This week, pro-Kremlin propagandists wrapped themselves in red tape. Significant paper work is needed to dig into the details: it’s all about official documents and agreements, like reported by euvsdisinfo.eu.

The first target of the disinformation stream was Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko’s proposal for peacekeepers that would cover the whole of eastern Ukraine including the border with Russia. So, we heard from the Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov that deploying a UN peacekeeping mission at the Russian-Ukrainian border in Donbas would contradict the Minsk agreements.

In fact, the Package of Measures for the Implementation of the Minsk Agreements does not mention peacekeeping missions. Instead, it states that full Ukrainian government control has to be restored over the state border.

Another narrative – directly contradicting this one – was that the peacekeepers are not needed, as the border between Ukraine and Russia is “a zone of peace and tranquillity”. Take a look at the figures concerning the civilian death during the war in Ukraine to know that that is disinformation.

The topic also enabled the evocation of some of the most popular false narratives about “Ukraine being run by a terrorist junta that destroys the Russian language” and that the US and the European countries brought both Hitler and Poroshenko to power.

No evidence needed

The second target of the past week was the recent report on Crimea by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. According to the UN, the human rights situation in Crimea has significantly deteriorated under Russian occupation. “Grave human rights violations, such as arbitrary arrests and detentions, enforced disappearances, ill-treatment and torture, and at least one extra-judicial execution were documented”, the report says.

But apparently the report is based on lies, or that was the simple pro-Kremlin answer. The argument went as follows: the UN experts haven’t been to Crimea, so they received all the information from Ukraine and those who “haven’t visited Crimea for a long time and judge the situation based on Ukrainian TV channels.”

In fact, the Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine has been collecting information throughout Ukraine, including in Crimea – where the Russian authorities provided it access only once. Part of the documentation was in the form of direct interviews and fact-finding missions at the Administrative Boundary Line between mainland Ukraine and Crimea.

Also, an attempt was made to mislead the audience about Spanish Mallorca’s appetite for independence. Sputnik claimed that not only Catalonia wants to vote for independence, but that the Balearic Islands calls for independence as well. In reality, the vote of the Mallorca Republic is just a political intention and a manifesto written by one minority nationalist party.

Finally, though, the pro-Kremlin disinformation paper mill returned to one of its most straightforward techniques: in fact there’s no need at all for any documents to support false arguments. So we heard that a Lithuanian NATO instructor had raped two girls in Donbas. The latest manifestation of this well worn theme, which we have tracked for a long time, was quickly debunked by Lithuania.

In addition, Latvia and Estonia heard that they have territorial claims over Russia, just as Poland has over Ukraine and Belarus, and Romania over Transnistria.

The large-scale threat of cyber-terrorism and information wars to national and international security, prevention of terrorism in the info space and voluntary rules of conduct for the electronic media, are among the topics to be discussed by experts, officials and the press at an international conference by the iATR in Sofia on September 27-28, like reported by neweurope.eu.

The conference in Bulgaria, organised by the International Academy of Television and Radio and backed by Russia’s Federal Agency for Press and Communications, will also address the role of media in covering terrorist attacks in Europe, the Middle East and the war in Syria. How to resist the heroization of terror and terrorist in civil societies and electronic media will also be addressed.

Leonid Mlechin, the chairman of IATR board, director of the Department of feature programmes of Public Television of Russia and Vladimir Kozlov, deputy head of the Russian federal agency for press and mass communications, will open the conference. It is expected that Bulgarian Vice prime Minister and Minister of Defence Krasimir Karakachanov will address the conference.

The conference will be attended by Stjepan Mesic, President of Croatia 2000-2010; Dorit Golender, former ambassador of Israel to Russia in 2010 – 2015, Vice President of Genesis foundation; Sotir Tsatsarov, Chief Prosecutor of Bulgaria; Elena Yoncheva, Deputy of the National Assembly of Bulgaria; Toma Tomov, Deputy of Bulgaria; Rumen Petkov, Chairman of the General Assembly, International Institute for Security and Cooperation; Veroljub Arsic, head of the delegation of the Parliament of Serbia, Deputy Chairman, Parliament of Serbia; Galina Sidorova, co-founder of the Association of Investigative Journalists; Yury Kobaladze, deputy dean of the Faculty of international journalism, MGIMO University (Russia).

Representatives of the ministries of foreign affairs of Russia, China, Iran and Serbia, representatives of public and journalistic organisations of Bulgaria, representatives of Russian and international electronic media, diplomatic missions, representatives of security agencies, will also attend the conference.

Moreover, 80 Russian and foreign leading media journalists and national experts from more than 20 countries and representatives of international organisations United Nations, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), The United Nations Organization for Education, Science and Culture (UNESCO) and the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), will also attend the discussions of the iATR conference in Sofia.

To navigate through the rampant rainforest of pro-Kremlin disinformation, a special compass comes in handy. But in the disinformation world, instead of pointing to the Earth’s magnetic north pole, the needle points judgmentally to the West, like reported by euvsdisinfo.eu.

Thus, with the 2018 Winter Olympics in South Korea approaching, sport comes high on the propagandists’ agenda. The new message is that international sports organisations have been captured by the “Anglo-Saxon sports mafia”.

Russia, the logic goes, with its doping scandals serves as a scapegoat for the Western powers who “turn a blind eye to their own doping terminators”. Here, we hear an echo of the more than a year-old disinformation campaign accusing the West of conspiring against Russia and using a doping agency for that.

The story travelled from the English language page of Katehon.com to the Czech disinformation outlet Zvedavec.org. The President of the supervisory board of Katehon is Russian businessman Konstantin Malofeev, who is on both the EU and US sanctions lists for supporting and funding the separatists in Eastern Ukraine.

Malofeev is also the founder of the pro-Kremlin media group Tsargrad that promotes “Orthodox values” and frequently spreads disinformation. Its previous masterpieces include a report of the CIA planning the “physical elimination” of the Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Katehon, for its part, ran a scoop in July that there was a coup in the US and that the US Congress had declared an economic war both on Russia and the EU.

