Hey everybody, I'm Kyle Rizzo. Welcome back to Make Me Smart or just welcome if this is your first time here. Thank you where you've been.

Here's what we say around here. None of us is as smart as all of us. That's the whole drill with this podcast.

And I'm Kimberly Adams. It is Tuesday, which for those of you who are new means it's time for us to do a deep dive or shall we say a deeper dive into one particular topic.

And today we are going to talk about disinformation and the way in which Russia has used it in as one of its tools of war in its invasion of Ukraine.

And also just the way information warfare is playing out in this conflict.

Yeah, that last little bit is key, right? Because this is in addition to the horrible things that are happening actually on the ground. There is a very calculated on both sides, by the way, information that is being fought.

So some terms, misinformation, information that is not factual, it is just wrong. Disinformation is misinformation that is intentionally spread to be wrong and to mislead and to get people to believe things that aren't so.

And as I said, there are things being done on both sides that we sort of need to interrogate to talk about what's actually happening and what's not. And that's why and how it's shaping our understanding of this entire war.

So that is what we're going to talk about today, the state of that information war and what tech companies and governments say that they're doing to combat this mis and disinformation.

And whether it will work in the way that we think it will. And so here to make a smart about this is Laura Edelsen, misinformation researcher and co director of the cyber security for democracy project at NYU. Hey, Laura.

Hey, thanks for having me.

So at this point, if you had to pick, who is winning the information war? Well, the information war is pretty clearly being won by Ukraine right now, which might be a little bit different from the ground war, depending on what day it is.

Say more about that, right, because it's, it's, you got some personalities involved. You've got these are the good guys and the bad guys. I mean, there's like going on in the information war.

Yeah, I think it's, it's really been fascinating over the last couple of weeks watching all this play out because, you know, historically, Russia is one of the, you know, really longstanding, very practice spreaders of disinformation.

You know, they are an actor that we have watched do this for many years now, right? I'm sure everyone is familiar with the fact that, you know, Russia spread misinformation disinformation and attempted to metal in the 2016 US presidential election via Facebook ads.

I know I think that, you know, that was not the first or the last time they tried to engage in this, you know, but one of the things that was really quite honestly fascinating to watch about the first week of this conflict is the fact that, you know, one, the US government was really proactive about making sure that there was factual information out there to the public about what was going on in Russia and what was going on in Ukraine.

And I think that created a climate where the sort of normal tricks, the disinformation tricks of creating a false narrative and clouding the facts and misdirection.

It was just much harder for that to take hold because there was more factual information out there.

The other thing that's been really fascinating to watch play out is just how effective the Ukrainians have been at getting their narrative out there. You know, obviously, President Zelensky has really been an incredibly powerful communicator.

And, right, it's not just communication. He's also shown really tremendous personal bravery. And those two things together have, you know, really given the world a very clear picture of who the Ukrainian people are.

And, you know, they've been reinforcing this message via social media in dozens of ways, you know, by making it clear that they are going to fight for their country, you know, but also that they, you know, that they're human and they're caring.

And they've been showing the second part in lots of ways from, you know, from cat videos to, you know, videos of Ukrainians helping capture Russian soldiers, you know, call their moms.

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