Falsely Implied Date

Falsely Implied Date

What other types of false context can be used to manipulate people? One common trick is to portray old footage as if it’s happening in the present, thus shifting the meaning. Often the deception is subtle; unless dates are explicitly mentioned, people usually assume the story they are looking at is new and current.

We worked on this book after the extent of Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine had become known and documented. Early on, however, many people were making the case that the war was overblown, a show put on for the cameras. According to this theory, there were no attacks, no bombings, no fighting. Russia, according to this theory, was being framed. The invasion of February 23, 2022, had never really happened.

A couple days after the invasion, a video appeared claiming to show such fakery. The video, shown as being from cable news station CNN, started by showing Ukrainian troops on maneuvers in snowy terrain. They work as a group, impressively advancing up a road while providing cover for each other. Then the camera pulls back and reveals something shocking: this isn’t a war scene at all. Behind this military maneuver is a horde of press filming it. As one poster asserts, this is a “FAKE WAR,” staged like a film for the sheeple masses.

Again, the principle of “Do I know what I’m looking at?” applies here. In this case, you probably don’t know. This one is difficult to find, but after searching through a few CNN videos and trying different search terms, we were able to trace it to the source and see the original context. And the context changes everything.

First of all, we note that the press involved is not some sort of deep-state secret. It’s in the original CNN video. But it’s the date that makes all the difference. As you can tell from the original title, this is a video of troops preparing before the invasion. It’s not a video of the war, and it was never presented as such. The invasion occurred on February 24, 2022. This video of troops training was posted by CNN on February 8, 2022.

When there’s no fact-check available, tracing something like this to the source can be tricky. But again, the trickiness can be a signal. If you see several people sharing a video like this, but no one provides a link to the original or provides a date or location of where the video was supposedly filmed, it might be best to hold off deciding whether a brutal and tragic war that killed thousands is all a media-cooked-up illusion.