The 4Ds of Russian disinformation campaigns
This is not going to be one of my programming or investing-related posts. Instead, I have to write this down for myself and hopefully others to discover. Today’s post is about key aspects of how Russia is spreading disinformation online.
I purchased a copy of “We are Bellingcat” — an excellent read so far, a book about the origins and operational details of an organization that does volunteer-driven investigations into various criminal activities based on open/publically available information.
Chapter 2 has excellent passages on how Russian disinformation works (page 75 in particular). It’s painful to read because of how well it works in confusing people, but nevertheless, need to dig in and bring this to the surface.
Let’s start with the main idea.
“The Kremlin employs what disinformation expert Ben Nimmo has dubbed the 4D Approach: Dismiss, Distort, Distract, Dismay”
Dismiss. If there is anything negative portrayed about the Russian government and its actions, the reaction from them is always the same, one of extreme denial. Here is how the book author explains it:
First, Russian officials aggressively dismiss uncomfortable facts, perhaps insulting the sources themselves, deeming them “Russophobes” or shills for a rival nation.
When something negative gets reported about Russia I always check how they respond to it and it’s literary this sort of response, EVERY SINGLE TIME. Aggressive denial and insulting of either the reporter, the outlet, or the participants in the news that were harmed. The victim must always be portrayed negatively and insulted.
When the despicable war on Ukraine started and there was an incident of the bombing of a maternity hospital, within hours (really short amount of time) of the news getting out, Kremlin accused the attack to be staged, and a pregnant woman in one of the pictures from the attack, bleeding and being transported out of the hospital was accused of being an actor!!! How can you be so sure so fast that it was not a real hospital attack? You can’t. There is just no way to know this fast. Yet Russian officials have everything mapped out — reports of attacks are fake news, the woman in the pictures is an actress “as she has some very realistic make-up”. That’s the exact quote from their Twitter account, look at the bottom of the screencap I grabbed:
“She is indeed. As she has some very realistic make-up.”
The worst of the worst criminals have higher moral standards than the Russian government.
Distort. Next, they build upon the denial and either distort the picture of what is happening in the event, doubling down on their wild claims. Their attacks on the victims, here again, shine through. It’s unrelenting and no room is left for doubt for their supporters. When Russia was implicated in the shooting down of MH17 commercial airline passenger flight that killed 298 people, there was zero remorse or sadness expressed for the people who died. Instead, they start creating multiple various explanations or incidents that have no truth in reality. They immediately surfaced an idea that it wasn’t a commercial airliner but a Ukrainian cargo plane that got shot down. The denials go through “nothing happened here” to “it’s actually an enemy plane” to whatever else wild that they can think of. As years go by, they continue to invent different explanations for the accident.
Different corners of the world then latch on to their fairy tales as they sound more plausible than the real event! Who in their right mind would shoot down a passenger plane with almost 300 innocent people on it? The world can’t imagine such perverse behavior so they tend to give credence to Russia’s fairy tales that are more believable! But if you know Russia, you know that they are more than capable of committing despicable and criminal acts of the worst kind and then take zero responsibility for it. Admit nothing.
Distract. This one is especially common now with the Ukraine war. Russia pumps “whataboutisms” into the information sphere at a high clip. They want you to ignore the fact that they invaded a country with 40 million people, killed thousands, displaced millions, and want you to focus on something else. “Oh, we invaded Ukraine? What about the US invading Iraq?? How about that??” Again, their supporters get a point to repeat, and any argument about how criminal their Ukraine invasion is will eventually lead to invasions by other countries. It shouldn’t matter, at this point in time, you, Russia, are committing war crimes and attacking a country — it’s happening now, it’s happening here, and you need to be held accountable.
Russia activates thousands of Twitter accounts to post its propaganda. And again, it works well. Many people that grow up without going through Russian social media attacks are not familiar with their methods and often fall for their tactics. If you support and echo their claims, suddenly you get thousands of likes, RTs, etc that make you feel part of the club and that you are onto something special! When in reality you are just spewing their nonsense back to the infosphere.
The book has excellent details about this, again related to MH17 downing, and how various Russian misinformation actors operated during that time. The key is how fast they spread the information, how aggressive they are, and what sort of language they use to appeal to different countries, demographics, etc. It just works so well.
Dismay. When Kremlin writes back the responses they want to make sure that the overall end result is a situation that in the end is more confusing and at the same time more threatening to those that disagree with Russia’s policy and thinking. They don’t miss a chance to throw veiled and often not veiled threats to those that oppose them.
At the end of the day, the strategy works well. It creates enough noise to drown out the signal, the truth. It casts doubt on the legitimate governments, sources, just enough to build distrust and it snowballs from there.
Russian intelligence agencies have the upper hand here and are winning the disinformation war. Time is on their side as they can throw random bits on the wall and play with people’s feelings and those that want to disprove them need to spend energy and time collecting the evidence. The retort better be 100% foolproof or even one slight mistake will be seized by Kremlin to discredit the whole report.
If there are any positives that I see is that there has been enough time and evidence collected about how the Russian disinformation works that people are less likely to trust their sources and are less afraid to call their bullshit out.
Organizations like Bellingcat and numerous journalists and activists are working tirelessly to combat this cancer of our modern society. I can only hope that in the end evil will fall and we can move on to better things in life.
