BackThe dubious value of winning battles on social media
Ukraine is winning a ‘battle of hearts’ but such a battle is usually won by those who lose the actual war
PremiumWhen two nations are in a conflict, the region from where poignant photographs emerge is usually the country that is hiding something better than the other one. It seeks to be morally overvalued by the rest of the world. This overvaluation is known as “winning the social media war". Palestine and Kashmir, for instance, have always been winners of such a war. And more recently, we are told by jubilant people who lead their lives by a “moral compass" that Ukraine is winning the “propaganda war". But does it matter? Is there any substantive value in winning a social-media war?
Since the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, most of us have been flooded with heartbreaking images from Ukraine. In every war, there is always that little girl who is holding a toy, crying her goodbye to her handsome dad, who is in uniform, kneeling. Many of the stories are real and stirring. But some have turned out to be fake. For instance, a popular video clip of a Russian warship asking Ukrainian soldiers on Snake Island to surrender, with one Ukrainian defying the order through an expletive. We were told the Russians then blew up the island, killing all on it. It was endorsed by Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky. Ukraine even named the ‘deceased soldiers’, and announced posthumous awards, but it emerges that all those soldiers had surrendered and are alive.
In other spurious news that Ukraine or its handlers have successfully transmitted, ingenious Ukrainians have hacked into the phones of advancing Russian soldiers and are hearing “everything". And of course, there have been moving images of Ukrainian civilian women taking up arms to defend their nation. And even of a male journalist claiming that he will stay put in a city under siege and defend it, making me feel sheepish because if Russians ever invade Gurgaon, I may be tempted to tell them exactly what to bomb. Even as stories of valour came in, the million-odd Ukrainians who fled were not shamed as cowards, but respected, correctly, as victims.
The world is awash in the perception that Ukrainians are good, funny and intelligent people, ruined by a mad Russian. Zelensky himself has become a mythical figure across the world for his defiance and willingness to become a martyr. Even a video clip in which he plays the piano with a body part that is not meant for playing the piano has becoming endearing, which it is.
It is hard to dispute that Ukraine is “winning the battle of hearts", but then it is usually won by those who lose the actual war. So, does winning the social-media war have any value, or is it just a feeble blow delivered by the vanquished? What has all this new global love for Ukraine got it except more encouragement to prolong its destruction?
Exaggeration and hyperbole are not entirely useless. They do defend the weak against the strong. They travel faster than dull facts, they are infectious as news, and they get the world’s attention and thereby serve as a shield for the oppressed or handlers of the oppressed. This is the foundation of activism itself, but for it to work, it needs the villain, like a politician, government or corporation, to have shame at least for tactical reasons, and hence be afraid of sustained defamation. But outside this framework, where the interest of the strong is greater than their need for compliments, the social-media war is largely useless.
I am certain public opinion matters to Russia’s Vladimir Putin. But, even though he has moved to block Facebook in Russia, like many strongmen, he probably knows that social media often represents the public opinion of a public that does not matter.
There are many ideas that win the social-media battle but lose the war. The liberal campaign against Brexit, for example, and in India, the campaign against Aadhaar in the name of privacy. Hundreds of millions of Indians are lucky that the hyper-moral lost that battle. There are, of course, ideas that were popular on social media that eventually won in the physical world. Like the campaign of middle-class farmers against farm reform, but its social-media noise had nothing much to do with the victory of the movement, which drew public support in a few states through conventional ways of creating fear and by recruiting thousands of farm labourers to demonstrate on the streets for months.
Social media is not an equal place. Some news does better than the rest. The ideas that usually win are simple, moral and negative stories delivered to victims or bystanders who have no stake in the matter. Ukraine is perfectly poised to win, even as it faces destruction in the real world.
Russia has tried to counter Ukraine’s popularity with its own propaganda, but it was doomed because social media is a bad conductor of the views of the morally grey. On Thursday, just as I was getting alarmed that I am surrounded only by good people who transmit only Ukrainian or Western propaganda, I finally got a bit of Russia’s infamous “disinformation". Scott Ritter, the former United Nations weapons inspector in Iraq who had become the moral face of America’s war in Iraq and whom The New York Times had described as “the loudest and most credible skeptic of the Bush administration’s contention that Hussein was hiding weapons of mass destruction", gave an interview that was posted on YouTube in which he said Nato was “too weak" to stop Russia, and that Ukraine’s government, though led by a Jew, was run by a “neo-Nazis".
Ukraine was quick to denounce him as a Russian agent. I got that news instantly. Too many good people around me.
Manu Joseph is a journalist, novelist, and the creator of the Netflix series, ‘Decoupled’
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