Facebook is opening a “War Room” to protect elections from disinformation attempts on the social network, like reported by euvsdisinfo.eu.

Scheduled to become operative on 24 September, the War Room will house about 20 Facebook staffers “focused on rooting out disinformation, monitoring false news, and deleting fake accounts that may be trying to influence voters.”

The team will use specially designed software to spot and track unusual activity flowing across the social network during election periods in different countries.

Data scientists and security experts will then scrutinise the suspicious activity, and posts that are deemed harmful to election processes will be taken down.

Samidh Chakrabarti, the head of the new team, has described the War Room as Facebook’s “biggest companywide reorientation since our shift from desktops to mobile phones.”

Chakrabarti says it will be a “last line of defence” since Facebook has implemented other measures to fight disinformation efforts and malicious use of the platform before they reach the War Room.

As the pivotal November midterm election approaches in the United States, the social media giant has been under growing pressure to crack down on foreign influence campaigns.

Facebook has faced harsh criticism for allowing Russian-linked operatives to spread inflammatory content on the platform ahead of the 2016 U.S. presidential election and for failing to adequately protect its users’ personal data.

After initially providing lower estimates, the company now admits that more than 126 million Americans were exposed to the posts and ads disseminated on Facebook by Russian-linked operatives in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election.

Now, says Chakrabarti, Facebook wants to “make sure that this same kind of playbook that bad actors used in 2016 is not used again.”

In an article published on September 19, however, the New York Times reported that the War Room was in “half-finished state,” showing “how nascent and hurried” many of the efforts to fight disinformation on social media still are.

British news outlets have republished tweets from Russian trolls more than 100 times, according to an investigation by the Guardian and like reported by euvsdisinfo.eu.

In June, the U.S. Congress released details of 1,000 accounts suspended by Twitter as being operated by the Internet Research Agency (IRA), a Kremlin-connected troll factory based in St. Petersburg.

The Guardian’s investigation reveals that these accounts were cited more than 20 times in news stories published by the British press.

The latest cases add up to another 80 citations uncovered by The Guardian in November 2017.

One of the most cited accounts believed to be run by the IRA, @KaniJJackson, posed as a Black Lives Matter activist and tweeted under the names “Kanisha J” and “Remove Trump Now.”

This account was cited nine times in the British media.

Another account, @wokeluisa, received five citations in news stories.

British media outlets that unwittingly republished tweets by accounts run by the IRA include BuzzFeed, the Guardian, the Telegraph, the BBC, the Daily Mail, and the Daily Express.

The Guardian and the BBC have since removed the embedded tweet and notified readers that the account is linked to botnets.

As the Guardian notes, the presence of Russian trolls in media articles examining public reactions to news events “could have altered the perception of how popular the views they supposedly espoused actually were.”

State-controlled media in Russia peddle an aggressive narrative about the West as a place in political and moral decay. Audiences are told that EU countries, such as Finland, are dangerous for Russian travellers and that Russians who live in the West should return to Russia.

However, not only foreign countries are targets of the Russian government-controlled disinformation campaign; Russian society itself is also a frequent recipient of information manipulation.

And countering disinformation is not only something that happens in countries outside Russia; there are also Russians who participate in this work inside their own country, like reported by euvsdisinfo.eu.

Civil society as a primary target

Domestic disinformation often targets Russian civil society actors.

Independent Russian journalists and human rights defenders are systematically misrepresented as agents of foreign governments, as are opposition politicians and environmental activists.

Disinformation is used as a tool to discredit Russian independent election observers and for example to create the false impression that international observers have been satisfied with the way elections are held in Russia.

Conspiracy theories play a special role in the disinformation campaign, and this includes the attacks on Russian civil society. In some of the more entertaining cases, yellow plastic ducks and fidget spinners have been presented as key elements of an alleged Western conspiracy to meddle in Russian internal affairs.

At the much more serious end, opposition leader Boris Nemtsov was the target of a disinformation campaign directed against him personally both before and after his killing near the Kremlin in February 2015.

