I'm Brian Lehrer. This is my daily politics podcast from WNYC Studios. It's Wednesday, March 2nd.

Six days ago, Russia's Vladimir Putin sought to shake the very foundations of the free world, thinking he could make it bend to his menacing ways.

But he badly miscalculated.

President Biden there with one of the most interesting lines about the war in Ukraine from the State of the Union address, not that Putin is bad, everybody agrees about that, but that he miscalculated,

misjudged the political and emotional temperament and temperature of the world.

Joining me now as a guest who has been struck, particularly by the failure of Putin's

disinformation machine, the same one that's been so effective at helping Donald Trump get elected

and dividing the American people.

Senan Aral is the director of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy, an author of the book The Hype Machine.

Now he's got a Washington Post op-ed called Ukraine is winning the information war.

Senan, thanks for giving us some time.

Welcome to WNYC.

Thanks, Brian.

Thanks for having me.

So your article starts with some historical

information war comparisons, beginning in 2008

with Putin's invasion of Georgia,

and then more into the social media era,

how he used Facebook and Twitter during his invasion

of Ukraine in 2014. What happened then? Well, you know, Putin and Russia are historically

expecting to win the information war whenever they are in the geopolitical sphere. In Georgia and in the annexation of Crimea,

they were way ahead of the social media platforms and of Ukraine and the international community.

...