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Comment by sva_ | Hacker News Reader

> Conversely they've been pretty effective at stopping information about their own disposition of forces being posted to social media, or at least it's not being retweeted anywhere I've seen.

I'm a bit twisted about this. In school, as a German, we were told that the Nazis only reported their wins, not their losses, and how this was such a terrible thing to do (I'm not saying Ukrainians are like Nazis of course.)

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I don’t know about you, but the point the teachers made when I was in school in France was more that they were censuring things like soldiers letters to their relatives and journal articles, which is bad, rather than officials emphasising victories without mentioning defeats, which is not ideal but understandable when morale plays such an important role.

> censoring things like soldiers letters to their relatives and journal articles

Literally every belligerent in WW2 did that?

Well, yes. That’s pretty much the point.

Everybody does this during war, would you expect the opposite? Would you yourself voluntarily share news of your own country's losses during war?

It's often claimed that a loosening of media restrictions post-Korean war contributed to the domestic lack of support for the Vietnam War.

But there are a lot of ways to shape a narrative in 2022 that involve amplification instead of censorship.

https://www.rewire.org/vietnam-war-media-shapes-public-opini...

If you are invading, it’s always a different story. The incentives are different

Sure, but what constitutes an "invasion" is also very vulnerable to the narrative.

It's about civilian population not accidentally leaking intel through their personal twitter.

Of course, official propaganda of any county at war would highlight wins and dim the losses, if anything but for morale purposes.

Ukraine reports losses only traditionally, because Ukrainians worry about their relatives, but losses are hard to count in real time. Dead soldiers are declared as missing until remains are found. Dead civilians are not reported by invaders at all. For example, we lost one MiG-29 just a few hours ago[0]. This morning report[1] is quite correct. Here is information[2] about death of Oleksandr Oksanchenko, one of the best pilots. And so on.

When dozens, if not hundreds, of soldiers and civilians die every hour, it's hard to track all of them. Usually, most information about losses will be available after the end of an intensive firefight, when officers will have time to fill reports. Some information about shootings is reported by civilians, but it is hard to verify it.

[0]: https://www.facebook.com/MinistryofDefence.UA/posts/26756335...

[1]: https://www.facebook.com/MinistryofDefence.UA/posts/26756335...

[2]: https://www.facebook.com/MinistryofDefence.UA/posts/26701995...

> remnants

Disposition doesn't necessarily mean wins and losses - in this case it means where the forces are located, their strengths and capabilities, and what they are planning to do. It is entirely appropriate that this kind of information is kept secret.

At my school, it was the genocide that was emphasized as the terrible thing, not the military strategy.

More then one bad things can happen at the same time. The genocide was not the only very very bad thing that happened either - the conquest for living space would be major even if genocide of Jews did not happened.

In this case, OP likely refers to false impression that the conquest was going well while it was already lost.

> In this case, OP likely refers to false impression that the conquest was going well while it was already lost.

That is exactly what I was referring to. I should've been more clear.

What are you saying then?

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