Russo-Ukrainian
Infowar on              
              SOCIAL MEDIA

One of the problem with Facebook is that as a tool of persuasion, it may be the greatest thing ever created.

Now imagine what that means in the hands of a dictator or an authoritarian. If you want to control the population of your country, there has never been a tool as effective as Facebook.
– Roger Mcnamee

Systematic information manipulation and disinformation have been applied by the Russian government as an operational tool in its assault on Ukraine (Council of the European Union, 2022).

Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine is notable for the extent to which it is being waged and shared online.

While social media have played a role in previous wars – for example, Russian soldiers were identified on the battlefield in the Donbas region during the 2014 invasion, and videos from the war in Syria were shared on TikTok – Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has illustrated how social mediais changing the way war can be chronicled, experienced and understood (The Economist, 2022).

This is largely due to the rapid rise in internet coverage and the use of social media; 75% of Ukrainians use the internet, and 89% of the population is covered by at least 3G mobile technology (International Telecommunication Union, 2021). In comparison, when the Russian Federation (hereafter “Russia”) invaded Ukraine in 2014, just 4% of Ukrainian mobile subscribers had access to 3G networks or faster, and during the war in Syria in 2015, only 30% of the Syrian population was online (The Economist, 2022).

The ongoing war in Ukraine has also clarified the extent of the disinformation threat. Although the use of disinformation as a weapon has always existed, the social media landscape has multiplied its reach and potential penetration.

Matched by increased restrictions on political opposition in Russia, disinformation narratives progressed from propaganda and historical revisionism – for example, insisting that Crimea had always been Russian after Moscow’s annexation in 2014 (Coynash, 2021; Chotiner, 2022) – to false claims about neo-Nazi infiltration in Ukraine’s government and conspiracy theories about Ukraine/US bioweapons laboratories. These efforts represent a handful of the ways in which the Russian government and aligned actors use disinformation as a weapon to distract, confuse and subvert opponents.

As Russia has been pushed back in Ukraine, the rhetoric has become ever more strident. At the start of the war, state media were pushing the line that Ukraine was a Nazi state. The line now, believes it or not, is that it’s run by LGBT Nazis trying to make Russia gender-neutral.

Your Prompt: Zelenskyy dressed in
pink dancing in a night gay club
@StableDiffusion

It's another step in eight years of escalating genocide by Ukrainian Nazi authorities against Russian people, against Russian speakers, against those who don't accept LGBT transgender Nazis values.

This was claimed by Vladimir Solovyov, Russian TV presenter and propagandist, who also stated that “Ukraine's president is not just a drug addict, he's a gay paedophile”:

Just look at Zelensky. Even in his acting career he was constantly promoting pederastic values. All his dancing in latex, all his gay mannerisms. All that playing around with drugs.

Tikhon Dzyadko, TV Rain station's editor in-chief says:

                  I think the main problem for the Russian government and for the state propaganda is that they have to somehow sell the process of demilitarization and de-Nazi-fication of Ukraine.
The Russian propaganda switched to the idea that Russia is the last fortress of traditional values.

Members of parliament are now citing cartoons as proof of Western subversion: The cartoon South Park has a school chef who's a paedophile. Peppa Pig, apparently a well-known cartoon: in one episode a polar bear draws a portrait of her family and says I live with my Mummy and other my Mummy.

Your Prompt: Zelenskyy drinks a mojito sitting at a bar counter wearing a glitter shirt @StableDiffusion

The spread of disinformation around Russia’s invasion of Ukraine reflects wider challenges related to the shift in how information is produced and distributed. Platform and algorithm designs can amplify the spread of disinformation by facilitating the creation of echo chambers and confirmation bias mechanisms that segregate the news and information people see and interact with online; information overload, confusion and cognitive biases play into these trends.

Disinformation is the false, inaccurate, or misleading information deliberately created, presented and disseminated, whereas mis-information is false or inaccurate information that is shared unknowingly and is not disseminated with the intention of deceiving the public. Russian action fits squarely with the definition of disinformation.

Russian propaganda and disinformation activities are produced in large volumes and are distributed across a large number of channels, both via online and traditional media. The producers and disseminators of this content include paid internet TROLLS, or people who post inflammatory, insincere, or manipulative messages via online chat rooms, discussion forums, and comment sections on news and other websites.

Strategies have also included more targeted approaches. For example, in 2020, Facebook identified a Russian military operation targeting Ukraine that had created fake Facebook profiles who posed as journalists and who attempted to spread disinformation in a way that appeared to be more credible. Efforts to manipulate public opinion on social media took place on Twitter and Facebook, with extensive efforts also concentrated on Instagram, YouTube and TikTok. Evidence also exists of disinformation campaigns taking place in the comments sections of major MEDIA OUTLETS.

More overtly, the Russian government runs co-ordinated information (and disinformation) campaigns on its own social media accounts. For example, 75 Russian government Twitter accounts, with 7,3 million followers garnering 35,9 million retweets, 29,8 million likes and 4 million replies, tweeted 1.157 times between 25 February and 3 March 2022. Roughly 75% of the tweets covered Ukraine and many furthered disinformation narratives questioning Ukraine’s status as a sovereign state, drawing attention to alleged war crimes by other countries, and spreading conspiracy theories.

Russian government accounts have also been linked to TYPO SQUATTING (registering websites with deliberately misspelled names of similarly named websites) of popular news organisations containing false information. For example, Russian actors created a fake website of the Polish daily newspaper, Gazeta Wyborcza, to spread disinformation about the atrocities reported
in Bucha.

Your Prompt: Biden and
Zelenskyy wearing proctective suit and gas mask @StableDiffusion

The impact of social media goes beyond its use as a direct source of information, given that feedback loops between social media, traditional media in OECD Member States, and Russian state-backed media can rapidly amplify information (and disinformation). Such a feedback loop was observed, for example, in the case of a conspiracy theory about Ukrainian biological facilities masked as a secret bioweapons program. The theory was originally shared by Twitter accounts connected with conspiracy theories in the United States, amplified by off-line media outlets (in this case cable news), and subsequently shared by Russian state propaganda (Ling, 2022).