Where is Russian Disinformation Headed?

Russian story is about, you know, Russia is innocent, Russia is the good guy, Russia just wants peace. (upbeat music) - My name is Eva Longshaper. And I am David A. Pitchbite, joining you from Florence. So who did we just hear? This week we're talking to Christian Famposrasmyschen, who is a PhD candidate at the European University of the Southern Florence. His research is about Russia's disinformation and the way this information acts is adapt their messages to different audiences, depending on their language, history. His focus is on Germany, Poland, and disinformation actors, global outreach in English. What I also thought was interesting in this interview was that he also talked about Seymour Hirsch, the American journalist calling him, I really use a useful idiot. - This is a term that is being applied to people who are not directly influenced or probably not spayed by different information actors, but actually in their own will and following their own beliefs, take these talking points and just spread them further. - And we talked a bit about disinformation around Nord Stream and how he sees disinformation developing in the coming years. At the end of the interview, so basically towards the end of the podcast, he will talk about how he thinks disinformation can be installed. If you're interested in how anti-vaccine and immunogidious information overlaps, we have an episode of this, we'll link to it in the description. - Okay, excellent. So let's start listening to our interview. - Hi, my name is Christian Santos. I'm a PhD researcher at the European University Institute where I work on disinformation and specifically Russian disinformation campaigns. I also do a little bit on Chinese but Russian disinformation campaigns. So by topics, fall into three categories. It's looking at the spread of disinformation, looking at the shapes of information narratives, of strategic narratives that are being pushed, how do they differ between audiences? And then look at can these be actually countered? We've been looking at how fringe communities consume a lot of Russian disinformation and how we can try to intervene in those communities and inform them about the quality of the information that they're receiving and see if that actually changes. - Is this an interest that you've had for a long time? I mean, what brought you to Russian disinformation? - So I did a internship at a research center which was looking at attention to economics. So how, you know, talking about, for example, you know, it will, it will smith slap at the Oscars. It kind of takes attention away from perhaps more important stuff, such as you could say, the war in Ukraine or the domestic policy is instead of, you know, the civil liberties fighting on a national stage. So that kind of like interest started pretty early on and then I started looking at how it was rushed actually using this kind of attention strategies to kind of sort of pretend from the Western users. So I started like lingering a little bit into it, that thought me into it and then I finished my master's thesis on Russian disinformation campaigns in Eastern Europe and been working on Russian disinformation in four. In a Danish context to kind of see evaluate Danish policies on it. - So now we're talking about Russian disinformation campaigns. I wonder if you could just give our listeners an idea of what a disinformation campaign looks like. - So disinformation, it comes out of a, you can say, like it belongs to the Red Hatred tradition within the Russian security apparatus of using information in an offensive way. So I'll keep calling weaponizing information. I don't know if that's necessarily that useful to think about it in that term, but it is about managing information spaces and the information available to specific audiences to influence their decisions any way that is favorable to you. And overall, it's an effort to kind of manipulate what kind of information is available so that we, the audience are not no longer making informed decision, but perhaps misinformed decision or being guided. So it is about manipulation. But what does manipulation actually mean? Does it mean that I suddenly believe tomorrow that, you know, Ukraine was attacking Russia and this is therefore the reason why the whole war started? No, it means because a lot of Russian disinformation can actually does this is trying to kind of push at existing doubts that I have. So for example, like, Ukraine being a Nazi state. So the As of Battalion was affiliated with Nazism. So that kind of like already exists within my knowledge and by pushing that button on and on and on again, I suddenly start to believe that I started to, or you can say, like, my inclinations are being enforced. - So it's, I've worked to think about a disinformation campaign. Is it shared to say there's somebody somewhere in Russia sitting in a ring? Thinking about the stories and what are the outlets that they use, let's say in Europe and over the world? - You can think of it like different tranches of actors. You can have someone who was very connected to the Kremlin. So for example, Kremlin came out, I think it's two days ago now, saying, oh, we found an antenna close to the Nord Stream 2 pipeline blow up. And this confirms the Seymour verse story about it was US behind