The aim of the combined local and global approach is to strengthen the Kremlin’s position in a besieged fortress narrative and minimise the relevance of political alternatives through damaging dissenters’ reputation in the public eye and sowing distrust in the very idea that there can be constructive forces outside the government.

Russian journalists fight back

The Russian media landscape is subject to heavy state control; the World Press Freedom index ranks Russia as number 148 out of 180 countries worldwide.

Both state media and most of the large, privately owned media follow weekly editorial instructions from the Kremlin. Whistle-blowers have described this media control system in detail (see examples here, here and here).

The tendency in the dominating Russian media goes towards more and more manipulation; this is for example apparent in the case of the state-owned news agency RIA Novosti.

But in spite of the dominance of the Kremlin’s disinformation-oriented narrative, Russian journalists have often played a key role in identifying the scope of disinformation and trolling.

The important information that has surfaced about the “troll factory” in St. Petersburg came from the independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta, from the large business newspaper RBC’s reportingand from the small St. Petersburg-based online magazine Bumaga, but also thanks to fearless individual Russian journalists who, like Lyumila Savchuk, have described these manipulations working under cover.

There are pockets of oxygen in the Russian media landscape where Russian journalists work not only to uphold journalistic standards, but also to expose and debunk the Kremlin-loyal disinformation in spite of a constant threat of different kinds of crackdowns from the government’s side.

The independent online outlet The Insider is an example of an outlet where journalists have specialised in raising awareness of disinformation with two special sections devoted to “anti-fake” and to “testimonies”, where some of the most revealing whistle-blower stories about the Kremlin’s media control have appeared. It was also in this section that The Insider revealed how Russian media received instructions about how to support the incumbent president during the election campaign.

A recent TV documentary has shown how The Insider and other Russian journalists work to expose disinformation and trolling.

Independent TV Rain has a special magazine programme dedicated to exposing information manipulations. The TV station has been removed from Russian cable packages and forced to broadcast only online as a result of its unwillingness to follow the Kremlin’s line.

Also other independent media keep an eye on disinformation, for example the Russian online media Medusa, which works from exile in Riga. Recently Medusa e.g. described a case when images from Moscow were used on state TV Rossiya 1 to illustrate successful urban development in the Siberian city of Omsk ahead of President Putin’s visit to the city.

Finally, a number of Russian language media with their base outside Russia maintain a focus on disinformation. For example, StopFake raises awareness about this problem in Russian from Kyiv, and RFE/RL’s Russian online TV project Current Time has a show that exposes and debunks disinformation.

Ridicule and accuse, recycle and amplify. This was the strategy behind the pro-Kremlin disinformation campaign’s immediate efforts when the UK released the images of the two suspects of the Salisbury nerve gas attack, like reported by euvsdisinfo.eu.

Polluting the information space – and readers’ thinking – by spreading clusters of contradicting and misleading messages aims at distracting the audiences from the facts. But this week it was also winning time and preparing the ground for Russia’s president Vladimir Putin’s statement that Russia has identified the suspects.

And here is how the pro-Kremlin disinformation campaign looked like in action this week:

First, the pro-Kremlin disinformation campaign started ridiculing the evidence provided by the UK. It claimed that the security camera footage of the two suspects arriving at Gatwick Airport on March 2, 2018, shows them in the same place at the same time. It further accused the UK of fabricating the evidence and ridiculed it stating that the UK is practising “God-level trolling” and that the Russian Military Intelligence agents must have “learned to walk in tandem while appearing separately in two different photos”.

But in fact, after passengers clear passport control and customs at Gatwick, they are obliged to walk separately through a row of identical barriers. Furthermore, the suspects were clearly filmed in different corridors.

Then it was time for detailed claims aimed at creating further confusion, like that Novichok was too toxic to be carried in a perfume bottle (debunked by the scientist who developed the substance) and that Sergei and Yulia Skripal never could have touched the poisoned door handle (debunked here). Disinformation also repeated the unsubstantiated claim that Novichok could have been manufactured in the UK. See the debunk here.

