disinformation

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Disinformation is the dissemination of false information with the aim of influencing public opinion , groups or individuals in the interests of political or economic interests. The information transmitted for this purpose is not only untrue according to objective standards , but is deliberately put into the world by the author for the purpose of deception. The disinformation can be spread, for example, via the mass media , which is also referred to as media manipulation . The disinformation is either an outright lie or consists indirectly of subtle suppression, withholding, or distraction from verified facts, or by implicating false opinions.

Disinformation is used in a targeted manner in numerous areas of politics and business. Many secret services have their own departments for the falsification and dissemination of information. In the military sector, disinformation is used to deceive the enemy, for example to guide him through incorrect information about the strength of the troops or their spatial distribution. Consumers are influenced by the spread of rumors or publicly available false information not to buy products from a competitor.

Causes and targets of disinformation

Disinformation can occur in public relations work by government agencies (e.g. the secret service or the military), by political parties and groups, by lobby groups or by individuals. The aim is to deceive the population, create public opinion or confuse the opponent.

The Russian chief of staff Valery Vasilyevich Gerasimov wrote in an essay for the weekly Voenno-Promyshlennyi Kur'er (“Military-Industrial Courier”) in February 2013 : “Wars are no longer declared and once they have started they turn out to be unfamiliar Muster. “Non-military means are more important than ever, in certain cases even more important than weapons. Gerasimov explicitly mentions communication as a non-military means. Wars do not win who has more weapons. Wars win who controls the information.

Examples

Russian propaganda is a current phenomenon of state-dispersed disinformation. The Russian government runs the media collective Ruptly , a subsidiary of its TV station RT, from an expensive business address in Berlin . As subsidiaries, these include: Redfish , Maffick , In the Now , Backthen and Waste-Ed , Facebook channels with in some cases millions of followers and with their own supposedly independent correspondents and producers, most of whom had previously worked for Russian state media for a long time. With the seemingly harmless “ grassroots ” label, the task is to infiltrate left-of-the-center media with covert disinformation campaigns, while strictly concealing their close ties to the Russian government. “Our target audience is anyone who is tired of a mainstream media industry that is one of the most socially exclusive industries in the world and employs journalists who often have a greater connection with those in power who are supposed to challenge and hold them accountable than with the masses of people our profession should serve, ”says Redfish . The underlying message is: The West is neither golden nor democratic. A mixture of facts and fiction is all about non-Russian grievances, cases such as Natalja Estemirowa , Anna Politkovskaya , Sergei Magnitsky and Boris Nemtsov or the pollution of Lake Baikal are not mentioned. The chairman of the German Association of Journalists (DJV), Frank Überall , says: “Here, cheap polemics against journalists are fueling the prejudice that the media are the extended arm of state power. What nonsense! "

Another example of state disinformation is the statement initially made by the Soviet Union in 1986 about the alleged harmlessness of the Chernobyl reactor accident . Other examples include the alleged murder of babies by Iraqi soldiers in the Gulf War of 1991 , which provoked worldwide outrage but was later exposed as a deliberate lie by a PR agency , and, in the same context, forged documents on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction submitted to the UN Security Council as a justification of the American attack. Another example is the so-called horseshoe plan , which served to justify the war in Kosovo .

The CIA used regular communication channels to spread false instructions and information among its employees, while instructions to the contrary were sent to selected decision-makers, with the addition of ignoring the other instructions. In one such operation, known as " eyewash, " CIA personnel in Pakistan were banned from pursuing potentially fatal operations against terrorist suspect Abu Subaida , while another directive instructed those responsible not to heed the first directive and continue the mission.

Numerous disinformation campaigns during the East-West conflict are attributed to the State Security Service of the GDR and the secret services of other Warsaw Pact states ; such activities came under the heading of Active Measures . According to a media report, the British secret service is using its technical capabilities to influence debates on the Internet.