it. So that came from such high top that it kind of looks like this was this is this is some information that comes from or is curated from the Kremlin. So that's a bit closer. Then you can think of it like, so you have those were connected directly to the Kremlin. So that would be, you know, whatever the press office from there would be saying. There is some research who indicates that the Kremlin has regular meetings with media outlets in both in Russia but also outside of Russia. So Russia today is put there, for example, where they are being given. So this is kind of what we want you guys to talk about. Then we start to look into like your people who are affiliated but not directly, like necessarily controlled by Russia. So this would be reporters who present themselves as independent but have a very, very pro-Russian bias. And they know more or less what they're doing. And then you can go into and call them what years to be called the useful idiots. One could argue that Mersh has played that role with his analysis on the Nord Stream 2 because he claims that this is the US. However, his story of how this actually happened is full of holes. There's a lot of like errors in it. Whether he's aware that he's a eating Russian disinformation based, we don't know. But he is. And he is being used a lot in Russian media. So you can kind of think of like the Kremlin at the center and then you have more and more tranches down towards people who have no idea what they're doing. So yeah, you can say there's someone in Russia who's sitting and cooking up all of these stories but I think it would be very simplified in the description. - So if we look at Simo Hirsch, what we would say he's just been reporting. And I actually find Simo Hirsch really shocking because he was a journalist of Kiro just so many people. So is he just not doing his recording? Is he being fed information? Do we have any idea of what the exact mechanics are? - We have no idea what kind of information is being fed. When we look at other reporters, there's a there's guy called Patrick Lancaster and a guy called Philip Graham's who are a UK and a US citizen. They've given a lot of access to Eastern Ukraine and he's heavily curated. So when they go and they talk to the Russian soldiers who are very, very clear about what they're about the message that they're given. Philip Graham's was allowed to interview one of the prisoners of war who a UK prisoner that the Russians caught in a so-stale. He's given very, very exclusive access. And when you look at the content, it's very, very well polished. So you can say there is a feeding of information going on. Whether Simo Hirsch has been fed information or simply has just misunderstood or like for all, because we still don't know what happened in North Korea too. He might have been right. We don't know, but there's just a lot of errors in this stuff which indicates that he's not. So there's differences in like, we can't say that Simo Hirsch is a Russian, a stooge, but we can say he aids a narrative and he helps with that narrative of Russia being innocent. - So we know already that there are strategic narratives that Russia and the Russian actors are pushing. And then we also know that there's a kind of decoration as you are saying, giving some people access and maybe showing them, look, there's a whistleblower who wants to give you some important information. But what you mentioned before that I think is important is some kind of strategic distraction. And maybe you could talk a bit more about it. Just a little bit more. - Sure. - She's a tension economy. - This about driving attention away from different stuff. One example could be, but it's not a great example, but one example could be before the invasion of Ukraine. Russia was continuously denying that it had any soldiers near the Ukrainian border. Instead, they very aggressively pushed stories of Ukraine bombing civilian. Tarkas. So there was a, for example, like a kindergarten in Donbas, who was constantly being referred to. And it was being pushed on all of the majors. So we had Sputnik, you had RT, you had South Front, you're strategic culture, you share this story. And there was an attempt to divert our attention away from Russian soldiers at Ukraine and border to Ukraine attacking civilians. That story, however, turned out not to be true. And if we take a look at the paper, I think, or the talk that you held recently, could you sum that up? So the paper tries to look at what kind of narratives are being pushed in Germany, Poland, and on English. And we did find a difference between them. So what we did was we looked on an aggregate level of what kind of stories were being pushed, like overall. And then we went in depth on a North Stream 2 to see how was that being portrayed. And interestingly enough, then you can talk again about the visitation dynamics. What we found was for Sputnik, Sputnik didn't have an article in German on North Stream 2 until around 2000. I think it's 20. So that's where the external diplomatic pressure from both the US and from some, Eastern European countries such as Poland, for example, became too big. And Ukraine, of course, became too, became so big that they could no longer ignore it. But there was an interest in keeping it absolutely out of the agenda until, up until that. Whereas in the