Information autocracy: Hypothetic utility of disinformation in the modern world

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In the post modern world, infodemic latent with propaganda tends to provide a post-truth picture of any event, contemporary or from the past, and persuade people to believe in it. Prototypical instances of such disinformation include deceptive advertising (in business and in politics), government propaganda, doctored photographs, forged documents, fake maps, internet frauds, fake websites, and manipulated Wikipedia entries.

According to Luciano Floridi (2011), the philosophy of information is primarily concerned with "how information should be adequately created, processed, managed, and used". But as he notes, we also need to study what happens when "the process of information is defective" as inaccurate and misleading information can be extremely dangerous.

Disinformation: A hysteria

Disinformation is nothing new. We've instances from Nazi Germany and Putin's Russia along with local sorcery from Chinese natives as significant sources of disinformation cobbled up by state factors to deceit the masses. Here, we'll be assessing the extent of disinformation in different locations, in different times and how disinformation created a post-truth picture of what actually the world witnessed in the past.

Case study: Nazi Germany

The first case study comes from Nazi Germany. In densely-populated Germany, where people got around primarily on foot or by mass transit, political wall newspapers, strategically situated at nodal points where the "masses" converged and dispersed in the course of any given day, were the most effective means of intruding on the visual field of millions of individuals. Indeed, using the techniques of modern advertising and mechanical and photographic reproduction, and the organizational weapon of the Nazi regime and party, Nazi propagandists made political wall newspapers into an effective method of diffusing political propaganda on a mass scale.

In diffusing disinformation as part of Nazi Propaganda, Hitler used grandiosity and paranoia. These were two poles of one fanatical ideology. From beginning to end, the narrative of paranoia displayed in the propaganda accompanied and justified the Nazi regime's grandiose war of aggression and its genocidal policies. The Nazis projected their own aggressive and murderous intentions and policies onto their victims, the Jews most of all. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno captured this aspect of Nazism when they wrote in 1944 that the "blind murderer has always seen his victim as a persecutor against whom he must defend himself."

The radical anti-Semitism of Nazi Germany's wartime propaganda also constituted an interpretive prism through which Nazi leaders viewed and misconstrued events as they unfolded. The idea of a 'Jewish conspiracy' was popularized by the mass publication of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion in the decades preceding the Nazis' arrival in power. The accomplishment of the Nazi propagandists was to bring the idea of this conspiracy up to date and to flesh it out with the names and faces of recognizable prominent figures in mid-twentieth-century Europe and the United States.

In this, the public language of the Nazi regime combined complete suppression of any facts about the Final Solution with a brutal, sometimes crude declaration of murderous intent. Two key verbs and nouns in the German language were at the core of this language of mass murder: vernichten and ausrotten. These translate as "annihilate", "exterminate", "totally destroy", and "kill", and the nouns Vernichtung and Ausrottung as "annihilation", "extermination", "total destruction", and "killing". When the Nazis projected a policy of Vernichtung or Ausrottung onto international Jewry, the clear meaning in that context was that the Jews were supporting a genocidal policy aimed at Germany. This largely later became a part of ongoing official policy.

The Nazi regime strove to assimilate extraordinary and genocidal language into a seemingly ordinary or more conventional narrative of war. The task of translating ideology into a coherent narrative of events for the news took place in the Propaganda Ministry, and especially in Dietrich's Reich Press Office. On a daily and weekly basis, this was the office that gave orders to the press about how to narrate ongoing events.

Even during the course of the war, tens of thousands of confidential "press directives" were communicated orally and in written form at a daily press conference in Berlin. These orders - compliance with which was compulsory - were then conveyed to several thousand newspapers and periodicals. Through Dietrich and his staff, Hitler had a more important and direct impact than has previously been acknowledged on the chronicle of events that ran in German newspapers and periodicals. In the realm of propaganda and control of the press, the regime displayed coordination and efficiency, even in the face of internal personality conflicts and organizational disputes, and presented a united front on its core policy aims. In Ian Kershaw's words, Goebbels and Dietrich were both "working towards the Führer".

