open Democracy News Analysis - A user-generated conflict, Evgeny Morozov - Comments

Vanes on "Russia/Georgia: War of the Web"

Vanes — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 01:49:16 +0100

Well, one may disagree with the author at some points, but one thing remains clear: the forum audience here is (almost?) exclusvely russian, because it has been translated to inoSMI. Coincidence? I'm not accusing anybody of anything, but didn't happen exactly what he has written? The article does not have to be heinous or biased - just bitter and critical - and there will always be many people zeaously defending themselves as not being manipulated, because ... well this is just how people work. Nobody thinks he's being manipulated. Let's just ask: anybody would consider russians to be neutral and unbiased about their own criticism? Hell no. The important message is this: if you can select the audience, you can effectively manipulate the reaction without directly manipulating anyone. Translating and linking an article is not good nor bad - but surely it is a form of selecting the audience.

alikos on "Russia/Georgia: War of the Web"

alikos — Sun, 24 May 2009 02:02:39 +0100

Где-то я уже похожее читал, причём буквально один в один... :)

GenaMatogen on "Russia/Georgia: War of the Web"

GenaMatogen — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 12:01:08 +0000

Guy's there is a one moment else
"With the advent of the blogosphere, Goebbel's famous line - "if you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it" -- has taken an entirely new meaning. Now, the state doesn't even have to repeat it - they just need to loudly pronounce it once and the digital guerrillas will do all the necessary repeating."

Is it direct blame of goverment in lie? Bud then What is acsactly the lie?
It's a key moment of this article without wich it loses the point.....

Not logged in on "Russia/Georgia: War of the Web"

Not logged in — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 07:32:49 +0000

(I ask a pardon for my bad English!) I have read through your clause and there was a desire to express the indignation of that antiRussian propagation and lie by which your clause is impregnated! The arrogance and hypocrisy will ruin UK and America! I lived 10 years in Israel (at me the Israeli citizenship) and as thousand left for Israel in 1991 - in 1998 I have returned to Russia, to Moscow! Last ten years I live in Moscow. I having visited many countries, would tell so: Russia - NEW, Russia-HAS changed, and the USA and UK- have remained in 80th years!" Cold war " and propagation against Russia NEVER came to an end and it is the fact, many clever people in Israel and all over the world understand it! As soon as Russia became weak in 90 – America, UK and the West as a whole at once have started to use this weakness in the purposes: to expand NATO, to finance the footmen Yuschenko, Saakashvili, to create military bases in the Europe and in Asia, to conduct the antiRussian propagation in all directions! America always considered strong Russia and considers as threat of the hegemony, to the sovereignty! I, as well as many my Israeli friends we consider, that America has made a historical mistake when in 90 has started to support drunkard Yeltsin and to help it to plunder Russia when has started to cover thieves and gangsters who plundered Russian people, to use weakness of Russia, to finance tyrants in Georgia and Ukraine, naming their democrats! America in the future will very dearly pay for this mistake, since for 95 % of Russians today, America is an enemy! Putin is the most westernized politician from possible for today in Russia, but to vegetables of cold war, such as Bush it to not understand, they live still a policy 80! In Russia all people considers, that on expansion of NATO it is necessary to return bases to Cuba, necessary to build new nuclear rockets, the ships, to distribute the Russian-Chinese influence by the same ways as it is done by America! Why it "is possible" for America, and Russia, or still someone "IS impossible" for China, Iran, Canada??? Really you think, what writing down every year all the new and new countries in " an axis of a harm " America remains the influential country? America harms to Russia in economy where can, for example, agitates to build oil pipelines and gas mains around of Russia... And as you look at if China or Russia will finance and will change a mode in Mexico (which has come to power very doubtful by!) also will start with Mexico to sell oil " around of America "? The world has changed! If America and UK wants, that with it respected - IT SHOULD RESPECT with OTHERS, Including Russia!

sitotkle on "Russia/Georgia: War of the Web"

sitotkle — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 21:32:15 +0100

Russia should not accuse U.S. and Western media of being bias. Russia could have easily won the media war if they would have allowed the international journalists in the conflict zones. What are they hiding there? If you don't let journalists in, how are they supposed to cover the other side of the story? If you deny interview requests from Western and U.S. media, how do u suppose they put you on air? I think Russian government planned the war media coverage as well as the war way in advance. Russians have no right to denounce Western coverage. You would not find any negative reporting on Russia on any state owned Russian channels. There are no indepandant journalists in Russia. The ones who dare to speak up against Putin are shot in the head and their death is never investigated. I think Russians need to figure out their media first, before denouncing other media networks