early, early 2015, you had a lot of them in English. And you also had Bollray back in 2014 in Polish. There was an attempt to shape a narrative earlier in Poland and in global English speaking narrative or audience than there was in German. So you can see some kind of a difference in the mission focus. We ended up finding that there were some differences in what kind of narratives were being pushed. Overall, so for example, in Poland, because of Polish, you could call it the historic trauma of Soviet occupation, also the history of the outbreak of World War II. And there's a hostility in Polish-speaking audiences towards Russian and Russian narratives that had to deal with it. So they would be focusing on historic revisionism telling that, you know, this whole deal is fictitious, its lies, and Polish government is conducting a war on history against Russia. In Germany, there wasn't, there isn't that hostility to it. Instead, there would be a much more emphasis on, you know, Russia is just being bullied and being attacked vigorously by the West. All of these accusations are lies. There were a few differences there. Looking at Nord Stream 2, it was kind of interesting to see how, for example, like the EU would play different roles in the English narrative, which is targeting like global audience, primarily in American and UK audience. It was all about, like, the EU was a victim of US aggression because the US wanted to stop Nord Stream 2. So all of the sanctions against Nord Stream 2 were described as a, you know, as a violation of the European sovereignty. I clearly remember that. And I can't even say that I thought it was that wrong. So a problem of thinking disinformation as either true or wrong is it doesn't really, it gives a lot of ground to, you could say, the disinformation actor because there's a grace on it. There's always something that is more true than something else. There's something that is kind of an interpretation. Some of it is just, you know, partial facts, partial truth. So when it came to the Nord Stream 2, there was a lot of, like, it was kind of easy to make this claim of the US, like bulldozing Europe. In the Polish narrative, there wasn't really that much attention to the EU. And in the German, it completely flipped. And it, the EU was in co-coops with the US. It was an anti-Russian actor who's trying to disrupt the whole process. And it was actually also kind of like, you know, infringing on German sovereignty. So there was interesting, like, how that actor played different roles in the narrative to kind of, like, spread it. And the reason why the EU was portrayed as an antagonist was during the couple of years of Nord Stream 2, there was a debate with the Nord Stream 2 was actually in violation of EU monopoly laws because Gasprom owns Nord Stream 2, also owns the gas that goes through the pipeline and the pipeline itself. So that was in violation with anti-monopoly law. So there was a, there was a, they had to recertify their operation. And that whole process was in the German narrative that Sputnik was pushing being interpreted as an attack from Brussels. So that kind of showed you a little bit of the difference. Do you, do you think that there is just a reservoir I'm going to say of pro-Russian sentiment in Germany? I think there is a, okay, so first of all, there has been a growing, like, increase in infringed communities in Germany. It's so, we did another study on infringed communities in Western Europe. In Germany has quite a lot of them. So already there, infringed communities are people who usually consume a lot of misinformation, who believe a lot of conspiracy theories. Germany is a big country. So there, there was a big, there was a big audience who would be kind of accepting of these narratives of conspiracy theories, the targeting at the US. So that might be one thing. I also think that there is a historic difference in that the German interpretation or the German story of World War II is one of accepting total responsibility of the war, which also means that everyone who were fighting you was basically a good guy. So with the Russian army, the Russian army is seen as liberators in the Germans in the German narrative. In the Polish narrative, they're not. They're just seen as a new occupier. So there, you have two very, very different approaches to Russia. Russian narratives, pro-Russian narratives. Russian story is about, Russia is innocent. Russia is the good guy. Russia just wants peace. It's a hard sell in Poland. It's an easier selling Germany for that reason. I also think, especially now during the war in Ukraine, there is a culture of pacifism and a culture of anti-war in Germany that has been very, very beneficial. So again, it's not necessarily about convincing you as an audience of a message. It's making you flip your opinion completely, but it's also about pushing the right buttons. And there you have a lot more buttons to press in Germany than you have in Poland. Now, it's also thinking about what you said in the talk, in a way, but like in other pro-Russian outlets or Russia links outlets, take a stance on each country's needs. And they try to promote a certain position taking the, they are speaking to certain audiences that are already unhappy. So maybe you could expand on that. What kind of image are these disinformation outlets