As governments and social media companies have mobilized to suppress Russian state media and the misinformation they spread about the war in Ukraine, Kremlin diplomats are stepping up to do the dirty work.
Russian embassies and consulates around the world are using Facebook, Twitter and other platforms extensively to divert blame for atrocities as they seek to undermine the international coalition that supports Ukraine.
Tech companies responded by adding more tags to Russian diplomatic accounts and removing accounts from their recommendations and search results. But the accounts are still active and spread misinformation and propaganda in almost every nation, in part because their diplomatic status gives them an extra layer of protection from moderation.
With hundreds of social media accounts on every continent, Russia's diplomatic corps acts as a global propaganda network, in which same statements can be recycled and modified for different audiences in different countries. And, so far, the steps to substantially reduce that effort have fallen short.
“Every week since the start of the war, these diplomats have posted thousands of times, garnering more than a million interactions on Twitter per week,” said Marcel Schliebs, a disinformation researcher at Oxford Internet Institute at Oxford University. He has tracked over 300 social media accounts linked to Russian embassies, consulates and diplomatic groups.
Some Russian embassies, such as those of the United Kingdom and Mexico, for example, are particularly active, producing pro-Russian propaganda and spreading falsehoods aimed at supporting the invasion.
The Russian missile attack on a Ukrainian train station that killed 50? Ukrainians were behind this, tweeted the Russian embassy in the UK. Talk about Russian war crimes? It is a plot by Britain to make Russia look bad, the embassy said. Those Ukrainian soldiers fighting for their country? In reality, they are Nazis operating under American orders, the embassy alleged.
The Russian embassy in London tweeted those and other conspiracy theories in a single day last week. Each post received hundreds or thousands of retweets, comments and likes, including dozens of other Twitter users who rejected the propaganda.
“They should know better, but that's what it's like to live and work for a totalitarian regime,” said Nicholas Cull, a professor at the University of Southern California who studies the intersection of diplomacy and propaganda. “A totalitarian regime requires a media bubble. It requires censorship at home and requires its own message, both for a domestic and foreign audience. That's what this is,” he added.
As representatives of their countries empowered to speak on their behalf, diplomats have always been known to advance the talking points of their nation. Russian diplomats in particular have long been known for spreading Kremlin misinformation. They have used social media to spread misinformation about the invasion of Crimea in 2014 and about the poisoning of Russian dissidents.
Their status as representatives of a foreign government has often given them the freedom to speak.
Sometimes they even try to rewrite history, as they did in 2019, when Russian diplomatic accounts used the hashtag #TruthaboutWWII to distort the Soviet Union's initial non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany. That misinformation campaign was revealed by researchers at the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Laboratory, who determined that Russian diplomats play a critical role, along with state media and social media bots, in the country's sophisticated disinformation apparatus.
“The Kremlin tends to employ a full-spectrum propaganda model,” Atlantic Council researchers concluded.
Since the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, technology companies and even governments have taken other steps to stop the flow of misinformation from Russia's state-controlled media. The European Union banned media such as RT and Sputnik. Meta banned those media from the platforms it owns, including Facebook and Instagram. Tech companies also cut sales points from advertising revenue and expanded efforts to tag their accounts.
A notable increase in pro-Russian propaganda regarding Ukraine began in the weeks and months before the invasion began in February.
The accounts tweeted about 2000 times a week immediately after the invasion, resulting in more than 1 million likes, retweets and comments, according to Schliebs' research.
That commitment fell after Twitter announced earlier this month that it would no longer promote more than 300 Russian accounts or include them in search results, a technical move known as “degradation”, designed to limit the reach of accounts. However, despite Twitter action, the accounts Schliebs monitored still garner around half a million likes, retweets, and comments per week.
Twitter and Facebook added “Russian government organization” tags to many of these accounts to ensure that users know the source of the information. But Schliebs found that many accounts still don't have labels: of the roughly 300 accounts he reviewed, only about one-third have a label.
A Twitter spokeswoman said the company has already tagged 260,000 tweets from Russian accounts since Feb. 28 and continues to add tags to accounts “on an ongoing basis.”
Schliebs compared tech companies' response to the invasion of Russia with their actions following the 2020 US elections, the January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol, and the COVID-19 pandemic. Then-President Donald Trump was banned from Twitter for inciting violence ahead of the January 6 riots. But Russian diplomats, who have spread far-fetched conspiracy theories and blamed Ukrainians for Russian atrocities, remain.
“I am by no means defending him (Trump), but I don't see the consistency in that policy,” he said.
Meta has implemented similar changes designed to label Russian diplomatic accounts and reduce their reach on their platforms.
Last month, the company also deleted a publication released by Russian diplomats suggesting that its deadly air strike on a children's hospital in Mariupol it was a montage.
Schliebs said there is a danger that platforms like Facebook and Twitter will be too harsh on diplomatic accounts. On the one hand, it could worsen Russia's antagonism towards US-based tech companies. (Facebook, for example, has been labeled an “extremist” organization.) But it could also force Russia and its followers to use less transparent platforms like Telegram, where researchers and regulators can't see what they're saying.
It is a change that Russian diplomats are preparing for, as the Russian embassy in the United Kingdom tweeted last week.
“Meet our DiploFamily at @telegram,” he wrote.
(With information from AP)
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