“Russia invests into dividing society”

Sasha, we have just passed the two-year mark of the war in Ukraine, as well as the daunting presidential elections in Russia. What is your assessment of the current situation? 
 
It’s a historic moment with these big, strategically vital elections coming up this year. We are very concerned because Russia’s long-range investment into international propaganda operations is coming to fruition in many parts of the world. It's not just overt propaganda, it's not just what you see from Russian state media. It's the deceptive invisible hand of that playbook of Russian propaganda that we worry about. Of course, it’s had a huge impact within the country for years, but in terms of global electoral outcomes, we worry about this largely outside of Russia.  
 
Is Putin primarily trying to undermine support for Ukraine, or how can we understand the narrative behind this? 
 
While the focus has been undermining Western military support for Ukraine, there is a much bigger objective here. Information is an absolutely integral part of Putin's foreign policy and military strategy, and always has been. With every aggression, Putin’s ground game has been accompanied by a very comprehensive information operations strategy – from the invasion in Georgia in 2008, to the occupation of Crimea, to the perpetration of war crimes in Syria. The purpose of this is to undo the post-Cold War order and to destabilize liberal democracies. And ultimately, with that, to undermine the values that won out at the end of the Cold War, which were democracy over authoritarianism, freedom of speech over censorship. The war in Ukraine is part of a long line of transgressive behaviors that were never really challenged very seriously by Western countries, so they've gone further and further and further. Putin may have been taken off guard by the fulsome nature of the Western response on Ukraine this time around. 
 
What does Russia’s end game look like – destabilizing the West and returning to Russian hegemony?  
 
It is reclaiming Russia’s sphere of influence after the perceived humiliation in 1989 post-Cold War. It is undermining the institutions that uphold that liberal order. Of course, NATO has been a key target all along, but it's a broader objective: If Putin can weaken the countries that underpin this liberal order, if he can create enough mistrust in democratic institutions, that opens up the opportunity for authoritarian nationalist countries and leaders to have a legitimate place on the world stage. And increasingly they see themselves as an alliance against this liberal democratic norm-setting constituency. If they can create a more ‘friendly’ leadership in these countries, then they're in a much better place to not have the type of interference that they see. 
 
What role do information operations play in creating a more favorable leadership for Russian interests? 
 
Putin knows that investing in manipulating public opinion can change outcomes and policies in their favor. Some of the Kremlin’s leading propagandists have talked about how this has been successful in the US withdrawal from Vietnam, for instance. They know that manipulation of opinion is a way to change the course of policy. For instance, we have significant challenges to NATO at the moment, not least with the idea that Trump may come into power with this forthcoming election in the United States. If Putin can undermine the strength of the commitment to that multilateralist approach, he's in a much better position. That’s why it is so existentially important for him to invest in undermining liberal democratic political candidates in favor of authoritarian nationalist political parties.   

Is this a new phenomenon that has only emerged with social media, or has it already existed in more traditional discourses? 

Russian influence has been there for a long time, and it happens in many different ways, not just online. There are more traditional forms of trying to buy politicians. All of this is part of the playbook. It would be wrong to suggest that social media was the only vector for Russian influence, but it has become an extremely useful tool and one that I think has been perhaps more effective than anybody might have imagined. And this points to some of the real inherent problems of how social media works.  

What are those problems from your point of view? 

For one, big tech companies are often failing to enforce their own rules on disinformation and hate. You see pro-Russian propaganda outlets that were banned by Facebook in 2020 coming back onto these platforms over and over and over again. But worse still, the technological architecture, the products, the systems of these social media platforms inorganically amplify harmful, extreme and misleading content. You get some of the worst content targeted at some of the most vulnerable users. And that's worked extremely effectively for disinformation actors.  

Second, we see a closing down of access for researchers to social media data. If we don't have an ecosystem of scrutiny of organizations, research bodies and regulators finding these types of activities online, exposing them to the public, making sure that users understand the ways in which they're being manipulated, the provenance of the information that they're seeing; then we're really operating in a black box, which is what they take advantage of. I think this comes down in good part to regulation of social media.  

Do you think there is a way of regulating social media without limiting freedom of speech and taking away the positive opportunities of this direct discourse? 

Yes, I do. And I think that this is the point. I fundamentally believe in free speech. What we now have on social media is not free speech, it's curated speech. These products and systems of the algorithms are essentially deciding what you see. That is what needs to be addressed to enable a real free speech environment. People need to see much more of the counterpoint, opposing views, so that certain views don't dominate just because they are being manipulated, and enormous resources are being put into faking the popularity of certain ideas. 

People’s consumption of media says a lot. We did a nationally representative poll in Germany. It showed that people who largely trust information from social media over traditional media are much more likely to believe disinformation related to the war in Ukraine. For instance, they're more likely to believe that Zelensky is a drug addict, that Western and Ukrainian officials are involved in illegal trafficking of Ukrainian children in the West, and that the Wagner insurrection was a Western supported plan. For example, 47% of those who responded to have the most trust in social media over mainstream media, believe that Zelensky is addicted to drugs, compared to 4% of those who said that they were unlikely to trust social media over mainstream media. You have a segregated information ecosystem in which people who primarily trust and imbibe their news from social media are going to believe in a different reality to those that might still be engaging with mainstream media.