09/07/2020
Maria Avdeeva, European Expert AssociationThe Kremlin’s disinformation operations constitute a direct threat to democracies – both stable and emerging. They are aimed at undermining the stability of our societies and manipulating our opinions and choices.
The strategic objective of such campaigns pursue is to weaken and destabilise governments and to target them with destructive influence.
In most cases, these operations go by a similar plot.
As a totalitarian state, Russia has always been elaborate in crafting and implementing information influence and disinformation campaigns, targeting the neighbouring states. Their tactics were perfected back in the Soviet era by the infamous KGB.
The New York Times in its contribution entitled “The Seven Commandments of Fake News”, highlights the following elements of such operations.
Look for cracks in the target society, social divisions which you can exploit and wedge open – economic, regional or linguistic. Find ways to emphasise those divisions and actually make people lose trust in one another.
Create a big, bold lie. So outrageous that no one could possibly believe it was made up.
Wrap that lie around a kernel of truth. Propaganda is most effective when there is a little bit of truth in it. Then, disinformation is eventually accepted as a whole.
Conceal your hand and make it seem like the story came from somewhere else. When people start searching for the original source, make sure they never realise it is you who stands behind it.
Find yourself a useful idiot, someone who would unwittingly take your message and push it into the target audience.
If someone is trying to expose your efforts, deny everything even if the truth is obvious. This works well because our attention span is quite short. Denial provides enough time until the next news cycle kicks in.
Be prepared to play a long game and put large resources into things that may not bear fruit for many years to come.
Now that we know how an info-operation is moulded, we can have a better understanding of how it is implemented.
The tools, techniques, and methods applied by the Kremlin became more flexible and inventive over time, targeting specific social groups.
A visible change in Russia’s approach to information operations was observed in 2008, after the invasion of Georgia, when the Kremlin realised it had failed to provide proper media support for its aggression.
Since then, Russia has been actively developing a hybrid war strategy. In 2014, the Kremlin got an opportunity to showcase its new methods during the illegal occupation of Crimea. Since that time, disinformation targeting other countries has become Moscow’s main foreign policy instrument.
Now, the term “information operations” is often associated with Russia. Moscow considers the Eastern Partnership region a zone of its priority influence.
To increase this influence on its closest neighbours, the Kremlin, instead of applying “soft power”, opts for blackmail – political pressure, economic blockades, hybrid disinformation, and direct military intervention, as was the case in Ukraine.
And of course, other members of Eastern Partnership remain at Moscow’s crosshairs – that’s, first of all, Belarus, Moldova, and Georgia. Moreover, both in Ukraine and Belarus, Russian money is actively used to gain control over regional and national media.
This led to Russia becoming the main source of global disinformation spread, due to its strategy of hybrid aggression. Moreover, the closer other countries are to Russia’s borders the more acute is the looming threat emanating the Kremlin, and the more they need to cooperate to develop countermeasures.
Among the peculiar features of Russia’s information operations in the region is sowing chaos in the media space, compromising truth, and employing a large number of different channels through which either half-truths or outright lies are fed to target audiences. At the same time, Russian propaganda uses numerous sources, massive repetition, and various arguments to explain their point.
Modern Russian propaganda is rapid, continuous, and cyclical, being able to quickly respond to the latest developments.
Due to the fact that the Russian media set no goal to cover the objective reality, they need no additional time to verify facts and confirm opinions – they simply spin their own interpretation of events and fake news.
It is precisely those factors that make such a propaganda model effective, at the same time complicating the development of countering mechanisms. The wide range of narratives and multiple channels for spinning them ensure the stability of the entire Russian propaganda system if their adversaries succeed in discrediting and blocking its individual elements.
Also, fabricating false facts is much less time-consuming than fact-checking.
Very often, Russian information operations are accompanied by military sabre-rattling and pursue an escalating domination strategy (massive army drills, provocations at the border, cyberattacks, sabotage, and intelligence operations). Their goal is to bring tensions to a boil only to coerce other countries to negotiations with and, perhaps, concessions to Russia.
Although in the core of Russia’s information operations lies a limited set of methods and tools, the Kremlin is highly flexible in their application. Thus, prospects for countering their individual elements and manifestations are limited.