Da Russia on "Russia/Georgia: War of the Web"

Da Russia — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 13:24:27 +0100

Yeah, inosmi.ru used for brainwashing - that's just completely ridiculous.

a guest on "Russia/Georgia: War of the Web"

a guest — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 12:33:51 +0100

That's total crap. I read both inosmi (not very often now though) and such online media as guardian, wp, and times. Inosmi represents absolutely adequatelty what is published in these media. Also inosmi is a good place to search for other western media. In most cases they provide the link to the original piece so that anyone can go and read the information from the source. The rest of it is crap too but thats just too long to explain.

Kent on "Russia/Georgia: War of the Web"

Kent — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 08:47:56 +0100

Here is it - a modern heinous Kremlin propaganda. Communists, that wretch fellows were, did propaganda themselves. Now, Kremlin must only find the most heinous articles from heinous west sources and translate. And OK!

W_K on "Russia/Georgia: War of the Web"

W_K — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 08:31:03 +0100

Ok. Show us few good articles about Russia on Time/CNN/BBC, that not translated in Russian on InoSmi))))
I read news sight in Russian and in english, most of interesting articles translated in Russian)
I think, that you liar)

LHLeon on "Russia/Georgia: War of the Web"

LHLeon — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 19:27:22 +0100

You have voted so in vain. Article is magnificent... As a joke. I so did not laugh for a long time already. I voted 5 star out of 5 ))))

489222 on "Russia/Georgia: War of the Web"

489222 — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 18:36:46 +0100

Билять, чего вы тут мильон ссыок понапихали? У кого мозги есть тот сам бы и нашел. а ваще, судя по коментам, енто говно кроме русских никто не читает!

Irene Glasgow on "Russia/Georgia: War of the Web"

Irene Glasgow — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 15:52:04 +0100

I've lived in the States since 1976. To find a decent reporting regarding Russia is almost an impossible proposition. I will be grateful if the esteemed author pointed me in the right direction! :-))
You see, I am a volunteer translator for the InoSmi.ru. I try very hard to find such unbiased articles! Every time I find one, the reaction from the readers is extremely positive. Unfortunately, if I was employed by the InoSmi and paid by piece, I would be pennyless!
Just when Georgia attacked South Ossetia, I had my two thoroughly American granddaughters visiting me in Russia where I was spending summer. When they returned to their prospective universities in the USA, they were met with awe. Every friend of theirs thought they had a harrowing experience in St.Petersburg and Moscow, with Russia being "at war".
Witnessing the Georgian aggression against its own people, they became quite interested in the biased way the USA was reporting hte events.
One of my granddaughters is studying to be a doctor. She volunteers in a veteran hospital. Talking to one of the vets she told him about her newly forming misgivings regarding the American media. His reply truly surprised him. He explained to her how the American media was lying about EVERYTHING that he and his friends experienced in Iraq. He said that ever since he's come back he doesn't believe anything that newspapers in the USa put out.
Thanks to you and your kin, dear Mr.Morozov, my granddaughters are learning not to trust their own media!
Why would you expect the Russian readers trust you, pray, tell, if even American readers don't trust you?
Thank God for the sites like www.antiwar.com, they bring their readers the truth about your so-called "Democratic" points of view.
BTW, do you consider the Georgian president a war criminal? He ordered the deadly attack against his own countrymen. He claims they are HIS people, right?! Then why did he order soldiers to kill and maim children, women and old men?

opendemocracy on "Russia/Georgia: War of the Web"

opendemocracy — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 15:47:01 +0100

Are you sure , NickTheTrick?

I've just tried - it allows you to change your votes as often as you like - and when I vote 1 star, the average immediately goes down as expected.

Tony

NikkTheTrick on "Russia/Georgia: War of the Web"

NikkTheTrick — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 08:36:32 +0100

Agreed with all comments above - Pavlik Morozov is always Pavlik Morozov ;)

But I have one concern about voting here on this site:

I voted 1 star out of 5 for this attempt at an article.

The average rating before my vote was 4 full stars.

After I voted 1/5 it actually became 4 stars plus a small piece of fifth star...

Now, it says there are only 6 votes. A 1/5 vote in that situation should have dropped the average score dramatically, but instead it was *increased*.

