Year One - Disinformation Review
This week, we attach the master-table containing all the disinformation stories reported to us over the last ten months – 174 pages worth!
The Disinformation Review project started last October. Since then, our contributors have reported 1,649 disinformation stories that they noticed in their local pro-Kremlin outlets. This sample represents 18 different languages - which means even more countries were targeted by the campaign.
Top of the list comes disinformation in Russian, with 936 examples. This targets also the audience in the Baltic states (during the ten months, we have not been told of any stories in Estonian, Latvian, or Lithuanian), in the Caucasus, in Belarus and in Ukraine (there are only five stories in the Ukrainian language in the master-table). And remembering the “Lisa case” in Germany (http://ceip.org/1UuM3oy), we cannot omit that the pro-Kremlin disinformation campaign in the Russian language targets also Russian-speaking minorities in many countries further from Russia's borders.
|
|
The other “lingua franca” highly represented in the master-table is English, with 173 stories. Among the English-language outlets, you will find RT (aka Russia Today) and Sputnik, but also more than a dozen less-known sources: minor websites, blogs, etc. Despite their limited audience, their influence cannot be underestimated - we see these sites serving as sources for other disinformation-oriented outlets in other languages. As our partners from European Values think-tank in Prague regularly showed us, Czech pro-Kremlin outlets often use the English conspiracy sites like whatdoesitmean.com for their own reporting.
Russian, Czech and English are the three most represented languages in all the Disinformation Reviews. Among other languages, you will also find multiple stories in Bulgarian, Georgian, German, Hungarian, or Slovak. The pro-Kremlin disinformation campaign in other languages was covered in a less representative manner, but you will still find some stories in Dutch, French, Italian, Norwegian, Polish, Romanian, Serbian, Spanish, Swedish or Ukrainian.
|
|
Territory-wise, the most exotic pro-Kremlin disinformation comes probably from Venezuela. As StopFake pointed out in February (http://bit.ly/1LtH8Ek), Venezuela’s TV station aired a story claiming that UNICEF accuses Ukraine of aggression against Donetsk and Luhansk. Of course, the story was a fake.
This database of disinformation has been possible only thanks to dozens of contributors monitoring the pro-Kremlin campaign in their countries and their languages and providing us with their reports. We thank you very much for all your efforts and we are looking forward to further collaboration.
READ AND SEARCH THE DISINFORMATION REVIEW MASTER-TABLE
|
|
|
With this edition, the East StratCom Task Force wishes you an enjoyable summer! We will start collecting your stories again in the week beginning 22 August. The Disinformation Digest will be back on Friday 26 August, the Disinformation Review on Tuesday 30 August.
|
|
|
|
|
