My article of April 4 on Fake News drew some interesting comments, including a number which disagreed with my assessment of Russia’s use of disinformation.
Russian propaganda today is far more sophisticated than the unconvincing boasts by communist hacks between 1950 and 1989 that life in the USSR was easier and fairer than it was in the West. Nowadays, Kremlin propagandists are young, smart, and streetwise. They know what concepts appeal to western public opinion. They know the jargon, the fads and mind-set of the younger generation who have never known the Cold War.
They know how to use the truth selectively and how to confect a giant lie out of an assemblage of half-truths. And they have the technical knowledge to ensure that their Kremlin-approved narrative is widely available on social media that voters in the West are likely to see and read.
Russian attempts to fuel dissent and spread disinformation have been exposed recently by a cache of leaked documents that show what the Kremlin was prepared to pay for hacking, propaganda and rent-a-mob rallies in the Ukraine.
Hacked e-mails sent by figures linked to Moscow have uncovered a dirty tricks campaign in Ukraine, which was invaded on the orders of President Vladimir Putin in 2014. Intelligence and military experts have highlighted how this information warfare campaign revealed the dangers faced by European countries because Russia was using the same weapons of disinformation, bribery and distortion to attack the West.
The cache of leaked Kremlin e-mails on the disinformation campaign in Ukraine is startling in its barefaced and immoral cynicism. The cost and extent of Russian attempts to fuel dissent have been laid bare. Thousands of e-mails outlined a campaign of dirty tricks, including wider plans to troll opponents and “demotivate enemies” on social media.
They also covered costs of proposals to hack opponents’ e-mail accounts priced at $100 to $300 and offers to take down websites for $50 to $5,000. Amassing the personal data of targeted individuals in Ukraine’s second largest city of Kharkiv was priced at $130,500.
A month of rallies in the same city designed for propaganda purposes would cost $19,200 (including payment of local thugs and bribes to the police and media). They even put a price on how much Russia should pay to suborn opinion in Ukraine and corrupt the country’s officials: $183,000 to get 20 agents elected to local government.
They know how to use the truth selectively and how to confect a giant lie out of an assemblage of half-truths
There is overwhelming evidence that the tools and techniques of Russian covert conflict are being used in and against the European Union, the United Kingdom and the United States.
In the wake of the assassination attempts on the Skripals in Salisbury, it is all the more important for us to understand these methods. Pro-Kremlin trolls on Twitter have worked hard to “dismiss, distort and distract” from the nerve agent attack in battles that have played out over social media.
It is believed that Moscow unleashed an extensive disinformation operation after the Salisbury spy attack, with thousands of suspected robotic accounts spreading doubt and conspiracy theories on the internet. While some pro-Kremlin trolls have acted independently, Russia stands accused of running a “troll factory” in St Petersburg. Automated Twitter accounts have been used to pump out streams of pro-Kremlin messages.
What was supposed to work in Ukraine has also been tried in much of Western Europe and with considerable success. The doctrine underpinning contemporary Russian conflict starts with the tools of KGB operations (today called the FSB). These include espionage, the use of political fronts and disinformation campaigns. Moscow has packaged the full spectrum of state power in a highly creative way. It is a new strategic art – a framework of thinking that says you are in a state of perpetual conflict.
For Russia, trolls, hackers, political technologists andpaid-for protestors are more useful than military hardware, although a state still needs both. The central feature of Putin’s approach to the world, which he calls “strategic relativism”, is that Russia cannot get stronger, but the Kremlin can ensure that its adversaries get weaker. It pursues this goal by sowing dissention and polarisation within alliances, countries and institutions.
The West has been slow to understand the scale and the ruthlessness of this Russian propaganda onslaught.
There have been complaints in the UK and elsewhere about the one-sidedness of RT, the Russian English language television station, or the carefully calibrated calculation of Sputnik, the Russian information outlet.
But only recently have western military strategists called for greater understanding of how to fight asymmetric war against Russia, with Moscow’s disinformation weapon as a main component of the multi-faceted assault.
Moscow’s attempts to sow confusion as its knee-jerk response to any tricky situation has antagonised the outside world. The attempts to blame Britain for the poisoning of the Skripals as part of a plot to discredit Russia, or to win voters’ support for increased defence spending, have been laughable and fool nobody.
Moscow has flooded pro-Russian news channels and social media platforms with more than 20 conspiracy theories about the Salisbury attack to deflect attention from Britain’s assertion that Russia is to blame. But lies in the end are caught out by their own lies.
Those who use conspiracy theories at home to explain global politics are misled if they assume that everyone else thinks the same way. It is of course easier to sow confusion in a world where social media have opened the floodgates to extremism and, frankly, crack-pot ideas.
Western society still puts a value on truth. Attempts to subvert elections or spread fake news store up resentment.
Disinformation is a word and a concept invented in the Soviet Union. Lenin understood well the need to win hearts and minds for the communist cause. Stalin took that further, with the use of “agitprop” (the dissemination of communist political propaganda especially in plays, books and films) to turn information into a propaganda weapon.
The KGB became adept not only at honing a pro-Soviet message, but also in using lies, falsification and fake news to confuse and disorientate its ideological enemies. Little wonder that Putin, a career KGB officer whose mindset was shaped by his time as a spy, also sees disinformation as a powerful weapon in Russia’s armoury.