A day after a missile hit a shopping mall in central Ukraine in June, killing at least 18 people, the Spanish-speaking arm of Russia’s global TV network, RT en Español, has fired. Facebook to challenge the truth of the attack.
On its account, available across much of Central and South America and even in the United States, the network posted a video statement from a military spokesman claimed that Russia’s air force had bombed an arsenal supplied by Ukraine’s Western allies. A video released by the Ukrainian government and survivors of the attack interview on the ground of The New York Times, shows otherwise.
As Russia’s war in Ukraine began, Facebook, Twitter, and other social media giants blocked or restricted the Kremlin’s propaganda machine’s ability to access the accounts in the West. However, this effort has been limited by geography and language, creating a series of restrictions rather than a full-blown ban.
In Spanish in Latin America or in Arabic across the Middle East, a stream of Russian disinformation and propaganda continues to try to justify President Vladimir V. Putin, wreaking havoc in Ukraine and blaming Russia’s atrocities that have killed thousands of civilians.
As a result, the geographical and cultural asymmetry in information warfare in Ukraine has dampened US and European-led efforts to put widespread international pressure on Putin to stop the war. .
Paul M. Barrett, deputy director of the Stern Center said: “There is no secret worldwide about Russia’s infamous combat capability not only on the battlefield, the actual battlefield, but also in combat. with distorted information and information”. Business and Human Rights at New York University, who recently wrote a study on dissemination of harmful Russian propaganda on Youtube.
The failure of Facebook, Twitter and even TikTok, the Chinese-owned app, to more aggressively check Russian posts in non-English languages has begun to attract much criticism as the war lengthen.
Two weeks ago, a bipartisan group of US senators added to the criticism, accusing platforms of allowing Russia to “amplify and export its lies abroad” in Spanish. Dental. While the focus of those efforts was in Central and South America, misinformation also reached Hispanic audiences in the United States, they said.
Lawmakers called on companies to do more to block Russia’s Spanish stores, including RT en Español and Sputnik Mundo, which have spread accusations that the United States, among others , is producing biological weapons in Ukraine. Information experts say investigations reveal flaws in the international operations of the platforms, which often receive fewer resources than in the United States.
The impact of Russia’s wartime propaganda on public opinion abroad is difficult to measure precisely. Polls have show that Putin remains a disparaged world leader, suggesting that the Kremlin’s efforts have yet to translate into a substantial improvement in global support for the invasion.
At the same time, Russian disinformation is spreading freely in many parts of the world, where the war in Ukraine is viewed in less obvious terms, good and evil, as in the United States and Europe.
Senators Robert Menendez of New Jersey and Tim Kaine of Virginia: “In these unusual circumstances, we must remain vigilant about the ability of Russian disinformation agents to spread disinformation. about Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, whether in Spanish or any other language.” , both a Democrat and Bill Cassidy, a Republican from Louisiana, Written in a letter to Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg.
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Facebook, in a written response to questions, said it had restricted access to RT and Sputnik accounts in the European Union, UK and Ukraine after receiving requests from government officials. (Court of Justice of the European Union dismiss the appeal by RT France to overturn the ban on network activity within the block.)
Facebook said it too ads are blocked from all Russian state media and “downgraded” posts from accounts linked to it. Accounts in other languages face similar rules aimed at preventing misinformation or harmful content, the company said.
“We have multiple teams working across the company to limit the spread of misinformation in dozens of languages,” the company statement said.
Days after the war began, Twitter also shut down Russian accounts in the European Union and added labels to accounts that retweeted links to them. In April, the company announced that it would not amplify such accounts, causing a drop in engagements, according to a written statement.
Recently, TikTok said it had removed or labeled tens of thousands of posts as part of “ongoing actions we take to protect against fake engagement”. In May, it also added labels to Ukrainian government accounts.
The moves against the Kremlin have not prevented the use of Western social networks to penetrate foreign audiences. Their propaganda network, which for years has managed to build an audience in multiple languages, became overwhelmed when Russian troops massed around Ukraine last winter – and in the weeks following the invasion. summary on February 24.
RT en Español’s Facebook page has 18 million followers, more than the Spanish English page or CNN. The posts drive traffic to Actualidad RT, the network’s main news channel.
According to Avaaz’s analysis, a Russian grassroots good governance organization saw a spike in participation in the weeks following the start of the war.
RT Online, the Arabic-language site of the TV network on Facebook, also saw an 187% spike in skirmishes in the first month of the war, Avaaz found. Sputnik’s accounts in Brazil and Japan also spiked, albeit smaller ones. A similar analysis by Zignal Labs, a social media activity tracker, showed an increase in the association of RT and Sputnik news posts in Spanish.
On these sites, the Russian war is wrong description as a righteous target against the fascist regime in Ukraine, which sought nuclear weapons and agreed with the United States to develop biological weapons on Russia’s doorstep. In this distorted view of the war, atrocities are well documented in cities like Bucha is an exaggeration or even a hoax, staged to demonize Russia.
Nora Benavidez, senior advisor at Free pressAn advocacy group for digital rights and accountability, says Facebook has long taken a British-centered approach to censorship policies, ignoring harmful misinformation about many images in other languages and in other parts of the world.
While many languages are spoken on Facebook, more than 80% of Facebook’s enforcement resources are in English, she said.
“In short, I think it’s a form of bigotry that the rest of the world shouldn’t be protected from the worst, most dangerous content the way English speaking users should be, ” she said.
Bret Schafer, a senior fellow at the Alliance for Securing Democracy, said Russian state media branches in Spanish and Arabic are most influential on the country’s Facebook and Twitter. RT en Español, Sputnik Mundo and RT Play en Español were among the 10 most viewed pages on Facebook in Latin America, with tens of millions of viewers.
Even after the restrictions, Russia still finds a way around it. RT en Español created new accounts on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube under the name Ahi Les Va, according to research by Mr. Schafer’s teams. Those accounts continue to post Russian misinformation to growing groups of new followers.
“If you talk to people in Latin America, RT is just seen as another medium to be read and trusted,” he said. “It has a huge impact.”
The failure to pursue Russian posts in Spanish, Arabic and other languages has opened the door for the Kremlin to capture audiences in many parts of the world, where the United States, the main antagonist its, viewed with larger ambient air.
A report by the Bertelsmann Foundation in June note that 42% of traffic on RT’s Spanish network is in three countries that have either supported Russia or expressed neutrality in the war with Ukraine: Argentina, Venezuela, and Mexico.
Philip Kitzberger, a political scientist at Torcuato di Tella University in Argentina’s capital Buenos Aires, said: “Part of RT’s success may not have been so much thanks to promoting the Russian version of events. events, but rather to question the story of the West. “And that finds some resonance in certain groups, which are aligned in Latin America with a very critical left-wing of America”
Ana Lankes contribution report.
