As some of you will know, I've been accepted to a startup program in London called Entrepreneur First. I thought I'd share the content of the presentation I made during the final interview stage, which included an "unconference" and mentioned in the Wall Street Journal blog.
The topic of propaganda is near and dear to my heart, and is so extensive and far spread, whether on the topic of Ukraine or on the "health benefits" of tobacco and the effect of burning unprecedented amounts of fossil fuels. As someone mentioned, I seem to care a lot about the Truth. Well, I do.
---
Hi, I'm Sasha, and I'm originally from Ukraine. You've probably heard about my country. Back in the good old days, many people barely knew where my country was. Now everyone knows, because there is a war going on in the Eastern border regions of Lugansk and Donetsk, where my grandfather grew up.
This war, to a great extent, has been started and fuelled through the extensive use of propaganda. Propaganda has selected, distorted and even created fictitious information.
While the example I have given you is, I hope, compelling, it is not the only one. War has been waged with information and disinformation since long ago, and goes on today. The Cold War is a prime example. But to me, the Ukraine is closest to my heart, and the information war within it shocks me the most.
Perhaps the most disturbing story that circulated many of the main Russian channels was of a child in Sloviansk who was allegedly crucified by soldiers of the "evil Kiev junta". Other similar outright lies involved alleged promises to give two slaves and a piece of land to Ukrainian servicemen.
Not less harmful were news statements saying that the new government would ban the Russian language and arrest or kill infringers. And we should not be surprised that people who did not know better, that countless people in Kiev still speak Russian, would take arms to protect themselves from "fascists".
Less blatant, but even more effective has been the campaign of misinformation around the tragedy in Odessa on May the 2nd 2014. Kremlin media have effectively depicted the event as a murderous arson of the Trade Union’s building by “fascists” leading to the death of 40 people. These accounts generally ignore the preceding injuries and deaths of pro-Ukrainian activists by gunfire, and the passiveness or controversial acts of police tasked with upholding order. This distorted version of events has been a key catalyst in bringing Russian volunteers to fight in Eastern Ukraine.
So strong is the effect of propaganda that after the shooting down of the MH17, an educated friend of mine living in Russia shared a blog post, which wondered if the people on the plane might have been the corpses of the MH370 passengers, planted there by the CIA. A Dutch friend is convinced that the plane was shot down by an Su-25 fighter plane that can't operate at the height of a Boeing 777. Many other versions of events of varying fantasy circulated the web, each creating an alternative reality of the events.
All this disinformation comes from a wealth of channels. For Russian speakers, state-owned TV channels like Zvezda, Channel 1, LifeNews and paper and internet newspapers like Argumenty i Fakty or Pravda.ru. With viewerships in the millions, they influence most of Russia's public and adjacent states, like the Baltics, Belarus and Ukraine. For the wider world, online news and analysis resources like Russia Today, Sputnik International and the Centre for Research in Globalisation attempt to influence a wealth of Western readers. And closer to the physical realm, fake conferences and exhibitions like “Material Evidence” in New York.
These are but some of the many examples of lies and distortion that have kept this conflict alive and the volunteers, from both Ukraine and Russia, coming. This concept is not new of course, states always have demonised their enemies and appealed to their fear to make them fight. But the Internet has given the information war far greater power.
Just like the physical war, the information war is sustained by both volunteers and regular recruits. “Troll factories”, like the “Internet Research Agency” one recently exposed in St. Petersburg. The Agency, for instance, has some 40 rooms with professional “trolls” who post blogs and comment in support of the Kremlin, while posing as regular citizens of not only Russia, but also Western countries.
One of the greatest dangers of information wars, is that they are nearly invisible. On the one side, it does not cause direct physical damage as a mortar or a tank may do. On the other, their indirect impact makes defense more difficult, since one often does not realise he is being attacked. They divide people into parallel realities, breaking communication, and inciting fear and submission.
I could not help myself but be reminded of George Orwell's 1984, where rewriting of history is the norm, where thoughts are policed even more than actions, and war is peace, freedom is slavery and ignorance is strength. This is not the future I want to live in, and the simplest alternative, closing the internet, even if it were possible, would come at the expense of the freedom of speech, so how can one fight back and where?
So far, one of the better examples that I have seen in fighting propaganda has been the Ukrainian site StopFake. They have been analysing the largest sources of misinformation and debunking them. However their effort has relied on considerable manual analysis and fact checking, rendering it slow and selective.
Similar to Edward Snowden and WikiLeaks in the West, some whistle blowers have attempted to expose the Kremlin's involvement in the East, by discovering or collecting information about the war. Lev Shlosberg who spoke of secret funerals of Russian servicemen. Boris Nemtsov, who gathered publicly available information into a report linking the Kremlin to the war in Ukraine. The trouble with such efforts is that they are not merely manual, but are also dangerous to perform. Snowden is a fugitive, Shlosberg was beaten by thugs and Nemtsov was murdered next to the Kremlin.
Another example has been a webapp called TrolleyBust, who try to block trolls on Facebook using crowdsourcing of opinions and the analysis of communication with known propagandists, leading to a sort of recursive clustering of trolls. However their platform does not appear to be very robust and only targets one social platform.
Despite the great volume of propaganda circulating the Internet, this medium, in contrast to radio, TV and paper press, has a distinct advantage: Availability. We can gather, analyse and react to a great wealth of data.
Also, given the volume of propaganda, it is difficult and expensive to fight it through pure human labour. Machine learning perhaps the main way forward, for surely, if we can accurately classify spam vs. non-spam, why should we not be able to classify propaganda?
But to do so, we will have to leverage a wealth of different information, ranging from social networks, news articles, maps, books and images. And then we must combine it all. Not to mention surmounting the defenses that propagandists hide behind, such as IP proxies.
This is a great challenge with currently few ready answers, but hopefully we can start asking the right questions.