Haven’t heard about it? Neither have we.

 

After past examples of unbalanced coverage and attempts to influence elections (here; here; see also here), many observers were asking: what about the German general election on 24 September?

Already in January, the Disinformation Review reported an uptick in false reporting about Germany in pro-Kremlin media. Around the same time, observers highlighted how bot activity on social media had been redirected from the US to attack chancellor Angela Merkel, like reported by euvsdisinfo.eu.

The themes highlighted in pro-Kremlin media concern some of the favourite topics of pro-Kremlin disinformation:

– The refugee crisis (featured with statements like “The arrival of refugees in Germany was planned by the US with the intention of changing the German mentality and converting Germans into liberals and cosmopolitans”);

– The alleged resurgence of fascism: claims include “The aim of the German contribution to NATO’s presence in the Baltic countries is to be able to attack Leningrad” (sic!) or “the German government is supporting neo-Nazism in Ukraine”;

– The absence of freedom of speech in Germany;

– Mistreatment of children.

Angela Merkel has been a particular target, with fakes such as “Angela Merkel is Adolf Hitler’s daughter” and “Merkel is the Führer of the Fourth Reich”.

Symbiosis of pro-Kremlin narratives, far-right, and bot networks

Researchers have identified what they see as some of the key outlets of pro-Kremlin narratives in Germany. They have also noted the links that exist between supporters of the far-right and pro-Kremlin media. DFRLab says that the use of bots to automatically amplify messages on social media has been confirmed: “The analysis shows that the most active amplifiers of these outlets do, indeed, include apparent bots, but they are not the most important factor. The signals are significantly boosted by pro-Kremlin activists, far-right users, and anti-migrant users, who have been known to work together to harass critics.” With bots coming as cheap as US$ 100, this is hardly a surprise.

At the same time, there has been an unprecedented level of awareness of the threat of pro-Kremlin disinformation in Germany:

• The country’s internal security service, Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz, has not tired of warning of potential interference in the election campaign, in particular following the hacking of the IT system of the German parliament in 2015.
• The German office for IT security has hired a 180-strong team to stave off cyberattacks and hacking attempts.
• Fact-checking initiatives have sprung up (faktenfinder.tagesschau.de; correctiv.org and Facebook has cooperated with investigative researchers Correctiv to fact-check suspicious posts. The Hamilton 68 dash board tracks disinformation in the German Twitter sphere.
• Robust new laws against online hate speech and fake news approved just before the summer break will enter into force on 1 October. If social networks fail to remove content branded as fake, they can face fines of up to EUR 50 million.
• German media have extensively covered the issue, contributing to a general awareness of the problem of fake news and disinformation.

RT (Russia Today) and Sputnik are the two foreign language flagships of Russia’s campaign to influence international public opinion. Both outlets present themselves as media that provide alternative views to the mainstream in international news reporting. However, before accepting this premise, three fundamental differences between these outlets and what is normally perceived as independent journalism should be kept mind, like reported by euvsdisinfo.eu.

1. They are not independent

• Sputnik was created by a Presidential decree with the aim to “report on the state policy of Russia abroad”;
• RT is fully financed by the Russian government and is included in an official list of core organizations of strategic importance for Russia.

2. They do not want to be impartial

• “The period of impartial journalism is over. Objectivity is a myth”, the CEO and editor-in-chief Dmitry Kiselyov told Sputnik’s editorial staff after a reorganisation of the media house to which Sputnik belongs;
• The management of both RT and Sputnik receive weekly instructions from the Kremlin. These instructions include guidelines on political narratives, what should be covered and whom the outlets should not talk about.

3. They produce fake news to promote political objectives

• The independent media watchdog in the UK, Ofcom, has on 15 occasions expressed criticismof RT for, among other problems, “materially misleading” output;
• RT has for example been instrumental in creating the smoke screen of disinformation, with which the Russian authorities seek to cover up the facts about the downing of Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17 over Eastern Ukraine with this article as just one of many examples.

Are RT and Sputnik really media?

French President Emmanuel Macron says no: “Russia Today and Sputnik did not behave as media organisations and journalists, but as agencies of influence and propaganda, lying propaganda – no more, no less,” so he told journalists at his joint press conference with President Putin in Versailles on 29 May 2017.

Russian authorities themselves have called the media they control a “weapon” and have described their media role as “like we’re at war”.

If you want to read more about RT and Sputnik, here are some recommendations from international media and from the analysis produced by East Stratcom over the last two years:

Examples of disinformation spread by RT and Sputnik:

This article includes a list with examples of disinformation produced or promoted by RT: Inside RT’s world of alternative news.

A list of disinformation produced or promoted by Sputnik can be found in this article: Sputnik’s short-lived presence in the Slovak press agency.

Whistle blower testimonials:

Some former RT whistle blowers have provided testimonials that are useful for understanding the work of these otherwise secretive organisations: What is it like to work for the Kremlin’s propaganda media?

A German journalist, Martin Schlak, went undercover in RT’s German language newsroom. Here is what he found out: Undercover among Russia Today: Epilogue of the spy.

How does the Kremlin exercise its media control?

The guidelines issued by the Kremlin are called “temniks” in Russian journalistic professional jargon. This story presents an example of how they are used: Temnik – the Kremlin’s route to media control.

“The yellow telephones” are hotlines between the chief editors in leading Russian media and the Kremlin, ensuring the Kremlin’s control over reporting: How the Kremlin and the Media Ended Up in Bed Together. RT’s chief editor admits she has it on her desk “to discuss secret things” with the Kremlin.

Usually the Kremlin’s instructions to media are held in oral form. But sometimes editors print and distribute them: “We don’t promote the English Queen’s anniversary!!!”.

RT itself acknowledges that it has something to hide: Why else would employees face a $50,000 fine for talking about their work at RT? Welcome to The Machine: Inside the Secretive World of RT.

RT sometimes presents itself not as RT

RT has branched out with a series of projects that avoid being associated with Russia Today. One of them is In The Now: RT goes undercover as In The Now.

