vt.tiktok.com
Monika Bielskyte on TikTok
What if the account making you furious shares a payroll with the account cheering you on? The argument looks spontaneous. The outrage was commissioned. Soviet intelligence called its covert influence operations “active measures”: forged documents, planted stories, front organizations and political manipulation designed to fracture an adversary from within. Conversion was optional. Cynicism, nihilism and demoralization did the work. In Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible, Peter Pomerantsev documented how this machinery evolved under Putin. Vladislav Surkov, his political strategist, blurred the boundaries between power and opposition. Pomerantsev called it “a strategy of power based on keeping any opposition there may be constantly confused, a ceaseless shape-shifting that is unstoppable because it’s indefinable.” Disorientation is the point. Opposing extremes can be amplified by the same operator. The apparent choices multiply while the space for constructive action collapses. Competing explanations pile up until establishing reality feels exhausting and acting on it feels futile. Steve Bannon called it “flood the zone with shit.” It is cheaper to bury a fact than to disprove it. Every verified account enters a race against an unlimited supply of counterfeits. Generative AI turns that race into an industrial production line, compressing much of the old content machinery into a prompt, producing endless variations of plausible unreality, tailored to different languages, identities and grievances. One operator can test hundreds of narratives and amplify whichever version finds the fracture. Private influence firms recruit contractors, click-farm workers and paid influencers across borders. Many have no ideological investment in the cause. Your outrage is someone’s day job. Cognitive warfare works like a societal autoimmune disorder: defenses turn inward and misidentify the body’s own cells as the threat. A population fighting itself does not have to be invaded. It can surrender its interests from within while remaining convinced that every choice was entirely its own. No one can privately outlearn a market that industrializes confusion. Lifelong education and information literacy are severely undervalued forms of civil defense. When people recover the ability to know what is happening, they recover the ability to change what happens next. #CognitiveWarfare #StrategicDisinformation #GenerativeAI #HybridWarfare #InformationLiteracy
