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]
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 firehood of falsehood is not to prove that russia is right, or the “good guys”. The goal is to instill doubt by creating confusion, chaos, complexity. russia might be bad, sure, but what about... it might be hard to disprove that Wagner are nazis or terrorists, or that russia is a corrupt, dictatorial regime, but what if 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. Bothsideism is easier to attain: no regime is perfect, as long as there’s doubt, why support either?
