On May 8, 2022, an AFP dispatch announced that the Egyptian prosecutor’s office had ordered the release of three people who, in a song published in March on TikTok, had the audacity to denounce galloping inflation in their country. Widely relayed and appreciated (more than 11 million likes), their satirical video earned them being imprisoned on the following grounds: “terrorism” and the dissemination of “false information”. False information ? If we strictly stick to the facts, consumer prices in Egypt rose in March by 12.1%, in the context of a sharp rise in energy and raw materials linked to the war in Ukraine. We can therefore effectively speak of “inflation”.
But how then to qualify this true information made false by the simple will of an autocratic power which works to disguise reality? There is something fraudulent in the intention that makes one think of “fake news”. During the past decade, the latter have invaded the public space, taking advantage of the sounding board of social networks. Association of fake (“erroneous, bogus”) and news (information), the concept designates these false news disseminated with the aim of deceiving or manipulating the public.
Real time revisionism
Inspired by this expression and by contracting the terms “true” and “fake”, we could then qualify as “vrake news” this information which is based on a tangible reality, but which a disguise process presents as false. To argue, as the Russians have, that the massacre of civilians that took place in Boutcha is only one “staging” is an emblematic case of “vrake news”. This nauseating relativism recounts both the porosity of minds to propaganda and the problematic emergence of real-time revisionism, used as a geostrategic weapon. “Can words so precious lose all value? »wondered the Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky, in his speech on May 8.
Where “fake news” contributes to the construction of an alternative reality by presenting the false as true in a sometimes whimsical way (no, the pope has never supported Donald Trump), the central objective of “vrake news is to deny the obvious, to propose a substitute “narrative” where the true is invalidated, until its very possibility is annihilated.
Thus, since the law passed on March 4 by the Duma, speaking publicly in Russia of “war” or “invasion” about what is happening in Ukraine equates you with a propagator of “false information”, and can be worth up to fifteen years in prison. In this upside-down world, the sworn promoters of “vrake news” keep reminding us that all this is only a “special operation” aimed at ” maintain the peace “ ; in which the real victims are actively disguised as fake “Nazis”.