This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality

Peter Pomerantsev's second book on the information environment is less a conventional analysis than an immersive investigation. Moving from the Philippines to Ukraine, from the UK to the US, he documents how propaganda has mutated in the digital age — no longer seeking to convince, but to confuse; no longer asserting a single truth, but flooding the information space with so many competing versions of reality that audiences abandon the search for truth altogether. The book's central insight is that the goal of modern information operations is not persuasion but disorientation.

Pomerantsev brings to this a rare combination of credentials: the son of Soviet-era dissidents, a former producer inside Russian television, and one of the field's most astute theorists. His accounts of the individuals caught inside these systems — activists, journalists, propagandists themselves — give the book a human texture that purely analytical works lack. This Is Not Propaganda is essential reading not because it provides a framework for understanding disinformation — Rid does that better — but because it captures what it feels like to live inside it. For practitioners advising clients on the human dimensions of information threats, that experiential grounding is invaluable.