portraying? One of the problems for a lot of Russian disinformation is that not every elite Europe is interested in buying into their narratives. So they tend to go after or tend to have have kept connections, both like financially supporting parties, but also just giving more airtime to populous and far-right parties. Because they're in opposition to the established parties who are more pro-American than they are pro-Russian. So that's why they have to go to, you can say, like people on the extremes or on the fringes of the political spectrum. One where this is kind of obvious is during the last German Bundestagswiki for parliament, Russia today in Sputnik would give a lot of airtime to attend to if you're a Dutch land, the far-right party in Germany would be very, very like talk a lot about their politics, also talk about issues related to their politics. So for example, very much an immigration, they would push a lot on anti-immigration stories and they would be very critical towards the green party because the green party has been opposing very adamantly Nord Stream 2 and also took a much more anti-Russian political stance when it came into government. In that sense, they are according to some domestic elites, but a problem is, you know, we have, especially in Western Europe, a very pro-American view in general. And that's seen as direct threat by Russia because it still operates in this anti-basically, basically a cold war mentality of if you're against, if you're not with us, you're against us. And if we, if we're looking at the friendish groups that you were talking about, if we look at Germany, if for example, is there anyone on the left? So interestingly, just before this podcast, I was looking at how often Timo was like the leader of AFD would pop up on interviews on Arteens Sputnik. And he gives a lot of interviews to Arteens Sputnik, which is kind of interesting because both of those platforms had been banned in Europe. So his primary audience in Germany, isn't this just. have access to it unless they use VPNs or other points of access. So that's kind of interesting. He's been pushing a lot of it. Then I did the same to look at, you know, D-Link and if you have a side of the box next, she doesn't appear that often. But her rally for peace, I think was a couple of weeks ago, does appear and it comes up. And there you have, like, so there you take, or there's a split neck and RT will take snippets of interviews she gave to other newspapers and kind of like insert and use them to kind of like, you know, fill out an article. So there isn't that much of attention to, you know, D-Link as one might believe. However, when you look at, you know, previous at Disinformation campaigns in Eastern Europe has been a tendency of drawing on, you know, former communist networks. So the successors of the Communist Party in Eastern Europe have been, you know, very, very helpful. So there you have some kind of connections. I think it's, there's been a lot of focus on the far right in the literature in general, but also like in journalist investigation and, you know, independent research, non-economic research. We can call it that, not that it, you know, belittles it or anything. But there's been a lot of focus on the far, far right. And I think one of the reasons is that the far right has co-up that a lot of again conspiracies and stories that are that make them more vulnerable to believe a new conspiracy. But again, it's, you can use, you can press on a lot of buttons. You can also press on a lot of buttons on the list. Once example is during the 2016 US parliamentary, or presidential election and the last one here in 2022, Russian disinformation campaigns and like Boknets and media outlets would actually target the Black Lives Matter movement. And by like pushing stories of saying, you know, all every police officer is racist and this is an inherently racist country. Why should you vote? This is just, you know, they're never going to be with. So it's also like tapping into frustrations that are, you know, inherently legitimate in the US. Just as easy as you can tap into a frustration of being disenfranchised and having lost, you know, a lost in the globalism rates. So you can still like tap into frustration just like doing that. And there's frustrations all across the board. But are the enough-wing actors responding even enthusiastically to this? And so are they amplifying are they giving interviews at all? So we have to look at like every campaign by itself, right? The so there's been a study on the MH17 downing the MH17, which has ended up being proven that it was a Russian separatist in the Dumbass who shut it down. And Russia's like sent a lot of stories out saying this is absolutely alive. It was the Ukrainians who shut them down. It wasn't this. Those stories trended more among conservative users on Twitter. So they would, it's a conservative users would engage more with it. But that's just one story. When you look at the, right now, for example, at the entire piece movement, there's a lot on the left. Now we haven't, there hasn't been any as far as I know an in-depth study on it. But I believe that there's definitely going to be a just big of resonance in the far left. Then there is going to be on the far right. Because it speaks into narrative, which has been part of the left