So, it seems like democracy is very open here indeed ;)

Not logged in on "Russia/Georgia: War of the Web"

Not logged in — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 18:58:00 +0100

Viewpoint from Russia about the phrase below:

"they usually do their best to pick the most heinous articles, most of them full of bad reporting and stereotypes about Russia".

When I see, that "bad reporting and sterotypes" number if enough for EVERYDAY and nearly complete inosmi site updating, it seems to me, that covering Russia by "self-censored" is simply usual policy. Ask yourself, why so much rubbish articles are present everyday? Maybe, due to information war orders? And after completely loosing information war for Russian brains, you are seeking answers for the boss, who will ask about this? :) Your stupid "propoganda" was made by axe only, more crazy, than communist articles in Pravda in 1970-th. But Russians can create 200 feet church by axe only - Pravda was much better, than this anti-Russian rage. Congratulations! You have done the thing, communtists were dreaming about: no one Russian man beleives in American TV&newspapers. Have fun!

A user-generated conflict, Evgeny Morozov

Evgeny Morozov — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 10:50:12 +0100

When a few years ago Jay Rosen, a professor of journalism at NYU and one of the chief proponents of citizen journalism, tried to describe the fundamental shift in the balance of power between the media and the public caused by blogs and other forms of user-generated content, he famously spoke of "the people formerly known as the audience". "[They] are simply the public made realer, less fictional, more able, less predictable", he stated in a rather solemn tone.

Call me elitist, but I never fully embraced the notion that this great unwinding of reality, fiction, and predictability merited that much celebration. Watching the information wars of the last few months-first in China in the aftermath of the Tibet and the Olympics protests and now in Russia in light of its war with Georgia ands its coverage in the Western media-I couldn't help but wonder if Rosen fully understood all the implications of his otherwise spot-on diagnosis.

My biggest problem with Rosen's optimism is that, when applied in the international context-where "media" are the CNNs and the BBCs of this world, and the public are the Russians and the Chinese angry with their coverage (most often because their governments told them so) - it is not at all clear what those "former audiences" have really morphed into. Rosen is correct: passive they are no more. They-and especially the young people- are all actively producing information on blogs, forums, and comment sections of the sites belonging to some of the most venerable names in the news media. But could it be that the people formerly known as the audience have become the people currently known as the information warriors?

The online spats that have followed the information war between Russia and the West lend much evidence to this claim (notice that Russians don't view this as an information war between Russia and Georgia - it's an information war with the whole of the Western media which, according to the most bellicose of Russians, plays along with Georgia). This information war is the first truly global user-generated conflict: the war of the professional sound bites and the TV imagery has been relegated to the background, with blogs and comments playing the leading role (the most egregious of the professional TV propaganda have found a temporary home on YouTube). Even the conventional cyberwarfare - the hacking of servers and the defamation of sites, while also present in this campaign, seems of very little strategic importance to either side in this conflict.

The Western media conspiracy

Instead, it is the comment sections and forums of New York Times, BBC, CNN, The Guardian and the like - and some of the silliest online polls that they organized (e.g. CNN's "Do you think Russia's actions in Georgia are justified?") - that are the real battleground for the ultimate truth. Russians have taken to these websites in droves, posting links, photos, facts - anything that could only convince their Western counterparts that they live inside an anti-Russian media bubble constructed by complicit Western corporate media advancing political interests of their countries (detailed media analysis of the CNN coverage and the coverage of the conflict in the British media was quick to follow). As most of these sites have a strict moderation policy and don't publish openly extremist comments, many Russians only get angrier: their deeply held suspicions of a big media conspiracy against Russia have been proven again.

Some Russians want to engage with the West so badly that those of them who didn't speak English started posting templates with messages like this one with comments that contained links to inaccuracies in reporting and coverage exhibited by a handful of Western media (Google spotted more than 600 identical instances of this very comment springing up in the last few days). Some Russians may not have fully understood what they were posting, but they were confident that it was a good way to educate their peers abroad and help their country in an unfair struggle with the Western media.

In theory, this sounds wonderful: people whose opinions were badly suppressed for ages have finally acquired a voice and are eager to engage with the world, providing ample material for case-studies in the soon-to-be-published textbooks on intercultural online communications. But, on closer examination, such conclusions ring shallow and, at best, resemble the starry-eyed optimism of utopian visionaries like Nicholas Negroponte, who, back in the mid-1990s, eagerly spoke about the end of nationalism that would happen as the whole world gets online and starts clicking.

