Not everything is relative: disinformation and its favorite loopholes
One may say that, in Ukraine, we are living the first full social media war. A fair critique would be that we are living the first white, Christian social media war, once that Middle East and Africa went through horrendous tragedies with far less interest from white Europe and America. However, the relativisation of values when evaluating what happens in the Kyiv suburbs reveals the critical weakness that makes misinformation feasible. The flow of untruths engineered in the media — social or otherwise — does not survive the lack of an ingredient: the individual’s need to have their point of view endorsed by an external agent.
The subtle or non-existent condemnation of Putin’s war is sustained by many pleas. Not all of them are false. For example, questioning what the US would do if Chinese missiles were deployed in Mexico is a valid question. Asking why hasn’t Saudi Arabia been heavily sanctioned for taking a primary role in the Yemen civil war is reasonable as well. The list that illustrates how hypocritical foreign affairs is really long, and hardly deniable. What it is not is a green card to relativize the events in Ukraine. International politics has always been, and it will always be, an output made of hypocrisy where the powerful subdue the weak.
Take Brazil, for example. The country’s president, Jair Bolsonaro, declared his support to Russia. For him, Putin is a staunch conservative fighting a wave of leftist invaders led by the US and the European Union. Bolsonaro’s nemesis, Luis Inacio Lula da Silva’s party, the Labour Party or PT, also released a note defending Russia and blaming the US imperialism for the war (the note has been quickly deleted after the outcry). For opposite reasons, both found shelter to adapt the truth to justify their own beliefs.
In social media, the debate festers, plunged into a mixture of ignorance, denial and convenience. Within their filter bubbles, people propose their views from saying that Trump was the only US president among the last five that has not started a war until condemning the existence of a Nazi conspiracy led by the Jewish president Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
The missing part of the debate is, sadly, the basics. For example: when accusing the BBC or the American media for their coverage, why seldom the accusers suggest checking non-aligned sources like the Qatari-based Al Jazeera or the leftist Le Monde Diplomatique? Why don’t Putin’s apologists, even the moderate ones, mention that the entire independent media in Russia and Belarus has been forcibly silenced, while in the rest of Europe, even the media not aligned with conservative values condemn the Kremlin to the same extent as large news corporations?
The answer is: because they can’t. The fragmentation of media broke the homogeneity of the information flows and allowed clusters and dark corners where information can be twisted and turned, hidden by different patterns of visualisation. Bad information actors need little effort to spread disinformation because the optimised networks to do so are already deployed after years of operation of customised reverberation boxes
Such boxes can transport aspects of reality that encourage self-confirmation and positive response patterns so valuable to the revenues of technology giants. In a nutshell: people deliberately spread from half-truths to full disinformation not necessarily because they are evil or stupid. They do it because their brains adopted the gratification frameworks fitting their inner beliefs. They simply cannot believe they are wrong.
In the future, any historian will have an immense amount of information to work with and easily observe how the Kremlin and its minions, transformed into fully-fledged dictatorships, reigned with freedom of speech forbidden, dissenters arrested, beaten or killed and how Russia has been throwned into a path of isolation and economic deterioration. Nonetheless, currently, not even societies across the world that are not under surveillance, like Brazil, US or India, are equipped to fight disinformation, nor are capable to understand how deep they are susceptible to disinformation. Studies show that people who identify themselves as highly skilled to detect disinformation have a greater likelihood to fall prey to fake news. They are willing victims of the disinformation trap.
Regarding the war in Ukraine, there are no space for doubts regarding what matters. Russia violated all agreements of international law, from the UN Charter until the wartime conventions of not bombing civilian areas. The Russian accusations that Ukraine shelters nazis, host US-financed labs to develop chemical, biological or nuclear weapons or that Russian-speaking Ukrainians are victims of genocide are pure nonsense, and can be rebuffed by observers of all political views, from American hawks to historically Putin sympathisers like the recent rulers in Poland, Czech Republic or Poland. The imperialistic roots of US, UK and other Western countries (plus China, who is in silence enjoying the infighting of its enemies) are known for a long date, can be equally nasty, but cannot move the needle towards Russian “rights” to invade a sovereign country, poorly disguised by a Goebbelesque mish-mash of history to justify Russian rights over Ukraine. Chills are flowing in Europe due to the so many similarities between the triggers of this and the last two World Wars.
Regarding disinformation, we are living the first experience of a open military confrontation involving powerful countries with complete connectivity to follow from the most dramatic events regarding the total capacity of one side to manufacture a version of reality and impose it on its citizens under the sights of a gun. The deterioration of the informational environment set up by Putin to control the narrative within his country exposes how crucial is the need for us to develop decentralised systems that prevent key-holders from sealing populations in bubbles in spite of their determination. More than anything, the unfolding of a dramatic event such as a war has at least one positive purpose: try to establish landmarks that can convince audiences held hostage by the owners of the narratives that such situations do not share guilt and responsibility between the sides in equal measure. If these audiences prefer to remain under such narratives, it is their right, but they prevent them from speaking in the name of transparency or impartiality.
