At the beginning of This is Not Propaganda, Peter Pomerantsev delivers a crushing indictment of the debased leadership that passes for normality in today’s world.
Vladimir Putin, Pomerantsev reminds us, promised to whack terrorists “while they are on the shitter”, Czech president Milos Zeman called for “pissing on the charred remains of Roma”, Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro told a female politician she was “too ugly” to be raped and, of course, Donald Trump boasted of grabbing women “by the pussy”.
This is Not Propaganda takes us on a journey around the world to explore how today’s authoritarian “strongmen” have found a useful tool in social media to continue such bully tactics online. In a journey that takes us to Estonia, Mexico, Ukraine, the Philippines, Syria, Russia, China and the United States, Pomerantsev shows just how deeply embedded the abuse of social media now is as a means of attaining and holding power.
Today’s government-backed disinformation campaigns are typically run out of call centres in which staff members each man dozens of fake social media personas. A dozen well-disguised fake accounts can potentially reach up to a million unsuspecting end users. This extraordinary reach of fake accounts is what gives online campaigns their power.
In this simple and inexpensive way, Pomerantsev explains, the powerful can create social media mobs to harass, smear and intimidate dissenting voices into silence, or discredit them with false accusations so that no one will listen to them.
The objective of such co-ordinated attacks is not simply to undermine the authority or objectivity of any particular individual or idea, however. The objective is to undermine the very ideas of objectivity and impartiality and to convince us all that truth is simply a matter of opinion. Once we are untethered from objective reality, as Brexit UK and Trump’s America are demonstrating, societies rapidly polarise and begin to disintegrate from within.
As Pomerantsev explains, the way that many social media platforms are designed feeds right into this Orwellian agenda. Social media platforms are typically designed to feed people more of the same type of content, regardless of its veracity.
Existing algorithms encourage extreme positions by rewarding those who post radical views with greater online attention. And the almost unlimited access to personal data that social media platforms currently have, and the licence they have in how to use that data, hands enormous power to those who would use it to influence our thoughts and behaviours.
It is abundantly clear that that power is now being used in ways that are highly detrimental to societies the world over. In perhaps the most insightful part of the book, Pomerantsev makes the link between the “strongman” humour quoted earlier and the ways in which today’s strongman leaders abuse social media.
Moral black holes are opening up everywhere
Their “humorous” banter about rape and murder, he writes, is aimed at degrading and dehumanising others by creating a space where all norms disappear. Similarly, on social media they create dystopic worlds where the primary intent is to exacerbate the phobias and prejudices of users. In both their real world and online pronouncements, today’s authoritarians reveal their psychopathology.
The consequences, on the streets and online, are alarmingly apparent. Look around, Pomerantsev writes, and moral black holes are opening up everywhere. Trump and the European populists portray women and children fleeing war and violence as terrorists and joke about the cruelty and suffering they are inflicting.
Powerful leaders openly mock the weak and disabled, disparage women, and valorise militarism and violence, while proclaiming that they do not need to heed the truth because the truth is what they say it is. Most perplexing of all, their masses of true believers agree.
We have seen this movie before and we know that it ends badly. But this time there is one clear difference. The authoritarian movements of the 20th century relied on a powerful ideology, be it communism, fascism or national socialism to engender and maintain mass support. This time, as the title of This is Not Propaganda makes clear, there is no ideology.
In the middle of the last century, Polish psychologist Andrew Lobaczewski argued that tyrants such as Hitler and Stalin used propaganda to disguise the fact that their real agenda was unfettered power for themselves and the ability to treat normal people with brutality and disdain.
Without the masking ideology, Lobaczewski wrote, nothing would remain except a naked and terrifying moral pathology. With the current crop of authoritarian leaders having dispensed with propaganda in favour of sewing cognitive and moral confusion, this, it seems, is where we are today.
This is Not Propaganda does not explore solutions to the problems posed by the weaponisation of social media by today’s populist authoritarians. But it does set out, eloquently and movingly, what is at stake. Pomerantsev is an accomplished storyteller and is adept at the use of visual imagery. In one of the most memorable images in the book, he describes a conversation with Mexican pro-democracy activist, Alberto Escorcia.
Escorcia describes how he was monitoring an anti-government protest by visualising the online communications between the protestors. As the demonstrators gathered, his online image was one of a large ball of dots, each representing an individual protestor, with lines joining them representing their communications with one another.
Then, Escorcia explains, the government-sponsored fake accounts began their online attacks. What happened next was that the protestors stopped communicating with one another and turned instead to defend themselves by responding to their attackers. As they did so, the thick lines representing the interactions between the protestors became thinner and thinner and the sea of joined-up dots started to break apart.
“That’s what I mean”, Escorcia is quoted as saying, “when I say the internet is a great battle between love, interconnectedness on the one side, and fear, hate, disjointedness on the other.”
This Is Not Propaganda is essential reading on this online battle between love and hate, and powerful testimony that in this crucial fight, social media platforms can no longer be allowed to sit on the fence.
Ian Hughes is a senior research fellow at the MaREI Centre, Environmental Research Institute at UCC and author of Disordered Minds: How Dangerous Personalities are Destroying Democracy.