Another tactic used by RT is to try to turn tables and claim that it is other media, not RT, that produce disinformation. One example is RT’s so-called “FakeCheck” project : KT – Kremlin Today.

Denmark and Sweden will cooperate in the field of hybrid threats, and there will be a strong focus on the problem with fake news and disinformation. This was the message in an op-ed published on Wednesday by the two countries’ defence ministers in the Swedish daily newspaper Aftonbladet under the headline “Russian fake news: a danger to our countries”, like reported by euvsdisinfo.eu.

“The security situation in our region is deteriorating as a result of Russia’s military build-up”, the ministers said in the op-ed, highlighting the threat from “hybrid warfare, including various forms of cyber attacks, disinformation and fake news, which can create uncertainty in societies. When we cannot clearly distinguish fake news and disinformation from what is true, we become increasingly unsafe. We have both been exposed to this in different forms […] We will increase our cooperation in this area”, defence ministers Claus Hjort Frederiksen (Denmark) and Peter Hulqvist (Sweden) concluded in their joint statement.

Denmark’s defence minister has already spoken openly about the threat posed by pro-Kremlin disinformation to the Danish troops which will be deployed to Estonia as a part of NATO’s Enhanced Forward Presence. In Sweden, which is not a NATO member, authorities have taken measures to raise resilience in Swedish society in the run-up the 2018 elections, due to the attempts seen in other countries to influence the outcome of elections. Both Denmark and Sweden have contributed with seconded experts to EU’s East Stratcom Task Force in Brussels, which since September 2015 has created awareness about the ongoing pro-Kremlin disinformation campaign in Europe.

“What would you do if we asked you to write something that wasn’t true?”

I was sitting in a 10th-floor conference room in the K Street offices of “RIA Global,” otherwise known as the Washington, D.C., bureau of the Russian-owned Sputnik News Service, where I’d come for a job interview. It was in mid-December, just over a month after Donald Trump’s upset election victory, and I’d applied to the company looking to escape from what I like to call “freelance hell,” a period in my life during which I never knew where my next paycheck would come from or whether it would be enough to keep me going, like reported by politico.eu .

The question took me by surprise. Sure, I knew Sputnik was state-owned and had a reputation for sometimes playing fast and loose with facts, but was my interviewer probing my willingness to lie or did he want to know whether I possessed the honest-to-goodness ethics that are prized at most news agencies?

“I’d quit,” I replied.

I then explained that I wouldn’t have a problem with working for a state-sponsored news organization — even a Russian one — so long as I had the editorial independence I’d have at any journalism organization, since there are many state-sponsored news organizations, including the BBC, Voice of America, Agence France-Press and Al-Jazeera, that all do excellent work.

My interlocutor, a tall man with a thick accent named Peter Martinichev, replied that Sputnik was no different from those agencies, and, seemingly satisfied with my answer, later told me I’d been hired to be Sputnik’s first White House correspondent.

But when I walked out of the office five months later — termination letter in hand — I thought back to that moment, and given my answer, wondered why he’d hired me in the first place.

From the first day that I took a seat in Sputnik’s newsroom in January, something seemed a little off. For a place that billed itself as a major international wire service and news agency, there didn’t seem to be much experience at the top.

Most people associate Sputnik with its SputnikNews.com website, which is incendiary and outrageous enough that Foreign Policy bestowed Sputnik with the nickname “The BuzzFeed of Propaganda.” But most of Sputnik’s original reporting is done by the reporters of Sputnik Newswires — a more sedate arm of the company that has its roots in the once well-regarded RIA Novosti news agency. Most wire content is hidden behind a paywall, reserved for an unknown number of subscribers, but when a wire story is important enough, it will make its way to Sputnik’s website.

As one of the reporters for Sputnik’s wire service, I reported to a triumvirate of editors: Martinichev (who’d interviewed and hired me), Anastasia Sheveleva and Zlatko Kovach. Martinichev and Sheveleva were Russian, and neither appeared to be any older than my (then) 34 years. Nor did either of them seem to know much about how journalism works in the U.S., since they found standard practices — like keeping the names of sources I was meeting with secret from them or using company resources to expense meals or drinks to facilitate the meetings with those sources — to be outrageous.

Kovach, who is Macedonian by birth but also a naturalized U.S. citizen, wasn’t even a journalist, having spent his career working for General Dynamics, which was contracted to run the Southeast European Times, a multilingual website that targeted the Balkans by pushing back against propaganda efforts from Russia and other countries. After funding for that program lapsed, Kovach — who says he speaks six languages fluently — switched sides in the propaganda war.

And while other co-workers (including an American or two) would copy edit my stories, the Russians (and Kovach) were the ones who were unquestionably in charge, and they had their own agenda, which didn’t always include the whole truth.

This became evident after I first began to get called on by then-White House press secretary Sean Spicer. One of the first times I asked a question on camerawas on a Friday in early March 2017, when I inquired about why Trump was refusing to use the funding and authority granted him by Congress to send weapons to Ukraine to assist in that country’s fight against Russian aggression.

I didn’t know it then, but I’d broken one of the biggest unwritten rules of how things are done at Sputnik.

In practice, Sputnik’s mission statement — “Telling the Untold” — means that Sputnik’s content should reflect the Russian side of any news story, whether it lines up with reality or not. When it came to the issue of Crimea (which has been occupied by Russian-backed troops since 2014), we were never to write anything on the subject that didn’t include language noting that 90 percent of Crimea residents voted in a referendum to rejoin Russia. Of course, when I’d include details of the tanks and armed men that lined the streets while the people of Crimea voted in that referendum, it would be removed from the story before it went live.

When asking about Ukraine, I’d based the premise of my question on the reality of the situation, and the pushback, as I interpreted it, was swift.

On Monday — our next day back in the office — I received an email from Martinichev ordering me to clear any future questions I intended to ask at the White House with my editors, “so that everyone is on the same page.” That is, he instructed me, if my editors didn’t have a specific question they wanted me to ask. My question “should never be a surprise,” he wrote. “We also need emergency questions in case [somebody] asks the same before us.”

