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Soft power, hard cash: How the UK secretly buys influencers

By Timur Tarkhanov

 

There is something profoundly grotesque about a government that funds “freedom campaigns” through secret payments to social media stars, complete with non-disclosure agreements forbidding them to reveal who’s really pulling the strings.

Yet that’s precisely what Britain’s Foreign Office has been caught doing. A recent investigation by Declassified UK revealed that the UK government had covertly paid dozens of foreign YouTube influencers to promote messages aligned with British foreign policy – under the familiar, pious banners of “democracy support” and “combating disinformation.”

Of course, those slogans sound wholesome enough. Who wouldn’t be in favour of democracy or against lies online? But this framing is the point: it launders raw geopolitical interests into the comforting language of values. In reality, this is simply propaganda. Slick, decentralized, modernized – but propaganda nonetheless…

READ FULL ARTICLE HERE… (rt.com)

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