Russian disinformation

Mand med protestskilt

Did Russian internet trolls influence American voters when Donald Trump won the presidential election in 2016?

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And could the same thing happen elsewhere?

Russian disinformation

The people in power in Russia did not invent disinformation as a political tool, but they are clever and cynical in the way they use it.

When we talk about disinformation in Denmark, the focus is mostly on Russia.

The state-controlled Russian media are very active with concocted stories on several of Denmark’s close allies in the EU and NATO, and this has led many in Denmark to try to describe and understand Russian disinformation.

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Another reason to focus on Russian disinformation is so we in Denmark can defend ourselves against it.

12.01

Disinformation is false information that a sender spreads on purpose to achieve one or more goals.

We must be able to trust that what we read in the newspaper is correct and that what our politicians say is true.

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This publication is about so-called disinformation – and especially Russian disinformation.

Facts:

Misinformation 

- is spreading incorrect information which you yourself believe to be true.

Disinformation 

- is spreading information that you know is false, in order to achieve a certain goal.

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There is good reason to pay attention, as today’s media offer both opportunities and threats. Social media can bring people together across time and space. But they can also be used to spread lies and to influence people’s attitudes. 

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Russia in particular has established a network of platforms – TV and radio channels, news agencies, social media – which they use very actively and cleverly for disinformation.

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Although Denmark has not yet been seriously affected by disinformation, we need to be prepared for this kind of warfare. As users of social media, we must get used to being our own fact checkers, so we are less likely to help the spread of disinformation.

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If you read on, you will become a lot more aware of Russian disinformation. You will see right into the heart of a Russian troll factory.

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You will hear about how disinformation works. And you will pick up lots of tips on how you can check whether a piece of news is fake.

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Russian disinformation

Russian disinformation: an example

My life as a troll

Russia influences specific groups of people

Become your 

own fact checker!

Disinformation as a tool

Disinformation is false information that a sender spreads on purpose to achieve one or more goals. In the political world, the immediate objective is usually to weaken an opponent and, directly or indirectly, to strengthen oneself.

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You can imagine that a political player (e.g. Russia) has a wide range of goals it wants to achieve. For example, there may be a political upheaval somewhere in the world that harms the player’s interests. This could lead our player to decide to push back in order to defend its interests and restore its influence.

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This was actually what happened in Ukraine in February 2014. Widespread demonstrations and street battles in the capital Kiev suddenly forced the country's then president Viktor Yanukovych to flee to Russia. He was replaced soon after by the current president Petro Poroshenko, who wants close ties with both the EU and NATO and is very critical of Russia.    

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Russia responded to this development by first conquering and annexing Crimea, a peninsula in Ukraine. Then Russia supported the war in eastern Ukraine, where parts of two Ukrainian regions want to secede, and where nearly 12,000 people have been killed since the spring of 2014.

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At the same time, the Russian state-controlled media started a campaign of disinformation which was designed to influence the populations of Russia itself, Ukraine and many Western countries.

For example, the news claimed:

  • that the upheavals in Kiev were organised by the US intelligence services
  • that the people living in Crimea and in eastern Ukraine were in danger from Ukrainian fascists and Nazis and needed help from Russia
  • that Ukrainian soldiers had committed atrocities against civilians in eastern Ukraine.

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Russia’s extensive disinformation directed at the whole conflict in Ukraine has been a major factor in bringing the problem to the attention of many Western states.

Russia’s extensive disinformation directed at the whole conflict in Ukraine has been a major factor in bringing the problem to the attention of many Western states.

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Developments in Ukraine suddenly gave Russia a number of new goals. One was to prevent the rapprochement between Ukraine on the one hand and the EU and NATO on the other. Russia also wanted yet another new president in Ukraine - this time pro-Russian.

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Finally, Russia wanted to convince the West in particular that Crimea was and should be a part of Russia. In the spring and summer of 2014, a number of western countries, including Denmark, introduced sanctions against Russia aimed at weakening the country’s economy. This meant that lifting the sanctions was suddenly added to the list of goals.

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These are examples of different goals for Russia. Some goals are long-term, some have a medium-term aim and some are short-term.