Another important dimension of promoting Nazi disinformation concerns the mix of text, imagery, and photographs evident in the Parole der Woche Wandzeitungen (Word of the Week wall newspapers). Distributed by the tens and sometimes hundreds of thousands of copies on a weekly basis, they were the most ubiquitous and intrusive aspect of Nazism's visual offensive in the new era of mechanical reproduction of illustrations, whether black and white or in color.

Case Study: Traditional China

Similarly, on a traditional note, based on disinformation, there were persistent rumors of 'soul stealing" that had brought Chinese masses of the late 18th century to grief. The hysteria that spread over east-central China in 1768 was cultured in a rich broth of local sorcery beliefs. Details varied from region to region, but the common ingredients were that the human soul can, under certain conditions, be separated from the body of its owner; one who obtains another's soul can use its force for his own benefit; the stealing of a soul (soul stealing, chiao-hun) can be brought about.

Based on disinformation and hearsay, popular hysteria and petty corruption had mostly resulted in serious judicial errors. Courtroom torture elicited confessions, but these were compromised by the accuseds' complaints before higher authorities. Once the case reached the provincial level, the bias against the accused was balanced by the worldly-wise skepticism of high officials far removed from the pressures and temptations of grubby county courtrooms.

This finally leads to faulty rash accusations, lynchings and homicide. Though his majesty took some reforms regarding handling such cases, yet fear of sorcery remained deeply embedded in the public mind, thanks to disinformation.

Case study: Putin's Russia

In recent times, in the era of infodemics, Russia is a good example of what Sergei Guriev and Daniel Treisman call an informational autocracy. In their words, "Informational autocrats recognize that violent repression in modern societies is costly and often counterproductive. Rather than killing or imprisoning thousands to inspire fear, they attempt to convince citizens that they are competent and not violent. Such dictators win the sincere support of many of their compatriots, but this support is based in part on the manipulation and distortion of information."

Putin's disinformational autocracy is built on the state control of all major forms of media, beginning with the takeover of television in the early 2000s, followed by newspapers in the early 2010s, and finally, major internet providers a few years later. Recognizing its limited ability to convince viewers that the government is uncorrupt, elections are free and fair, and local bureaucrats are looking out for the public interest, Russian television subtly argues that all governments are corrupt, all elections are rigged, and all citizens are powerless before the state.

Television is by far the most important source of information as well as the most tightly controlled. One of Putin's top officials meets weekly with editors of the main television channels to keep broadcasters in line. Russian state television depicts a binary world. Sometimes media ownership is not enough. In addition, the Putin hires an army of internet trolls— commentators paid to leave posts on chat boards on the internet—who seek to influence and disrupt online conversations in ways that help the Putin. The extensiveness of the Putin's efforts to manipulate media is beyond dispute. One study found that Russian bots make up around half of the Twitter posts about Russian politics among the most politically active accounts.

Russians have long experience extracting useful information from biased sources. The Levada Center reported in May, 2020 that while 57 per cent of Russians believe that state television reported accurately on foreign news, just 47 per cent believe its reporting on the economy. Public opinion polls show that as television became more highly politicized, Russian viewers' trust in television fell from 79 per cent in 2009 to just 48 per cent in 2018. Similarly, the share of Russians who cited television as a source for their news dropped from 94 to 69 per cent between 2009 and 2020.

Way ahead:

Thus, disinformation creates a veil of post truth about the past, present future and contemporary times and puts people under a veil of deceit. In addition, because we are exposed to so many different types of news, isolating the impact of any bit of news on social, cultural, religious or political behavior is challenging. Hence, a powerful link between the leaders' views and aims and the everyday experience of millions of pedestrians and strap-hangers, extraordinary texts and images, news reports that were mainly intended to promote disinformation, deserve to be moved from the periphery to the center of historical writing and reflection.