How authoritarian regimes use the Firehose of Falsehood, and why it works

Hitler called it The Big Lie. For Putin, it's the Firehose of Falsehood. Steve Bannon calls it Flood the Zone with Shit. Lying on a massive scale works.

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Hitler called his favored propaganda technique the Big Lie. Putin’s version is called the Firehose of Falsehood. Steve Bannon calls it Flood the Zone with Shit.

It’s kind of icky to copy-and-paste this here, but here is a passage from Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf (Volume I, Chapter 10: “Why the Second Reich Collapsed”):

...In the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; ...and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously... For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying. These people know only too well how to use falsehood for the basest purposes.

Hitler employed this technique as well, of course; and it came to be known as the Big Lie, after the name he gave it in his book. His most notable Big Lie was that Germany did not actually lose The Great War. Of course, they obviously did; signing the Armistice of Compiègne in 1918 which ended hostilities, and then again signing the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 which formally ended the war. Everyone knew they signed it. It was plainly in all the newspapers and books.

Yet Hitler’s Big Lie worked. It played perfectly into the populist narrative that Jews had sabotaged and weakened Germany from within. They had not only started The Great War, Hitler wrote, they poisoned Germany with their own “big lies” to cause it to lose the war, and then profited from it. This was part of his justification for what would become the Holocaust.

In 2016, the RAND Corporation — having observed Russia’s post-Cold War propaganda technique — dubbed it the “Firehose of Falsehood.” Putin understood, as did Hitler, that overwhelming the public with nonstop lies leads to total control of the national narrative. Putin’s firehose has four distinctive characteristics:

1. It’s high-volume and multi-channel. There are tens of thousands of fake social media accounts run by Russian disinformation trolls, who work in 12 hour shift with a daily quota of 135 fake posts. They also publish on RT (Russia Today) in a dozen languages and on scores of proxy news sites; articles which are then shared on social media.

2. It’s rapid, continuous, and repetitive. Just make shit up. All day long. A great trick: be the first to “BREAK” the news of something that never happened. Repeat the same shit from six months ago.

3. It lacks commitment to objectivity reality. While one might think people are likely to be more receptive to a news story that sounds plausible, there’s a great workaround that’s tremendously successful: Come up with something that is absolutely insanely implausible, but falsely attribute it to a trusted source. Suddenly everyone believes it. The Russians do this all the time.

4. It lacks commitment to consistency. Say one thing today, say another thing tomorrow. Putin is personally infamous for doing this. It’s also been found that contradictions can be more impactful to people who are paying attention because they feel like corrections, or it’s assumed that new information must have come to light.

Yet, as effective as certain world leaders have found an endless stream of lies to be, one wonders why they are effective. If someone lies constantly, wouldn’t most people just tune them out, and turn instead to a reliable source?

Yes and no. Yes, they tune out; but no, they don’t get elsewhere. The firehose of falsehood leads to information fatigue. People are so overwhelmed they just disengage. If they remember anything, it’s the lie they heard most often. This is the illusory truth effect: repetition makes false claims feel true.

When Russia invaded Ukraine, they told the Russian people that Ukraine was both a Nazi regime and a Western puppet — two contradictory things. With total state control of the media, they successfully excluded the real purpose of the invasion, which was annexation, part of Putin’s personal dream of gloriously rebuilding the Soviet Union. People got so confused they eventually just got tired of caring.

Constant lies are also impossible to deflect. If a single Russian troll posts 135 lies a day, a journalist would need 135 days to meaningfully respond to them. This is the strategy behind the Gish Gallop.

The lies always exploit tribalism. Everything is “us” (patriots) vs “them” (elites, outsiders, traitors). Anyone who disagreed with Hitler was a Jew or Jew lover. Anyone who disagrees with Putin is a “foreign agent” and arrested. Anyone who disagrees with Trump is a “deep state operative” or is extrajudicially deported.

The net result of all of this is that the population fatigues, retreats into cynicism, and just goes with the tribal flow. Proof of effectiveness of repeated lies came in 2025, when surveys showed that 68% of American Republicans believed Trump’s claim that the 2020 election was stolen. At the time, zero people believed it, and to this day 100% of all existing evidence disproves it, and every single investigation has failed to find any truth to it. But most in the tribe believe it anyway — because the Firehose of Falsehood actually works.

Incidentally, Steve Bannon’s name for Hitler’s and Putin’s disinformation strategy is “Flood the Zone with Shit.” During the 2020 election, Bannon told NPR:

All we have to do is flood the zone. Every day we hit them with three things. They'll bite on one, and we'll get all of our stuff done, bang, bang, bang. These guys will never be able to recover. But we've got to start with muzzle velocity.

Fortuitously for Steve, his charge has no problems following this particularly strategy.