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The ultimate aim of disinformation is to achieve the goals, so you can cross them off. The list of goals is only partially written down; many are implicit and not stated openly.

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Some goals stay on the list all the time, others disappear because they have been achieved or are no longer relevant, while new ones are added. After all, there are new developments in the world all the time, and a new development will often mean that the political players have new goals to pursue.

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There are lots of different tools in the Russian politicians’ toolbox, and disinformation is just one of them. We refer to a tool of this kind – where you are trying to achieve something more or less specific by using the tool – as “a means to an end”.

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Disinformation is a means to achieve something. In more technical terms, we could say that you perform an operation with disinformation in order to achieve an effect. So, disinformation is usually associated with an effect. It rarely stands alone.

What does Russia want?

The list of Russia's goals is a long one. Some we know, others we can identify by analysing or by picking up on indications. There is no official list that we can just look up, there is uncertainty about the goals, and often one expert will believe one thing while another believes something else. That’s the way it is, and it is quite natural. If you follow the debate on Russia and on Russian disinformation, then you have probably already seen or heard differing opinions.

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Most people agree that Russia would like to change several things in the world today. We talk about the world as the “international system”, and you could say that Russia wants to rearrange part of the system. When the Cold War ended, it was mainly the West, and especially the United States as the only superpower, that established the new system and decided how it should look.

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The Russians say quite openly that they are unhappy with this arrangement, and that they want to roll back the development. The ultimate goal is for Russia to have greater power to assert its own will.

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Intermediate goals along the way could include creating a rift in the EU and NATO, weakening the bond between the United States and many European states, and undermining the political cohesion among Western countries, making it harder for countries to make decisions and especially decisions that are against Russia.

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These are goals in the big political arena.

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Other goals could include weakening the West’s opposition to Russia’s allies such as Syria and Iran, maintaining pro-Russian regimes in countries like Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Armenia, and getting new pro-Russian regimes elected in countries such as Ukraine and Georgia.

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These last countries were all parts of the Soviet Union along with Russia, and Russia has a special relationship with them. But Russia may also try to influence other countries to get pro-Russian governments, and countries in the Balkans appear to have become more interesting to the Russian rulers.

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Several of these countries are set to become future members of the EU and NATO. If Russia can influence their populations through disinformation, it might help to get pro-Russian regimes elected which would ultimately reject both the EU and NATO. These are goals in the slightly smaller arena, but several of them have obvious implications for the main game.

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It is important to remember that the state-controlled Russian media also disseminate disinformation targeted at the Russian people. This is for entirely different aims, and could include ensuring support for Russia’s president Vladimir Putin, the Russian military or the Russian church.

Examples are disinformation about Putin's political opponents, about NATO or about life in the EU. Denmark has sometimes been used in stories of this kind. For example, one online newspaper wrote that Denmark had permitted animal brothels, where people can pay to have sex with animals.

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This kind of news is not aimed at a Danish audience. The purpose is rather to feed the Russians concocted horror stories, so they think they are better off, that they still know the difference between right and wrong, and that their politicians are looking after them.

12.06

It is important to remember that the state-controlled Russian media also disseminate disinformation targeted at the Russian people.

The Russian media

It is relatively easy for the Russian rulers to use disinformation as a means because they generally control the mainstream media in Russia. And they have created special state-controlled media platforms to convey news and analysis to international audiences.

There is also disinformation on these platforms. The best-known are the TV channel RT and the Sputnik news agency and radio station. Sputnik used to run a news service in Danish, but it shut down in 2016, about a year after it started, due to lack of support.

My life as a troll

For two months, Lyudmila Savchuk was employed by the “Internet Research Agency” in Saint Petersburg, which was in reality a troll factory.

Read more

An extraordinary development is that there are also special ‘troll factories’ in Russia, where trolls comment on all sort of things online.

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The trolls come to work, sit down in front of their computers, and start praising or disparaging Russian or foreign politicians, commenting on various events and generally trying to influence others through comment threads on Facebook and Twitter and in newspapers etc.

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They operate anonymously – under false identities – and they are given tasks by their bosses. They may be told to write positive things about a politician in another country because there will soon be elections there, or to make fun of foreign authorities which are critical of Russia.

