Know what a “propaganda-condom” is?

False information is often dubbed “misinformation” or “disinformation”, as if these terms mean the same thing. They do not. The former describes all false information, such as a covid-19 conspiracy theory unknowingly shared by your uncle. Disinformation, by contrast, is spread with the intent to mislead or manipulate others. Governments sometimes deploy it in the form of propaganda.

The tactic has been around in some form since Ancient Rome, yet the word “disinformation” didn’t emerge until the 20th century. Fittingly, its exact origins are unclear. One theory is that Joseph Stalin first coined dezinformatsiya, a term he took from the name of a KGB propaganda department. The English word was later adopted from the Russian one.

The practice was honed during the cold war. The Soviet Union disseminated false information to widen social and political divisions on the other side of the Iron Curtain. The Russians built a big bureaucracy to conduct these “active measures”. One campaign involved spreading rumours that America had invented AIDS (it was called “Operation INFEKTION”).

More recently, disinformation has flourished on the internet. Most elections are now accompanied by organised disinformation campaigns that spread rumours online to attack opponents or manipulate opinion. Last year such campaigns ran in 81 countries, up from 28 in 2017, according to a report by the University of Oxford. Sometimes political parties manage them in-house. More often they pay private companies to do the work. Disinformation campaigns may also be run by foreign powers that wish to influence the outcome of an election. Misleading messages are sent by bots and, increasingly, human-run fake accounts, which are better at avoiding social-media moderators. These days it can be hard to tell what’s fact and what’s fake. Time to learn the techniques – and language – of disinformation.

Пропагандон (Propagandon)
1. Propaganda-condom (noun)
2. A way to insult a propagandist
Some Russians are elastic with the truth

Many Russians are sick of disinformation and propaganda. It erupts from their TVs and floods social-media feeds. A derogatory nickname has emerged to describe the people hogging these screens: propagandon, which literally means “progaganda-condom”. The term usually refers to journalists who spread state propaganda. Dmitry Kiselyov, a famous news anchor, is known in the West as the “Kremlin’s chief propagandist”. In Russia and Ukraine, he is the “Kremlin’s chief propagandon”.

The label is a portmanteau of propaganda and gandon, a Russian word derived from condom in English. Gandon usually refers to someone you want to characterise in a negative way without referring to any particular trait or action: it has its roots in teenage culture, and is often used as a jibe by people who watched too much MTV growing up. The combination of juvenile name-calling and the mighty Kremlin’s information machine makes propagandon an entertaining and powerful insult. These days even those who don’t normally swear openly, such as respected journalists and pensioners, have been known to use the term. There’s just one problem: calling a propagandist a condom doesn’t offer protection from their lies.
Sasha Raspopina

Gaslight
To manipulate others into doubting their own judgment (verb)
Shining a light on scheming statesmen

“Are you trying to tell me I’m insane?” Paula asks her husband in “Gaslight”, a film from 1944. He has dimmed the gaslights in their home, but when Paula notices, he says she is mistaken. Over time, Paula’s spouse convinces her that she’s imagining things. This story of a manipulative man was a lightbulb (or should that be gas-lamp?) moment for many people. “Gaslighting” has come to refer to those who trick others, usually women, into questioning their own judgment, making them dependent on their abusers.

Populist politicians appear to have turned the ploy on whole populations. By obfuscating facts and spreading lies, they can make voters doubt reliable sources of information and their own understanding of the world. When people start to distrust reality, some may become more reliant on political leaders to tell them what is true or false.

Liberals have labelled the false claims of Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin and Jair Bolsonaro as “political gaslighting” so readily that it is becoming a cliché. They have stretched the term, but not entirely without reason. In a speech in 2018 Trump told Americans that “what you are seeing and what you are reading is not what’s happening.” He might as well have flickered the stage lights behind him.
Bo Franklin

WhatsApp University
A platform where misinformation flourishes (noun)
Dropping out of this university could have some benefits

Forget Harvard and Oxford. When it comes to influencing opinions and shaping discourse, the world’s most influential university might be a messaging service. Its students shun academic tomes: instead some read fake news at “WhatsApp University”. This moniker is meant to disparage an app commonly used to disseminate disinformation and conspiracy theories. The term is most often used in India, where WhatsApp has over 400m users, more than in any other country.

