In the Land of Fiction and Fake News
Image by Alfred S. Campbell, via Library of Congress “Storytelling gives us the power to bring order to the chaos of the real under our own sign, and in this it isn’t very far from political power.” – Elena Ferrante
The Russian brand of fake news arrived in my life this way: In late June 2014, I was trading loving emails with a man I had been seeing. Travel had separated us, and we anxiously anticipated our reunion. These messages were sweet, down to noting the reverberation of shortening proximity.
On the eve of my return, he sent an email with an entirely different tone. He had dined with a friend. The friend had enlightened him about how the US had wronged Putin by essentially forcing him to invade Ukraine. After the dinner, the man I was dating had begun scouring the internet for more clues. He had no personal links to Ukraine. He worked in a mom-and-pop business in Brooklyn.
What he went on to express was not just an opposing political viewpoint, but an entirely new way of being: arrogant, judgmental, projecting evil impulses on everyone. He told me all major news outlets had conspired to deceive the American people with treachery and lies. Obama was party to the evil. It was “inarguable.”
The moment I read the words, I felt he had been abducted. We fought about it. He provided sourcing, among which was RT, the state-run Russian television station.
Years later, when US reporters pieced together the first signs of Russian interference in the US elections, they noticed a Ukrainian minister had popped up in a May 2015 Facebook town hall to beg the company to create a verification process for Facebook accounts. The year before, someone had been fabricating false accounts for Ukrainian officials and posting misinformation. After begging Facebook to take action and receiving no response, the real-life officials had joined the town hall in desperation. When six publicly known Russian-linked Facebook pages were later studied, it turned out they had posted 340 million times. These were only six of the 470 accounts linked to Russian operatives. How many times had the other 466 posted? Twenty-six trillion? Twenty-five English language news outlets had also been targeted to push out misinformation.
Russia had geopolitical goals. I knew from interviewing cybersecurity experts that international hackers punched in to do their work like regular employees, from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. My happiness with the man I was dating was only collateral damage. I tell this story because it broke my heart. Today, love has become a casualty of propaganda everywhere in the United States. Friends de-friend. Families exchange messages in capital letters and then block.
A cop once told me that, in a chase, the officer in pursuit is not supposed to make the arrest. His adrenaline is running too high for rational thought. Embarking on a scavenger hunt for information—going down the “rabbit hole”—can apparently make a person more likely to believe propaganda because they become not just a recipient of information, but a “truth seeker.”
Propaganda is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “Information, especially of a biased or misleading nature,. The Western name was meant to indicate a false origin—a shape-shifter from the start.
