5 Russian Propaganda Techniques. (Please read this. Thank You.) [View all]

[DetlefK]

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2017/8/20/1690714/-Three-Russian-propaganda-techniques-being-used-by-the-Trump-administration-and-how-to-fight-them

Vanity Fair wrote about the goal of toxic cynicism in Russian propaganda:

At the heart of this mind-set is the idea that there is no such thing as objective truth or even facts, because everything is spun or disguised to reflect advantageously on one group or another. “The whole idea of values has been thoroughly debased in Russia, to the extent that if you talk about Western values you’ll just get a laugh,” says Ben Nimmo, a research fellow at the Atlantic Council. This environment of toxic cynicism allows Putin’s word to be as good as anyone else’s, because according to Moscow’s worldview everyone, including and especially westerners, is a self-righteous hypocrite and a liar.

I hear this from conservatives all the time. They think that everything that comes from the left is some sort of spin. Therefore, any spin of their own is justified.





Whataboutism is a sly sideways ad hominem attack. It’s an appeal to hypocrisy. You think Nazis running over people in Charlottesville are bad? Well, what about Antifa?

...

No matter the issue, change the subject.

Russian journalist Alexey Kovalev wrote a viral post earlier this year in which he warned the American press corp about answers from the Whitehouse packed with “false moral equivalences and straight, undiluted bullshit.”

(This is a favorite of Putin. If he gets a question he doesn't like in an interview, he changes subjects by bombarding you with memorized statistics.)





The United States isn’t here yet, but one of the tactics used by Vladislav Surkov, the inventor of Putinism, is to try to co-opt narratives across all strata of politics and communities. The idea is that if you can control these narratives, they can be controlled to the advantage of those in charge.

Peter Pomerantsev wrote this about Surkov’s strategy in The Atlantic:

The brilliance of this new type of authoritarianism is that instead of simply oppressing opposition, as had been the case with 20th-century strains, it climbs inside all ideologies and movements, exploiting and rendering them absurd. One moment Surkov would fund civic forums and human-rights NGOs, the next he would quietly support nationalist movements that accuse the NGOs of being tools of the West. With a flourish he sponsored lavish arts festivals for the most provocative modern artists in Moscow, then supported Orthodox fundamentalists, dressed all in black and carrying crosses, who in turn attacked the modern-art exhibitions. The Kremlin’s idea is to own all forms of political discourse, to not let any independent movements develop outside of its walls.

The Kremlin switches messages at will to its advantage, climbing inside everything: European right-wing nationalists are seduced with an anti-EU message; the Far Left is co-opted with tales of fighting U.S. hegemony; U.S. religious conservatives are convinced by the Kremlin’s fight against homosexuality. And the result is an array of voices, working away at global audiences from different angles, producing a cumulative echo chamber of Kremlin support, all broadcast on RT.





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I would like to add a fourth one: lie by omission.

This is especially used by RT:
- First, they only cover stories that make the US look bad. RT doesn't even bother with hyping stories that make Russia look good. It's all about demonizing the US.
- Second, when they have a story, they cut away facts until the story has a narrative that makes the US look bad. The uninformed reader gets a (sometimes totally) wrong impression while RT is technically not lying.



And a fifth one: "I'm just asking questions!"

Andrew Feinberg used to write for the russian news-website "Sputnik" until he was fed up and quit. Why? He was fed up that his editor dictated to him what questions he was supposed to ask in press-conferences. Why is this important?

He was supposed to ask questions about rumors or questions that are are based on the premise that some rumor is true. Asking the question is not the goal: The goal is to give the rumor credibility by bringing it up. The goal is legitimizing a baseless claim by treating it like a well-known fact.
Sputnik and RT love to use a variant of this where they accuse the "mainstream-media" of censorship by not reporting about certain stories.

Example: "Why isn't the mainstream-media investigating Hillary Clinton's pedophile-ring???"
I have witnessed this myself. I got in a shouting-match with somebody from the anti-american Alt-Left about "Pizzagate". This was way, way after "Pizzagate" had fallen apart, but he insisted that journalists keep on investigating Hillary Clinton's connections to pedophiles until they can find that perfect, irrefutable, unfakable piece of evidence that clears her once and for all.
(He was also a 9/11-truther and couldn't think of one bad thing about Trump.)