Person Starts Discussion About "The Great Information War" And People Are Finding It Helpful

Carole Cadwalladr is a British journalist as well as an author known for exposing the Facebook–Cambridge Analytica data scandal a few years back. According to the journalist, Russia's attack on Ukraine is not an immediate decision taken by Putin and his regime. Russia has been targeting the West since 2014 and there is a huge part of the war that has been taking place on social media for years now.

Image credits: carolecadwalla

A Cold War historian and disinformation scholar, Inga ZakšauskienÄ— told Lithuanian National Television and Radio, “There have always been attempts to manipulate history and facts, but today it is much easier to do so. During the Cold War period, it was very expensive to organize disinformation campaigns. What is new today is the very swift dissemination of messages and the low cost of producing and distributing them.”

What's scary is that Putin knows how to do it.

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Justin Pelletier, a Professor of Practice of Computing Security at the Rochester Institute of Technology, shared that Russia has one of the most capable and technological militaries on the planet.

“They have advanced intelligence, information warfare, cyber warfare, and electronic warfare capabilities. Russia has used these technologies in recent years in combat in Syria and the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine, and is using them in its current invasion of Ukraine,” he added.

“Russia has used and is likely to continue to use cyber operations to subvert the Ukrainian government,” Pelletier said. “For example, in the weeks leading up to both the 2014 and 2022 invasions, Ukrainian soldiers were targeted with disinformation designed to sow confusion and disorder in the event of an attack.”

Image credits: carolecadwalla

Recently, officials from Ukraine requested the US tech giants to take action and restrict access to their services in Russia so as to stop the country from spreading misinformation.

In response to the plea, many social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook and Google have taken action.

Twitter revealed that it has permanently suspended more than a dozen accounts and blocked some content that violated its “manipulation and spam” policy.

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Meta, which owns Facebook, also reported that it removed a network run by people in Russia and Ukraine that “ran a handful of websites masquerading as independent news outlets, publishing claims about the West betraying Ukraine and Ukraine being a failed state.”

The company would also restrict access to several accounts in Ukraine, including some Russian state media organizations. It’s also “reviewing other government requests to restrict Russian state-controlled media.”