4 ms·

What is being called "Disinformation Campaign" is simply one of the tools of politics since time immemorial.

• nkozyra 7y ago
  Yes and no. The "tool" here is the internet, effectively the most immediate form of mass communication we've ever known. The ease and efficacy of swaying opinion via this tool incites agents to utilize it more and more often. It has wider reach than, say, propaganda in film or distributed leaflets.
  • nmussy 7y ago
    I'm not completely convinced than its reach is that much wider than previous forms of media. Social networks definitely made the Internet more insidious, with your friends and other "real people" acting as a proxy for disinformation; it's personalized mass printed words and sounds.
  • luckylion 7y ago
    > the internet, effectively the most immediate form of mass communication we've ever known It's a multi-to-multi communication tool though, where a unidirectional medium like radio or TV allowed you to get the message out (while controlling that no other message went out), the internet is messy, there are competing messages and they aren't easily censored, you can't be sure to reach the intended recipient (back in the TV days, most people watched TV and there were only a limited amount of channels; even if you had the power to make the big media companies broadcast your message on the web, tons of people will not visit any of their sites in any given day), and you compete with cat pictures. It's communication by masses, not to masses. Traditionally, "mass communication" meant one-way-media usage to communicate to large parts of the audience.
• baybal2 7y ago
  I think people don't get the etymology. Propaganda is one thing, it was surely there "since time immemorial." Plain lies, and non-genuine political messaging is also from the same opera. What militarised disinformation is something on the whole new level though. The aim of disinformation is to make your enemies do blunders and mistakes. It can be ingeniously crafted, and aimed. For example, Soviets made deliberate decision to reduce secrecy for some of their submarines to warp impression of NATO naval intelligence, so as to sow discord in between political agendas in the West, all without employing any lie. And it worked surprisingly good according declassified US intelligence reports. Above all, it's about intellectually discombobulating your enemies, drowning them in lies, making them loose factual "anchor points" for decision making, and making them to disbelieve their own eyes and ears.
  • dsfyu404ed 7y ago
    >What militarised disinformation is something on the whole new level though People said the same thing about radio waves (whereas you can mostly stop print publications from crossing your borders and being published within them).
    • Quequau 7y ago
      Radio was a tool that was used extensively in the run to the Rwandan genocide against the Tutsi.
      • dsfyu404ed 7y ago
        I fail to see the relevance of that to this discussion. Radio was also used extensively by the various resistance movements in Europe during WW2. Technology is used by people to facilitate the things those people want to do, good, evil or in-between. "Militarized Disinformation" takes different forms in the internet age but the internet has not revolutionized lying at scale by any means. It just makes everything travel faster.