I really enjoyed Peter Pomerantsev’s 2019 book “This Is Not Propaganda”. It mixes a biographical thread of his very interesting family history with the very recent developments of miss information campaigns. How information topology has changed during the last quarter century has been of some interest to me. While I am not an expert by any stretch of the imagination I am not totally naive on the subject either. Pomerantsev does in my opinion a wonderful job in explaining the pedigree of the mayhem that messes with our societies right now. He focuses on a couple of key points along the way that brings them exemplary to life. I think even if one would have not never considered why it can be, that a rather reality TV persona can be what used to be the ‘leader of the free world’, one would understand the causes much better after reading this very insightful book. There were a couple of passages where the author managed to explain topics to me in a wonderful concise way. While the existence of ISIS had not escaped me either, I had never really understood what drove the sudden surge of this phenomenon. After a few pages I realized much clearer why this ‘movement’ became attractive enough for people to actually go there. It is high time that more people understand how manipulation of political movements functions on the Internet. The companies running the infrastructure have provided the backbone for allot of things that are really bad for mankind. They did not intend to. They simply did not notice. Maybe they still are ignorant. They certainly do not much to reign it in. There has never been more junk information on the pages of Google, Facebook and Twitter.
Good information quality is the fresh water in the developed world in the 21st century. Lots of entities have plenty of motivation to dump dead donkeys in the wells that are owned by these companies. People will not stop drinking from them. They actually like the taste.