Finally, the pro-Kremlin disinformation avoided any remarks on Russia’s responsibility and spread conspiracies that it was the UK who attempted to poison the Skripals: that it was an anti-Russian provocation  and hysteria  by the UK secret services to distract attention from Brexit, to set the EU against Russia and to weaken Russia’s economy.

If in April Russia’s disinformation stories on the Salisbury attack managed to contaminate the information space and two out of three articles on the Skripal case shared on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or Pinterest, came from Kremlin-funded media outlets, this time the immediate impact of disinformation was much more limited. Even in a brief phone poll on Russian Govorit Moskva Radio Station, over half the callers said they believe Russia was behind the nerve agent poisonings in Britain.

Who is keeping silent?

When a topic is too painful the pro-Kremlin disinformation campaign prefers to ignore it. In Russia, the local election day on September 9 was “one of the calmest in recent years”, we learned from the Russian police.  At the same time, the state-controlled Russian TV channels were carefully silent about the country-wide protests and clashes between the protesters and the police with hundreds detained.

The Russian TV told its audience a different breaking news story: Two million kids starve in Britain! and it is the UK “propaganda” that “hushes up” this problem. In fact Russian TV must have learned about the so called holiday hunger from one of the many reports in the UK media.

We also saw a culmination of a disinformation story that started spreading in 2016: that Finns would have organised mass shootings of Soviet Soldiers in Sandarmokh, Karelia, during WWII. The claim is tailored to distract the attention from the thousands victims of Stalin’s terror who in fact were executed and buried in Sandarmokh. The same technique has been in use before in relation to the Katyn massacre. Freshen your mind from disinformation pollution with this debunk.

French government think tanks have issued 50 recommendations to combat “information manipulations”, like reported by euvsdisinfo.eu.

The recommendations are part of an exhaustive new study published by the Centre for Analysis, Planning and Strategy (CAPS) — attached to the ministry of foreign affairs — and the Institute for Strategic Research of the Military School (IRSEM) — attached to the ministry of the armed forces.

The study focuses chiefly on the Kremlin’s disinformation efforts, although it also details disinformation campaigns conducted by China and the Gulf States.

It warns that information manipulation, defined as “the intentional and massive distribution of false or biased news for hostile political purposes,” aims to “undermine the foundations of our democracy” and thereby constitute a threat to national security.

Its recommendations are addressed to governments, civil society, private actors, and the general public.

Among them, the study calls for the creation of a national structure tasked with detecting and countering information manipulations, and advocates deeper international cooperation between structures that currently fight disinformation.

Increasing media literacy is high on the list of recommendations, which includes publishing lists of social-media accounts identified as belonging to trolls and developing simple tools allowing citizens to detect disinformation. In addition, the study recommends the adoption of an international charter enshrining ethical standards for journalists.

It also urges digital platforms to be more transparent and to develop membership options that would offer users more control over their personal data.

French President Emmanuel Macron is an outspoken critic of pro-Kremlin disinformation. During a press conference with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin last year, he famously accused RT and Sputnik of spreading “lying propaganda.”

A bill cracking down on disinformation was adopted by the French parliament in early July but was later rejected by the Senate.

Denmark. The fairy tale country of Hans Christian Andersen. A prosperous and advanced Nordic welfare state filled with happy, open-minded people, uniting around the concept of hygge, like reported by euvsdisinfo.eu

But behind this façade lurks a world of animal brothels where pets are “put in special machines and even have their limbs broken”, as readers were informed in an article published last year by the Russian state-owned news agency RIA. This kind of abuse is legal in Denmark and even a citizens’ right protected by the Danish constitution, another Russian media outlet claimed.

Danish society also struggles with low hygiene standards and empty shelves in supermarkets. On top of it all, Danish political leaders are blinded by irrational anti-Russian hysteria.

This is the kind of picture of Denmark one can meet in Russia’s ongoing disinformation campaign.

Denmark as target I

If Denmark’s Nordic neighbours Finland and Norway compete for the role as the home of cruelty to children, one narrative that sticks to Denmark is that of cruelty to animals.