But none of that happened; the loud chorus of mouse clicks heard around the world today sounds more like the deeply disturbing nationalist operas of Richard Wagner than the funky world beats of Peter Gabriel. That nations would finally transcend their biases and join in a globalist unison extolling their commonly shared virtues of human rights and liberalism was the never-fulfilled early promise of the Internet. Given the loud and all-pervasive nationalist outcry heard around the Web today, even the truly internationalist online outlets may soon need to qualify their names to reflect this disturbing reality. "Feeble Global Voices" would be a more appropriate way to describe the rapidly shrinking online influence that even the most brilliant among them exercise today.

Netizens unite!

The fundamental element missing from Jay Rosen's analysis is the difference in the starting conditions between the political situation in the US and places like China and Russia, where the state still plays a key role in most political, economic, and social processes. While the Internet may have diminished the already-dwindling influence of traditional media, it may have done much to augment - often in subtle and non-obvious ways - the influence of the state.

What happened in Russia is that the people formerly known as the audience did not have to wait too long for a new identity; many of them simply got drafted (or volunteered) to assist in state-waged propaganda wars, sometimes even launching and leading guerrilla campaigns of their own. With the advent of the blogosphere, Goebbel's famous line - "if you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it" -- has taken an entirely new meaning. Now, the state doesn't even have to repeat it - they just need to loudly pronounce it once and the digital guerrillas will do all the necessary repeating.

The only important role left for the state then is to convince the netizens that the stakes are high and that there is a real enemy out there that could be fought online. Thus, one of the primary objectives of the Kremlin-funded propaganda machine has been to paint the West - and particularly most of the Western media- as ignorant, biased, and mired in opinion, not reporting. The bet was that as more and more ordinary Russians are convinced that the West is dishonest, it would be much easier to fend off any real and substantiated criticism and accusation from abroad. The eagerness with which many Russians have taken to the Web during the war with Georgia proves that Kremlin's bet has paid off.

One of the chief ways to create such a climate was to fund the proliferation of sites that would selectively pick reports from the Western media, translate them into Russian, and offer ample space for commentary, often resulting in many articles amassing thousands of comments from angry Russians. The primary pillars of this e-smear campaign in Russia have been sites like Inosmi.ru (a shorthand for "Foreign Media", owned by the infamous RIA Novosti agency) and, to a lesser extent, Inopressa.ru (a shorthand for "Foreign Press", it belongs to Newsru agency ).

These sites would typically pick a dozen articles from the foreign media - mostly American and British, but also that of the Baltic states and Eastern Europe - and translate them into Russian. Needless to say, they usually do their best to pick the most heinous articles, most of them full of bad reporting and stereotypes about Russia. This may seem relatively innocent but Inosmi has quickly gained a large following, which particularly delights in commenting on articles, mostly to report on inaccuracies in the articles and ignorance of their authors.

Sites like Inosmi do their best perpetuate the myth of the "great brainwashing" -- that the Western media is either utterly biased against Russia or simply incompetent - and that the Western public and policy-makers are being constantly kept in the dark as to the true nature of things in Russia (this in itself is quite comical, as Russians themselves squandered most of their independent media in the early Putin years; arguably, they are in much greater darkness).

That many Russians don't even consider the possibility that they themselves may have been "brainwashed" only attests to the strength of their convictions and the success of sites like Inosmi in their campaign to perpetuate the myth of the "great brainwashing". It surely the work of such sites - which now even accept voluntary translations of articles done by their readers - that explains why so many Russians all too eagerly engage in "comment warfare" on foreign web-sites: they do feel that they have something to prove.

The asymmetry of this information warfare makes it all the more potent, as, thanks to sites like Inosmi, Russians can now easily point their British and American counterparts to the low quality of BBC or CNN reporting on Russia, but most of the Brits and Americans wouldn't be able to name even a single Russian news channel (for most of them broadcast in Russian and are thus are saved from any external criticism). But reading Russian media's coverage of the West (or, more tellingly, the war with Georgia) would surely produce many more suspicions of media being too closely tied to Kremlin and entirely brainwashed by the state.

Commenting on the Western media's response to the war in South Ossetia, many Russian bloggers asked why the Kremlin wasn't doing anything in the online space and it was up to the individual bloggers to defend the pride of their motherhood. Don't the bureaucrats realise that winning the sympathies of the West is as important? The Kremlin may have been smarter: after all, why bother with artificially constructed narratives, lobbyists, and manipulating traditional media, if there are thousands of bloggers and commentators, eager to advance Kremlin's line for free, and often much more effectively?

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