NewsGuard, a New York-based company that studies and monitors disinformation on the internet, has identified 250 sites that are actively spreading Russian propaganda about the war in Ukraine. According to researchers, dozens of new ones have been added in recent months.
The Associated Press writes about it.
Some such sites pretend to be independent think tanks or news outlets. About half of them speak English, others speak French, German or Italian. Many of these portals were created long before the war and were not clearly connected to the Russian government until they suddenly started repeating Kremlin narratives.
"They may be establishing sleeper sites," said NewsGuard co-CEO Gordon Krowitz.
"Sleeper sites" are disinformation websites that slowly build an audience with innocuous, neutral posts and then switch to propaganda and disinformation at the appropriate time.
YouTube, TikTok and Meta, which are owned by Facebook and Instagram, have pledged to remove Russian propaganda outlets RT and Sputnik from their platforms. But the researchers found that Russia was simply posting its disinformation from other accounts.
The Disinformation Situation Center, a European coalition of disinformation researchers, discovered that some RT video content appeared on social networks under a new brand and logo. The RT logo is simply removed from the video and the content is posted on a new YouTube channel that is not covered by the EU ban.
Felix Kartte, a senior adviser at Reset, a British non-profit organization that funds the work of the Center for Combating Disinformation, believes that more aggressive moderation of content on social networks could make it more difficult for Russia to circumvent the bans.
"Rather than putting effective content moderation systems in place, they are playing whack-a-mole with the Kremlin’s disinformation apparatus," he said.
European Commission Vice President Vera Jourova last month called disinformation "a growing problem in the EU."
"And we really have to take stronger measures," she said.
- The EU imposed sanctions against Russiaʼs Sputnik and RT/Russia Today (RT English, RT UK, RT Germany, RT France and RT Spanish) in early March. Soon, Poland, Moldova, Greece, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia turned them off completely.
- The sixth package of anti-Russian sanctions expanded the Kremlinʼs list of banned propaganda media. Russian Rossiya24, TV center International, RTR Planeta were disconnected from cable, satellite and Internet broadcasting in the EU.