ARGUMENT: PROPAGANDAHow Unmoderated Platforms Became the Frontline for Russian Propaganda

Published 19 August 2022

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has highlighted the evolving complexities of platform governance challenges in an increasingly decentralized information environment. Samantha Bradshaw, Renee DiResta, and Christopher Giles write that “A comprehensive strategy to combat disinformation campaigns must consider full spectrum operations that incorporate both overt and covert dynamics across a wide range of analog, digital, and alternative media,” adding that “An overfocus on covert networks on Facebook and Twitter misses the full expanse of the propaganda strategies that often reach more users through different communication media on popular local media and social media channels.”

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has highlighted the evolving complexities of platform governance challenges in an increasingly decentralized information environment. Samantha Bradshaw, Renee DiResta, and Christopher Giles write in Lawfare that Russia, leading up to and throughout the conflict, brought the full scope of its propaganda apparatus to bear, leveraging overt and covert capabilities on both broadcast and social media to justify the invasion, downplay the death and destruction of families and homes, and deny human rights abuses.

“Social media companies have been called to make difficult, real-time decisions about content moderation with life-or-death stakes,” they write. “However, even as the Western conversation focuses on Facebook, Twitter, and Alphabet’s successes and failures, state war propaganda is increasingly prevalent on platforms that offer minimal-moderation virality as their value proposition.”

They note that

For several years, most of the focus on social media influence operations has homed in on disinformation and coordinated inauthentic behavior (CIB), particularly the covert campaigns with now-notorious bots and trolls run amok on Western social media, such as those that sowed discontent during the 2016 U.S. presidential election. However, this narrow focus on mainstream social media platforms and covert activities has left two glaring blind spots for ongoing information operations: overt information operations and the rise of social media propaganda on alternative platforms like Telegram.

The add:

Russia has a long history of “full spectrum” information operations that span the range of available communication mediums. Russian politicians, ministries, and media outlets work together to co-construct narratives that serve their geopolitical interests. Evidence of these “full spectrum” operations predate the digital era, with examples of Soviet operations leveraging newspapers, radio, and television tracing back to the 1930s and throughout the civil rights movement. Every available dissemination channel was utilized, and while the narratives were inflected for specific audiences or to highlight particular details, the overarching goal of undermining Western hegemony remained constant.

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Today, internet memes have replaced propaganda posters and the full spectrum of channels including social media. However, state-backed media, which itself now has a presence on social platforms, continues to play an important role in shaping narratives that support Russia’s geopolitical interests.

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While the steps platforms took to limit the reach of state-backed media by demoting their content or banning them altogether impacted the reach of some channels, outlets learned to adjust their strategies to evade bans by using official embassy accounts and individual journalists’ accounts to share content. Although most state-backed media content was not being algorithmically recommended to users, there was nothing preventing the sharing of content from these channels.

Bradshaw, DiResta, and Giles conclude:

A comprehensive strategy to combat disinformation campaigns must consider full spectrum operations that incorporate both overt and covert dynamics across a wide range of analog, digital, and alternative media, including non-Western platforms like Telegram. An overfocus on covert networks on Facebook and Twitter misses the full expanse of the propaganda strategies that often reach more users through different communication media on popular local media and social media channels. It misses the fact that state actors are simply moving their content strategies and investing in audience growth on platforms that won’t moderate, investigate provenance, or contextualize state narratives.

State-backed media are some of the worst offenders when it comes to editorializing the war and denying the use of force or violent events taking place on the ground, and their increasing use of social media as a channel creates distinct complexities. While some platform policies prevent certain government entities from denying the use of force or violent events in the context of an attack against the territorial integrity of another state, state-backed media are not explicitly limited from publishing these kinds of narratives despite the fact they have significantly larger audiences than government or embassy accounts. One way platforms could continue to strengthen their response to overt propaganda would be to include state-backed media in this policy.

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Propaganda has—and always will be—a component of violent conflict. In the modern information environment, social media platforms are one of the first lines of defense on the digital battlefield. The Russia-Ukraine war has shown that platforms are not simply neutral or commercial entities: Their policies make them arbiters of geopolitics, and the decisions they make—or don’t make, in the case of Telegram—can mean life or death during times of war, conflict, and violence. Although information spaces have never been homogeneous, the invasion of Ukraine provides a preview of the policymaking challenges in a fractured and highly politicized information environment.