When information is a weapon, everyone is at war. We live in a world of influence operations run amok, a world of dark ads, psychological operations, 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 evolutionaries and pop-up populists, 'behavioural change' salesmen, Jihadi fan-boys, Identitarians, truth cops, and much more. Forty years after his dissident parents were pursued by the KGB, he finds the Kremlin re-emerging as a great propaganda power. His research takes him back to Russia - but the answers he finds there are surprising. Part reportage, part intellectual adventure, This is Not Propaganda is a Pynchon-like exploration of how we can reimagine our politics and ourselves in a time where truth has been turned topsy-turvy

Amer. consume 57% of the world's advertising while representing only 6% of the population, & half of our waking hours are spent immersed in the mass media. Drawing on the history of propaganda as well as on contemporary res. in social psychol., this book shows how the tactics used by political campaigners, sales agents, advertisers, televangelists, demagogues, & others often take advantage of our emotions by appealing to our deepest fears & most irrational hopes, creating a distorted vision of the world we live. This updated ed. includes coverage of the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal, recent election campaigns, talk radio, teen suicide, UFO abductions, the Columbine shootings, & novel propaganda tactics based on hypocrisy & false allegations.