for a very long time anti-war piece movement. Also, a tendency of anti-Americanism in the far left. Do you have any indication of how this is going to continue to develop? And I think one thing that you mentioned in the beginning was what can we actually do? How can we actually not necessarily stop? But how can we reach these friend-aged groups and alert them to the dangers of disinformation? So those are two very big questions. So in terms of what's going to happen, there's different things that can happen. So when you talk about disinformation campaigns, you can talk about the content that is being created and then how it's being shared and how whether it actually works. I think when it comes to the content, it's going to be of the same playbook because it's not really that new and revolutionary. The distribution is, I think, that's where it's going to be more interesting. So the EU banned Russia-Tedans-Butnik. Russia-Tedans-Butnik were core platforms in Russian disinformation campaigns. They would be amplified by other platforms. They would be redirected towards, and we're all the reference to. Doing that, Russia had to readjust its campaigns. And I think it's going to readjust in a way that's probably going to be more lasting. First of all, they admitted that it's not going to be that easy to reach audiences. So I think they focused on which audiences were more interesting. We had to shut down a lot of editorial offices all over Europe. However, they maintained a German and Italian and French version, which I think speaks to what is being prioritized. So there's one thing about like focusing on the audiences that actually count on a more global scale, but also meant saying, "Okay, Europe is not our primary market. Our primary market is Africa, South America, and Asia." So one interesting example is that Futnik just created a new platform on India, focusing on Indian domestic politics. They've had a presence in Asia and Central Asia for a very, very, long time, but they're real started to promote and they have like a telegram for India only, which is kind of interesting as well. And even though like, you could say for a while, the entire system collapsed, but it is so slow to start to rebuild. And it's been rebuilding in a different way. So one way is to shift traffic from Russia to days, Facebook account to host their radio shows and tv shows. So a lot of the TV shows on Russia today and some of the radio shows from Futnik still have a presence on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. And then you can use their accounts to kind of spread the same content. A lot of those will also have, you know, pinned at the top. Please go to these platforms where the Russia Day is still active and kind of redirect the traffic to that. Another thing in terms of distributing is starting to use more, you can say, modern platforms. As you know, Russia today and Futnik were kind of emulating the CNN and BBC as of 24 hour and pen use networks. Both Russia and China have been using a lot more influencers lately. In Germany, you have Anal Huiz, an Instagrammer influencer who, you know, mixes up nice photos of a beautiful Russian landscape with her being in Donbass and saying, oh, look at how terrible the Ukrainians are treating the civilians. And this is, you know, this is a bomb dad house. So there, you're kind of like adapting and taking a more modern take because it's more younger viewers who follow that. You have in Spain. So taking on more, you know, more modern and more like less traditional media personalities and trying to use them. So there, I think there's a shift towards instead of, you know, broadcasting going into microcasting and like focusing on influencers with, you know, a more interesting audience. Another thing in terms of redistributing is after the, or during COVID, because we censored so vigorously on, on traditional social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, there was a, there was an audience who had to move over to alternative and those alternative platforms suddenly got a much bigger, you know, user base. So rumble, bitchute, Odyssey, those platforms that grew out of a lot of, or grew out, grew out of the COVID pandemic have kind of started to be co-opted by Russian disinformation actors. So Russian disinformation actors would usually have a presence on Twitter, but also on rumble on Odyssey. Russia today keeps an active profile on both rumble and Odyssey and redirects all their traffic towards them because they know they, they're, it's accessible to countries in, or audiences in Europe. One platform which with the war has become absolute central is telegram. And in research, especially academic research, we've had an extreme focus on Twitter. If that's not really your primary audience, why, why invest in Twitter? Looking into these other platforms is going to be much more important because they are going to be the new platforms that are, that are interesting. For China, this is all about TikTok. There are some Russian like disinformation actors who are active on TikTok, but it's, it's, they've been more focused on, you know, Instagram, they're more focused on, yeah, IntelliGram's huge. How can, let's just say, European or other global democracies, what can we do? Is there some kind of solution or is it just, you know, it's only going to get