Seven commandments of fake news: Exposing the Kremlin’s methods

·  Fifth Commandment: find yourself a “useful idiot” – someone who would unwittingly push your message to wider audiences.

·  Sixth Commandment: when truth is uncovered – deny everything.

·  Seventh Commandment: play the long game – efforts might not bear fruit for years, but accumulated over a longer period of time they will eventually have a political impact.

EU vs Disinfo has extensively analyzed the strategies and tactics of the Kremlin’s disinformation campaigns. Finding and exploiting differences within pluralistic societies, carefully calibrating disinformation messages to target audiences,  wrapping false statements around a kernel of truth, amplifying narratives both through willing and unsuspecting voices – these are the core features of the Kremlin’s disinformation campaigns. And they are highly effective.

And while the Kremlin’s methods might in many ways be old, its tools are new. While the soviet KGB had to rely on obscure newspapers, nowadays the Kremlin has a media empire at its disposal.

Its flagship, TV channel RT (formerly Russia Today) wants global audiences to “question more” 24 hours a day in six languages. It is also fully funded by the Russian government and receives weekly instructions from Kremlin. Then there is Sputnik, established by a Presidential degree to “report on state policy of Russia abroad,” with “reporting” so deliberately misleading, that it prompted the President of France Emmanuel Macron to call out Sputnik along with the RT as “agencies of influence and propaganda, lying propaganda – no more, no less.” In addition to that, there are ubiquitous online sites in Kremlin’s arsenal, which intentionally conceal their links to Russia. Not least among them – the infamous Internet Research Agency (aka St. Petersburg’s Troll factory),  which was at the center of Russian attempts to influence the public opinion on social media before the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

With time-tested methods and ample modern tools, the Kremlin relentlessly pursues the strategy of “divide and rule” – to break alliances, turn individuals, social groups, and countries against one another and weaken the West in a classic zero-sum game approach.

— Read the first part, and watch entire series here

This article is published courtesy of EU vs Disinfo