OPEN LETTER/ Come to the dialogue and listen to me speak, otherwise I will cut off your scholarships, you will rot in prison. Please!

 Kliko këtu për të tjera
Voxpress:

Analysis/ How does Russia spread fake news in the Balkans?

2024-09-23 09:16:23Kosova&Bota SHKRUAR NGA REDAKSIA VOX

Analysis/ How does Russia spread fake news in the Balkans?

It was midnight in Tehran and 10:00 PM in Belgrade on April 13, when a massive disinformation campaign was about to begin.

At the time, Iran had just launched one of its largest ever drone and missile attacks against Israel, further raising tensions in the Middle East.

While the world was closely following the news, an unknown Serbian-language medium began to distribute articles about the Iranian attack at breakneck speed – more than 100 every hour – even though facts and details were few and hard to come by.

Much of this information appears to have been sourced from Russian-language Telegram channels, the Kremlin-funded RT network, or other Russian state-run media outlets.

A months-long investigation by Radio Free Europe's Balkan Service found it was all part of a wider pro-Kremlin disinformation network that uses automation to rapidly create hundreds of articles – often based on content from Russian media, which are prohibited by the European Union.

VIGINUM, a French government mechanism that monitors foreign digital interference, published a report in February about a pro-Russian propaganda network called "Portal Kombat".

It identified around 193 websites that purported to spread information from pro-Russian sources, as well as Russian news outlets and institutions.

For four months, Radio Free Europe tracked websites in multiple languages ​​that targeted audiences in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Albania, North Macedonia and Serbia.

Radio Free Europe's investigation shed light on this global operation, showing how "articles" were automatically generated and released over the airwaves, only to end up on local-language websites masquerading as legitimate news sources.

The Balkans, for a long time, have proven to be an attractive ground for pro-Russian narratives, and especially Serbia, whose president, Aleksandar Vučić, has established friendly relations with the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, while seeking EU membership. A poll across the Balkans Western, conducted by the International Republican Institute (IRI) and published on May 14, showed that the majority of respondents in Albania, Kosovo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro and North Macedonia condemned Russia's aggression in Ukraine, while 49 percent of Serbs saw it as "justifiable".

The Balkan versions of the Portal Kombat websites were remarkably similar, albeit in different languages.

All the fake news websites targeting the region Radio Free Europe monitored had the same structure and even name: Pravda, or the truth.

Pravda's first website in Serbian – Pravda-rs.com – was registered on March 20. A few days later – and within seconds – three more Pravda domains were registered: in Bosnian, Macedonian and Albanian. Automated fake news: How does content spread so quickly?
From March 22 to July 20, a total of 70,719 news stories were published on these four websites. But most of them – more than 67,000 – appeared on the Serbian-language website.

Focusing on the Serbian-language website allowed Radio Free Europe to track how pro-Russian content spread across multiple platforms within minutes.

Most of the content appearing on the four websites appears to have been taken from pro-Kremlin Telegram channels.

The automation process is so efficient that the time between posting to a Telegram channel and appearing on Pravda's web pages ranges from three to 12 minutes.
The disinformation operation also uses Russian platforms, such as VK Video and Yandex, to translate, produce and distribute content.

Russian propaganda at low cost

VIGINUM found in its latest report that the websites in the Portal Kombat network it researched don't attract much readership in general.

For websites targeting the Balkans, Similarweb – a service that tracks visits to registered websites – reported that the most active website, Pravda-rs[.]com, had fewer than 5,000 visits in June. If the campaign was effective, it doesn't really matter – given the negligible cost of generating disinformation, says disinformation expert Peter Benzoni.

"For Russia, this is an information war. Just like with drones… low-cost strikes that fail 99 percent of the time are justified by the 1 percent that succeed. These sites are the drones of the information war," says Benzoni, a researcher at the German Marshall Fund's Alliance for Securing Democracy, based in Washington, for Radio Free Europe.

Misinformation about Ukraine

Russia's war against Ukraine is the most popular topic on the Serbian website, with hundreds of unverified reports from the battlefield often labeling Russian soldiers as "ours" and those fighting on the Ukrainian side as "the enemy."

While international news generally doesn't feature much, events in the Middle East on April 13 were an exception, REL found.

On the night between April 13 and 14, Iran's attacks on Israel "exploded" not only on the Serbian website, but also on those in the Albanian, Macedonian and Bosnian languages.

The number of articles, which on the Serbian website was usually around 500-600 per day, increased to more than 1,000 on April 14. Even higher activity was observed in the other three Balkan countries.

The network received content from popular Russian bloggers and their posts were published synchronously on all four websites.

In addition to numerous video clips of dubious authenticity, many articles were published justifying the Iranian attack, as well as various unsubstantiated claims about what Washington allegedly knew in advance.

RT, which the US State Department describes as a key player in the Kremlin's disinformation and propaganda apparatus, has been blocked in the European Union, Canada and elsewhere since Russia launched a full-scale invasion. of Ukraine in February 2022. In May, the bloc banned four more Russian media.

However, Russian media, using fake news websites like the ones REL investigated, have found a back door to European audiences. According to Benzon, a large part of banned media content is uploaded to these websites./ REL


Në përputhje me standarded JTI

Video

SHIKO KANALIN NE YOUTUBE
×