At all times, the main goal of criminal law has been to protect the individual, society, or the ruling group from unlawful encroachments that are dangerous to them. With changes in eras and the resource base of social formations, the system of social values undergoes radical transformations, which affect not only the direction of criminality and the identification of victimization but also give rise to new levels of crime in general, previously outside the attention of criminal law due to their irrelevance to former social formations.

Such a key value in a developed information society is consciousness – primarily that of the individual, and secondarily, that of society. The safety of consciousness, at least against intentional negative or destructive influence, is ensured by the security of communication (both personal and mediated, individual and mass). However, due to a long-standing lack of even the understanding of the possibility to secure communication, there exists within domestic and global paradigms an anachronistic presumption that this is impossible. The question “…how…?!” preempts real attempts to explore how criminal law can specifically influence the security of communication and, accordingly, safety of consciousness.

Since Russia’s war against Ukraine began in 2014 and the full-scale invasion in 2022, amid hybrid aggression, the meaning of informational expansion as a means to influence consciousness through soft power politics, fake news, and propaganda has gained a new significance for Ukraine.

Nevertheless, the issue of criminal-legal protection of human consciousness remains unseen: criminallegal characteristics of influences are masked by word forms that, in fact, conceal the primary goal of such attacks – the human consciousness and, consequently, the reaction of the psyche. An example of such “concealments” of real influences on consciousness under other constructs is, for instance, the criminalization of glorifying the actions of the USSR or Russia.

But this is only a demonstration of the problem, since a similar situation of “widely closed eyes” continues regarding other consciousness manipulations, spanning from psychological violence in domestic abuse to influences on consciousness by destructive sects, gambling, and also during elections.

Bibliography

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