The claims about animal brothels should be seen in context: Russian media have peddled stories about how Danes can simply drop off unwanted animals in zoos as fodder for predators, alongside intensive coverage of the case when a giraffe was euthanised in a Danish zoo.

The animal-related narratives targeting Denmark are part of an overarching disinformation narrative about the West as a place of moral decay due to the spread of liberal values.

Besides cruelty to children and animals, this super-narrative about the West also includes anti-LGBTI messaging, for example the claims that “Europe is the kingdom of gays”; that homosexuals are “sick and perverse” and that the adoption of a more pro-Western policy in Russia can lead to forced homosexuality.

The primary target audience of this form of disinformation in Russia is domestic. It seeks to provoke scepticism, if not fear and hatred, towards the West among Russian audiences.

The narrative about cruelty to animals is not the only the topic where Russia’s disinformation is of relevance to Denmark. Disinformation targeting EU and NATO, where Denmark is a member, can influence debates and opinion in and about Denmark. Similarly, disinformation about the global migration challenge and its European aspects can be used to drive in wedges in Danish public discussions.

Denmark as target II

A central point in understanding the strategy and tactics of the pro-Kremlin disinformation campaign is that it uses different messages for different audiences.

While most Danes will know that the stories about government-approved animal brothels in their country are incorrect, disinformation is more likely to spread in Denmark when the topic does not concern the country itself.

Denmark has been successfully targeted with disinformation about Syria, according to the online magazine Zetland. Narratives from Russian state media RT and Sputnik penetrated Danish media with no systematic pro-Kremlin bias.

Pro-Kremlin narratives do not only spread in Denmark as a result of unintended absorption in news outlets. Berlingske, Mandag Morgen and Zetland have described the existence of pro-Russian activism inside Denmark with ties to the Russia-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine and Finnish pro-Kremlin propagandists.

Response from Danish media

Danish media have shown a strong interest in informing their audiences about pro-Kremlin disinformation; especially when Denmark has been blatantly misrepresented.

Leading outlets, among them Politiken and Altinget, have covered the animal brothels case as an example of the disinformation challenge.

When a report broadcast by Russia’s state-controlled NTV ridiculed Denmark for alleged anti-Russian hysteria, Radio24Syv talked to leading politicians and citizens, who had been interviewed by NTV, but who said that their statements had been manipulated by the TV station.

A new Danish TV documentary, which was recently aired on the national TV channel DR, showed how disinformation is produced by “the troll factory” in St. Petersburg, but also how reporters from Russia, Ukraine and Finland challenge this kind of propaganda in their journalistic work.

A fact-checking platform, TjekDet, has been established under the Altinget/Mandag Morgen media house in response to the disinformation problem.

The daily newspaper Berlingske’s opinion editor, Pierre Collignon, recently addressed the topic in a book titled Back to Reality: The Fight Against Fake News, Lies and Manipulations.

Response from Danish academia

Denmark’s academic environments have also begun to focus on disinformation.

The Danish Institute of International Studies (DIIS) has published a report titled “Russian Hybrid Warfare: A Study of Disinformation” and an interactive online tool supported by a social media campaign about disinformation and trolling addressing high school student audiences.

At the University of Copenhagen a group of scholars currently investigates these problems in a project titled Digital Disinformation with interdisciplinary research into “information wars, the quality of public debate and how to respond to digital disinformation in the 21st century”.

Response from the Danish government

In its latest Intelligence Risk Assessment the Danish Defence Intelligence Service mentions “Russian influence campaigns” as “a growing threat, also against Denmark, which may become the target of Russian influence campaigns with little or no warning”, and identifies elections as a vulnerable target.

The government has established an “inter-ministerial task force for countering influence campaigns”, which coordinates efforts across branches of government, including the foreign, defence and justice ministries and the two national intelligence and security services.

When the task force was launched in September 2017, Denmark’s Foreign Minister Anders Samuelsen stressed both the national and the common European and Western aspect of the disinformation challenge: “Our Western democratic processes and media have become more vulnerable to ’fake news’, disinformation campaigns and other dubious methods. We saw this in Russia’s attempts to influence elections in the US and in France. When a foreign power makes strategic use of fake news, lies and disinformation in order to further its interests and undermine our Western interests and democratic processes, one cannot, as a government, be an inactive bystander”.

