This is incorrect.
The success of the NATO misinformation campaign is not the result of their excellent planning supported by tech platforms combined with pictures of cats causing misinformation to struggle to take hold, but by an unwillingness to act on our side.
The presumption they make is that we’re bad people, deplorable they call us, but we’re not. We’re intelligent ethical actors that try to do the right thing. Our bias is to not lie, as we prefer a factual truthful environment, and therein lies the problem, because they lie, lie early, and lie often, but more importantly, lie effectively.
Ghost of Kiev, Snake Island. I can hear Joe Biden in my head yelling, “Come on, man”.
We have among us those quick on the draw who immediately race to counter their lies, and we know they’re right, but most of us aren’t like that. We understand that people are being hurt in Ukraine, and we don’t want to add to that by marginalizing their plight with an intense counter-misinformation campaign. So we don’t react until it becomes an imperative, by which time it’s often too late, because we’ve ceded too much ground by then.
This is what happened with the vaccine mandates as well, we didn’t want to dissuade people from becoming vaccinated, because we believe that’s between you and your doctor, but the mandate gave us the moral ground necessary for us to act, so we opened up a total information war.
We have the means and the ability to put them away, but we don’t want to, because we want to be sensitive to what’s happening, and that often becomes a liability as information cascades during that time.
Also, it’s too early to form judgement on the remarkableness of Zelensky. This NATO suit can still run away to Lviv i.e. Austro-Hungarian Lemberg i.e. Galicia-Volhynia with suitcases filled with cash and catch a train to West Germany from there. He allowed the conflict to escalate this far, hardly remarkable leadership.
