Another viral threat

This is a depressing book. The author’s thesis, easily substantiated by the facts, is that the end of the Cold War more or less coincided with the development of a new means with which to intimidate Western democracies: instead of weapons of mass destruction, along came the internet. After allegations that Russia interfered in the American presidential election of 2016 by digital means, and indeed in the EU referendum in Britain that same year – though I am yet to meet anyone who voted Leave because the Russians told them to – few can be unaware of the toxic power of digital communications, notably of social media. It is there to be manipulated by political actors of varying degrees of scrupulousness to achieve their often-unsavoury ends. That is what this book is about.

It is laced with fragments of autobiography, which make it a cut above the average polemic and lend it an air of perspective. Mr Pomerantsev – now a research fellow at the London School of Economics but once a journalist specialising in documentaries – was born to Russian-speaking Ukrainian parents. In the late 1970s, they were able to leave the Soviet Union, thanks to the period of détente when Brezhnev was trying to cool things down with Jimmy Carter and some people were able to leave, in keeping with the Soviets’ generally empty promises on improved human rights. They came to London and found work as journalists, Pomerantsev père with the BBC World Service, broadcasting back material deemed in the British “national interest” to the Soviet Union. With the fall of the Berlin Wall, the author’s mother was able to go back into Russia and report on life there. The author himself lived in Moscow from 2001 to 2010 until, as he puts it quoting Hannah Arendt, he felt compelled to leave a country where “nothing is true and everything is possible”. The fragments of autobiography serve in part to illustrate that the wall of lies his parents’ generation were confronted by in the Soviet Union has now been replicated, not least using digital means, in Putin’s Russia. It makes the point that fake news was around long before Twitter and Facebook. What has changed is that anybody can play the game.

The author gives a tour of a dark and unpleasant world where the use of these means allows dictatorship and corruption to flourish. He walks us through the ugliness of Duterte’s regime in the Philippines, where the leader used social media first to spread his anti-drugs message and then to attack and humiliate his opponents and those who sought to question him. He takes us to Mexico, where those running drug cartels develop ever more sophisticated means of undermining the authorities, and where the police, often heavily bribed or under grave threats, turn a blind eye to their evil. This is a section that every smug metropolitan Western cocaine user should read, to acquaint themselves with the sort of people they are keeping in business, and the extent of the harm they do. And he illustrates how China’s already considerable power is augmented both by its own use of digital media and its blocking of the Chinese people’s access to parts of it the rulers deem unhelpful – what is known as “the Great Firewall”.

But again, he comes back to Russia: that warped regime’s poisonous intervention in Syria, notably, and its attempts to manipulate opinion about it, and the blitz of false information it unleashed in 2013-14 when it seized part of Ukraine and the Crimea. Inevitably, those of us brought up in a democracy with accountable politicians find it hard to adjust our expectations to cope with a regime that routinely lies and whose head of government couldn’t care less whether he tells the truth or not. What one does about it is unclear; one must, I suppose, hope that at the rate the Russian population is declining, and with the crash in the price of oil – the commodity on which it increasingly relies to pay its way – it will, within a few decades, be in no position to muck around with anybody else with apparent impunity.

The least convincing part of the book is where the author looks at the rise of populism in Western democracies and tries to paint a picture of the populist parties’ use of social media that echoes that in the rogue states he has already catalogued. Here, the main weapon against such fake news is clear: a free press doing its job properly. And people have a choice about how to vote. As a Leaver said to the author after Leave won in 2016, a disconnected elite is just as culpable for encouraging populism as the internet. He admits the EU has started to serve itself, rather than its peoples. What isn’t discussed is how we break the spell of Twitter and Facebook. Perhaps it might start if those who see the damage they do stop using them – at which point the manipulators, bigots and nutters would be left talking only to themselves.