The problem primarily lies in the fact that we most often try to act reactively, responding to what has already happened. Deconstruction of disinformation is certainly crucial for grasping the mechanisms the Russian propaganda machine employs. However, we need to shift to a range of more proactive measures and cooperation in countering information aggression.
Since Russia entered the active phase of conducting information operations in order to achieve foreign policy goals, the expert community, government agencies, international organisations and businesses have been trying to find effective mechanisms to neutralise them.
Algorithms for monitoring information attacks are actively developing to systemically collect and document cases of pro-Kremlin disinformation.
Governments recognise that the media and information as such are strategic national assets.
Any encroachment of these assets entails liability. Besides, coordinated sanctions should be considered against foreign officials at the helm of government agencies waging an information war.
There have been positive practices where non-profits – independently or with government support – work to identify fake news and propaganda narratives, designing tailored methods for exposing them.
Also, other protective mechanisms to prevent misinformation should be strengthened.
A promising area is to boost media literacy. A well-informed society, media, and government contribute to ensuring greater resilience to foreign disinformation campaigns.
Initiatives aimed at improving media literacy and critical thinking should explain the mechanisms of Infowars, the developed methods of counteraction, the goals and objectives of Russian information influence, as well as threats it is posing.
To this end, targeted campaigns should be carried out to raise awareness of misinformation implications, and to educate audiences in order to protect the integrity of election campaigns.
Effective counteraction also requires joint efforts on the part of governments and civil society, based on mutual trust. It is the destruction of such mutual trust that the Kremlin propaganda seeks to achieve in targeted democracies.
To this end, resilience to disinformation must be developed – in order to withstand external pressure and falsification. This means that governments have to constantly adapt to the latest developments through legislative changes, launching government programs for youths to improve media literacy, supporting civil society organisations working to expose misinformation, as well as strengthening national media markets.
It is also necessary to improve communication between the government and the public, which will make all of the said mechanisms much more efficient.
Another effective countering mechanism is to expose active measures in the information field.
Joseph Nye argues that the best defence against authoritarian regimes applying “sharp power” is to expose such attempts and make them public.
In this regard, it is advisable to analyse and dissect the methods of influence Russia has been using, as well as develop basic scenarios for countering them. This will streamline the efforts to identify info ops at the times of political instability, especially during election campaigns.
Since 2014, disinformation campaigns run by Kremlin-backed groups have affected sixteen electoral processes across Europe.
In such circumstances, it is advisable that the best practices for identifying and countering Russian disinformation be adopted, as well as researching the Kremlin’s tactics, especially by countries where Russia employs similar mechanisms.
For example, to Belarus and Ukraine, where the Kremlin has been exploiting factors of linguistic similarity, common borders, and common parts of the historical past, information aggression is a constant threat. In order to minimise Russia’s hybrid meddling in these countries’ media space, it is feasible to create its own, alternative expert agenda.
It is important to take further steps to reduce the Kremlin’s resource potential in the information field across the Eastern Partnership countries.
It should be noted that the EU prefers non-legislative initiatives and self-regulation. The main trends of addressing the issue at the level of all-European institutions are as follows:
A good example is the European cooperation network on elections, which brings together national electoral authorities, audiovisual media regulators, six cybersecurity and data protection bodies, as well as relevant expert groups, including those promoting media literacy.
According to Daniel Bartha, Executive Director at the Center for Euro-Atlantic Integration and Democracy (CEID), although this may sound obvious, not much effort has been made to set up basic cooperation in most of the affected countries across the region.
Six years into the start of the hybrid confrontation, Russia has been actively enhancing its tactics, although its strategy aimed at sparking and deepening cracks in other countries remains unchanged.
The Kremlin has always flexibly exploited disinformation methods, also pursuing their further development, adopting modern technologies of information spins.
However, a clear understanding of the aggressor’s goals, the ability to predict possible directions of Russia’s information attacks, and the use of accumulated positive experience will ultimately help in building an effective system to counter hybrid aggressions.
This article is published as part of the Prospect Foundation project “Online Media Literacy for Editors and Administrators of Social Media Public Pages”, managed by iSANS and supported through grants from the International Visegrad Fund. A Russian version of this article is available on Reform.by.
Source: Visegradinsight
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