UKR-TAZ

As I’ve noted before, Russian information warriors may appear to be losing roundedly to their Ukrainian rivals, but this is only the case if we leave out the Global South. Writing today in The Atlantic, social media analyst Carl Miller confirms that Indian, South African, and other accounts in the Global South have been actively promoting support for Putin and Russia, framing the conflict in anti-colonial terms that equate colonialism with Western imperialism.

The memes pushed vivid anti-colonial and anti-Western imagery mixed with Putin strongman motifs and solidarity among the BRICS: Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. Some applauded Russia’s great friendship toward India or Putin’s apparent role in African liberation movements, but many were really about the West, its own seeming hypocrisy, and the alleged aggression of NATO expansion. [. . .

The blunt reality is that in many parts of the world, antipathy for the West is deep and sympathy for Russia is real. 

This, in my estimation, is where a lot of the work in “information war” — or what I’ve called “information peace,” the effort to build a global information ecosystem that is reliable, trustworthy, and conducive to democracy — needs to take place if conflicts like these aren’t to completely unwind any capacity for the world community to take on common problems like climate change (which the IPCC just reminded us yesterday are massive and quickly worsening). That will be a theme of my talk/webinar later today, which will be recorded and shared online afterward.