So every morning I’d submit my questions via email, and his reply would almost always dismiss them in favor of his own replacement questions on other topics, with no regard to whether they were based on reality or not.

For example, about two weeks after the April sarin gas attack in Syria’s Idlib province, and a week after Trump bombed a Syrian airfield in response, I emailed Martinichev two planned questions, about Syrian peace talks and government policy toward the St. Petersburg Economic Forum. In response, he referred me to an article on the website of RT, the Russian-owned cable news channel, which, like Sputnik, is controlled by the Russian government. The article talked about an emeritus professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who, based on some photographs he’d seen, had somehow come up with the idea that the attack was carried out by Syrian rebels, not the government of Syrian dictator Bashar Assad. (At that point the U.S. government had concluded not only that the Assad regime was responsible for the attack but also that the Syrian regime and Russia had attempted to cover up that fact.) Martinichev also pointed to a report that the Islamic State terrorist group had exploded an old mustard-gas shell near an Iraqi army base outside of Mosul — seemingly contradicting the U.S. government line that no one but the Syrian regime had the technology to pull off the Sarin gas attack. (He was, of course, ignoring the fact that the mustard-gas shell was probably older than I was and had caused no casualties, whereas the highly effective sarin had been dropped by an airplane.)

Sitting in the televised daily White House press briefing that day, I was ordered to ask Spicer whether the White House or U.S. intelligence community planned to review “alternate versions and new data” about the attack in response to the professor’s findings and the news of the ISIS attack.

History will note that I didn’t raise my hand very high for either question that day. But I did follow up with Sarah Huckabee Sanders in person, sheepishly beginning my query: “My editor will not let this go …”

When I got back to the office, Martinichev expressed disappointment that I hadn’t asked the question on camera (as if I had control over who Sean Spicer called on) and explained that Moscow wanted me to follow up with Spicer on why the ISIS chemical weapons attack hadn’t caused the U.S. government to send cruise missiles into Iraq the way it bombed Syria after Assad gassed his own people.

But the point of the question wasn’t to get an answer; it was to use the platform of the televised briefing to portray the U.S. government as hypocritical for not reacting to the Islamic State’s use of an old mustard gas shell the same way it had reacted to Assad’s use of sarin gas against civilians.

I began to realize that Sputnik’s mission wasn’t really to report the news as much as it was to push a narrative that would either sow doubts about situations that weren’t flattering to Russia or its allies, or hurt the reputation of the United States and its allies. Consider, for example, when Trump’s budget proposed massive cuts to foreign aid sent to Ukraine. While these decreases in funding were a result of across-the-board cuts to the State Department and other agencies, I was told to ask whether such cuts were related to unspecified “corruption” in Ukraine’s government. Instead of humiliating myself by asking such a stupid question on camera, I emailed a White House spokesperson. Considering how ridiculous the query was, I was not the least bit surprised when I got no reply.

Considering the U.S. government conclusion that the Russian government interfered in the 2016 election, using fake news stories and the slanted content at outlets like Sputnik to harm Hillary Clinton’s candidacy and bolster Trump, one might assume that I was ordered to write stories that were unabashedly pro-Trump. I never was. Instead, the stories I was told to cover invariably could be used to push narratives that the U.S. government is hypocritical, corrupt and lacks the moral standing to confront Putin’s dictatorship on human rights or any other similar issue. One prominent pro-Trump journalist who worked at Sputnik during the election told me that she was never ordered to write pro-Trump stories but often did so on her own initiative; another former Sputnik reporter said that he was pressured to exploit his contacts to get ahold of hacked emails belonging to former CIA Director John Brennan — and was fired after he refused to traffic in stolen data.

It’s possible that the White House also believed that Sputnik would be a friendly outlet, as my initial reception by the White House press office was warm and welcoming, at least until I started asking questions — such as why wouldn’t Trump send weapons to Ukraine and why Jared Kushner omitted meetings with Russians from his security clearance forms — that indicated I intended to do my job like any other reporter. After that, my White House access became almost nonexistent. Like many other White House reporters, I’m sure, I struggled to get questions answered and emails returned.

I was regularly criticized on social media of spreading propaganda; some people even accused me of treason. I always responded in defense of myself and my colleagues. The way I saw it, at least at first, was that I was simply doing the job the way I’d do any other, and that I wasn’t spreading disinformation. But eventually, all the little things I’d noticed about how my job at Sputnik wasn’t quite like any other reporting job started to add up, and I became more and more uneasy. I realized that it didn’t matter how hard I worked or how aggressively I pushed back at the strictures my bosses were putting on me — as long as I was working at Sputnik I’d be contributing to the spread of disinformation and propaganda, even if I wasn’t actively writing it myself.

I started looking at job boards and asking more experienced colleagues outside of Sputnik for advice on how best to extricate myself.

If during the months since starting at Sputnik I’d began having concerns that things weren’t the way I’d been promised they would be, my last week at Sputnik removed any doubt.

On May 22, the White House held a briefing with budget director Mick Mulvaney, during which I asked why a proposal to keep families with undocumented immigrant parents from getting a tax credit to help them raise children even if those children were American citizens made any sense. A columnist for The Washington Post noted the exchange, identifying me as Sputnik’s White House reporter, and writing “Trump’s budget is so cruel a Russian propaganda outfit set the White House straight.”

This did not make my bosses happy. A characteristic feature of Sputnik’s news wire content is that the names of reporters rarely accompany the stories they write. While I was able to push back on this practice on a number of occasions, I was never given a concrete reason for why Sputnik wants its reporters to remain anonymous. If I were to hazard a guess, it would be so that no one can be held accountable for errors, lies and half-truths in any given story. When the Post identified me as Sputnik’s White House reporter, my bosses indicated they were not pleased, and pointed out to me that company policy was to not put bylines on stories.

I’d also pushed back against some of the more ridiculous questions they wanted me to ask at the White House, so I am sure they knew I wasn’t exactly comfortable with things, either. The day after one editor in particular dressed me down over the Post column, I brought a suitcase to the office, ostensibly to hold the spare suit I’d been keeping there. But I was really preparing myself to clean out my desk and give my notice.

