There are nowadays many publications worldwide about the information war Russia started against Ukraine. But very few of them in media go in detail on how the Russian propaganda can be dealt with. This is true even though we have the new Ministry of Information Policy established, which should have formulated the strategy and offered concrete tools on countering propaganda.
However, the problem is extremely important for our country. In particular, Geoffrey R. Pyatt, Ambassador of the US, said during the “Journalism in Conditions of Information Warfare: Challenges for the Profession” discussion, which took place in the America House. “When I look back at this two-year period of transformation Ukraine has lived through, I think one of the most important and unanticipated aspects of it was the information warfare. It is the way which the Kremlin has chosen to weaponize information as part of its strategy to deny Ukraine and Ukrainian people the choice about their future; but also to wage war. This is something, which has implications on how all of us in the Euro-Atlantic community should think of our relationships with Russia. It’s also very important in terms of thinking about how to make Ukraine successful – that is to say, the modern, European, democratic Ukraine that the Ukrainian people have chosen and demanded – and it is not going to happen unless the government can be effective in getting their story out; unless the government resists the narratives the Kremlin has used as part of this campaign of dividing us which we have seen in Washington and all across Europe,” said the diplomat.
Meanwhile, Anne Applebaum, American journalist, author of the book Gulag: A History, shared her thoughts on how to find an antidote to propaganda. “Just to explain what my ‘Beyond Propaganda’ project has been over the past year,” she said. “Me and a couple of colleagues have tried to understand what is the nature of modern propaganda. And we don’t even like the word propaganda, we prefer disinformation.” According to her, disinformation has a two-fold aim. “One of the goals is undermining people’s faith in the media in general. So that when they watch television or read the newspaper, they don’t believe anything. The most brilliant example of how this worked was following the crash of the Malaysian airliner past year, when the Russian response was not to say ‘we didn’t do it.’ Their response was to put out fifteen different theories about how it was done, ranging from plausible to implausible. Ukrainian plane has shot this plane out of the sky, or it was a plot created by the Malaysian airline itself, there are all kinds of theories. And the point of all this was to create a sense that this was a story with no explanation and there would never be any answer. Somebody, I think from Radio Free Europe, did an interview in Moscow a few days later with people on the street, asking them who shot down the plane, and most people said ‘I don’t know and will never know.’ And of course the purpose of the propaganda was to cover up even the idea that there could be the real explanation and people who could be really responsible. Another goal is to create a moral equivalence, and I’ve seen this done many times. They say: okay, Putin is corrupt, but you’re corrupt too, you’re corrupt in exactly the same way. There is no difference between Russia and the West, it’s all just propaganda. It’s an attempt to show that there are no differences between systems, everything is all the same, and it’s a very cynical way of looking at the world,” explained Applebaum.
She drew attention to the phenomenon of using fake news. In the world of the Internet and the advance of media technology, it is much easier to create a fake photo and fake news stories; to publish fake experts, phony websites and think tanks, to cite false sources of information of every kind. “Part of what we’ve tried to do was figuring out what it is, what are these phenomena and trying to describe them,” continued the journalist. “The second thing we tried to think about was what institutions should fight it, what are the correct responses. In case of Soviet-style propaganda you could come back with counter-propaganda and present an alternate narrative that was more attractive – more or less, we have democracy, we have McDonalds, we have big cars, and we have Jackson Pollock and modern art, and that was opposed to what you had, and it was a sort of contest you could have in 1960s and 1970s. It doesn’t work anymore either. So, the question is how do you fight it and which institution should do it, what is the right response from government? And the right answer: is it always the state? Whereas in the olden days you founded the radio Free Europe, and radio Svoboda, and that were the things that would do counter-propaganda. That seems now insufficient and maybe also ineffective in a way that it wasn’t before. You need a kind of multiple solutions; you need some solutions that come from civil society, and some that come from television producers. And maybe the right way is to respond through the creation and sponsorship of things like Stopfake. We originally had the idea that there should be a kind of handbook, a guide for disinformation; but now more and more I think that there ought to be a reliable website where you can check the story that looks phishy, some source you could check it against. And there exists a little bit of that now, like the organizations Stopfake, Bellingcat, and others who do checking stories online.”
She is certain that civic education could be another part of this strategy – and it means educating not only children, but also adults. Internet is a huge arena for disinformation and fakes of any kind, from commercial to political. We must teach our children to distinguish the real news from fake ones, though the latter might look like the real thing. “Media literacy is a way of teaching people how to read the media. And as I explain it to my children, you could teach it in schools, universities, trade unions; you can teach it through all kinds of organizations. You can help people become literate and better at reading the newspapers, as you help them distinguish different kinds of stories. And help them at least learn how to compare this version of the news versus that version. And as I said I think that in the future it’s going to be an important part of children’s education. For if we want to teach people how to use banks, or what is a stock market, how do you have a pension plan, how to get through modern life financially, you may also want to teach them how to evaluate information,” asserted Applebaum.
