Even before the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Anne Applebaum wrote about Russia’s war of discourse and information.

The Washington Post columnist and Pulitzer Prize-winning historian was on the receiving end of a disinformation campaign. Now, since it’s been revealed that Russia played both sides of America’s ideological divides using ads on social media, Applebaum says there needs to be new ways of creating and consuming media that take into account media manipulation. 

Applebaum recently wrote a historical account of genocide in Ukraine, where disinformation played a critical factor. It’s call Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine. In it, Applebaum traces a Stalin-era policy that led to the death of millions of Ukrainians. Applebaum, among many, consider the tragedy — known as “Holodomor” — to be genocide. 

She writes about the creation of the U.N. Genocide Convention, and how it considered events like the Holodomor and Holocaust to create policy that considers some mass killings genocidal on technical grounds, but not others. 

Applebaum, a professor of practice at the Institute of Global Affairs at the London School of Economics, joins Worldview to discuss her new book, media accountability, and Eurasian politics.