I never got that chance. On May 26 — a few days after the Post article had pierced my anonymity — I was called into a meeting with Martinichev and another man I’d never met. This much older man, who also spoke with a thick Russian accent, called himself Mikhail Safronov and identified himself as Sputnik’s Washington bureau chief, though I’d never once seen him set foot in the bureau.

“When the president comes back from Europe, we’d like you to start asking about the Seth Rich case,” Martinichev told me.

Seth Rich was a Democratic National Committee employee who had been murdered near his Washington, D.C., home in what the D.C. Metropolitan Police determined to be a botched robbery. But many on the fringes of the American right had been pushing the idea that his murder was retaliation for what they alleged was his role in leaking thousands of DNC emails to WikiLeaks during the 2016 election. Earlier that month, Fox News had run a story claiming that a private investigator had found information linking Rich’s murder to the theft and leaking of those thousands of emails, and the right-wing media universe had exploded with talk of a cover-up perpetrated by the Clintons, the Democratic National Committee and the Democratic communications consultant who was assisting Rich’s family in dealing with the feeding frenzy kicked off by the Fox story.

Was this a test, I wondered? Because there was no way Martinichev or Safronov could think this was a legitimate story, since Fox News had retracted their story several days earlier.

I replied that I wasn’t comfortable asking questions or writing about such a thing when there was absolutely no factual basis for doing so. But that story served a purpose, and Sputnik wouldn’t let it go. If Sputnik’s readers could be made to believe that Rich was the DNC leaker, it would shift blame from the Russian hackers the U.S. intelligence community had said were responsible.

That was the last straw, I told myself, and I began to open my mouth again. But before I could explain that I couldn’t continue to work there under such conditions, Martinichev spoke again.

“In that case, we are terminating your contract, effective immediately,” he said, opening a folder to present me a letter to that effect.

I asked whether I was being fired for refusing to report lies, or for any other reason, but both he and Safronov wouldn’t elaborate on any reasons, explaining that because Washington, D.C., is an at-will employment jurisdiction, they could fire me for any reason, at any time, and didn’t have to tell me why. Months later, after Yahoo News published a story about the circumstances surrounding my departure, a Sputnik spokesperson claimed that I was let go for “performance related issues.” If Martinichev or my other supervisors had problems with my work, I wasn’t aware of any. Nor was I aware of any problems with my work ethic, as I regularly arrived early to prepare for each day before my scheduled start time and on many days stayed past my scheduled end time. At no time was I ever told there was a problem with my performance that threatened my job.

I retrieved my suitcase, packed, and, feeling the weight of so many months of intolerable conditions lift from my shoulders, left Sputnik’s office for the last time, tweeting about my departure as I walked out the door: “I’m no longer working for @SputnikInt — I’d love to tell you why. Please feel free to contact me.”

From my first day at Sputnik, I truly believed that even at a Russian state-owned news service, I could do good work so long as I maintained my own ethical standards. I even believed that Sputnik’s stated mission — to “tell the untold” — is one worth undertaking. Other state-owned news services aim to report stories ignored by other outlets, and to provide a different perspective on the news. Many of them do an excellent job.

But when the “untold” is untold because it’s not true, and the “alternative perspective” is a way to push a hostile government’s agenda by tearing down the reputation of other nations, all the ethics in the world can’t help you. I thought Sputnik wanted me for my skills as a journalist, but what they wanted was to use the veneer of journalism to push their own agenda. I won’t make the mistake of taking someone like Martinichev at his word again.

There has always been fake news, but in the age of the smartphone and platforms like Facebook and Google, it has taken on a new character, like reported by nesta.org.uk.

Democracy depends on open public debate, and while arguments, opinions and emotions form part of that debate, and facts may be disputed or interpreted in different ways for partisan purposes, the trust that underpins democratic decision-making, including the outcomes of elections, requires some consensus on what is generally regarded to be ‘true’.

Over time, established media organisations can be said to have built levels of trust with audiences for the accuracy of the information they provide.

This has historically been true of broadcast news in the UK, the impartiality of which has been both regulated and prized.

Major platforms have facilitated the distribution of fake news; the smartphone has facilitated rapid sharing of fake news by individuals; the algorithms underpinning platforms serve to maximize consumption of fake news items and enable their monetization.

Meanwhile, fake news pays. There are clear economic incentives for producers of fake news, and these relate to the level of engagement that social media users undertake. Fake news websites can raise money from advertising on their sites through, for example, Google Adsense or through Facebook advertising on their pages.

The creation of smart ‘bots’ and ‘troll factories’ has led to industrial-scale production of ‘fake news’ and ‘fake information‘ in some instances.

Fake news arguably becomes more of a problem when the economic viability of mature mainstream news organisations is threatened by the two major platforms – Facebook and Google – which are devouring advertising revenue, especially online; they hold significant – indeed, strategic – market power and regulatory intervention is needed to strengthen the real news market.

So what can we do?

1. UK (and EU) regulatory frameworks require updating

Specifically, OFCOM requires empowerment in this field: after all, the founding legislation for the current UK regulatory regime predates the creation of Facebook and the smartphone.

There needs to be effective recognition that certain Internet Intermediaries or Online Platforms are media organisations — in Ofcom’s words, editorially responsible providers — and should at least carry responsibilities in respect of protection of minors and prevention of hate speech: this has implications for the regulation of fake news.

Different aspects of these platforms may need specific regulation to ensure a balanced playing field in respect of data between the platforms and users; the APIs which allow interconnectivity for other app developers; and the advertising metrics which the platforms claim.

Facebook should be compelled to display the original logos of originating news organisations for items in its news feed, not a generic branding. The powers of the Electoral Commission also need to be revisited, especially in the context of personally targeted social media advertising. It is not clear that the scope and power of Facebook and Google has been considered by regulators on a cross-regulatory basis, and some of the issues raised by data, algorithms and advertising could cross the boundaries of regulatory knowledge and capacity.

