In August 2018, I wrote an article about how to protect yourself from manipulation during an information war. Back then, Facebook was the main battlefield for the Armenian audience. People argued, fought, trolled one another, planted stories, created fake accounts, published “insider information,” compromising material and endless expert predictions.
Eight years have passed, and Facebook has not disappeared. If anything, many people now see it as one of the most toxic information environments, filled with aggressive comments, political bubbles, endless conflict and a constant fight for attention. But there is an important point: leaving Facebook is no longer enough to leave the information war.
It has long since moved beyond a single platform.
Telegram, TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, X, news websites, closed chats, Reels, Shorts and now AI systems all build a separate information environment around each of us. You can delete Facebook, stop reading Telegram and close X, only to find yourself inside the same competition for attention on another platform the next day.
So the question today is different. It is no longer which social network to leave, but how to keep your own head when the information war has become part of the entire digital environment.
You used to be persuaded. Today you are studied first
Once, propaganda needed a television channel, a newspaper, an editorial office or at least a large audience. Today it is enough to understand what affects you personally: what you are afraid to lose, what makes you angry, whom you trust, which video you finish and which one you close after a second, which comment makes you stop, whose voice feels convincing and whose creates instant rejection.
An algorithm does not even need to know your political position in the traditional sense. It only needs to observe your behavior. You paused on a video, returned to a post, opened a profile, forwarded something, watched a second clip on the same subject. After a while, your feed becomes increasingly good at understanding which version of the world keeps you engaged.
At that point the information war becomes personal. Once, the same poster was displayed to everyone. Today a different one can be assembled for every person.
A modern information war begins not with what you are shown. It begins with the system already knowing what you are likely to react to.
The strongest manipulation may contain no lie at all
Imagine a rally attended by ten thousand people. One outlet films the densest part of the square. Another shows an almost empty street nearby. Both images are real.
Imagine an economic indicator that rises by twenty percent after previously falling by fifty. One headline celebrates rapid growth; another describes a deep decline. Technically, both can be telling the truth.
Or take a twenty-minute interview from which you are shown fifteen seconds. The quote is genuine. The person really said it. But you do not know what was said one minute before or one minute after.
That is why “is this true or fake?” is often too simple a question today. A more useful set of questions is: what part of reality am I being shown, what is being left outside the frame, who selected this fragment, why now, and what conclusion am I expected to reach?
Truth can be manipulated too. Sometimes all it takes is choosing the right piece of it.
The most dangerous phrase: “I figured it out myself”
Information manipulation today less and less often looks like a direct instruction to “believe us.” That is too crude. “See for yourself” works much better.
You are shown a screenshot, a video, a graph, a photograph, a “leaked document,” an audio recording or a post from an alleged eyewitness. Your own brain then completes the story. That is exactly why the conclusion feels so convincing. Nobody seems to have imposed it on you. You saw it yourself, connected the dots yourself and reached the conclusion yourself.
A manipulator no longer needs to hand you the conclusion. It is far more effective to create the conditions in which you reach the desired conclusion yourself.
Why we are so easy to catch
Because the human brain evolved in a very different world. We are extremely good at distinguishing insiders from outsiders, noticing danger, trusting familiar people, remembering vivid stories and reacting quickly to threats. Those mechanisms once helped us survive.
Today an entire attention economy is built around them. Fear holds attention. Outrage generates comments. Anger encourages sharing. Group identity creates loyalty. Confirmation of our own beliefs feels rewarding.
The algorithm does not care what you feel. It cares that you keep watching. Gradually, a very comfortable information universe forms around a person. In it, intelligent people mostly agree with them. Reliable sources confirm their views. The opposing side appears stupid, corrupt or dangerous.
The longer a person lives inside that picture, the stronger the feeling becomes: “At last, I understand how everything really works.” That is exactly the moment to become especially careful.
The real target is no longer your opinion
An opinion is relatively easy to change. What is far more valuable is changing the mechanism by which a person makes decisions. The aim is to make one word trigger irritation automatically; to make one source feel true before it is read and another feel false before it is checked; to make every new event fall instantly into a ready-made explanation; and to make facts reinforce a position instead of challenging it.
When this happens, a person no longer needs external propaganda in the traditional sense. They begin filtering the world in the desired direction themselves. They select convenient confirmations, attack opponents, spread useful messages and defend their picture of reality from anything that threatens it.
A manipulator wins when they no longer need to persuade you because you have started doing their work yourself.
AI has multiplied the scale
There is another change whose current scale would have been difficult to imagine in 2018. The cost of producing persuasive content has collapsed. In minutes, it is possible to create dozens of texts, images, comments and videos, translate them into different languages, adjust the tone for different audiences, clone a voice, synthesize a face and test which version spreads best.
That is already changing the mechanics of information warfare. But there is a second layer. AI is increasingly becoming an intermediary between people and reality. Instead of searching across dozens of sources, we increasingly ask a system: what happened, who is responsible, is this true, explain this conflict to me.
