“The Iron Curtain” lives again. And the American news media have totally missed the message.
The Iron Curtain, a term popularized by former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill after World War II, is making a comeback as Vladimir Putin erects a digital iron curtain around his country to keep his own people from knowing details of his invasion of Ukraine. Instead, Putin allows only his state-run media to tell the story. The rest of the media are being censored.
Now if you think that sounds familiar, you’re not wrong. Post a photo of Rachel Levine on Twitter, call him a man, and see what happens.
Getting good information from the front lines of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is a near impossibility. Imagine being a Russian after Putin turned off all the news except his own.
Like Big Tech did in America during the 2020 election, censoring stories its political party didn’t like (which continues to this day), is what Putin is doing now to his citizens. Social media companies are on the receiving end of Putin’s complaints that they engage in “extremist activities” and are giving “false information” about the war: you know, the same way those same social media companies, their political party, and state-apparatchiks referred to conservatives. Ask Donald Trump what happened to him during the run-up to the 2020 election.
Putin is working to silence TikTok, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram and is making it harder to get virtual private networks (VPNs). WhatsApp, an encrypted messaging service run by Meta (Facebook), reportedly still works.
Because of the balanced news blackout, some tech acolytes are using their expertise to engage in digital combat with the Kremlin by sending individual messages to Russians. These tech warriors have bundled and disseminated swaths of randomly generated phone numbers, allowing people all over the world to send text messages to Russian strangers in an attempt to get them to stop the war and help Ukraine.
Who are we? Just an anonymous people… Why are we? To #fightforUkraine ✌️✌️✌️#OpRussia #UkraineUnderAttaсk #UkraineRussianWar pic.twitter.com/mgYaiP7eT2
— squad303 (@squad3o3) March 6, 2022
It’s similar to what Democrats did during the 2020 election.
The Wall Street Journal reports that the effort is helping. No kidding?
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They talked to a Portland, Ore. truck salesman who has sent more than 2000 messages to Russians using the service created by “Squad303.”
This is crazy. The person questioned me being American so I had to prove it. I’ve sent over 200 messages thanks to @squad3o3 to Russian cell phones. This one got me, it roughly translates to “it’s terrible in Russia” @xxNB65 @YourAnonNews @xenasolo @ZelenskyyUa got a new friend🙏 pic.twitter.com/UOunxs2aIJ
— Mr. T aka Masta Chef (@titancrawford1) March 6, 2022
The service is operated by Polish programmers and is run out of a website 1920.in. The truck driver told the Journal how shocked he was that the Russians are so “brainwashed.” We’re thinking he missed Hillary Clinton’s Trump-Russia collusion brainwashing efforts that started in 2016.
The approval of Russian state media looks a lot like CNN or MSNBC these days: carrying water for deep state government apparatchiks spouting pro-party talking points.
An American professor told the Journal that it’s up to the West to get their messages to the Russians.
Thomas Kent, a former president of Radio Free Europe who now lectures at Columbia University, said the West now has a moral responsibility to circumvent the Kremlin crackdown on the free flow of information by using tools such as the one developed by Squad303. The tool provided an opportunity to converse with concerned Russians willing to receive information, he said.
“If Russian authorities didn’t think that ordinary people could undermine their power, they would not censor the media so thoroughly,” Mr. Kent said.
Now go back and read his quote and imagine him saying something like this about American media.
Indeed, according to Reuters, old-timey Radio Free Europe has begun directing its signals into Ukraine and Russia, where “several publications have also launched mirroring websites – or copies at new internet addresses, as well as channels on Telegram. The BBC has resumed shortwave broadcasts on frequencies that can be “received clearly in Kyiv and parts of Russia.” According to Reuters, the Radio Free Europe apps have ways to “circumventing censorship.”
You know, like conservatives have resorted to communicating through Telegram, Parler, Locals, MeWe, Minds, and Gettr.
We know the battle in Ukraine is horrible. I know people there dodging bombs. But the information war isn’t only being fought there and in Russia. Do these American media people even listen to themselves?
Professor Kent also wrote that there are many other ways to get word to the Russians. Putin, he says, got a big head start in the information wars. “Putin,” he writes, “has prepared for more than a decade for total information control … The Kremlin has repeatedly practiced disconnecting Russia from the international internet. Now that war has begun, Putin has moved into a final phase, blocking Russians from Western news sites and shutting down any domestic outlet that the Kremlin cannot intimidate. He has blocked Facebook and Twitter, and an internet shutdown could happen at any time. The West does not appear to have a plan for this moment.”
He’s wrong. Western media are experts at it. All they need do is ask Democrats how to manipulate Big Tech, legacy media, and messaging. They’ve got it down. Just ask Donald Trump how that whole 2020 election worked out. Shoot, Jeff Zucker’s out of work — put Don Lemon’s old boss in charge of it.
Anonymous reportedly hacked into unsecured printers and took them over, sending 100,000 users the message that “their president, the government, and media all have been feeding them lies” about the war.
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The mainstreams, such as the New York Times and the Washington Post, have begun their own channels on outlets to which conservatives have long since fled, “Telegram, the as-yet-unbanned social-media-and-messaging app that claims more than 1 billion downloads (Russia is its second-biggest market) and acts as a platform to both news outlets and news outlets and Russian state channels alike,” according to The Atlantic. The far-Left American magazine also reported that “the BBC, whose Russian-language website more than tripled its weekly average audience (10.7 million people compared with its average 3.1 million) in the first week of the Russian invasion, before being blocked by the Kremlin, encouraged its audience to use tools such as the Psiphon app, an open-source, virtual private network service that helps users conceal their location, and Tor, a more secure web browser.”
All of a sudden, the Leftist press in the West has discovered that it’s somehow a bad thing to censor another side of a story. Who woulda thunk?
American conservatives, indeed conservatives all over the world, can only look and shake their heads.
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