2. We need to strengthen trusted media outlets

That means support for public service broadcasters like the BBC, which itself is investing significantly in factchecking fake claims on social media.

Facebook and Google make much of their money from content developed by others: consequently, a levy on the advertising receipts of Facebook and Google should be enforced to support  media outlets hit by the platforms’ dominance of advertising.

3. Self-regulation

There are also measures which platforms themselves could take to address some of these these issues (self-regulation). Employing an Executive Editor and other editors for different segments and more internal human fact-checkers, would help. Using the actual brands of originating media in the Facebook news feed or Google search results would also make the information on whether a source was likely to be truthful more immediately discernible.

Facebook needs to recognise its responsibilities and invest some of its profits in employing a strong editorial team or teams headed by an Executive Editor, supported by fact- checkers. Facebook itself should dedicate itself to being a champion of the truth, more actively support its users in taking action on fake news, and collaborate with genuine media organisations on ensuring recognition for their content.

4. Digital literacy

Programmes of digital literacy could help citizens to gain greater understanding of the problems of fake news.

There is no silver bullet to the problems of fake news, but these actions would be a start. Tackling fake news requires more than voluntary action by the major online platforms, as there is substantial evidence that there are financial disincentives for them to do so.

We have reached a situation where there is unquestionable dominance of online advertising revenue by Facebook and Google in particular: and many of the media organisations on whom we could have relied to challenge fake news robustly have been badly hit by the impact on their own advertising revenues.

Now is the time to commence a full debate on the future of news and the best means to protect it: and regulators themselves should be challenged as to whether they believe a regulatory regime, put in place before Facebook was founded and before the smartphone existed is still relevant in every aspect to the challenges society now face.

One morning in November, Simon Hegelich, a professor of political science at the Technical University of Munich, was surprised to get an urgent invitation from the office of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who wanted to hear more about his research on the manipulation of voter sentiment. Less than two weeks earlier, the U.S. elections had ended in victory for Donald Trump, and the post-mortems were full of buzzwords the Chancellor urgently needed to understand: filter bubbles, bots, fake news, disinformation, much of it related to the claims that Russia had somehow hijacked the elections. “Basically she wanted to know what the hell is going on,” Hegelich recalls, like reported by time.com.

What was past, Merkel thought, may be prologue. With German elections scheduled for Sept. 24, the Chancellor knows that her bid for a fourth term in office may be subject to the same dirty tricks employed in the U.S. presidential race. As Europe’s most powerful leader and its most determined critic of the Kremlin, Merkel has long been a target of Russian influence campaigns. Troves of emails were stolen from her political allies in 2015 by the same Russian hackers who later targeted the U.S. presidential race. During her 12 years in power, Merkel has also watched the Kremlin’s media apparatus air broadsides against her policies in a variety of languages, including German, English, Spanish and French.

Her concern is not just the Russian media outlets that spread disinformation, Hegelich says. It is also the automated algorithms, known as bots, that help false reports go viral much faster than politicians or fact-checkers can debunk them. When American voters were shown a series of such stories from the U.S. elections, about 15% reported seeing them during the race; 8% said they believed them, according to a study published this spring by Stanford University. In June, when researchers in Germany asked a similar set of questions, 59% of Germans reported seeing fake news online; 61% said that it poses a threat to democracy.

So Merkel’s government is preparing for a siege. Her coalition in parliament passed a law at the end of June that will impose fines worth upwards of $50 million on Facebook and other social media companies that do not promptly remove “illegal content,” a term that Merkel’s government has used to target everything from hate speech and pornography to malicious propaganda. “False news is a threat to our culture of debate,” the official behind the law, Justice Minister Heiko Maas, told the German weekly Welt am Sonntag in January. Two months later, when he presented a draft of the Network Enforcement Act to reporters in Berlin, Maas made clear that the government aimed to regulate social media with an unprecedented rigor. “There should be just as little tolerance for criminal rabble rousing on social networks as on the street,” he said.

Political leaders in Washington are well aware of the challenge. In an interview with MSNBC aired on Aug. 6, the White House National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster said President Trump has a “clear-eyed understanding” of the regime in Moscow. Its attempts to undermine the West, he said, include a “sophisticated campaign of subversion and disinformation and propaganda that is going every day in an effort to break apart Europe and that pit political groups against each other … to sow dissension and conspiracy theories.”

Germany’s Network Enforcement Act is among the more extreme reactions to this campaign, though it’s hardly the only one. The European Union has also created an office devoted to debunking fake news and Russian propaganda. The Czech Republic has set up a police agency to scan social media for disinformation and other “hybrid threats.” French President Emmanuel Macron banned two Russian news organizations, RT and Sputnik, from his campaign headquarters in April.

All of these steps point to the fears – some would say the paranoia – that the tools of political sabotage have advanced enough to threaten Western democracies. “Democracy is all about public opinion,” Hegelich recalls telling Merkel when they met. “And if there are new ways to manipulate public opinion, then we will see a new type of democracy.”

In some ways this is already happening. In an era when anonymous hackers can steal the secrets of virtually any politician, and where an Internet connection is all that’s needed to command an audience of millions, the rules fashioned and maintained by European democracies over decades are breaking down.

What takes their place is anybody’s guess. But Russia and Germany have emerged as the most determined players in the scramble to adapt to this terrain and, where possible, to reshape it. The German vote will be an early test: either the campaign will unfold in the same atmosphere of hacks, leaks and disinformation that marred the U.S. elections last fall, or they will progress in typically German fashion, orderly and somewhat boring, under the rules that Merkel’s government is trying to rewrite on the fly.

The Fake News police

From his offices in London, Richard Allan, Facebook’s vice president for public policy in Europe, has watched these German rules take shape with a mix of surprise and resignation. The Network Enforcement Act, which is due to take effect in October, would give social networks a new, weightier role in our political debate. Instead of leaving it to courts or legislators to decide what constitutes “fake news,” defamation or propaganda, the bill tries to make Facebook an “arbiter of truth,” says Allan. “And we’re just not comfortable with that.”

