Making sense of disinformation age
Peter Pomerantsev “This is Not Propaganda : Adventures in the War Against Reality” explores how Russia reinvented post-modern politics and war against reality. This is the story of the brave life and tragic fate of Maria del Rosario Fuenles Rubio speaks about the initial promise of information revolution and highlights the horror of perversion. The Mexican doctor had used Twitter to provide a life-saving civic service, warning her fellow citizens of gang-related violence in her home in the city of Reynosa. Tweeting anonymously under the account of Felina@Miut3, and encouraged residents to share live updates of shootings and flag which districts to avoid.
Peter Pomerantsev makes sense of disinformation age in a world of influence operations running amok, where dark ads, psyops, hacks, bots, ISIS, soft facts, Putin , trolls and trump seeks to shape our very reality.
Pomeranstev meets Twitter revolutionaries and pop-up populists, Beavioral change salesmen, Hihadi fanboys, truth cops and identitarians.
In 2014, a drug gang kidnapped her and two other doctors from a hospital to treat a wounded criminal and accidently discovered her twitter identity when they seized her mobile phone and shot her dead.
One of the last tweet from her account revealed Felina’s real name asnd warned her followers “Don’t make the same mistake as I did, You won’t get anything out of this.” The final Tweet was a doctor lying on the floor with her face blown off.
The communication revolution which promised to democratise information by giving voice to the voiceless has been hijacked and manipulated to serve the interests of the powerful and block out dissent.
The book is also a fascinating examination of how the “war against reality” has turned societies “liquid” citing examples from the Philippines to the Us to Mexico to Ukraine and a mixture of memoir, reportage and analysis
The forces of darkness have captured a communication revolution designed to bring light and snuffed out champions of free speech such as Fuentes.
Consequently the society being fractured and of politicians inventing as new version of “the people”.
This is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality by Peter Pomerantsev, Faber |& Faber £14.99 268 pages.