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Talking to Trolls—How Users Respond to a Coordinated Information Operation and Why They’re so Supportive

Darren L. Linvill, Patrick L. Warren, Amanda E. Moore

Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, volume 27, issue 1, zmab022 (2022), 19 pp.

"Through this research we gained insight into tactics employed by state-backed social media disinformation. With that goal, we explored user interactions with inauthentic Twitter accounts. We used multiple procedures to measure the ways in which users talked with and about the accounts employed by t ... more

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The Vladimirror Network: Pro-Putin Power-Users on Facebook

Moustafa Ayad

London: Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) (2022), 11 pp.

"Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) researchers identified key pro-Putin accounts with two or more duplicates engaged in administering, moderating, and contributing to large public Facebook groups with hundreds of thousands of members fawning over the Russian President Vladimir Putin, the Russia ... more

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Putin's Disinformation & Misinformation Campaign

Jakub Ferencík

EUROPEUM (2022), 12 pp.

"Disinformation and misinformation have been amplified in the digital age. In order to combat their increasing presence in our everyday lives, we have to first educate ourselves on what disinformation is. In this post, Jakub Ferencik looks at this question in some detail, primarily by analyzing Vlad ... more

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Shadow Forces: Hidden Malign Domestic and Foreign "Grey Zone" Media Influence in Central-Eastern Europe

Lóránt Gyõri

Political Capital Institute (2022), 39 pp.

"This paper is the summary of the results of a research project lasting over six months, covering domestic and foreign hidden malign influence activities pursued through the so-called "grey zone" media in three countries - the Czech Republic, Serbia and Hungary -, during a period of heightened inter ... more

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Russian Media in the Balkans. Case Study: How Moscow‘s Propaganda Influences Serbia

Thomas Brey

Potsdam: Friedrich Naumann Foundation (2022), 27 pp.

"The influence of Russian state-run foreign media (RT, Sputnik et al.) on public opinion in Western democracies is now common knowledge - regardless of its political qualification. Well-documented analyses are available, e.g., from the USA, France and Germany. The German government has also repeated ... more

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Tracking the Propaganda and Disinformation About Foreign Influence in Serbia. Case Study: Serbian Media on the Ukraine War

Beograd: CRTA (2022), 15 pp.

"The topic of the war in Ukraine dominated the media during the first three months of the war and completely marginalized all other topics. The most foreign actor reported on most in the media was Russia, while the countries of the West, the US, the EU, and NATO were far less noticeable. Although th ... more

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The Kremlin's Troll Network Never Sleeps: Inauthentic Pro-Kremlin Online Behavior on Facebook in Germany, Italy, Romania and Hungary

Lóránt Gyori, Csaba Molnár, Péter Krekó, Patrik Szicherle et al.

Budapest: Political Capital Institute (2022), 36 pp.

"The research – based on programmatic text-mining supported analyses of several millions of war-related comments scraped by Sentione and further examined with CrowdTangle - found traces of inauthentic, repetitive pro-Kremlin activity on Facebook in all countries under review, which can be consider ... ed attempts to influence public opinion in the affected states and, in some cases, beyond them. Our main conclusions are: Crises help the Kremlin. Even if public opinion in the EU is currently unfavorable to the Kremlin, the onset of high, permanent inflation, soaring energy prices and the looming danger of an EU-wide recession could create a more favorable environment for the Kremlin’s propaganda efforts. Most (covertly) Kremlin-friendly forces will adopt a rhetoric blasting sanctions for harming Europe more than Russia. Importing disinformation narratives. Three out of the four narratives found in Hungary were imported into the country from abroad. One doubting Ukraine’s existence as a country started from an organization connected to Ukrainian pro-Putin oligarch Viktor Medvechuk, taken over by the so-called “news agency” of separatists. Another narrative detailing a new, dictatorial world order based on, among others, COVID-19 restrictions, and led by NATO was aimed at developing countries where Russia can hope to hold more sway. The third essentially took over a trend in the Russian media space: users tried to discredit anti-war voices by asking them “where they were in the past eight years” when Ukraine committed atrocities against minorities. Strategies in Germany: Divide and Rule. The six relevant narratives we found in Germany employed three different strategies. The first was anti-Westernism, where the US and NATO are to blame for Russia’s attack. The second aimed clearly at generating debates by spreading a Kremlin-critical narrative. Some profiles involved in this were caught disseminating both pro-Kremlin and anti-Kremlin narratives, which indicates it is not intended to counter the Kremlin’s information operation but to be a part of it. The third strategy was about exploiting contemporary events - such as heightened discussions on sanctions and rising inflation." (Executive summary) more

