New York.- Major US social media companies sometimes describe the task of identifying disinformation and other malicious material pushed by state actors as an endless game of cat and mouse.
This week, several of them made a major move in that game by kicking RT and its related Russian state-owned media network off their platforms, a move that will sharply reduce the network’s viewership in the short term, media analysts said. But the Kremlin, when stymied in the past, has been quick to come up with new ways to get its message out, they said, and RT can turn to other outlets for distribution. Take, for example, when just two years ago Canada and the European Union banned RT from broadcasting altogether. Viewership in several countries for channels like RT Deutsch and RT France immediately plummeted, but within days new pages appeared that mimicked RT exactly under different, unrelated names that were not blocked and appeared in Internet search results, experts said.
‘This does not collapse your audience’
“This doesn’t collapse its audience,” said Bret Schafer, a researcher at the German Marshall Fund, referring to the new ban. Schafer co-authored a report examining RT’s continued dissemination of content following the previous ban, prompted by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. “If you’re a really die-hard RT fan, you’ll find a way to access it,” he said. “What this really hurts is its ability to expand platforms, to reach new audiences, to get in front of people who aren’t actively seeking out RT.” Over the past decade, the Kremlin has sought to strangle all independent domestic media outlets, driving much of it out of the country. But it has also worked to create a state-run international broadcast network to break what President Vladimir Putin called the West’s “monopoly” on global information. RT is the central pillar of that network. The websites of RT and related outlets such as Sputnik have amassed a global Facebook audience of more than 88 million followers, according to data posted on CrowdTangle earlier this year. RT’s basic message that the West remains an imperialist aggressor fit well with widespread distrust of the United States and Europe. On Monday, Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, and Alphabet, which owns YouTube, banned RT and related organizations controlled by Rossiya Segodnya, an umbrella organization that groups Russian state media. The ban cut off multiple arteries of the networks’ direct access to their audience. Experts say there is no doubt that Russian networks will lose a significant portion of their followers; Facebook pages that attracted 88 million people have been deleted, for example. “You can’t recreate one of these massive social media platforms overnight,” said Emerson T. Brooking, a resident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Research Lab. But RT and related networks have plenty of other options to spread their message, not least because they are extremely popular in Latin America, the Middle East and Africa. Using pages that duplicate their content means that they not only appear in search results, but their content can also be posted on places like Reddit or WhatsApp without necessarily setting off alarm bells.
Proliferation of other platforms
Other platforms, such as Telegram and X, have also proliferated, but have not banned them. In Latin America, for example, RT and other related networks have a multi-tentacle distribution system that includes easily accessible television broadcasts as well as multiple social media platforms, according to Douglas Farah, president of IBI Consultants and lead author of a report on RT’s influence in Latin America published by the U.S. Institute of Peace. RT itself has established a huge presence in Mexico, with its Latin American division, Actualidad RT, appearing on billboards around Mexico City earlier this year. The television network teleSur, created by Venezuela, Cuba and other countries, broadcasts RT content directly across the continent, Farah said. Canal Red, an online network founded last year in Spain, also carries RT content and has hired at least one prominent broadcaster who previously worked for the Russian network. It denies ties to Russia and considers itself neutral. Farah said that in recent months, allied Russian networks in Latin America have become much more aggressive in attacking Ukraine and calling it a hotbed of Nazis. In general, emphasizing the traditional reputation of the United States as an overbearing and exploitative power is a pillar of the broadcasters’ message, helping them find sympathetic audiences in the region, as well as in the Middle East. “A big part of Russia’s PR strategy is to leverage criticism of the United States and more broadly of Western policy in different places, and they have an easier time in the world right now in that regard because American policy when it comes to Israel and Gaza is incredibly unpopular around the world,” said H. A. Hellyer, a nonresident scholar in Middle East policy at the Carnegie Endowment.
Secretly run media outlet
According to the US State Department, RT secretly runs an online media outlet, African Stream, across a wide range of platforms. African Stream says it is an independent media outlet focused on African issues, and has issued a statement denying any ties to RT. However, according to an analysis by Stanford University’s Internet Observatory, the network has often spread pro-Russian and anti-Western messages. As far as the US is concerned, RT as a television network has never attracted a wide audience, although experts said some online media outlets, such as Infowars, have shared its articles. Sarah Ann Oates, co-author of the new book Seeing Red: Russian Propaganda and American News, said many of the Russian talking points, such as the claim that American democracy is in crisis, will continue to spread in the US, in large part because former President Donald Trump and his supporters voice them. Still, a series of U.S. criminal cases against RT announced this month could raise questions about the information it spreads that could alienate nonideological viewers, Oates and others said. Social media giants had been under pressure to limit the spread of Russian propaganda since after the 2016 U.S. presidential election, when it became clear that the Kremlin had worked to sharpen internal differences — for example, by using social media to organize rival street demonstrations. Much of that work was carried out by the Internet Research Agency, a shadowy group run by the late catering magnate and mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin. Today, the United States accuses the Kremlin of being deeply involved. Last week, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken said that RT and related media outlets had direct ties to Russian intelligence and have been working to spread disinformation to interfere in foreign elections and help procure weapons for the war in Ukraine. News of the criminal cases against RT broke days earlier when the Justice Department charged two RT employees with funneling at least $9.7 million to American podcasters at Tenet Media, a Tennessee-based video streaming site, to push Russian propaganda. The department also shut down 32 websites it said Russia had created to mimic the news pages of organizations like The Washington Post and Fox News but used to spread Russian disinformation. “It was smoke and mirrors before, and now it’s a smoking gun,” Oates said. Many Russian commentators called the social media companies’ move an attack on free speech — something American officials called laughable, given the absence of such freedoms in Russia. “The idea that Russia or China would allow this kind of manipulation on their social media is out of the question,” said Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va.
‘RT looks a lot like a hydra’
Ultimately, one of the strengths of Russian media abroad has been its ability to constantly appear in new guises, experts said. “They have adapted very well to different cultures,” Oates said. “RT is very much like a hydra: you cut off one head and another one pops up.”
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