Lately, we’ve been seeing alot of information from different print, broadcast and social media organisations in regards to the conflict between Russia, Ukraine and NATO, and these widely circulated information have been evoking the emotions of the readers, listeners or viewers of these messages, propelling them to adopt a stance and express sympathy based on what they believed was true. But much of this information spreading like wildfire on this issue have been demystified and proven to be false.
We’ve seen false information about the President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelenskyy standing at the frontline in the battle against Russia, but it was actually an old information dating back to April 2021 when Ukraine had a conflict with the Donbass region.
We’ve seen widely circulated information about some bombings in Ukraine but which were actually proven to be false through reverse image search on the web, as the event dated back to 2015.
We’ve also seen images about non-state actors being involved in the war, but which were actually not true. An image of a Ukrainian model with an aerosoft gun was being circulated, with the aphorism that she was defending her country, but the image was actually taken in 2020. Verified social media influencers have also been circulating false information.
A video was also been circulated about a Ukrainian man bidding his family goodbye and sending them to safety as he goes to fight against Russia. He was actually a citizen of the Donetsk Republic which broke away from Ukraine, and he was meant to fight against the Ukrainian forces. The information was published by a mayor of his town on Twitter before it was been altered by the purveyors of fake news.
A video about the ghost of kyiv who gunned down 6 Russian fighter jet, which later increased to ten was actually taken from a video game simulator created by a Scot.
We cannot talk about the advent of misinformation, fake news or propaganda, as anyone may choose to call it without scanning through the pages of some history books to have an idea about events that transpired during the Cold War between the capitalist West and the socialist East. It was a geopolitical and ideological war between these sociopolitically distinct societies.
During this period, the United State’s Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) launched an operation known as Operation Mockingbird. The agency wanted to realise one thing through this operation and that was influencing and shaping the opinion of people through misinformation. They achieved this by hiring journalists to write fake news stories for them. They also recruited students who were studying journalism at colleges to help them in accomplishing their atrocious acts. They also bribed journalists in order to collect intelligent reports.
Many journalists who worked for the CIA unveiled their enormity. One of the most popular among these whistleblowers, although controversial and esoteric, was a German Journalist, Udo Ulfkotte. He was a student of journalism at the University of Frankfurt before he was been recruited by top German print media outfit, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), in which he later became an editor and which were carrying out secret assignments for the country’s intelligence agency, which was a branch of the CIA, to write fake stories for them which at first he could never verify because he was young, naive and manipulated. Ulfkotte was popular for his writeup in 1993 in which he penned down a fake news story about late Libyan leader and Pan-Africanist, Moammar Gaddafi partnering with some European companies to create a poisonous gas factory. Ulfkotte later went on to write as many books where he exposed the many heinous acts of the CIA and how journalists were embedded in their payroll.
Even before Ulfkotte had revealed this in 2011, a popular American journalist during the 70s, Carl Bernstein had already disclosed the agency’s despicable acts in misinforming the public. This shows that the media were used to secure the dominance and hegemony of the U.S in the world.
This is yet another period and same method is still being applied by the West against Russia, due to their obscured interests. It seems the cold war never ended. Even Russia is not left out in these game of propaganda. They also play their own games, but they have been outsmarted by the West.
This is one of the obvious reasons why consumers of messages on the mainstream and social media should be very cautious in believing the messages they receive from our local media outlets, which these our local media outlets receive from transnational media agencies that are being controlled by the west. We should be very skeptical and avoid taking every information we see hook, line and sinker.
