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As governments and social media companies move to put pressure Russiastate media and disinformation about the war UkraineKremlin’s diplomats take action to do the dirty work.
Russian embassies and consulates around the world are using Facebook, Twitter and other platforms to blame atrocities and seek to undermine the support of the international coalition. Ukraine.
Tech companies responded by adding more tags. Russia‘s diplomatic accounts and removing them from their recommendations and search results. But accounts are still active, spreading disinformation and propaganda in nearly every nation, partly because their diplomatic status gives them an additional layer of protection from moderation.
With hundreds of social media accounts on every continent, Russia‘s diplomatic agency acts as a global propaganda network where the same claims can be reconverted and corrected for different audiences in different countries. And so far, steps to significantly reduce that effort have been inadequate.
“Every week since the start of the war, these diplomats have posted thousands of posts and received more than a million interactions per week on Twitter,” he said. Marcel SchliebsA disinformation researcher at Oxford University’s Oxford Internet Institute, Dr. HE IS He followed more than 300 social media accounts linked to Russian embassies, consulates and diplomatic groups.
For example, some Russian embassies, such as those in the United Kingdom and Mexico, are particularly active, running pro-Russian propaganda and spreading lies intended to support the occupation.
Russian missile attack on Ukrainian train station, where 50 people died? Behind him were the Ukrainians. Russian Embassy He tweeted in England. Are you talking about Russian war crimes? A conspiracy to make England Russia you look bad, Embassy He claimed. Ukrainian soldiers fighting for their country? They are actually Nazis operating under US orders. Embassy claimed.
The Russian Embassy in London tweeted this and other conspiracy theories one day last week. Each post received hundreds or thousands of retweets, comments and likes; among them dozens of other Twitter users who repulsed the propaganda.
“They should know better, but that’s what it’s like to live and work in a totalitarian regime,” said University of Southern California professor Nicholas Cull, who studies the intersection of diplomacy and propaganda. “A totalitarian regime requires a media bubble. It requires home censorship and requires your own messaging for both domestic and foreign audiences. That’s it.”
Diplomats are known for always pushing their country’s talking points, as representatives of their countries empowered to speak for themselves. Russian diplomats, in particular, have long been known for spreading Kremlin disinformation. Russian diplomats used social media to spread disinformation about the 2014 invasion of Crimea and the poisoning of Russian dissidents.
Their status as representatives of a foreign government often gave them freedom of speech.
Sometimes they even try to rewrite history, as in 2019 when Russian diplomatic accounts used the hashtag #TruthaboutWWII to distort the Soviet Union’s initial non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany. This disinformation campaign was uncovered by researchers at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Laboratory and determined that Russian diplomats, along with state media and social media bots, play an important role in the country’s complex disinformation apparatus.
The Atlantic Council researchers concluded that “the Kremlin tends to use a full-blown propaganda model.”
from the beginning Russiainvasion Ukrainetech companies and even governments have taken other measures to stop the flow of disinformation from other sources. Russiastate-controlled media. The European Union banned broadcasts such as RT and Sputnik. Meta has banned these exits from platforms it owns, including Facebook and Instagram. Tech companies have also cut sales from advertising revenue and expanded their efforts to tag their accounts.
a message asking for comment Russian Embassy It was not immediately returned to the US.
Noticeable increase in pro-Russian propaganda Ukraine it started weeks and months before the invasion even started in February.
According to Schliebs’ research, accounts were tweeting about 2,000 times a week immediately after the invasion, resulting in more than 1 million likes, retweets, and comments.
That engagement fell after Twitter announced earlier this month that it would no longer promote or include in search results over 300 Russian accounts. Yet despite Twitter’s action, the accounts that Schliebs follows are still gaining nearly half a million likes, retweets, and comments per week.
Twitter and Facebook have added “Russian government agency” tags to many of these accounts to let users know the source of the information. But Schliebs found that many accounts still don’t have tags: Only a third of the 300 or so accounts he reviewed have tags.
A Twitter spokesperson said the company has tagged 260,000 Tweets from Russian accounts since Feb. 28 and continues to “cyclically” add tags to accounts.
Schliebs responds to tech companies Russia2020 US election, 6 January 2021, attack on the US Capitol and its occupation by actions in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. President at the time, Donald Trump, was kicked off Twitter for inciting violence before the January 6 riot. But Russian diplomats – spreading crazy conspiracy theories and blaming the Ukrainians for Russian atrocities – go ahead.
“I’m not defending him (Trump) in any way, but I don’t see any consistency in this policy,” he said.
Meta implemented similar changes designed to tag Russian diplomatic accounts and reduce their reach on their platform.
Last month, the company also removed a post spread by Russian diplomats that suggested the deadly airstrike on a children’s hospital in Mariupol was a hoax.
Platforms like Facebook and Twitter are in danger of falling too far into diplomatic accounts, Schliebs said. First, it could get worse RussiaHis hostility towards US-based tech companies. (For example, Facebook has been labeled an “extremist” organization.) But it can also push. Russia and redirects its supporters to less transparent platforms like Telegram, where researchers and regulators can’t see what they’re saying.
That’s a shift Russiadiplomats are getting ready Russian Embassy He tweeted last week in the UK.
It read, “Meet our DiploFamily on @telegram.”
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