How Russia and China fool us

Russia and China have launched some 600 disinformation attacks against Western countries, organizations and personalities in the past year, according to a tally by the EU’s External Action service, an army raised to combat propaganda and information manipulation.

These attacks fill the communication space with fake news with the aim of dividing and weakening Western societies. They use dozens of languages ​​and techniques. They are launched in a coordinated manner through more than 600 channels, many of them controlled by Russian and Chinese state agents. These channels use social networks and dozens of digital media related to the Kremlin and the Chinese Communist Party, such as RT and Sputnik. In Spain, Diario Octubre stands out as, by reproducing RT content, it prevents the EU veto on this television channel from being effective.

Each attack, and there are more than one a day, begins with false information launched simultaneously from various channels against populations located in the main Western information markets. There they rely on various allies, human and artificial bots, analysts and commentators, influencers and generalist headlines, which magnify the impact.

The lie travels four times faster than the truth. This makes it easier for an average of 37 hours to pass from the moment it is launched until the counterattack manages to neutralize it.

“Our counter-narrative – explains one of the experts from the Foreign Action service – has to reach the same people who have received the attack. It is not easy to convince them that they have been deceived because nobody likes to admit it.”

More effective than convincing these people is preventing the attack. For this, it is necessary to build defenses capable of anticipating it. External Action, a service that reports to Josep Borrell, responsible for community diplomacy and vice president of the European Commission, collaborates with NATO and the secret services of the G7 countries. Use the tools that are used to combat cybercrime. With them they identify the attacker and the techniques he has used to spread the false content. When the attack pattern is set, the defense pattern is designed. The combination of all this information allows, in some cases, to detect the offensive in a preventive way.

The priority of these attacks is to distract and confuse Western societies. Also divide and weaken them on sensitive issues such as immigration and the cost of living. The Kremlin, for example, blames energy and food inflation on US and EU sanctions, not the invasion of Ukraine.

Joan Julibert, a professor at the University of Barcelona, ​​an expert in communication and author of El poder de la mentida (Edicions Saldonar), believes that “Russia needs to destabilize Western democracies and electoral periods are a good time because information enters a state of exception to the imposition of propaganda”.

Russian diplomatic representations are part of the vast army of disinformation that the Kremlin has used against Europe, for at least ten years, when the Euromaidan revolution pushed Ukraine out of its sphere of influence. The Russian embassy in Madrid would form part of this ecosystem, which has the collaboration of the Chinese media to amplify it.

Exposed to this constant offensive, Western populations lose the ability to discern fact from fiction. What’s more, as the researcher Johann Hari, author of The value of attention (Peninsula), explains, the lie settles. “Conflict attracts us more than agreement,” he says. In the networks we see more bad things than good, more anger than pleasure ”. Negativity sets in in such an aggressive communicative environment, with an incessant bombardment of information through all kinds of channels, that our attention span deteriorates to the point of not being able to read a book. Hari is not surprised that “this attention crisis coincides with the worst crisis of democracy since the 1930s.”

Without being able to pay attention to the most important issues, the ones that require further reflection, we cannot understand what is happening either and we are more vulnerable to misinformation. Democracy, therefore, deteriorates.

Julibert, even so, is optimistic. He affirms that nothing happens to us that would not have happened in the thirties, when the cinema, for example, was a weapon of fascist and Stalinist propaganda. “Today we have more educated societies than then and then the danger of propaganda was overcome.” “Achieving it now – he adds – requires self-regulation, the production of information with a seal of veracity, the conviction that information is a good of general interest, not just a private good from which the maximum benefit must be obtained”.