Tell Me Lies, Tell Me Sweet Little Lies

Otherwise well-informed people have been taken in by Russian propaganda, which planted fictional stories about atrocities in Ukraine to justify the invasion

"File:2018-07-15 Sunflowers at Museum of Folk Architecture and Ethnography in Pyrohiv, Kyiv, Ukraine 5.jpg" by Maksym Kozlenko is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

As a practicing news reporter, I have many interesting conversations with generally well-informed people from Mondays to Fridays. As a rule of thumb, everyone tends to be much more insightful about their own industries than about affairs where they lack first-hand knowledge.

Over the last year or so, at least a couple of bright and well-educated high flyers from the worlds of business and finance have told me that Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was fully justified by the genocide of Russian speakers in the east of the country. There is only one problem with this claim: There was no genocide in Eastern Ukraine before the Russian invasion!

In the years before the invasion, Russian state-controlled media planted fake stories that would eventually justify a war in the minds of people who sought out its propaganda. One of the most infamous was an interview with a woman calling herself Galina Pyshniak, who claimed to be an eye-witness to a three-year-old boy being crucified by Ukrainian nationalists. It was debunked by independent fact-checkers within 24 hours, but Putin’s disinformation network had a much larger reach than the reality-based pushback. This should be irrelevant, but relativists will often treat issues like this as a popularity contest.

Some of the examples went off into science fiction territory, such as claims that Nazi zombies were fighting with the Ukrainian army in Donbas. Putin’s disinfo campaign also simultaneously used the word “genocide” to describe completely fictional atrocities, while undermining the power of the word by using it to describe much less serious matters, as discussed by the EU here.

How did otherwise bright and educated people fall for such brazen lies? The people who told me this were far from the stereotype of gullible conspiracy theorists. They are sophisticated people, who are never going to fall for low-status speculation about the Earth really being flat or Australia not existing.

Instead, both people made the same series of mistakes. First of all, they realized that the Western media is imperfect, which is obviously true. Secondly, to fill in the gaps, they both started consuming Putin’s disinfo, which is a slippery slope at best. Thirdly, they both started giving Russian propaganda the same weighting as articles in the Western media in their own minds. This is a huge mistake, in my opinion.

We need to think about feedback loops to understand why an equal weighting is dangerous. Not every article in every newspaper will be entirely true, obviously. However, if an article turns out to be false, the best news sources will find a way to backtrack, whether that is through formal corrections, letters to the editor, actions by a readers’ editor or follow-up stories that provide more context. This never happens on propaganda sites like RT, for obvious reasons.

Also, the Western media isn’t a monolith. Court documents have proved that Fox News deliberately misled its viewers about the 2020 election in the US. Other sections of the Western media are ruthlessly putting the boot into Fox. Here is one example of a critical article at a rival news source. Our long-standing advice at Sharpen Your Axe is to read a range of credible news sources and look for a consensus on what actually happened in the real world while mostly throwing away the commentary. The point is worth repeating.

Russian propaganda is infamous for just spurting out lots of random and semi-random pieces of disinfo and misinformation, with little attempt to connect the dots. However, what you will never see is one branch of the propaganda machine criticizing fictional stories from another branch. The basic idea is to see if anything gains traction with consumers of nonsense. If it does, all the branches will join in the fun.

The underlying strategy behind the disinfo is to weaken the West by dividing it while promoting extremist and populist voices. Liberal democracy is presented as illegitimate, while ruthless dictators are given a free pass. Any connection with reality is entirely coincidental; and independent fact-checkers are actively persecuted in Russia.

As a result, thoughtful people should give a much higher weighting to fact-checked information that is published by a wide range of credible news sources that strive to correct mistakes. Anything from a state-controlled propaganda source should be ignored, at best, or treated as fiction if you really do insist on keeping an eye on the field. Combining a wide range of credible news sources with good non-fiction books and public information will yield the best results.

In general terms, we should ground our approach to the news in skepticism. We should always emphasize doubt and uncertainty. We should check everything and then adjust our beliefs up and down along an imaginary sliding scale like Bayesians. Sadly, we will probably have to give up any pretensions to hidden knowledge allegedly making us special. In fact, being well-informed has much more to do with developing virtues like recognizing appropriate sources of information than it does to having access to secret knowledge.

If we take this approach, we can clearly see that the invasion of Ukraine was driven by a potent mix of Russian nationalism (and, yes, ideas matter) combined with old-fashioned imperialism and Putin’s need for a port that doesn’t freeze in winter. There might be other factors too, but without evidence, it is best to refrain from speculation. Finally, blaming the victim of a crime is never acceptable. Always blame the perpetrator! The comments are open. See you next week!

Further Reading

The people who make the series of mistakes discussed above are often distrustful of the free media in the West. They suspect that mainstream news sources fail to publish the whole truth. This is, of course, true. Journalists are constrained by claims that we can defend in court. Unlike conspiracy theorists, we aren’t meant to use our imaginations to fill in the blanks.

However, good methodology combined with patience can yield incredible reality-based investigations. One example is Nicole Perlroth’s deep years-long investigation into the murkiest corners of the infosecurity world. It yielded an excellent book called This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends, which takes a clear-eyed view of how exactly state-level actors (including the US and Russia) can exploit bugs in software. It is highly recommended.

Sharpen Your Axe is a project to develop a community who want to think critically about the media, conspiracy theories and current affairs without getting conned by gurus selling fringe views. Please subscribe to get this content in your inbox every week. Shares on social media are appreciated!

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Opinions expressed on Substack, Twitter, Mastodon and Post are those of Rupert Cocke as an individual and do not reflect the opinions or views of the organization where he works or its subsidiaries.