Firehose of falsehood
- Pekka Kallioniemi, “In today’s #vatniksoup, I’ll be talking about the Russian style of online propaganda and disinformation, “Firehose of Falsehood”. It’s a commonly used Kremlin strategy for Russian information operations, which often prioritizes quantity over quality.”, May 4, 2023 (thread) (pdf)
Destroy and ridicule the idea of truth
“ The “firehose of falsehood” works not just by flooding voters with misinformation. It’s a “say anything, but don’t forget to say everything” model. You broadcast so many different messages that at least one will matter a LOT to a given voter. And they can contradict one another.
The Firehose of Falsehood: the Russian style of propaganda for an age of information abundance.
- High volume and multi-channel approach
- Shameless in its willingness to broadcast lies
- No commitment to, or requirement for consistency
- Rapid, continuous and repetitive messaging
- Point is not to persuade but to confuse and overwhelm
- Assumes a low trust environment and lowers it further
- Number of arguments matters more than their quality
- Drown out competing messages through sheer volume
- — Jay Rosen [1]
- Roman Skaskiw, “Nine Lessons of Russian Propaganda”, 2016: “3. Destroy and ridicule the idea of truth. Many people, including Peruvian statesman and Nobel Prize winning author Mario Vargo Llosa, have observed that Russian propaganda destroys meaning.”
Bothsidesism and whataboutism
“ russia is not squeaky clean. russia is what it is. And we are not ashamed of showing who we are.
- — Sergey Lavrov, “Lavrov: Russia is not squeaky clean and not ashamed”, 17 June 2022
The goal of russian propaganda with the firehose of falsehood is not to prove that russia is right, or that russia are the “good guys”. Indeed, they admit they’re not. The goal is to instill doubt about who the good guys are, or that there can be any, by creating confusion, chaos, complexity. russia might be bad, sure, but what about...
A case in point is the inviting, by russia, of Roger Waters to speak on their behalf at the United Nations. He didn’t deny russian aggression, that would be too obvious, too ridiculous, but... let’s add some lies to water it down: “The invasion of Ukraine by the Russian Federation was illegal. I condemn it in the strongest possible terms. Also, the Russian invasion of Ukraine was not unprovoked. So, I also condemn the provocateurs in the strongest possible terms.” See, all of sudden, the russian invasion of Ukraine is still wrong... but not so bad!
It might be hard to deny that Wagner are nazis or terrorists, or that russia is a corrupt, dictatorial regime, but what if instead there’s doubt about Ukraine having some issues too? Nobody’s perfect, right? Doesn’t even need to be proved, instilling doubt is enough in order to push for questioning US support for Ukraine. Bothsidesism is much easier to achieve: since no regime is ever flawless, as long as the firehose of falsehood can create reasonable doubt, why support either?