But neither can Facebook claim to be a neutral channel of communication, as indifferent to what its users say as the wires that connect our telephones. That passive approach went out the window during the 2016 elections. Within a week of Trump’s victory, Mark Zuckerberg, the co-founder and chief executive of Facebook, admitted that the public was right to ask about the company’s role in spreading fake news and about the impact it may have had on the elections. “These are very important questions and I care deeply about getting them right,” he wrote in a statement. He also cautioned, however, that “identifying the ‘truth’ is complicated.”

Rather than play the role of truth teller itself, Facebook has effectively outsourced it to independent fact-checkers, who sift through an endless stream of posts, articles, conspiracy theories and rumors and try to set the record straight. In the U.S. Facebook has begun warning users of “disputed content” and providing links to reliable sources like the Associated Press. In Germany, the company’s fact-checking partner is an investigative journalism start-up called Correctiv, whose cluttered newsroom is on the second floor of a vine-covered building in central Berlin, beneath a hostel and above a bar.

Jutta Kramm, the director of its four-person fact-checking team, doesn’t much care whether the fake news comes from Russia or from its ideological fellow travelers on the German right wing. She only wants to keep their propaganda out of her country’s elections. “We just want to be prepared for them,” says Kramm, a former editor at the Berliner Zeitung newspaper. “It’s really important that we make our electoral decisions on the basis of facts and not lies.”

Her job is to divine the difference. Each morning an email from Facebook arrives in her inbox full of dubious material dredged up from across the social network. Much of it comes from automated filters that are designed to pick out hoaxes and clickbait. Regular Facebook users compile the rest by flagging posts they deem wrong or offensive. The result is a digital mess that Correctiv sifts through in search of posts that are purposely misleading and likely to spread.

From their hushed corner of the newsroom, whose walls are a collage of stickers and posters for civil rights campaigns around the world, the fact-checkers focus on the lies that could do the most political damage. “We’re not going to work on a rumor that some guy is just sharing with his cousins,” says Jacques Pezet, one of the Correctiv fact-checkers. In Germany, the most common hoaxes relate to immigration policy. Their aim is to spread xenophobia and to undermine Merkel by playing up the risks of her openness toward migrants, especially her decision in 2015 to welcome hundreds of thousands of refugees from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. Some of these posts involve imaginary or wildly exaggerated tales of migrants assaulting German women or stealing animals for ritual sacrifice. Others suggest that the government wants to seize property from German citizens in order to house more migrants.

When a story like these appears in the Correctiv inbox, its journalists try to track down the original source and produce a report exposing its errors and falsehoods. That part of the job is hardly groundbreaking. There are plenty of fact-checking operations in the U.S. and Europe that have long sought to keep politicians and news sources honest. What’s different about Correctiv is its ability, with help from Facebook, “to get into the filter bubble of the people who are reading fake news,” says Kramm.

As part of their cooperation, Facebook has agreed to reach into the news feeds of its users and put a warning label next to the disputed posts. The idea is not to censor or delete the content but to make readers think twice about its sources while offering them a way to double check its claims. “We’re not the ones doing the fact checking,” says Allan. “The healthy ecosystem is one in which expert fact checkers are doing their job, and they can reach people through Facebook.”

The ‘fighters of the information war’

The approach taken by Correctiv still allows plenty of fake news to spread. Over the last few months, the agency has developed a list of the major forces in the field of propaganda, primarily right-wing agitators, anonymous bloggers and networks of bots that generate or amplify the latest hoax. They often seem to work in concert with each other, swarming around some issue that gets their attention or advances a broader agenda.

Among the most aggressive fixtures on this list is a small but growing Russian operation known as News Front, a multimedia outlet that pumps out content in several languages, including German, Spanish, and English. With about ten staff members and a few dozen contributors around the world, it is among the better-resourced players in the Russian media ecosystem – even though its sources of funding are opaque.

Konstantin Knyrik, the 28-year-old founder and editor of News Front, thinks of himself less as a journalist than an information warrior for the digital age, and he has the career and the connections to prove it. As a teenager in the mid-2000s, he became an active member of the Eurasian Youth Union, a group of hardline Russian nationalists who campaign for Moscow to restore the empire it lost after the fall of the Soviet Union. When he was just 16 years old, Knyrik became its representative in the region of Crimea, a vast peninsula in southern Ukraine. In spring 2014, as Russian troops invaded the region and prepared to annex it, Knyrik led a column of pro-Russian paramilitaries to seize the headquarters of the Crimean Center for Investigative Journalism, the region’s leading independent news source. The troops forcibly expelled the Center’s journalists and confiscated their equipment. Knyrik then created News Front in its place.

Today his outlet films its broadcasts at a studio in Simferopol, the capital of Crimea, with oversight from the region’s Kremlin-backed authorities. Speaking by phone from his offices in June, Knyrik cast himself as a counterweight to the West’s propaganda war against Russia: “We want people to see an alternative point of view.” In the U.S. and Europe, he says, “All they have is an information vacuum, with all this stuff being pounded into their heads, all these absurd lies from the official propaganda channels.”

It is a favorite narrative of Russian state media; the editor in chief of the Kremlin-funded RT network, Margarita Simonyan, told TIME much the same thing in 2015: “No one shows objective reality,” she said. Even the idea of objective reporting is not consistent with this worldview. There is only the spin of competing perspectives, none of which is more valid than the others.

His own newsroom, Knyrik insists, is independent of government influence, and his financing comes from online donations and “sympathetic businessmen.” Yet News Front reporters have somehow been granted extraordinary access to the Russian armed forces. They often embed with Russian troops and paramilitaries fighting in Syria and eastern Ukraine, frequently running footage or live streams from the front lines. In a report released in June, a News Front editor filmed through the crosshairs of a machine gun mounted on a Russian coast guard vessel in the waters off Crimea, whose borders are now patrolled by the FSB, the Kremlin’s main intelligence service.

