Social media turn on Putin, the past master Carole Cadwalladr

Disinformation and fake accounts were used against the west for years – now the Kremlin is under attack.

*In Russia on Friday, Vladimir Putin, a man who is now scared of his own shadow, took the extraordinary step of attempting to outlaw information. He banned Facebook. He shut down Twitter. He passed a new law that declares journalism a criminal offence: any journalist found to have published “fake news” on the war in Ukraine now faces up to 15 years in prison.

It is, like so many things in the last week, incredible, unprecedented, horrifying – but more importantly it’s also desperate and absurd. Because in 2022 you can’t ban information. It’s like trying to ban oxygen. It’s the kind of move that one of his grey-faced Soviet predecessors might have made. It’s as modern and up-to-date as a typewriter. Only a fool would make predictions right now, but here’s one anyway: it proves that Putin, the founding father of what’s come to be known as “information war”, just lost the information war.

Anything can and may happen. But having dominated the dark arts of disinformation for the last eight years, the Kremlin’s invincible mastery of the information space has been exposed as a sham, a fiction, another lie. Putin has put on the equivalent of a pair of bell-bottoms and is dad-dancing across the internet. Meanwhile Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy isn’t just commanding his armed forces: he’s commanding TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, Telegram. He’s simultaneously available across all social media platforms – hybrid warfare’s first hybrid leader.'>>>

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/mar/06/social-media-turn-on-putin-the-past-master

She was interviewed by H Sreenavasin for Amanpour, and I saw her for the first time, asserting putin's huge and long-term disinformation campaign.