The “Post-truth era” and its effects on public perception of Georgian and Ukrainian history.
Ескіз недоступний
Дата
2020
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Видавець
Tbilisi, Georgia: IBSU
Анотація
“Post-truth” is a common moniker, often applied to the current trends of disseminating political information in the conditions of rampant informational warfare. It is a particularly “devious” element of informational warfare, resistant to fact-checks, since “post-truth” relies more so on confidence and charisma of its producer, rather than on the truthfulness of facts. As such, the producers of propaganda rely on suggesting “alternative facts,” with the end goal being a population that lives in the moment and discards pre-existing knowledge, while also abstains from opposing propagandists, since “one can never know the full truth.” In particular, such tactics are used to distort history, even one originally built upon witness testimonies. Analyzing modern media, particularly “social networks”, this paper shows how recent and not-so-recent Ukrainian and Georgian history becomes a common target for such distorted portrayals on the Internet. The topics that end up distorted are the countries’conflicts with Russia: their historical annexations by Moscow, along with the recent causes of war. The actors that spread such propaganda usually operate on a pro-Communist, or a pro-Russian platform (which are oftentimes interchangeable in the English-speaking community on the Internet). The implications of such activities are quite alarming, requiring further studies on behalf of Georgian and Ukrainian interests, to bring out the concrete numbers on exactly how many people in the US or other English-speaking countries have been affected by propaganda.
15th International Silk Road virtual conference. Conference Proceedings (Silk Road 2020)
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Ключові слова
history of Ukraine, history of Georgia, memory politics, post-truth, propaganda, social networks