‘Russia may be winning the shooting war, but Ukraine is winning the information war. That is the key to getting allies’ support and sympathy’. (Sean McFate, Atlantic Council, March 2022)
‘You furnish the pictures,’ the US media tycoon William R Hearst said in 1897, ‘and I’ll furnish the war’. The Spanish-Cuban war had not yet begun, but Hearst’s newspapers were to play a major role in ensuring that it did – and that the US public supported Washington’s aims. Who controls the narrative to a large extent controls the war. The information warfare raging over Ukraine today is a playbook of censorship and propaganda, as imperialist countries endeavour to keep their populations squarely behind NATO’s war aims.
Since the 24 February Russian invasion, the social media giants Facebook, Twitter and Google, with its subsidiary YouTube, have acted to restrict or ban publications and voices critical of NATO or less than damning of Russia.
- In March, YouTube announced it would remove content about Russia’s invasion in Ukraine that violates [our policy]… of not minimising or trivialising well-documented violent events’. It has removed 15,000 videos and permanently banned more than 1,000 channels on these grounds. These include 550 episodes of Breaking the Set by the anti-imperialist US journalist Abby Martin.
- RT (formerly Russia Today) has been forced to cease operating in the US, and is banned across most of Europe, including Britain.
- In April, GoogleAdSense – which pays publishers per number of clicks they receive for online articles – informed a number of online publications that they would no longer be able to earn revenue from any content that, in Google’s words ‘exploits, dismisses or condones the war or… [implies] that victims are responsible for their own tragedy’. One of those affected is the left-wing website Mint Press News (MPN)
- Also in April, the PayPal accounts of MPN, its editor Mnar Adley and senior staff writer Alan McLeod were also permanently closed, as was that of independent news website Consortium News. PayPal has form for acting on behalf of its imperialist masters, having closed down Wikileaks’ account in 2011 and persistently attempting to block groups like Rock around the Blockade that support Cuba.
- Twitter has permanently blocked nearly 400 accounts where it accuses users of ‘undermining faith in the NATO alliance and its stability’. These include anti-war campaigner Scott Ritter, the former UN Iraq weapons inspector. It has also disabled liking, sharing or retweeting comments it disapproves of.
The anti-imperialist journalist Ben Norton, meanwhile, had his face plastered across the New York Times with a red line through it, accused of recycling Chinese propaganda by publishing details of US involvement in the Ukraine coup of 2014. Facebook’s ban on promoting violence now makes an exception if it is directed against Russian soldiers or politicians. It has also lifted its ban on posts in support of Ukraine’s neo-Nazi Azov brigade, if it is ‘in the context of the war in Ukraine’.
While the mainstream press acts overtly as cheerleaders for imperialist war, the collusion of social media giants with imperialist states, while more insidious, is equally effective. State intelligence services permeate these companies at every level. Google, Microsoft and Amazon have multibillion dollar contracts with the CIA to provide intelligence, logistics and computing services. Google’s current Global Head of Developer Product Policy, Ben Renda, is a former information management officer for NATO who worked for the US Department of Defense in cybersecurity. Since 2018, Facebook has allowed the NATO thinktank Atlantic Council to curate billions of its feeds and decide what is ‘credible’ and what is ‘fake’; its head of intelligence is former NATO spokesman Ben Nimmo. Twitter has partnered with ASPI – an Australian anti-China thinktank that advises the US government – to police its platform. Since 2013, Twitter’s senior executive for operations in Europe, the Middle East and North Africa has been Gordon MacMillan – a serving reservist in the British Army who specialises in cyberwarfare.
At the same time, the slick and finely honed media operation coming out of Ukraine – described as ‘a master class in information warfare’ – is supported at every level by operatives from Washington and London. 150 public relations firms from around the world (including from Britain) are reportedly involved. Funding is provided by the US government and its allies through USAID, the National Endowment for Democracy, the US Embassy and NATO. Yaroslav Turbil, the man in charge of global digital communications for the Ukrainian government, has ensured everyone is on message with a dossier of propaganda, including ‘acceptable language’ to be used in the rehabilitation of Ukraine’s ultra-nationalist and fascist groups, such as Right Sector and the Azov Battalions, as ‘patriots’ and ‘heroes’. One ‘key message’ to reiterate to all news outlets: ‘We protect the entire Europe, as Putin will not stop in Ukraine’. Meaning: more weapons for Ukraine, more sanctions against Russia, more NATO expansion.
This is bourgeois democracy’s much-vaunted ‘freedom of the press’. Freedom for imperialism’s bloodthirsty propaganda machine to splash any apparent Russian atrocity, however unverified, across the front of tabloid newspapers; freedom to rehabilitate fascists, re-write history, promote its proxies, cover up crimes, even whip up hysteria against Russian athletes, artists and scientists. In contrast, those who speak in the name of the working class, against imperialist expansion and the drive to global war, face repression, censorship and silence. We cannot know the truth about what is happening on the ground in Ukraine, but we do know in whose interests the narrative is being manipulated. Fight state censorship.
Cat Wiener