worse from here? I think there are two ways to go about this. One of them is censorship, any other is counter speech, counter narrative. And you can do both of them badly, you can do both of them in, in a more like intelligent way. I think this, the censorship, And the effort to censor recent disinformation on large social media platforms is going to backfire on the long run. It's going to give, you know, on the short run some benefits because, you know, the broad audience who were not active on these fringe, because they're still fringe platforms. Like, it's not normal to have an Odyssey account. It's not normal to have a Rumble account. It's hard to be a little bit more, you know, normal to have a telegram account. And I think it's like, especially in Eastern Europe, it was always like kind of a thing to use telegram. But shutting down on this platform is going to move. You're just going to move it towards another platform where that platform is going to have a user base, which is more vulnerable, more susceptible to these narratives. I think one of the more interesting is from this war has been Ukrainian communication. The Ukrainians are also like pushing something propaganda. They're also like, you know, what do you call it? I won't call it won't call disinformation because I think there's actually a lot of truth in what they're saying. But it is sometimes cherry picking of reality. But it's counter speech and we've seen like the Ukrainians have actually been very, very effective in pushing back on Russian narratives. And I think that is probably a strategy that Europe could go forward with. This is not to say, and I'm not advocating to start revamp the propaganda partners from the Cold War. But acknowledging that providing a narrative, a counter narrative to Russia is very important and is very important to keep to make sure that the stories and facts that doesn't really fit into Russia's narrative actually come out. So we need to create or we need to be better at providing narratives, which are first of all factual. And it's factual because it's easier to tell the truth and maintain a law. Because then you have to keep like making up lies and you have to be extremely detailed instead of telling the truth which everyone else can verify. And this is one of things that I think the Ukrainians have been doing really pretty well is that you know when they say this attack happened here. You have an entire community of open source intelligence analysts who can actually find the videos and verify this actually happened. And I think that is probably a way to counter it. So one of the things we did in an experiment was to see what happens if we tell fringe communities that that that that what they're consuming here is you know it's problematic for these reasons so we deepunked some of their claims. And they'd actually work and people would actually listen to it and stop stop consuming that that source of disinformation. So counter speech can work and I think we should probably acknowledge that a bit more and and and a ramp up our you know communication strategies. Both both domestically and abroad and I think domestically have been quite effective. We still have a in Europe least a you know growing or not growing but we have maintained a quite large support for for you brain which can't indicate that you know public communication from governments have been effective in doing that. And just one quick kind of bonus question so you were doing the research for a number of years have you yourself personally been on the radar of Russian disinformation actors or botnets. I think I'm too too small a fish for having you know experienced big things like auto from Finland has like you know herring tales of her being persecuted by by Russian disinformation actors and you know botnets. And there's very much of stuff like I haven't experienced any of that. So that was their interview and what did you think now listening to it again what did you think was the most interesting thing back up. I thought that was very interesting but he shows how there's this kind of murky zone in which a lot of different actors as women and there's a kind of part that there's a. And there's a network of actors with different levels of proximity to the Kremlin and whether don't have to see them as having equal power but actually they do have a lot of power over their audiences what I think I would definitely want to follow is the use of it when sex and the use of this kind of very very diffused very decentralized media landscape. I agree I agree I thought that was interesting and I have to say I'm still shocked by the fact that see more horse from the journalistic hero or one of my journalistic heroes is supposed to be a useful idiot. So as we are recording this we're there are still no conclusions on on the Nord Stream sabotage and so I think it's something to keep in mind for those who are missing into this may try and we will see what's images exactly and if anything does you know if anything does change of course we'll add the links to the show note and the transcript will be on our website. Thank you again for listening and we'll be back with a new episode in two weeks. In the meantime you can find us on social media not on telegram but on Twitter or Facebook and Instagram. See you in two weeks. Bye for now. Bye.