Whenever any sort of disinformation, fake news and propaganda is discussed I feel like all the talk about it always get’s stuck on it’s existence. Like “the russians are spreading misinformation in europe” or whatever. Which, sure, they do, how the fuck is there no talk about what to do of it?
Cause the way I see it, there’s two options, either there’s no more russia or whatever other rivaling hegemonial power follows up, forever, or alternatively you ask the question about why the fuck this shit lands in the first place and make sure it doesn’t
The thing about lying is that it requires a degree of trust to work.
When you have trust, it’s easy to lie.
When you don’t have trust, you don’t get away with lying.
There are two types of propaganda:
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White propaganda, i.e. propaganda that is true. You emphasize truths that help your point of view.
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Black propaganda, i.e. propaganda that is false. Lying.
When governments communicate to their own people, there is usually a significant degree of implicit trust. This is why governments are so easily able to simply lie to their own people and still be believed.
When governments communicate to an “enemy” population, the level of trust is very low. So they can’t get away with lying which means, when seeking to influence a hostile population, you need to ensure your propaganda contains a high degree of truth and support your POV much like a lawyer selectively emphasizing the most beneficial facts while being careful not to be caught in a credibility destroying lie since credibility is so low to begin with.
Russian “disinformation” is so successful because it’s directed towards a hostile population and so must therefore contain a high degree of truth to compensate for the lack of implicit trust.
It can be selective, of course, and they obviously are going to be extremely biased about which facts they emphasize and how they frame them. But since their credibility within the west is so low they can’t “spend” credibility on lying.
In contrast western governments have a high degree of implicit trust so they can afford to spend credibility on lies. When caught in a lie they might take some credibility hit but they have sufficiently high credibility to be able to spin the lie into something plausible (“what I really meant was within this specific instance”) or even to pretend it was an honest mistake rather than a lie. So domestic propaganda can get away with a low truth content.
Russian propaganda is persuasive and finds an audience because when you really look at it, it’s usually true. At least true in terms of what it contains even if it is often a distortion in terms of what it omits.
Usually it will be simply discarded since the trust value is so low but when you really look at Russian claims (specifically claims made to western / non-Russian audiences) they’re usually simply true facts. Rarely the whole story and presented with spin but in the factual sense actually true.
Now, they’re much more free to lie to their own domestic audience of course and they do, but likewise a western government is much more free to lie to their own domestic audiences and they do.
Likewise, western propaganda directed at Russia usually emphasizes truths that are obvious to Russians. Corruption is a big one. Clearly a big issue that affects Russians so that truth is emphasized when western governments seek to sway Russians.
Foreign “disinformation” finds fertile ground because it’s often more factually true than domestic propaganda and its generally more factually true because it has to be, because they don’t have the implicit trust required to be able to lie.
Is there an alternative to white/black labelling here? Maybe just true propaganda and false propaganda?
It would be nice to avoid b/w labels but I’m not aware of another set for this binary.
“True” vs “false” doesn’t quite capture it since “true propaganda” would imply honesty or trustworthiness to me which isn’t correct either since “true propaganda” can be deceitful by omission.
Mearsheimer proposes 5 types of propaganda which is a more accurate model but then that’s too much extra fluff to make this single point.
Maybe propaganda of emphasis vs propaganda of lies ? Trust based lying vs emphasis of facts? I don’t know, it needs to be invented and popularized.
I think the fundamental problem here is that if you harden your populace against disinformation, it makes your own hegemony’s control more difficult. You need people to be happy to consume and believe disinformation to keep the wheels of the US hegemony functioning. If people in Europe were less willing to believe obvious lies, they might all be justifiably very angry at the USA for blowing up the NordStream, you know?
Every imperial media outlet would agree that the US blowing up Nord Stream is exactly the sort of “disinformation” that they want to harden their population against. The prevailing concern isn’t the accuracy of the information that a population is presented, the concern is who controls access to that information.
That would be a whataboutism, sweaty.
We’re expected to have opinions about things we know nothing about and have no experience with. People being expected to have an opinion on Ukraine or Russia, right this second, when they honestly don’t think about either of them and they’re not allowed to admit to it.
So, all the little propaganda campaigns that are always working to pump out noise eventually find everybody. Then, when a person is asked about something they have nor strong opinions about or experience with the first thing that pops into their head is something that was just background noise for months or years and gets repeated, adding to the propaganda noise that’s always humming away.
i like to say something like, “this country was constructed from the very beginning to be ruled by a tiny, powerful elite who claimed ownership of nearly all the land and a very large portion of the people. the strategy ability of a small group of rich people to frame the issues of the day and indoctrinate a great many others to repeat and enforce their values has been here for a long time.”
If anything, I think the heightened cultural emphasis on “propaganda” is a byproduct of the consolidation of who is permitted to define “truth” for a population. “Propaganda” is essentially any speech or idea that originates from outside or contradicts the established arbiter of “truth”. Whether or not a thing accurately reflects or conflicts with empirical reality has no bearing on whether it’s considered “propaganda”.
I don’t think “propaganda” is really a useful term anymore, if it ever was, to describe the accuracy or inaccuracy of a piece of information. It only really describes whether the effect that information has is helpful or harmful to a particular ruling class. It’s more a value judgement than a measure of accuracy.
