by people with new phrases that change the meaning of the image, symptoms of a time when sense is ceaselessly unstable. So that one might take a picture of a pipe and write beneath it: “This is not a pipe.”