This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality

‘Through our current smog of smouldering bullshit, This is Not Propaganda shines a necessary, humane and dissident light.’

Nick Rankin, author of Churchill’s Wizards: the British Genius for Deception 1914-1945

‘The world’s most powerful people are lying like never before, and no one understands the art of their lies like Peter Pomerantsev.’

Oliver Bullough, author of Moneyland: The Inside Story of the Crooks and Kleptocrats Who Rule the World

When information is a weapon, everyone is at war.

We live in a world of influence operations run amok, a world of dark ads, psy-ops, hacks, bots, soft facts, ISIS, Putin, trolls, Trump. We’ve lost not only our sense of peace and democracy – but our sense of what those words even mean.

As Peter Pomerantsev seeks to make sense of the disinformation age, he meets Twitter revolutionaries and pop-up populists, ‘behavioural change’ salesmen, Jihadi fan-boys, Identitarians, truth cops, and many others. Forty years after his dissident parents were pursued by the KGB, Pomerantsev finds the Kremlin re-emerging as a great propaganda power. His research takes him back to Russia – but the answers he finds there are not what he expected.