In today’s #vatnik soup I’ll continue discussing propaganda and disinformation. During the information age, winning the online propaganda battle can be just as important as gaining the advantage on the traditional battlefields.

For example, 🇺🇦 is pretty much dependent on the modern weaponry from the West. These weapons will be delivered as long as the people support these efforts. If people either lose interest or start resisting them, the war will be prolonged and 🇷🇺’s war efforts become stronger.

Propaganda and disinformation are by no means new phenomena. Textual “fakes” have been around since the invention of writing, and already in Ancient Rome propaganda was spread through poems and texts imprinted on coins.

WW1 was the first war in which mass media played a significant role. Propaganda in mass media had two goals: keep up the morale and keep the people informed about what occured on the battlefield: bl.uk/world-war-one/…

In WW2 the efforts to demonize the opposite side became a popular thing. Nazi Germany depicted British troops as cowards and Russians as dehumanized beasts. Propaganda leaflets that contained demoralizing messages were dropped to enemy territories from planes.

Even programs like Lend-Lease required the support from the people, and this required effective propaganda.

In Russo-Ukrainian War, we haven’t really seen any technological breakthrough with propaganda and disinformation efforts.

Photo and video editing are still the most common way to spread disinformation, even though we saw some
creative use of video game material at the early stages of the war. We’ve seen photoshopped cocaine on Zelenskyy’s table, Same Hyde’s face on a Russian passport…

… fake Ukrainian fighter jets in MH17 related satellite images and Argentinian lawyers depicted as the “Ghost of Kyiv”. There’s also been a lot of images and videos where the context is changed. A video from military exercise in 🇫🇮 was descritbe as an preparation for war.

Photoshops are easy, fast and cheap to produce and they spread quickly around social media. Videos require much more effort, but we’ve seen a few. Crude and unbelievable deepfake video of Zelenskyy surrendering surfaced in March, 2022.

In the near future, most photos and videos will be done by AI. We already have algorithms such as Stable Diffusion and Dreambooth that create realistic looking photographs, and these algorithms become better all the time.

In near future, we will have interfaces that take commands such as “Ukrainian soldier burying a civilian in a forest” and then go on and create a
realistic depiction from this description.

That will truly be the age of confusion and mistrust.