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The Long Tail of Influence Operations: A Case Study on News Front

Elise Thomas

London: Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) (2021), 17 pp.

"This case study examines two websites and two blogging accounts which appear to be linked to News Front, a Crimean-based news organisation previously accused of being a source of pro-Kremlin disinformation and influence operations. The sites and accounts shared stories and images in many cases iden ... more

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Post-Mortem: Russian and Chinese Covid-19 Information Operations

Edward Lucas, Ben Dubow, James Lamond, Jake Morris, Corina Rebegea, Vera Zakem

Washington, DC: Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA) (2021), 72 pp.

"Russia recycled previous narratives and exacerbated tensions in Western society while attempting some propaganda about Russian scientific prowess. Russia’s approach evolved little; it recycled previous narratives, spreading a broad range of COVID-19 disinformation. Evidence supports the theory th ... more

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Information Bedlam: Russian and Chinese Information Operations During Covid-19

Edward Lucas, Jake Morris, Corina Rebegea

Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA) (2021), 20 pp.

"Based on a literature review through January 2021, evaluated at an expert seminar, this policy brief provides a baseline analysis of changing tactics, narratives, and distribution strategies in Russian and Chinese information operations (IOs) relating to the covid-19 pandemic. Key findings: China c ... more

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#StopXinjiang Rumors: The CCP’s Decentralised Disinformation Campaign

Fergus Ryan, Ariel Bogle, Albert Zhang, Jacob Wallis

Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), International Cyber Policy Centre (2021), 50 pp.

"This report analyses two Chinese state-linked networks seeking to influence discourse about Xinjiang across platforms including Twitter and YouTube. This activity targeted the Chinese-speaking diaspora as well as international audiences, sharing content in a variety of languages. Both networks atte ... more

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Combating Foreign Disinformation on Social Media: Study Overview and Conclusions

Raphael Cohen, Nathan Beauchamp-Mustafaga, Joe Cheravitch et al.

Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND Corporation (2021), xvi, 119 pp.

"Drawing on a host of different primary and secondary sources and more than 150 original interviews from across the U.S. government, the joint force, industry, civil society, and subject-matter experts from nine countries around the world, researchers examined how China, Russia, and North Korea have ... more

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Tackling Kremlin's Media Capture in Southeast Europe: Shared Patterns, Specific Vulnerabilities and Responses to Russian Disinformation
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Rumena Filipova, Alexander Gerganov, Martin Vladimirov

Sofia: Center for the Study of Democracy (CSD) (2021), 124 pp.

"The current report illuminates the scope, means, and reach of Russia’s sharp power influence through the phenomenon of media capture. It traces the regime’s malign impact on good governance and democratic development in eight Southeast European countries (EU members: Bulgaria and Croatia, as we ... more

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The COVID-19 Story: Unmasking China's Global Strategy

Louisa Lim, Julia Bergin, Johan Lidberg

International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) (2021), 7 pp.

