Here's how propaganda is clouding Russians' understanding of the war in Ukraine : NPR
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
March 15, 20222:28 PM ET
Nell Clark
A resident cleans her balcony in an apartment building damaged by shelling in Kyiv on Tuesday. Fadel Senna/AFP via Getty Images hide caption
toggle caption Fadel Senna/AFP via Getty Images
A resident cleans her balcony in an apartment building damaged by shelling in Kyiv on Tuesday.
Fadel Senna/AFP via Getty Images
Russia has cracked down on free speech and placed strict propaganda controls on what citizens see and hear about the brutal war in Ukraine.
Earlier this month, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed into law a rule that criminalizes reporting that contradicts the Russian government's version of events. The law has forced many independent media outlets to leave the country, shut down — or face potential lengthy prison terms.
Julia Ioffe, reporter and founding partner of the media company Puck, joined Morning Edition to discuss how Russia is sanitizing the war to cloud its citizens' views. Listen here.
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"[Russians] are being told that Russian soldiers are extremely decorous and careful about preserving Ukrainian civilian life, that they're being greeted as liberators, that everybody wants to live under Russian rule, and that there are no civilian casualties on the Ukrainian side," reports Ioffe.
State media doesn't use the words "war" or "invasion" and doesn't mention Russia's bombing of Kyiv.
Technology
How to spot disinformation and propaganda coming out of the Ukraine-Russia conflict
How to spot disinformation and propaganda coming out of the Ukraine-Russia conflict
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The Kremlin has weaponized social media as well, hiring trolls to spread disinformation about the war and stir up fights online, says Ioffe.
Some Russians are turning to alternative sources for the truth and to break through propaganda. Some use VPNs — or virtual private networks — to mask their locations to access blocked sites such as Twitter, Facebook, and media organizations that report independently from the Kremlin, says Ioffe. Demand for VPNs shot up by more than 2,000% on Sunday, the day before the Putin regime shut off access to Instagram.
"But you have to understand that to go and do this, you already have to be looking. It's people who already don't believe what the Kremlin information sources are telling them," says Ioffe. "They know that this is a war against Ukrainian civilians."
All of this means the truth about the war is hard to find and mostly is discovered by people who already distrust the Kremlin and its state-sponsored media.
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"People who are not looking for this information are generally people who don't care, or people who trust Kremlin sources of information. And if they trust those sources of information, then they believe, for the most part, what the Kremlin is telling them, and for the most part, they support this war," Ioffe says.
"But the war they're supporting is not the war that exists on the ground in Ukraine."
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For those still unwilling to admit what they are doing.
They are only a few and then they are mostly mocked or ignored.
Mark me down as mocking but not ignoring...
Amazing that the Russian propaganda is sometimes repeated, almost word for word, [deleted]
I saw quite a bit of that yesterday. It was nauseating.
That kind of is my point. What's Up With That?
Going to have to stop labeling things as "meta". Mark Zuckerberg might have issues with that...
Putin can't afford to have the real news read to his people. It could end up 1917 all over again and this time it will be he and his family disappearing in a remote farm house
Putin uses his American apologists on Russian TV.
Lil Tucker looks he could be the petri dish offspring of Alfred E Newman and Howdy Doody