Information Warfare: Another Media Misfire
Ezoic
January 9, 2025: The Soviet Union and its successor, the Russian Federation, depend on disinformation campaigns to cover their tracks when their espionage, sabotage or special operations activities were exposed and reported on in nations with free media. Socialist dictatorships like North Korea, China, Cuba and the Soviet Union as well as Islamic terrorists groups and radical groups of all sorts see the media as a means of protection, deception, agitation and recruitment. The Soviet Union had a large bureaucracy dedicated to dezinformatsiya or disinformation and propaganda. China has the largest internet based disinformation operation. China tried to keep this secret, but in 2022 widespread protests and demonstrations in China against strict covid19 controls were widely reported outside China because they involved an unprecedented breakdown of China's enormous Internet censorship operation often called the Great Firewall of China. For over a decade China has had the largest population of Internet users in the world. Between September and November 2022 China experienced a major breakdown of its Internet censorship operation as an unprecedented number of Chinese protested the censorship online employing numerous techniques that had emerged over the last decade to evade the censorship. These methods were never used on a massive scale before and, when that finally happened, the Great Firewall was unable to cope. As more Chinese users realized that the internet controls were overwhelmed and breaking down, more people joined in. All this was mainly in support of public demonstrations against the months of increasingly restrictive covid19 lockdowns. These cracks in internet censorship meant more Chinese became aware of how damaging the lockdowns were. The Great Firewall was supposed to prevent that from happening. The government and the Chinese people both discovered how much bad news the Great Firewall had been hiding. This did permanent damage to Chinese censorship efforts and after that incident a growing number of Chinese knew ways to successfully and consistently evade the Great Firewall.
https://www.strategypage.com/htmw/htiw/articles/202501091416.aspx#gsc.tab=0