The most famous Russian troll is Lyudmila Savchuk, who went undercover in a troll factory to show how the trolls work.

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The trolls come to work, sit down in front of their computers, and start praising or disparaging people.

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It is relatively easy for the Russian rulers to use disinformation as a means because they generally control the mainstream media in Russia.

Russia influences specific groups of people

Researchers have discovered a pattern in who is most affected by disinformation.

Read more

The Russian authorities also use robots – bots – to relay information in large waves. The robots are computers, which may be programmed to re-tweet from a large number of fake profiles on Twitter.

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We can often see from the activity on Twitter that robots are active. For example, there may be obvious fluctuations in traffic – first lots of activity, then quite quiet, then lots of activity again, and so on.

Sometimes they also start a new wave under a new hashtag, and because there are so many fake profiles, it is easy to make it look as though a lot of Twitter users are in the wave. At other times, they only follow real Twitter users, then they take their posts and give them much wider exposure than they would otherwise have had.

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We can often see from the activity on Twitter that robots are active. For example, there may be obvious fluctuations in traffic – first lots of activity, then quite quiet, then lots of activity again, and so on.

The robots mean that the Russian authorities can reach a lot of people quickly with short and direct messages, and thus influence of more people.

  

It is the same story here as with the trolls: The more people say that something is true, the more likely the rest of us are to believe it.

Facts:

The more times you see a news story, the more likely you are to believe it. So says a study from Yale University. And that is the case whether the news is true or false.

You can read about the study here: Prior exposure increases perceived accuracy of fake news

Many editors and journalists in the state-controlled media in Russia and in the international newsrooms work within tight constraints. They know that there are issues they must not write about because politicians do not want them to. 

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At the same time, many of the acceptable topics are covered in a particular way. Journalists understand that this is how things are: that significant international issues must be described within a framework of conflict between the West and Russia, and the West must be described as the aggressor. 

Russian disinformation: an example

On the fourth of March 2018, an attempt is made to murder the former Russian military intelligence officer Sergei Skripal and his daughter Julia in the south of England.

Read more

You may remember the story of the former Russian spy Sergei Skripal, who was attacked with nerve gas in the south of England in March 2018. The UK authorities said that Russia was behind the attempt to kill Skripal, but the Russian authorities denied it all. 

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And the Russian state-controlled media did not investigate whether Russia might have been behind the attack, though that would have been natural for many journalists. 

Instead, the media claimed that Britain wanted to blacken Russia, so they presented a wide range of alternative explanations. The important thing here is that the media knew that most of their explanations were quite clearly wrong. 

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The aim was to create confusion and make people around the world doubt whether they could still trust the British authorities. And they were pretty successful in this.

Denmark and the Nordics

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In Denmark, we must also be alert and ready to cope with waves of disinformation if they come.

This could happen during a general election in which Russia tried to persuade us to vote in a particular way. 

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So far there has not been such a strong Russian focus on Denmark – there is much more focus on some of our neighbouring countries such as Germany and Sweden.

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From Sweden, for example, there are reports of large amounts of disinformation and even fake letters being shared on social media with the aim of influencing the Swedish voters.

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A major topic was Sweden’s relationship with NATO. Sweden is not a member of NATO but works closely with the alliance – among other things, the Swedes have allowed military exercises on Swedish soil in collaboration with NATO. 

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In Sweden, Russian media have relayed disinformation, sometimes spiced with false letters designed to make Swedish voters oppose closer ties with NATO. They might say that the Swedish arms industry wants to move closer to NATO or that Swedes are losing control of their own country and that NATO countries can place nuclear weapons in Sweden if they should want to. Some of the stories have been picked up and passed on by Swedish media and politicians.

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Russian disinformation is a challenge, but we must not panic because of it. Here in the Nordic countries  we learn even in primary school to be very critical, so we are good at sensing whether something is true or false. We just have to remember to use this critical faculty.

Flemming Splidsboel Hansen is a senior researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies. He researches into Russian domestic and foreign policy.

Published by DIIS  

Danish Institute for International Studies · 2019