Originally Posted by
Dayuhan
Yes, we all know it's deep, it's wide, it's extensive in all dimensions. This is completely irrelevant to the core questions: is it effective? Is it actually selling the product? To answer that you need opinion polls and other indicators of public opinion, not charts depicting the structure of the information campaign.
For all it's depth and breadth, the Russian propaganda campaign is anything but sophisticated. The content is crude, often to the point of absurdity, as you regularly point out. Bombarding people with ridiculous claims and wild accusations does not convince, and it can very easily bounce back on the source.
I wonder if the Russians have examined the lessons of the US domestic propaganda campaign supporting war on Iraq. That campaign was effective... at first. Americans were all too willing to believe that Saddam was a saber-toothed threat, an AQ-supporting, WMD-armed monster who had to be removed. They were willing to support the war, as long as it went well. How long did that last?
Obviously it's difficult to know whether Russians really believe everything the government throws at them, but given their quite extended experience with managed information and state propaganda, it seems likely that there's a lot of doubt and a lot of cynicism about the official line, especially in urban areas with better access to outside news sources. Patriotic groundswells are transient phenomena, and when they're done crudely managed propaganda becomes more liability than asset.
Again, the extent, depth and breadth of an information campaign don't mean a thing if the content is crap. The question is not "who where does it reach", but "who does it convince"... because unconvincing propaganda only undermines its source.
Every authoritarian government is threatened by these events, especially when they start showing signs of being contagious. The semi-spontaneous urban insurrection has been high on the list of authoritarian nightmares since the storming of the Bastille (at least), and given the events that led to the dissolution of the Soviet Union it is obviously going to be a concern of the Russian oligarchy. Controlling information has always been hard in urban environments, and today's information environment exacerbates that, so any time precedents start emerging, authoritarian governments are going to start worrying. The Arab Spring precedent was an obvious threat to corrupt and autocratic governments, and it was certainly a threat to people like Putin, Lukashenko, and Yanukovych, whether they publicly voiced that threat or not. You can bet your last peso that when the Ukrainians went to the streets there was a whole lot of nervous concern over domestic conditions in Moscow and Minsk, whether or not anything was publicly said.
The Chinese government doesn't talk about that threat: there's good reason not to, as talking about it would only encourage what they fear. That doesn't mean they don't feel threatened.
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