In India much misinformation is spread by the country’s own political parties, particularly the ruling Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). It runs WhatsApp groups linking up millions of supporters, ostensibly to send campaign news. Some of these cyber-armies also post divisive propaganda and spread false rumours, targeting opponents in the lead-up to elections and stoking communal tensions, often at the expense of India’s Muslim minority.

Rampant misinformation can have deadly consequences, no matter who is spreading it. In recent years dozens of lynchings in India have been sparked by WhatsApp rumours. Last year Muslims were attacked and their businesses were boycotted after bogus messages circulated of “Corona Jihad’’, an Islamic conspiracy to spread the virus. Videos on WhatsApp falsely claimed to show covid-ridden Muslims spitting on people and licking cutlery. Several BJP politicians openly backed this conspiracy theory. Clearly they could do with a proper education.
Alia Shoaib

Слив (Sliv)
1. A flush, such as down a toilet (noun)
2. The flushing out of disinformation
Plumbing the depths of Russia’s disinformation wars

In many languages, information is described as though it is a liquid: in English it leaks, in Russian it can be flushed. A sliv, which literally means a flush, has come to stand for the deliberate release of secret – and often unverifiable or false – information. The goal is to manipulate, blackmail or spread disinformation. Leaks can be accidental. Slivs cannot.

The sliv has become a powerful political tool in Russia, used by the government and its opponents. They flush out kompromat (“compromising materials”) to damage each other’s reputations. As in a toilet bowl, the items are often unsightly, ranging from racy details of sex scandals to supposed evidence of corruption. A common tactic is to mix false information (such as compromising messages) with genuine items, to make the untrue claims seem more plausible.

Fighting a sliv is usually futile, because the tactic works even when the information is shown to be false. As one saying goes: “A sliv of kompromat can travel halfway around the world while a correction is putting on its shoes.” In Russia, where fake news and propaganda swirl around the internet, flushes of misinformation are regular occurrences. You can only hope they’re not about you.
Sasha Raspopina

五毛 (wumao)
1. Fifty cents
2. Online supporters of the Chinese Communist Party
It’ll cost you

The Chinese Communist Party keeps a tight control of the country’s internet. Its “great firewall” blocks access to many foreign websites. Home-grown messaging apps like WeChat are heavily censored. The wumao, loosely translated as “50 cents” and sometimes referred to as the “50-cent party”, watch over it all.

The term was coined to describe a group of people whom the Chinese state pays to post pro-government messages online: the name wumao supposedly referred to the 50 cents ($0.08) that individuals earn for each propaganda post. In fact, these pro-party posters probably receive no bonus for their toil. In 2016 researchers from Harvard University found that most wumao were government officials who wrote positive messages as part of their jobs. At the time, they were writing around 500m messages on social media every year.

The wumao avoid arguments with government critics. Instead their trick is to distract people from anything that could harm the state’s reputation, and drown out bad news with good. They leave pro-China slogans under calls for anti-government protests or negative news stories. The aim is to change the subject or bury it amid a flurry of more enthusiastic news.

Members of the 50-cent party do not work alone. Bots can flood social media with posts at a faster rate than bureaucrats. Some fiercely nationalistic young people, often known as xiaofenhong (“little pinks”), also defend China online. Their efforts have broadened the meaning of wumao. In recent years the term has been used to make fun of anyone seen to be a government cheerleader on the internet – even if they never make money from it.
Georgia Banjo

“Flooding the zone with shit”
A way to distract people from the truth (verb)
As crap as it sounds

The internet has made it easier to access information, but harder for people to control how they are perceived. So some politicians have developed new disinformation techniques for the digital age exploiting the fact that anyone can publish anything. One strategy is to distract from negative news by floating several competing narratives or explanations, of different degrees of craziness, in the media and on the internet.

Vladimir Putin pioneered the tactic. When the Russian state is accused of wrongdoing, his cronies often spread various rival theories, cherry-picking outlandish stories cooked up by pro-Putin outlets and giving them wider prominence on official channels. Steve Bannon, formerly a strategist for Donald Trump, used the same tactic to put the reality-TV star in the White House. He called it “flood the zone with shit”.

The aim is to overload the public with so many different explanations for a poisoning, plane crash or other untoward event, that people begin to think the truth is unknowable. In that kind of oversaturated media climate, opposition parties wedded to old-fashioned notions of truth and evidence can find it hard to make themselves heard. Many people may simply put their trust in a powerful leader to tell them what’s what instead. No wonder strongmen seem to have a love-hate relationship with the internet.
Josh Spencer

ILLUSTRATIONS: JULIA GEISER