Peter Pomerantsev, Senior Fellow at the London School of Economics, talks about how an abundance of information created a new reality.

About Peter Pomerantsev

"I’m a Visiting Senior Fellow at the Institute of Global Affairs of the London School of Economics and at the University of Johns Hopkins.

I research disinformation, hate speech and polarisation to try to work out what we can do about it."

Fighting for pluralism

In the 20th century, we had a dream. Those people who fought for democracy had a vision of what a democratic information space should be, and some risked their lives for it. They were fighting for freedom of expression against censorship. They were fighting for pluralism, having a varied and abundant range of media which they thought good for democratic debate. They all believed in a metaphor about the marketplace of ideas: that the best information would rise to the top.

Throughout the 20th century, dictatorships would try to suppress information through censorship and arrested people who tried to speak their mind. But in the 21st century, even authoritarian countries like Russia have much less censorship. We live in an age of what some academics term “information abundance”. You can even get through China’s internet firewall quite easily if you want to reach good sources of information. It’s incomparably easier to get different, better, accurate information than it was in the 20th century, but that has also brought a new set of problems: people feel very lost in this chaos of overabundance of information.

Often, when I travel through zones of intense information conflict, like in east Ukraine or in America, which is very similar to east Ukraine in some ways, I hear people say the same things: "We don’t understand what’s true or false anymore. We’re surrounded by this kind of deluge of information, disinformation, misinformation. We feel everybody’s biased. We feel everyone has an agenda. So, we just have to kind of follow our emotions, our gut instincts, to guide our way through."

Key Points

• The liberalisation and multiplication of media outlets and information platforms have led to an overabundance of information which confuses citizens around the world.
• Propagandists and other political actors use new technologies and social media tools to target micro-groups and spread Manichean ideology.
• The artificial divisions of “us and them” makes it easier for populists to push their message and reach their political goals.