The Net Delusion - Evgeny Morozov [78]
The Revolutionary Guards, too, have been aggressive in cyberspace. In late 2008, they even pledged to launch 10,000 blogs under the supervision of the paramilitary Basij forces to counter the secular bloggers. All of this could come in quite handy during emergencies. The most remarkable—but also the most overlooked—fact about Iran’s Twitter Revolution was that two weeks after the protests began, the number of pro-government messages on Twitter increased two-hundred-fold compared with the period immediately after the election. And most likely this was not because Iran’s Twitterati suddenly fell in love with Ahmadinejad.
Small Doses of Propaganda Are Still Bad for You
Whether they steer public opinion by training an army of Fifty-Centers—masking themselves as the “real” voices of the people, on a crusade to expose the biased and Western-funded opinions of those opposing the government—or by empowering a number of charismatic Internet personalities like Rykov or Sergeyeva, authoritarian governments have proved remarkably adept at shaping the direction, if not always the outcome, of most sensitive online conversations.
Obviously, not all of these schemes work. Some of the online propaganda efforts are still clumsy, as the “elude the cat” episode demonstrates; some cannot entirely diffuse social discontent because spinning efforts come too late or the issue is so big that no propaganda can suppress it. Yet it’s high time that we disabuse ourselves of the naïve belief that the Internet makes it easier to see the truth and avoid government shaping of news agenda. The fact that public discourse in the Internet era has become decentralized—allowing everyone to produce and disseminate their own views and opinions at almost no cost—does not by itself herald an era of transparency and honesty.
The existing imbalance of power between state structures and their opponents means that from the beginning the more powerful side—in virtually all cases, the state—is better positioned to take advantage of this new decentralized environment. Decentralization, if anything, creates more points of leverage over the public discourse, which, under certain conditions, can make it easier and cheaper to implant desired ideas into the national conversation.
Free and democratic societies do not have much to boast of here either. It’s the Internet culture that we have to thank for the persistence of many recent urban myths, from the idea of “death panels” to the belief that climate change is a hoax. And these otherwise crazy ideas persist even in the absence of a well-funded propaganda office; the dynamics of collective belief under authoritarian conditions could make truth even harder to establish (not to mention preserve).
It’s not the New York Times that those living under authoritarian conditions hold up as a benchmark against what they read online; it’s that original bastion of fair and balanced reporting, the newspaper Pravda. And compared to Pravda (which means “truth” in Russian) or Izvestiya (another highly propagandist paper of the Communist regime; its name means “news”), almost anything ever published online—no matter how anonymous or profane—looks more believable. The old Soviet joke said it best: “In the Truth (Pravda) there is no news, and in the News (Izvestiya) there is no truth.” Today, most people in authoritarian countries are operating in a media environment where there is some truth and there is some news, but the exact balance is unclear, and misjudgments are inevitable.
It’s not surprising, then, that surveys continuously reveal that Russians trust what they read online more than what they hear on television or read in newspapers (and not just Russians—plenty of Americans still seem to believe that Barack Obama was born in Kenya). History has made them intimately familiar with the methods of Pravda-based propaganda—and it takes some imagination and experience with Internet culture