Economics of Persuasion in Peace and War

Source details

Russian aggression against Ukraine is described as the first major interstate war of the smartphone era.
New information and communication technologies are reshaping how the war is fought on three fronts:
- a kinetic war in Ukraine;
- a war within Russia, where antiwar protesters want to force Russian President Vladimir Putin to withdraw from Ukraine;
- a war for global public opinion.

Rapid expansion of mobile broadband has transformed how information is collected and disseminated:
- Active mobile broadband subscriptions per capita: "0.04" in 2007 and "0.83" in 2021, "20 times more."
- Developing economy rates: "0.006" in 2007 and "0.73" in 2021.
- In Russia, the figure today is "more than 1."
- Fixed broadband subscriptions per capita: "0.05" in 2007 and "0.17" in 2021.
The spread of 3G and 4G enabled users to take photos, record videos, and immediately distribute them globally, driving social networks' growth.
Social media scale (global user counts):
- Facebook: "almost 3 billion" people.
- YouTube: "2.5 billion" people.
- Instagram: "1.5 billion" people.
The vast majority of social media use takes place on mobile devices.

Smartphones enable civilians and soldiers to record war crimes and movements of troops, and to post videos on social media.
The new era is characterized by an excess of information rather than a lack of it; much content is not fact-checked.
Broadband internet and social media favor dissemination of exciting and outrageous content, not necessarily true information.
Historical parallels:
- The Arab Spring coverage relied heavily on cell phone videos disseminated on social media; the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi in December 2010 was recorded and went viral, whereas a similar earlier self-immolation by Abdesslem Trimech went largely unnoticed because it was not recorded.

The author and coauthor research characterizes modern nondemocracies as relying less on mass repression and more on information manipulation; they label such leaders "spin dictators."
Russia's information strategy under Putin over the past 10 years has involved:
- troll factories, social media bots, anonymous Telegram channels, and Facebook advertising campaigns.
Actions taken during the Ukraine war to control domestic information include:
- closing down all remaining independent media;
- blocking most Western social media;
- introducing military censorship;
- making public statements contradicting the official version of events punishable by up to "15 years" in prison.

Polls registered an increase in Putin’s approval ratings from "60 percent" to "80 percent," but reliability is questioned due to increased repression and lower response rates.
List experiments suggest prevalence of "preference falsification" among Russians; one study finds "53 percent" of Russians support the war (Philipp Chapkovski and Max Schaub).
Research cited by the author ("3G Internet and Confidence in Government," by Nikita Melnikov, Ekaterina Zhuravskaya, and the author) shows that the spread of mobile broadband explains about half of the recent rise of populism in Europe.

In addition to supporting Ukraine militarily and through sanctions, the West should commit more resources to the information battle for Russians’ minds.
Rationale and opportunities:
- Russia is not China; there is no Great Firewall.
- Some social media—most important, YouTube and Telegram—are not blocked.
- VPNs are not outlawed.
- Compared with Cold War-era Russian-language radio programming, today there are many more avenues to reach Russian audiences with facts and fact-checking.
Strategic goal:
- Winning the information war within Russia will help win it on other fronts and may help prevent future invasions by Putin’s regime.

F&D Magazine — "Economics of Persuasion in Peace and War," Sergei Guriev, June 2022.

Economics of Persuasion in Peace and War
- Economics of Persuasion in Peace and War (Markdown version)
- Economics of Persuasion in Peace and War (PDF)