The adoption of the UN Migration Pact in December 2018, with the aim of strengthening human rights worldwide , was accompanied by a disinformation campaign by right-wing populist and right-wing extremists in Germany, Austria and other European countries, including the AfD , the Identitarian Movement and right-wing internet blogs. Fears of Islamization and “ resettlement ” were stoked. The disinformation was favored by an information policy of the governments that was judged to be inadequate. The effects of the disinformation campaign reached into the bourgeois camp. Some countries, including Austria, which is co-governed by the right-wing populist FPÖ , withdrew from the agreement. Sociologist Whitney Phillips cautioned that the mainstream media were critical of them making themselves “part of the disinformation campaign” because “their coverage acts like an amplifier.” “Disinformation gets its biggest and most lasting boost from the coverage of the mainstream media” she warned. After Austria and Hungary announced their withdrawal from the pact and the number of people mentioned in social media rose sharply, many daily newspapers reported on the pact for the first time. Many journalists described the pact as "controversial" but failed to report that doubts and falsehoods about the pact were originally spread by nationalists.

Disinformation and propaganda

Disinformation differs from the neighboring term propaganda , i.e. the targeted and one-way communication for the pursuit of a specific goal by communicators. In a broader sense, disinformation is also the deliberate oversupply of - from the recipient's perspective - useless information that is supposed to cover up the important information. In contrast to disinformation, propaganda does not have to be done with the deliberate untruthful use of false information.

See also

literature

Web links

Wiktionary: Disinformation  - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Brandon Michael Henry, Giuseppe Lippi et al .: What is disinformation? Considerations from six scientific perspectives. ( medienanstalt-nrw.de [PDF]).
  2. ↑ Patrick Beuth, Marc Brost , Peter Dausend, Steffen Dobbert , Götz Hamann : War without blood . In: Die Zeit , No. 9/2017
  3. ↑ Markus Beckedahl , Redfish: New propaganda station from Russia Today from Berlin on netzpolitik.org from October 19, 2018, accessed on November 10, 2018
  4. ↑ a b c d Jan-Henrik Wiebe, Mitten in Berlin: Russia's secret media center in Europe on T-online from October 18, 2018, accessed on November 10, 2018
  5. ^ Charles Davis, No Amateur Act: 'Grassroots' Media Startup Redfish Is Supported by the Kremlin on The Daily Beast, January 2, 2018, accessed November 10, 2018
  6. ↑ Viral “Manspreading” Video is Staged Kremlin Propaganda on EU vs Disinfo from October 8, 2018, accessed on November 10, 2018
  7. ↑ Thorsten Schmitz , How Russian Online Media Want to Destabilize Democracy on Süddeutsche.de from November 1, 2018, accessed on November 10, 2018
  8. ↑ Musa Okwonga , My new post, on Redfish and Russia Today on okwonga.com, August 12, 2018, accessed November 10, 2018
  9. ^ Greg Miller, Adam Goldman: 'Eyewash': How the CIA deceives its own workforce about operations . In: Washington Post , January 31, 2015
  10. ↑ Hubertus Knabe , Bernd Eisenfeld : West-Arbeit des MfS , Chapter 5.1 Foreign espionage and "active measures" in the Federal Republic - Head Office A. Ch. Links Verlag, 1999, ISBN 978-3-86153-182-1 , pp. 133 ff .
  11. ↑ British secret service can manipulate Internet content . In: Süddeutsche Zeitung , July 15, 2014
  12. ↑ Alternative facts from AfD-TV, everyone needs to know about the UN migration pact. , accessed on August 25, 2020
  13. ↑ How rights organize the propaganda against the migration pact. Retrieved December 23, 2018 .
  14. ↑ Review by Dietmar Süß: Died on the flight to Europe . In: sueddeutsche.de . 2018, ISSN  0174-4917 ( sueddeutsche.de [accessed December 23, 2018]).
  15. ↑ a b Harald Schumann, Elisa Simantke and Nico Schmidt "How dangerous is right-wing disinformation on the Internet?" Tagesspiegel from April 14, 2019
  16. ↑ Brandon Michael Henry, Giuseppe Lippi et al .: What is disinformation? Considerations from six scientific perspectives. , Footnote on p. 24.