Author(s): Peter Pomerantsev

Politics | Russia | Western Europe

Learn how the perception of truth has been weaponized in modern politics with this "insightful" account of propaganda in Russia and beyond during the age of disinformation (New York Times).When information is a weapon, every opinion is an act of war.We live in a world of influence operations run amok, where dark ads, psyops, hacks, bots, soft facts, ISIS, Putin, trolls, and Trump seek to shape our very reality. In this surreal atmosphere created to disorient us and undermine our sense of truth, we've lost not only our grip on peace and democracy -- but our very notion of what those words even mean. Peter Pomerantsev takes us to the front lines of the disinformation age, where he meets Twitter revolutionaries and pop-up populists, "behavioral change" salesmen, Jihadi fanboys, 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. Blending reportage, family history, and intellectual adventure, This Is Not Propaganda explores how we can reimagine our politics and ourselves when reality seems to be coming apart.

'Quietly frightening.' - Guardian
'Essential reading.' - Irish Times
'Consistently chilling.' - Herald
'Shocking and entertaining.' - Daily Telegraph

Author Biography: Peter Pomerantsev is a Senior Fellow at the LSE and a Research Fellow at Johns Hopkins University, studying twenty-first-century information manipulation and how to fix it. An author and TV producer, he is a widely cited expert on disinformation and media, and writes for publications including the Guardian, Granta, the London Review of Books and the New York Review of Books. His first book, Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible, won the 2016 Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize and was nominated for the Samuel Johnson, Guardian First Book, Pushkin House and Gordon Burn prizes. It has been translated into over a dozen languages.