The German Federal Government has been monitoring the activities of the media platform "red.", which is operated by a company registered in Turkey, for several months. "red." presents itself as a revolutionary platform for independent journalists. However, there are close ties with the Russian state media "RT".Trevor Barnes wrote in a 1981 analysis of the early years of the US Central Intelligence Agency, first created in 1946 as a central clearinghouse for the analysis of foreign intelligence. It was, as Barnes notes, “America's first peacetime foreign intelligence agency.” (2)
Today we can say authoritatively that "red." [aka, Red Media] is being used by Russia specifically to manipulate information. We were able to determine this as part of a national attribution procedure. The basis for this is a comprehensive analysis of the German security authorities.
The goal of such campaigns is clear: Russia uses platforms like "red." to weaken social cohesion in Germany and Europe by manipulating debates and artificially fueling them with false information, by stirring up mistrust in facts, in the media and in democratic structures, and by discrediting state structures or portraying them as unable to function properly. (1)
Liaison with foreign countries was an important source of information for the C.I.A.'s estimates in its early days and throughout the fifties. Before leaving C.I.G. [the US Central Intelligence Group, immediate predecessor of the CIA] in June 1947, its second director, General Vandenburg, instituted peacetime co-operation with a number of other nations and especially Britain. In May 1946 he received notes on British intelligence re-organization from Commodore Tully Shelley of naval intelligence who was at the time in London. Shelley said Sir Kenneth Strong, the director of Britain's joint intelligence committee, was strongly in favour of Anglo-American co-operation and was to fly to Washington in June to lay 'the complete plan' of a new joint intelligence bureau before Strong' s form er commander in Europe, Eisenhower. Later in 1946 information was twice passed to the British general staff intelligence in Italy about a planned (and finally successful) assassination by an Italian of a British commanding officer, Brigadier R. M. W. de Winten. Material on Indonesia and the Middle East was exchanged with the Dutch secret service and by 1949 the C.I.A. and British intelligence were holding regular liaison meetings in Washington and London. Another fruitful area for co-operation with the British was the monitoring of foreign broadcasts. American responsibility for this rested with C.I.G. In March 1947 Vandenburg began negotiating a new agreement with the British Broadcasting Corporation so that more material would be exchanged. Information from British intelligence was important because the C.I.A. took time to build up a network of spies, and in the late forties Britain's secret intelligence service supplied material regularly to the C.I.A. about possible Russian mobilization in eastern Europe. Russia however remained almost impervious to British and American intelligence in the late forties and early fifties. …I’m not providing these quotations to make a “gotcha” point. My point is that this is how intelligence agencies work. Sometimes they get things right, other times they get them wrong. Countries try to influence other countries and there are elaborate sets of formal and informal rules about what kinds of influence are legitimate and which are not.
Soon after its foundation the Agency began covert action, the secret attempt to influence developments by means short of war, in Europe and elsewhere. The orthodox view within the Agency is that these operations saved the Old World from the communist abyss and played a major role in maintaining the atmosphere of free debate. This claim is an exaggeration and needs careful scrutiny, although the role of covert action in American foreign policy after the war was significant.
Ideas, including political ideas, have always moved across political borders. In the proverbial Grand Scheme of Things, that is a good thing and an inevitable one. One important current example is the party grouping in the European Parliaments, in which parties from the different EU countries form EU parliamentary parties with each other. So the social-democrats from the various countries that are part of the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats (S&D) are standing together in favor of policies that are sometimes against those favored by the Christian Democratic conservatives in the European People's Party (EPP Group). There is a kind of Nationalist International among far-right parties, two of them actually, the Patriots for Europe and the Europe of Sovereign Nations (ESN).
There really was a German-sponsored organization in the 1930s called the Nationalist International – on its face about as contradictory a term as I can think of. Its formal name was Internationale Arbeitsgemeinschaft der Nationalisten – International Action of Nationalists. (3)
The Social Democratic parties of the world have had an umbrella international organization since the 19th century, including today’s Socialist International. Soviet-line Communist Parties back in the day were part of an international organization largely directed by the USSR (or technically by the Soviet Communist Party).
Sidney Blumenthal, senior adviser to President Bill Clinton 1997-2001 (and father of the leftwing commentator Max Blumenthal), organized a formal cooperation among the US Democratic Party, the Canadian Liberal Party, the British Labour Party, and the German Social Democratic Party called the Third Way.
It is also generally accepted as legitimate for countries to limit or block foreign media, political, labor or other types of groups to limit activities being directed by foreign governments considered dangerous or undesirable. There are laws defining such things as well as complicated norms and practices regulating them. Leaking official state secrets or classified information on weapons systems is obviously a touchier and generally more high-stakes type of sharing than clearly identified media sources controlled by a foreign state government.
If your read something from China Daily, a daily news service from the Central Propaganda Department of the Chinese Communist Party, you know (presumably!) you’re getting information embedded in a particular national and political perspective. That doesn’t mean that all non-Chinese governments should block access to it in their national territory. It just means that it exists on a spectrum stretching from bland factual reporting to blatantly hostile “information operations” run by nefarious actors.
Does the “red.”/Red Media service deliver bad information? Is it really primarily a Russian front to spread confusion?
This is why we need good media, both in “legacy” media and what we’re still calling “alternative” ones. It’s a paradox – or a “contradiction” to use the Hegelian term – that the digital age gives us vastly more information by which we can find and verify sources and factual claims than ever before. But at the same time, it’s easier than ever to start trusting dubious sources.
Critical thinking and critical reading were important even back in the days when the Internet was still a project waiting to emerge from the US Defense Department’s ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network). (4) And they are even more important now, even with AI.
Especially with AI, actually!
Notes:
(1) Beobachtung der Aktivitäten der Medienplattform „red.“ Deutsches Auswärigen Amt 02.07.2025. <https://www.auswaertiges-amt.de/de/newsroom/regierungspressekonferenz-2725706#content_0> (Accessed: 2025-21-12). My translation to English.
(2) Barnes, Trevor (1981): The Secret Cold War: The C.I.A. and American Foreign Policy in Europe, 1946-1956. Part I. The Historical Journal 24:2, 399-415. US involvement in Indonesia contributed mightily to some very bloody results in the 1960s. <https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X00005537>
(3) Hamre, Martin Kristoffer (2025): Fascists of the World, Unite? A History of Fascist Internationalism in the 1930s, 104. Berlin & Boston: De Gruyter Oldenbourg.
(4) Internet History part 1: The First Time Two Computers Were Ever Connected. National Science and Media Museum YouTube channel 03/28/2012. <https://youtu.be/khajeqHUQ7Q?si=a3krZgN8aL6uUnFu> (Accessed: 2025-21-12).
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