The Defence Minister, Claus Hjorth Frederiksen, has also been vocal in identifying the challenge coming from disinformation and other forms of influence campaigns. Speaking to the press after his visit to EU’s East StratCom Task Force in Brussels in March 2018, the Defence Minister said: “We see how Russia more and more often spreads fake news. Honestly speaking, it’s quite shocking what we are witnessing. Next year we’ll have parliamentary elections. This is a problem we must try to be able to handle before we find ourselves in the middle of it”.

On 7 September 2018, the Danish government presented a plan with 11 new initiatives to “safeguard Danish democracy and elections“.

The Danish plan includes strengthened media monitoring, intelligence work and emergency preparedness; advice and information for political parties and politicians; dialogue and cooperation with media and social media and a legislative proposal “to ensure that the criminal code is up to date to protect Denmark against the threat from influence campaigns launched by foreign intelligence services”.

At the press conference where the new initiatives were launched, government members underlined the seriousness of the problem and named Russia as the source:

Minister of Justice Søren Pape Poulsen: “With the risk of influence campaigns, we are facing a threat against our liberal democracy which we need to firmly address. We therefore now launch this action plan to ensure that our government authorities, democracy and media are better prepared if foreign countries attempt to influence important decisions of high significance to Denmark.”

Minister of Foreign Affairs Anders Samuelsen: “Russian influence campaigns targeting elections in the United States and France show the importance of staying abreast of this development. That is why we act now. The Danish people must remain completely confident in our democracy. Many of our allies are in the same situation. It is important to me that we also draw on their experiences to ensure that we stand united and as strong as possible against the threat.”

Minister of Defence Claus Hjort Frederiksen: “We have by now seen a number of examples of Kremlin attempts to influence democratic elections in the West with campaigns focusing on creating discord and disagreement in the population. They focus on existing political dilemmas or even seek to amplify points of views on both sides on a conflict – solely with the purpose of creating discord and undermine trust in in our political institutions, authorities and ultimately within the population itself”.

Resilience through awareness is key

Statements from political leaders, such as those quoted above, are complimentary to the work done by the intelligence communities and other government institutions as well as the work done by media, academia and other parts of civil society.

Similar to initiatives in neighbouring Sweden, these Danish efforts all amount to raising awareness of a problem that perhaps cannot be prevented from occurring, but where the successfully built resilience can lower or even neutralise the impact of future disinformation attacks.

As many as 93 percent of messages about vaccines posted on Twitter between 2014 and 2017 came from malicious accounts, including accounts operated by Russian trolls, like reported by euvsdisinfo.eu.

The findings were published by researchers at George Washington University as part of a new study titled “Weaponized Health Communication: Twitter Bots and Russian Trolls Amplify the Vaccine Debate.”

Researchers examined a random sample of almost 1.8 million tweets collected between July 2014 and September 2017 – before and during the U.S. presidential campaign, which different Russian actors are accused of seeking to influence.

The study initially aimed at improving social media communications for U.S. public health workers.

Instead, researchers found that public health issues were being targeted by what the study describes as “attempts to spread misinformation and disinformation by foreign powers.”

They identified several accounts belonging to the Internet research Agency, the infamous Russian troll factory based in St. Petersburg. The agency has been indicted in the United States for interfering in the 2016 U.S. presidential elections.

According to the study, Russian trolls tweeted both pro-and anti-vaccine messages, a strategy often used by trolls to confuse audiences and undermine established facts or institutions.

Mark Dredze, one of the researchers who took part in the study, said Russian trolls played both sides to “erode public trust in vaccination, exposing us all to the risk of infectious diseases.”

Trolls, Dredze said, are using vaccination as “a wedge issue, promoting discord in American society.”

As many as 46 percent of Russians “know nothing” about the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, according to a new survey.

The poll was conducted in March 2018 by the respected Levada Centre, Russia’s largest independent polling agency, like reported by euvsdisinfo.eu.

