The same conflict is being reported on but the narratives are vastly different, as are the conclusions being drawn by all the sides. (Photo: DENIS SINYAKOV/AFP via Getty Images)
I arrived in Russia a few days after the war in Ukraine began. Days later the channel I work for, RT, a Russian government-funded network, was taken off air in Europe, the United States, the United Kingdom and South Africa. A sense of foreboding choked the corridors at the Moscow headquarters. In hushed tones, people would gather in small circles and speculate if the network would close down. Would more people be losing their jobs? Had RT failed to get its message across?
What exactly is that message? For the channel, it is presenting the Russian government’s view of global events. For critics it is misrepresenting facts on the ground and undermining Western democracies by confusing the information sphere.
Fast forward five weeks and there’s a renewed vigour and optimism among RT staff. In the same way that Moscow is learning from this conflict who her true friends are, so is RT identifying new audiences.
It’s no secret that Washington and her allies have been pressuring countries to join their campaign of sanctions against Moscow. At the time of writing the Pakistani prime minister is facing a potential vote of no-confidence by an opposition he claims is backed by “foreign influences”. Prime Minister Imran Khan has refused to be drawn into the Ukraine-Russia conflict, insisting on maintaining a “neutral position” and hence, he believes, the current backlash.
In India, the government is reportedly considering Moscow’s proposal to bypass Western sanctions that have kicked Russian banks off the SWIFT international money trading system. This would see New Delhi trading in direct rupee-ruble transfers.
Is there a connection between this and Twitter suspending more than a hundred Indian accounts for alleged “coordinated inauthentic behaviour”? The two countries involved think yes, especially as the accounts are pro-Russia.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken wrapped up a three-day trip this week to the Middle East and Africa. When in Algeria and Morocco, he urged the governments to limit their ties with Russia. Most African states have baulked. Instead they’re seeking to remain neutral in the Ukraine conflict and rather focus on their own economic and political future.
Where has this left RT? It should come as no surprise that the channel is looking for new friends and finding them in Africa and Asia. This is not to say it’s given up on its audiences in Europe and the US, but the challenge has always been about how to reach them. Now, with no access to traditional satellites and cable providers, it’s clear the solution lies elsewhere.
In the same way that Covid-19, many would argue, accelerated existing trends in remote work, e-commerce, and automation, this conflict has accelerated existing trends in the information war.
After RT was banned, also from the social platform YouTube and de-platformed from Instagram, Facebook and Twitter, Russian software developers put their heads together to find and create new digital platforms on which Russian media can broadcast.
Koo is India’s alternative to Twitter. It launched in early 2020 and expanded to Nigeria last year when Abuja suspended Twitter. Its goal is to reach 100 million users in the next nine months — and it seems realistic. As for TikTok, the most popular app of the past two years, there are already 16 alternatives on offer.
So the thinking in Moscow is: you don’t want us on your satellites, you don’t want us on your digital platforms, we’ll develop our own.
The implications are far-reaching.
Already I feel like I’m living in a parallel universe. I speak to friends and colleagues in South Africa who, by-and-large, are seeing very different news to the news I’m exposed to here in Russia. We are being told that the Western media’s reports of Russian casualties on the battlefield are hugely exaggerated. The high number of civilians being killed? It’s because, the Russian military insists, many are being used as human shields by the Ukrainian paramilitaries who deliberately want the world to accuse Russian snipers of targeting them. Same conflict but competing narratives and very different conclusions being drawn by the sides.
The danger in this is that we will increasingly all come to live in our “echo chambers” where two neighbours could be physically next door to each other but getting information on disparate and even opposed platforms. The parallel universe I’m experiencing now will be small compared to what I believe is waiting for all of us another conflict or two down the road.
I have reported on wars for more than two decades and in this time my role has slowly changed from being an eyewitness and documenting what I see to having to verify the news and sifting through images and reports as I spend getting on-the-ground information.
It wasn’t so long ago that video broadcasting meant only television. Remember when we would gather at 8pm to watch the evening news bulletin? That was eventually replaced by 24/7 networks such as CNN. The advent of social media broke that model.
I reported on the 2001 India earthquake for the SABC. I remember an old man handing me a folded piece of torn paper with a British phone number on it.
“It’s my daughter in England. Please can you call her and tell her I’m okay. You’re a journalist and she’ll believe you,” he beseeched me.
Fast forward five years and I am standing on the border of the northern Israeli town of Metula interviewing soldiers as they walk through the fence into enemy territory. Today you are lucky if the army’s press division gives you permission to interview someone in an office in Tel Aviv.
Then it was the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war. Days later, in the southern suburbs of Lebanon’s capital, Beirut, I handed over my passport and the woman behind the computer desk did a quick google search before giving the Hezbollah commander a nod that I can film in their neighbourhood. Nowadays I get stopped at the airport on arrival and hours can pass before I get security clearance into the country.
Fast forward to the Arab Spring of 2011 where a million people gathered in Tahrir Square in Cairo. It was the first time that social media was used to mobilise protestors and even today observers debate whether this “Twitter revolution” as it came to be known would have happened without the “new media”. The government responded by cutting off the internet.
And if that wasn’t bad enough, journalists soon became the target of extremist groups such as the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq. It was so bad that in the end we couldn’t travel to areas where it had a majority support-base and had to rely on the militants to give us footage of what was happening in their strongholds, which sparked another debate all of its own.
Fast forward to the current conflict. It began eight years ago when, after reporting for RT in west Ukraine among people who are against Russia, I was banned from re-entering the country for five years. Until now, Russian journalists cannot enter west Ukraine — while Western journalists are often afraid to travel to the east of the country where people are pro-Russia.
Journalists are no longer seen as neutral “purveyors” of news. We are often tainted with the label of being an “information soldier” in an increasingly information war.
You too have the choice, not only of which news you want to watch, but which platform you want to use. As the amount of information grows alongside its distribution, I fear we will all become more disconnected from each other as we are faced with these endless growing choices. The hate mail I get today from people who are against RT is at least an indication that on some level we are still communicating with each other and using similar sources of information. But it’s not far off, I believe, when we will be living next door to someone who, for all intents and purposes, could be living on another planet.