And we receive a coherent, confident and elegantly written answer. A beautifully written answer is psychologically easy to mistake for an accurate one.
AI can help us make sense of enormous amounts of information. It can also make mistakes, rely on weak sources, miss context or reproduce existing informational bias. Information literacy now therefore includes another skill: checking machines as well as people.
What actually helps today
Rather than offering “ten rules for survival,” I would keep a few simple habits. Habits matter because in an information war, behavior protects us more often than terminology does.
- Slow down when you feel an immediate urge to share. A strong emotional impulse is a good reason to publish nothing for the next ten minutes. “Urgent,” “share before they delete it,” “everyone is silent,” “watch immediately” are often part of the distribution mechanism itself.
- Look for the primary source. If ten Telegram channels cite one another, there may still be zero original sources. A number needs a methodology, a study needs an author, a video needs provenance and a quote needs context. Even a link does not necessarily mean you have reached the original source.
- Separate fact from interpretation. “The minister said this sentence” is something that can be checked. “The minister admitted complete failure” is an interpretation. Sometimes the entire information war fits between those two sentences.
- Check most carefully what you desperately want to believe. We are quick to question information that contradicts our beliefs and rarely question information that confirms them perfectly. If a story fits your worldview too comfortably, that is exactly when it deserves a second check.
- Check the date, place and full context of video. An old clip can become “breaking footage” within hours. A short edit from a longer interview can reverse the meaning of a conversation. Sometimes finding the full recording is enough to make the whole story collapse.
- Do not build your worldview inside a single platform. Telegram shows one world, TikTok another, X a third, Facebook a fourth, television a fifth, your favorite blogger a sixth, and AI can construct a seventh. Every environment contains part of reality while distorting it in its own way.
- Limit the number of times you touch the news each day. Constantly refreshing a feed rarely makes a person dramatically better informed. More often, it simply keeps the nervous system waiting for the next threat.
- Preserve parts of life that information warfare cannot reach. A walk, a book, sport, music, a museum, a conversation with someone close, working with your hands or having dinner without a phone are not merely forms of rest anymore. They are ways of recovering your own rhythm of thought.
Check especially what you most want to believe
This deserves a section of its own. If you cannot stand a politician and see a story that finally proves what a terrible person they are, that is precisely the story you should check most carefully. If you support someone and see a story that completely confirms their righteousness, the same rule applies.
At that point, it is no longer only the author of the publication working against your judgment. Your own desire to be right is working against you too.
The most convenient lie is the one a person desperately wants to be true.
One more thing I already wrote in 2018
Do not live inside the information war twenty-four hours a day. Today I consider that even more important than I did eight years ago.
If your emotional life begins to depend on the next notification, the next post and the next “urgent development,” your ability to evaluate events calmly gradually declines. You begin to live in someone else’s rhythm. And it is much easier to impose an interpretation on someone who is exhausted, irritated and constantly waiting for the next threat.
Sometimes the best way to protect your thinking is simply to go outside and walk for a few kilometers without a feed in your hand. Not because important things have stopped happening in the world, but because an hour later you will return to them with a different nervous system.
Try one simple question
When one subject takes over the entire information space, ask yourself: what do I actually know myself?
Not what a Telegram channel wrote. Not what your favorite journalist said. Not what a blogger showed you. Not what a politician claims. Not what AI explained.
What can you genuinely state on the basis of verifiable facts?
Very often the list is much shorter than expected. And that is fine. For some reason, we have learned to treat “I don’t know” as weakness. Today it is increasingly a sign of intellectual maturity.
An information war demands an immediate position: for or against, us or them, support or condemn. Sometimes the most intelligent position is simply: “I do not have enough information yet.”
The most valuable currency today is no longer information
There is too much information. Attention is scarce.
Whoever gets your attention gains a chance to trigger an emotion. Whoever triggers an emotion gains a chance to offer an interpretation. Whoever shapes your interpretations over time gradually participates in building your picture of reality.
Modern information hygiene therefore begins even before fact-checking. It begins with a very simple question:
Who am I giving the next ten minutes of my head to, and why?
One last thing
In the original version of this article, I wrote a rather harsh sentence: “Everyone lies during information wars.”
Today I would phrase it more precisely. During an information war, every side tries to show you a version of reality that serves its goals. Sometimes that involves lies. Sometimes truth. Sometimes half-truths. Sometimes a real photograph shown at the right moment to the right audience is enough.
The task of an adult is therefore not to find one absolutely pure source and move into it forever. Such a place probably does not exist.
What matters more is preserving a small space between information and your own reaction. A few seconds in which you can ask: who is saying this, where did it come from, what am I not being shown, why did I react so strongly, is there another version, could I be wrong?
It is in that narrow gap between what you were shown and what you decided to think about it that one of the last territories of genuine personal freedom now exists.
As long as that space remains, your choice still belongs to you.
