Who’s Behind #IStandWithPutin?
More than a month on from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, suggesting that the wheels have fallen off Vladimir Putin’s propaganda machine has become commonplace. Russia’s playbook is outdated and has failed to adapt; Moscow has been stunned either by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s great skill as a media operator or by the viral ferocity of Kyiv’s own digital fighters.
As the researcher Sinan Aral in , “Ukraine and its partisans are running circles around Putin and his propagandists in the battle for hearts and minds, both in Ukraine and abroad.” Even Russia’s lurch back into Soviet-style information control seems to be nothing but a retreat from the gleeful, postmodern, fact-defying dance of digital propaganda in which it had been so masterful. My personal social-media feeds stand as testament to how each of these observations might, individually, be true: They feature wall-to-wall Zelensky,, and farmers towing tanks. I know absolutely no one who thinks the invasion is anything but an outrage.