What makes News Front stand out from its allies is that it rarely even pretends to uphold traditional journalistic standards. Its website refers to the agency’s staff as “voluntary fighters of the information war,” whose mission is to “defend the interests of Russian civilization and to show the true face of the enemies of the Russian world.” Sputnik and RT, Russian outlets with overt funding from the state, try to act like professional media companies, presenting a Russian twist on world events usually without resorting to outright jingoism and fabrication. Their Crimean cousin, by contrast, acts more like a scrappy paramilitary unit, pushing the same goals and ideology more aggressively, free of direct links to the Kremlin. The site’s contributors in Europe often publish their work anonymously, providing a layer of protection from the authorities that Russia’s official outlets do not enjoy. The main stringer for News Front in Germany, for instance, uses online aliases, and Knyrik declines to provide his real name. “I worry about him and our other volunteers. They could be arrested,” he says, as though his reporters in Europe are soldiers behind enemy lines.

In an analysis of Russia’s influence operation in Germany published in June, the Digital Forensics Lab of the Atlantic Council, a non-partisan think tank based in Washington, found News Front to be one of the Kremlin’s three main propaganda outlets in Germany, alongside Sputnik and RT. Taken together, these three operations have a sizeable audience in Germany, with nearly half a million followers on Facebook, enough to rival some of the country’s leading publications. According to the Digital Forensics Lab report, their main asset appears to be a robust network of German “amplifiers,” including both automated bots and real social media users who help their reports go viral by sharing and reposting them thousands of times. “Together, this network represents a potential channel by which disinformation could be inserted into the German information space ahead of the elections,” the report states.

What lies ahead

If Russia and Germany are building up the front-lines in this new information war, the authorities in Europe are still attempting to marshal the troops. The Brussels-based organization known as East StratCom, which the European Union created in 2015 to counter Russian misinformation, seems woefully underequipped to achieve that objective.

With help from a network of NGOs, diplomats, think tanks and media professionals, the three journalists at East StratCom compile a weekly list of fake news stories and try to debunk them on Facebook and Twitter. But the agency does not even have its own budget, surviving on the scraps from the E.U.’s budget for strategic communications. And its reach on social media platforms is tiny; its Facebook page has only 17,000 likes, compared to the million plus on that of the Kremlin-funded agency Sputnik.

“They have thousands of people telling stories which do not reflect reality,” Jean-Claude Juncker, the head of the E.U.’s executive branch, told TIME in February. “We have only a few people, because I don’t want to engage a thousand new civil servants to react to this.”

Besides, what good would such an army do? Chasing hoaxes around the Internet often draws more attention to them, and in an age of partisan divides, many readers would be inclined to believe a deception as long as it supports their political views. “Fake news always has an early start,” says Peter Burger, a professor at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands who studies the way that hoaxes spread. “And even if we fact check them, a lot of people will say we are just liberals in an ivory tower, or part of some conspiracy.”

The better approach, he says, might be introduce a fact-checking curriculum in schools and make students more aware of their sources of information. But that educational approach will take years to have an impact, and in the meantime fake news technology will continue to advance. In a study published in July, academics at the University of Washington created software to “synthesize” a video of Barack Obama delivering lines he had never actually spoken.

“From a technical point of view, you can create videos that look absolutely like they are real,” says Hegelich, who continued advising the German government after that first meeting with Merkel in November. Right now, it would take hours if not days to produce a forensic analysis showing that such a video is fake, and by then its impact would be almost irreversible. At the very least, it would make voters in Germany or elsewhere unsure of what to believe as they head to the polls. “It leaves a trace of doubt over everything,” says Hegelich. And for any effort to undermine a democracy, that would be mission accomplished.

The St Petersburg troll factory is infamous for paying writers to leave online comments that favour the Kremlin’s positions (New York Times). Now yet another whistleblower from the factory has stepped forward in an interview with St. Petersburg-based independent outlet Bumaga (read article in Russian).

The former troll chose to remain anonymous so we have no way of verifying the identity of the former employee of the so-called “Internet Research Agency”, like reported by euvsdisinfo.eu.

However, his comments are in line with the reports of the trolling work by other whistleblowers: Marat Burkhard, interviewed by Radio Free Europe (read interview); Lyudmila Savchuk who went to work in the troll factory as an undercover journalist (read interview) and Olga Maltseva (read article in Russian).

Some highlights of the conversation:

1 – Why did you take this job?
I graduated with a degree in philosophy in 2014 and didn’t know where to turn. I had large debts which needed to be paid off quickly. Then I read an article about “the factory” and realized that it was a place where I could make some quick money. Many of my colleagues found out about jobs there in the same way.
2 – How much did you earn?
Enough. Even Russia’s economic crisis didn’t affect the trolls. If you work there for long enough, then with all the bonuses you get for good work, you can get 80,000 to 90,000 rubles a month [between 1300 and 1450 euros]. I really only stayed in the job for this salary. For example, I bought myself a Mazda Six during my time there.
3 – How do trolls work?
We arrived in the office in the morning, five people sitting together in a room of 20 square meters and every day, we wrote 200 comments and 20 news posts each. There were many different teams in the “factory”, including, at some point, one on the US elections and one on Ukraine.
Trolls write absurd things that no one else would ever write. Every time when I came up with a text, it was a real journey of fantasy. We were allowed to distort the initial information as necessary in order to turn it into what we needed.
4 – Do trolls enjoy their job?
Not even those who work there like this job. Everyone thinks we are delirious. I was ashamed of working there and tried not to tell anyone where I work.
5 – How did the management react to the media coverage about the trolling factory?
After the media coverage, the management started to reduce staff. Now they are recruiting people who really believe what they are writing. You need to prove that you are a patriot in order to write comments for money.
6 – What makes the ideal troll?
A professional troll should have a feeling for those with whom he communicates. Most importantly, he must not lose the creative vein since it’s unbelievably difficult to come up with something new day by day.
7 – Does trolling have an effect?
Personally, I believe that trolling does not bring at all any result in the real world. Even less so the one that is intended by the sponsors. No one believes in our posts: neither we nor the others. Sometimes trolls argue with other trolls. It seems to me that the overwhelming majority simply does not pay any attention to such comments.