EUvsDisInfo on Russian disinformation in 2020

The European Union has an agency called the East StratCom Task Force that provides a public information website called EUvsDisInfo that tracks and comments on propaganda campaigns generated by Vladimir Putin's Russian government. It's a useful source, although it doesn't pretend to be an independent news agency and is explicit about its EU sponsorship.

It has a year round-up for 2020, Figures of the Year: From 16 to 177 Million 12/29/2020:

[F]alling for a troll factory dedicated to deceiving people can be an honest mistake, as an analysis of 32 accounts connected to IRA [the Russian Internet Research Agency] showed how well they impersonate Americans and design posts to incite outrage, fear, and hostility. The IRA’s trolls have also become better at impersonating candidates and parties, and using apolitical and commercial content to better imitate authentic user behaviour to evade detection. 2020 was also the year when more and more actors adopted similar methods.

But let’s not get too entangled in social media, as the pro-Kremlin disinformation ecosystem also includes websites that benefit from advertising revenues from major corporations like Amazon, Burger King, Mercedes Benz, Samsung, Spotify, and Volvo via Google or Criteo ad services. The research by Global Disinformation Index shows that annually more than $76 million is spent on such sites spreading disinformation. [my emphasis]

Of course countries try to meddle in each others' politics by a wide variety of methods. Interpreting them is part of the larger challenge of parsing sources. Obviously, messages elaborately disguised as false sources are more dubious than one's clearly and accurately identified. Serious academic sources have to be evaluated in a different way than popular magazines and newspapers. Sensationalist tabloid publications need to be viewed differently than more serious papers. And so on.

Notice in this EUvsDisInfo article that the Russian news agencies RT and Sputnik are the source of the COVID-denial type of misinformation on which it focuses. RT and Sputnik are openly Russian government-sponsored sources. People should evaluate the sources according to what they are and how they evolve. The BBC and Aljazeera are also official state media with reputations for decent reporting, though they also have their blind spots. Neither RT nor Sputnik have that reputation. But as sources for official Russian positions, they are important sources.

The EUvsDisInfo article also calls attention to an important historical event that has long played a role in contemporary disputes over historical and foreign-policy symbolism:

Historical revisionism also remained in the focus for the Kremlin and it’s controlled media. For example, the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact and its secret protocols on the delineation of “spheres of interests” between the two totalitarian powers was at the centre of efforts to blame the West for its alleged efforts to re-write history and diminish the Soviet’s role in defeating Nazism. However, what they fail to mention is that 80 years ago this cooperation also included Russia’s deportation of hundreds of refugees to the German authorities(opens in a new tab). Most of them were German anti-fascists, communists, and Jews, who were seeking asylum in the Soviet Union, and ended up being handed over to the Gestapo. Instead of admitting wrongdoings in the past, the Kremlin has actively worked on improving it’s image in history books, social media(opens in a new tab) and pro-Kremlin outlets. [my emphasis]

What it says about the USSR handing some refugees over to Germany under the terms of the pact is true. But a phrase like "what they fail to mention" is a typical phrase in this kind of controversy over historic symbolism. I'm kind of shaking my head at the idea of trying to say anything analytic and coherent about the Soviet-German agreement of 1939. It was a complicated set of arrangements with huge stakes on both sides, a pretty cold-blooded piece of pragmatic calculation on both sides. "Pragmatic" as in amoral.

The mutual attempts by the USSR and US to minimize the other's role in defeating Hitler Germany was a standard feature of Cold War polemics. That continues with the US and post-Soviet Russia. When relations cool, the criticism over World War II gets rolled out. When they improve, both sides discover good things about their common cause as allies during the Second World War. During the easing of relations during the 1970s, there was a documentary series made about the USSR in the war, the American version was narrated by actor Burt Reynold. It was shown in the Soviet Union under the title, The Great Patriotic War, which it was called there. The American release was The Unknown War. Because the triumphalist Cold War American narrative about the Second World War left a lot of Americans knowing actually very little about the Soviet role in the war, including the fact that the USSR lost far and away the most people in that conflict.