It was released on 21 August to mark the 50^th anniversary of the crushing of the Prague Spring.

Asked whether the Soviet Union was right to send troops and tanks to halt the pro-democracy campaign of reforms underway in Czechoslovakia in 1968, 36 percent of respondents approved of Moscow’s decision to intervene.

Only 19 percent said the Soviet Union was wrong; 45 percent of respondents were unable to answer.

In the 18-35 age bracket, Levada Centre director Lev Gudkov said only 10 percent of respondents knew about the Prague spring.

Gudkov told The Guardian that the results show the resurgence of “Brezhnev-era propaganda, stereotypes of the Soviet period.”

The Prague Spring and its violent repression by the Soviet Union, he said, “are being forced out of the public memory.”

According to the survey, an estimated 22 percent of Russians have heard of the Prague Spring but are unable to describe the events. Another 21 percent have heard or read about the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia, while only 11 percent say they have good knowledge of the events.

Regarding the causes of the Prague Spring, 21 percent of respondents blamed a “subversive action by Western countries” to split the communist bloc. Another 23 percent cited a coup attempt by anti-Soviet leaders in Czechoslovakia.

Only 18 percent of respondents described it as a “rebellion against a regime installed by the Soviet Union,” down from 31 percent in 2008.

Russian hackers were likely behind a series of crippling cyberattacks against at least nine Swedish media outlets in 2016, according to a newly released U.S. State Department cable, like reported by euvsdisinfo.eu.

The partially classified cable was published by BuzzFeed and obtained through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.

Sent in October 2016 to U.S. ambassadors in Europe, the document outlined suspicions of Russian meddling in the U.S. presidential election. It also warned that Russia was focusing “significant resources” on partner counties including Sweden and Finland.

In addition to the cyberattacks, BuzzFeed quotes the cable as saying that “Russian actors” were suspected of seeking to “infiltrate Sweden with distorted and false information about NATO in the Swedish press, at think tank events, and on social media.”

The cyberattacks took place in March 2016, at a time when Swedish authorities were debating whether to approve a cooperation treaty with NATO. The agreement was eventually approved in May 2016.

Like in other Western countries, pro-Kremlin disinformation has seen an upsurge in Sweden in recent years.

Last year, the Swedish Institute of International Affairs published a detailed study accusing Russia of waging a coordinated disinformation campaign to influence public opinion in the country.

To protect Sweden from pro-Kremlin disinformation, the government has responded by adopting a new security strategy and developing positive narratives to counter falsehoods.

Sweden’s Security Service (Säpo) has briefed all political parties on the issue and the Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency (MSB) conducts awareness-raising activities and trainings on hostile disinformation.

The MSB has also set up a special task force to protect the integrity of the upcoming national election in September.

Since the US election in 2016, Facebook has worked with improving its knowledge of and resilience towards information operations that are using the platform to spread disinformation and sow discord, like reported by euvsdisinfo.eu.

On 31 July Facebook announced that they had removed 32 pages and accounts from their platforms (Facebook and Instagram) for “coordinated and inauthentic behaviour.” Facebook concludes so far that the actors behind the accounts (called ‘bad actors’ by the platform) have been more careful covering their tracks than previous bad actors, in part due to the measures Facebook have taken over the past year to prevent abuse of the platform.

However, using lessons learned from the previous investigation into the operations conducted by the St Petersburg troll factory – the Internet Research Agency (IRA) – Facebook could identify the recently disabled inauthentic accounts. The deleted accounts and pages had created about 30 events since May 2017 of which the largest had approximately 4,700 accounts interested in attending, and 1,400 users saying that they would attend. One of the accounts had created a Facebook event for a protest on August 10 to 12 which enlisted support from real people, indicating an active influence operation.

To help with the analysis, Facebook has shared the information with the Digital Forensic Research Lab (@DFRLab), who will conduct a thorough analysis of the accounts. An initial analysis from the DFRLab shows that although attribution is hard to make at this early stage, behavioural and language patterns were similar to the operations run from the Internet Research Agency from 2014 to 2017; such as non-native language use, plagiarism and divisive content.