Russia’s information warfare – airbrushing reality

This is the best dissection of Russian Information Warfare I have seen to date.

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March 23, 2016 – 23:39

Authors: 

Ben Nimmo is a senior fellow at the Institute for Statecraft in London specialising in Russian information warfare and influence. He formerly worked as a press officer at NATO and a journalist in Brussels and the Baltic States.

Dr Jonathan Eyal is the Associate Director, Strategic Research Partnerships, and International Director of the Royal United Services Institute. He also serves as a Senior Research Fellow and Editor of the RUSI Newsbrief.

This work is submitted in a personal capacity by both authors.

Abstract:

1. Russia is conducting a coordinated but undeclared information campaign against the United Kingdom, attempting to influence the UK’s domestic debate on key issues in order to produce an outcome of benefit to Russia. This campaign is lobbying for a British exit from the EU, the scrapping of Trident, and a Scottish exit from the Union – all outcomes which would weaken the UK and give Russia a freer hand in world affairs. This is unacceptable behaviour by a foreign government.

2. The precise impact of this behaviour is hard to measure. However, Russian claims that the Scottish independence referendum was fixed certainly fuelled the broader campaign to question the vote,[1] and the Kremlin-funded media certainly amplified and expanded on those claims.[2] Anecdotal evidence supports the thesis that this coverage had at least some degree of impact on some individual voters;[3] the degree to which the disinformation has penetrated different audiences merits further study.

3. Moreover, regardless of the impact of this disinformation, the fact that a disinformation campaign is being conducted by Russian government outlets remains demonstrably the case; that case is set out below. This being so, appropriate legal and diplomatic responses should be brought to bear both on the direct actors in the disinformation campaign, and on the Russian government more broadly.

Conduct of the campaign: airbrushing reality

4. Russia’s information warfare in the UK can best be thought of as an attempt to airbrush reality. Objective reality – the actual relationship between majority and minority, mainstream and fringe – is systematically replaced by a pseudo-reality in which minorities who echo the Kremlin’s strategic priorities are presented as the majority, and the genuine majority is presented as a fringe, if it is presented at all.

5. The chief communicators of this airbrushed reality are the Kremlin-funded media outlets RT (formerly Russia Today) and Sputnik.

6. Both RT and Sputnik are funded by the Russian government. RT’s official budget[4] stood at 13.85 billion rubles in 2015;[5] the equivalent figure for Sputnik’s parent organisation, the Rossiya Segodnya news agency (which also incorporates the Russian-language RIA Novosti), stood at 5.8 billion rubles.[6]

7. RT compares itself explicitly with other international public-service broadcasters, notably the BBC and U.S. stations such as Radio Free Europe. However, both RT and Sputnik regularly and systematically violate journalistic standards in a way which serves the Kremlin’s interests. They achieve their effect by giving disproportionate coverage to extremist politicians, “experts” of dubious background, and mainstream politicians whose views chime with the Kremlin’s chosen narratives.[7]

8. Such disproportionate coverage is a violation of Ofcom’s standards, which state, inter alia, that “Due impartiality on matters of political or industrial controversy and matters relating to current public policy must be preserved on the part of any person providing a service (…). This may be achieved within a programme or over a series of programmes taken as a whole,”[8] and that “views must also be presented with due weight over appropriate time frames”.[9]  However, given that much of the RT and Sputnik coverage is presented on the internet, it largely falls outside Ofcom’s remit.

Continue at http://www.stopfake.org/en/russia-s-information-warfare-airbrushing-reality/