“Georgia. Human rights groups launched investigations into Russia’s reports of pitiless atrocities. It was fake news, but it took time to prove its falsity, and while the fact-checkers tried to disprove one story, the Kremlin put out two more. Russia proved that it could use television and the internet as weapons, launching barrages of disinformation and demonization – aiming, as one analyst put it, to “dismiss the critic, distort the facts, distract from the main issue, and dismay the audience.”
