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The thing about lying is that it requires a degree of trust to work.
When you have trust, it’s easy to lie.
When you don’t have trust, you don’t get away with lying.
There are two types of propaganda:
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White propaganda, i.e. propaganda that is true. You emphasize truths that help your point of view.
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Black propaganda, i.e. propaganda that is false. Lying.
When governments communicate to their own people, there is usually a significant degree of implicit trust. This is why governments are so easily able to simply lie to their own people and still be believed.
When governments communicate to an “enemy” population, the level of trust is very low. So they can’t get away with lying which means, when seeking to influence a hostile population, you need to ensure your propaganda contains a high degree of truth and support your POV much like a lawyer selectively emphasizing the most beneficial facts while being careful not to be caught in a credibility destroying lie since credibility is so low to begin with.
Russian “disinformation” is so successful because it’s directed towards a hostile population and so must therefore contain a high degree of truth to compensate for the lack of implicit trust.
It can be selective, of course, and they obviously are going to be extremely biased about which facts they emphasize and how they frame them. But since their credibility within the west is so low they can’t “spend” credibility on lying.
In contrast western governments have a high degree of implicit trust so they can afford to spend credibility on lies. When caught in a lie they might take some credibility hit but they have sufficiently high credibility to be able to spin the lie into something plausible (“what I really meant was within this specific instance”) or even to pretend it was an honest mistake rather than a lie. So domestic propaganda can get away with a low truth content.
Russian propaganda is persuasive and finds an audience because when you really look at it, it’s usually true. At least true in terms of what it contains even if it is often a distortion in terms of what it omits.
Usually it will be simply discarded since the trust value is so low but when you really look at Russian claims (specifically claims made to western / non-Russian audiences) they’re usually simply true facts. Rarely the whole story and presented with spin but in the factual sense actually true.
Now, they’re much more free to lie to their own domestic audience of course and they do, but likewise a western government is much more free to lie to their own domestic audiences and they do.
Likewise, western propaganda directed at Russia usually emphasizes truths that are obvious to Russians. Corruption is a big one. Clearly a big issue that affects Russians so that truth is emphasized when western governments seek to sway Russians.
Foreign “disinformation” finds fertile ground because it’s often more factually true than domestic propaganda and its generally more factually true because it has to be, because they don’t have the implicit trust required to be able to lie.
whataboutism 