The Privatization of Information Management and Propaganda: New Communications Agents in the Ukraine-Russia Conflict

• In Event: Propaganda and its Others in an Age of New Media

Abstract

The conflict between Ukraine and Russia from 2014 and onwards has again reminded the world that wars are not only fought with guns and tanks, but also with information technologies. With the rise and establishment of social networking media in conjunction with the spread of personal and mobile media it is argued that propaganda and information management take on new forms, leading to ‘hybrid war’, ‘iWar’ and ‘arrested war’, and other social media based techniques for organising discursive aggression. The nature of such aggression has received its fair amount of attention, but a less analysed aspect of these new forms of information dissemination is the fact that many agents involved nowadays come from PR and advertising, or from journalism, bringing with them competences, ideologies and practices from these specific fields. This calls for new approaches to information warfare and propaganda, where there is a need to identify the new agents involved, and analyse what implications this might have on the messages produced and disseminated.
The aim of this paper is discuss in which way information management is affected – if at all – by this new set of commercial and private-sector actors engaged in the management of information (besides PR, nation branding and journalism, also oligarchs and other individuals with an interest in Ukraine’s international image). Empirically, two cases will be discussed: The Ukraine Crisis Media Centre (UCMC) and StopFake. UCMC started as an NGO during the Euromaidan events in late 2013 and the organisation provides a communication platform for the Ukrainian military and government (press conferences and briefings), while StopFake was launched by journalist students and university faculty with the aim to debunk and counter Russian propaganda. Both initiatives are non-governmental, and the analytic focus of the paper is on individual actors and institutions, and on the ways in which the media production logics these actors bring with them impact on the forms and contents of the communicated messages.

Author

• Göran Bolin, Södertörn U