"China has used Covid to benefit its global image through the activation of existing media dissemination channels overseas and the use of new tactics such as disinformation and misinformation. China’s largescale medical diplomacy campaign has also provided propaganda wins in many developing countr ... ies, burnishing Beijing’s image as a reliable partner. Anecdotal reports indicate that Beijing has stepped up its content offerings, in particular by tailoring content including disinformation for specific countries and translating state-run messages into local languages. In some countries, China was also seen as the purveyor of the most accurate information about the new coronavirus, showing its growing influence over global narratives. For Beijing, Covid diplomacy clearly offers another means through which it can exert its influence. This research shows that countries that are recipients of China’s Covid vaccine clearly have more positive coverage of China, but it cannot draw conclusions as to the factors behind that. This strategy has largely been acceptable to global journalists, who — judging by the results of our focus groups in three separate countries — do not perceive China’s advances as a threat at a national level. Such views are in part due to the incremental nature of the changes, the clumsiness of China’s propaganda effort and the irrelevance of much of the material provided to local audiences. However, the survey does reveal that when viewed globally, there does appear to be more concern about China’s influence, in particular in the Asia Pacific region. The survey indicates that the overall impact of Beijing’s outreach is a redrawing of the global media landscape — one story at a time, one country at a time — shifting the China coverage in a more positive direction. China is using a multi-pronged approach to redraw the information landscape to benefit its own global image. In 2020, Beijing effectively shut down journalistic access to China, through visa denials and freezes, partly driven by international border closures. This had the effect of creating a vacuum in China coverage, creating a demand for stories from China, which could then be filled with statesponsored content already available through content-sharing agreements." (Conclusions, page 7) more

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Why Conspirational Propaganda Works and What We Can Do About It: Audience Vulnerability and Resistance to Anti-Western, Pro-Kremlin Disinformation in Ukraine

Peter Pomerantsev et al.

London School of Economics and Political Science; Internews Ukraine; Cardiff University, Crime and Security Research Institute (2021), 45 pp.

"The most effective propaganda resonates with audiences’ underlying worldviews and personal experiences. In order to fight it, one has to understand the mindsets that it preys on. This paper sets out to do exactly that. We first track a set of Kremlin-aligned propaganda narratives across Ukrainian ... more

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Borrowing Mouths to Speak on Xinjiang

Fergus Ryan, Ariel Bogle, Nathan Ruser et al.

Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), International Cyber Policy Centre (2021), 40 pp.

"This report explores how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) uses foreign social media influencers to shape and push messages domestically and internationally about Xinjiang that are aligned with its own preferred narratives. Our research has found key instances in which Chinese state entities have s ... more

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Finding China’s Edge: Engineering Influence Operations within the Limits of Social Media Platform Rules

Jakob Bund

Zürich: Center for Security Studies (CSS) (2021), 48 pp.

"To arrive at a careful evaluation of impact, this report concentrates on how the tactics of China’s influence operations have evolved during the first year of the pandemic. Looking at China’s key priority of information control, the first section conceptualizes the adaptation of influence opera ... more

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The Gender Dimensions of Foreign Influence Operations

Samantha Bradshaw, Amélie Henle

International Journal of Communication, volume 15 (2021), pp. 4596-4618

"Drawing on a qualitative analysis of 7,506 tweets by state-sponsored accounts from Russia’s GRU and the Internet Research Agency (IRA), Iran, and Venezuela, this article examines the gender dimensions of foreign influence operations. By examining the political communication of feminism and women� ... more

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More-Troll Kombat: French and Russian Influence Operations Go Head to Head Targeting Audiences in Africa

Graphika (2020), 83 pp.

"On December 15, Facebook announced that it had taken down three separate networks that it had discovered for “coordinated inauthentic behavior” that targeted communities across Africa. One, centered on the Central African Republic (CAR) and Mali, was linked to individuals associated with the Fr ... more

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Combatting and Defeating Chinese Propaganda and Disinformation: A Case Study of Taiwan’s 2020 Elections

Aaron Huang

Cambridge, MA: Harvard Kennedy School, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs (2020), 63 pp.

"In its 2020 presidential and legislative elections, Taiwan combatted and defeated Chinese propaganda and disinformation through a whole-of-society approach, one in which the government became better at debunking fake news and raising awareness of these attacks; civil society became more alert and c ... more

Tackling Kremlin's Media Capture in Southeast Europe: Shared Patterns, Specific Vulnerabilities and Responses to Russian Disinformation Top Insights

Tackling Kremlin's Media Capture in Southeast Europe: Shared Patterns, Specific Vulnerabilities and Responses to Russian Disinformation
Top Insights