Thread by @fascinatorfun

War Propaganda and International Law: A Conversation with Vivek Krishnamurthy

Is there an existing International Treaty that prohibits the publication of war propaganda?

Should Media & Social Media Companies be prohibiting it as a matter of law?

techpolicy.press/war-propaganda…

“The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which goes by the abbreviation ICCPR, it’s perhaps the most important international human rights treaty or certainly one of the three most important.”

“This was negotiated back in the 1960s, and it’s a treaty that has very wide acceptance around the world. Article 20 of this treaty basically states that any propaganda for war shall be prohibited by law. “

Turns out the Soviet Union was a strong proponent of it.

“At the end of the Second World War, there was this recognition at the end of the Second World War that propaganda played a very significant part in unleashing the Second World War.”

“And during the Nuremberg and Tokyo Trials there were several prosecutions of propagandists that were brought and those prosecutions really focused on a couple of things.”

“On the fact that these propagandists had created the conditions for an aggressive war to occur by whipping up their populace to be ready to support aggressive acts by the Axis forces in World War II.”

“But, part of the charges were also about the suppression of legitimate and free information in Nazi Germany and in Imperial Japan that would have prevented the development of alternative points of view regarding those countries’ aggression.”

I am thinking hard about the way Russia has been using media to spread blatant lies. Not just those at the very top but the news organisations involved

But it looks as if countries should have been enacting the provisions into their own countries laws.

And mostly, in the West, they haven’t but rely on their existing laws.

So far

“The Oxford Internet Institute asks the question, not what’s on RT on any given day, is this piece, is this story propaganda or not? It rather looks at the organization and its structure.”

“(It found) that even though RT holds itself out to be a media outlet that is like another cable news channel, like CNN or MSNBC, it’s an instrument of the Russian state.”

“…And that its journalists are hired not for their journalistic skills, but for their adherence with an incentive system that basically seeks to push the Russian government view on things with pervasive Russian government control.”