The site, called Man Stuff News, caters to a certain sensibility with categories like Backyard Grilling, TV Shows for Guys and Beard Grooming. A recent article titled “Tips for Dads During Labor” offered this advice: “Remember to spend some time together before deciding whether or not to give birth.”
However, when you go to the section dedicated to world news, the nature of the coverage changes drastically. A recent article there downplayed an international arrest warrant against Russian President Vladimir V. Putin for war crimes. It repeated word for word an article that had appeared a day earlier under a different headline on the website of RT, Russia’s global television channel.
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 other countries since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. However, sites like Man Stuff News have helped RT get around the restrictions and continue to reach European and American audiences, a new report says.
Replicas of RT articles were laundered thousands of times across hundreds of websites, said the report, written by researchers at the German Marshall Fund, the University of Amsterdam and the University of Amsterdam Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a non-profit research organization. The websites include content aggregators such as Infowars, run by conspiracy theorist Alex Jones; RT mirrors repurposed from abandoned “zombie” locations; fake local news outlets with names like the San Francisco Telegraph; and areas focused on spirituality, yoga, extraterrestrials and apocalypse. Many of the articles were then further distributed via social media.
The reasons for republishing RT content are likely to vary from site to site, but clandestine republication poses a particular danger in the European Union, where concerns about Kremlin-linked disinformation campaigns are growing, particularly as Russia seeks to to weaken European support for Ukraine in advance of parliamentary elections taking place next week.
“This is really the tip of the Russian propaganda iceberg,” said Bret Schafer, co-author of the report and senior fellow at German Marshall. “When we searched the search results in the EU, it was pretty obvious that if Russian propaganda doesn’t show up on Russian domains, it gets through, which is kind of a double whammy because it not only bypasses restrictions and bans, but also does it on websites , which are less transparent than RT itself.”
RT said in a statement that its content does not conform to the “US State Department/NATO party line,” adding that it is “very pleased that RT’s news content is so popular across a wide range of platforms and users.” “.
A message left to an email address provided for registration on the Man Stuff News website went unanswered. The website offers few details about where it is based and who runs it.
As non-Russian sources parroted Kremlin talking points, they helped legitimize the narrative to an often unsuspecting audience, the researchers concluded. The copied articles, which the researchers described as “Russia’s propaganda nesting dolls,” targeted a wide geographic audience through websites registered in at least 40 countries on six continents, including in countries where RT is reportedly blocked. Considering RT’s content in languages other than English and other Kremlin-controlled media outlets, the true extent of Russian propaganda laundering is likely much larger, researchers said.
Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, said in a speech this month that she was “particularly concerned about the increase in foreign interference and manipulation in our societies, our democracies and our elections.” She pointed to “swarms of negative disinformation” about specific issues and candidates, as well as malicious attempts to “buy influence and cause chaos.”
Last month, a consortium of 36 European fact-checking organizations said false or misleading content about the EU or Ukraine was among the most common forms of disinformation it had encountered.
An EU report this year said activists abroad – most obviously from Russia, but also from China – are coordinating on “virtually all platforms” to create an alternative information environment that would undermine trust in democracy. Last month, the European Commission conducted a pre-election stress test to assess platforms’ preparedness against AI-generated fakes, bot account influence campaigns and other threats.
Since 2022, the Kremlin has been unable to gain access to some of its main news channels in the West after Canada and the European Union removed RT from their airwaves. This month, the bloc banned four more Russian media outlets from broadcasting.
In the United States, government regulators have taken no action against the Russian network’s American outpost, RT America. Instead, broadcasters across the country cut ties with RT America in early 2022 and the company closed within days.
Online platforms have also tried to limit RT’s reach; YouTube blocked global access to channels affiliated with RT, saying it was committed to removing harmful misinformation. However, laundered RT content continues to exist there and on other platforms, researchers said, confirming previous findings by other research groups. On YouTube, RT articles appeared to be delivered using an automated text-to-speech generator to bypass filters. Content copied from RT also appeared on major social and messaging sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Substack, Telegram and X, as well as niche platforms such as Gab and Rumble, the researchers said.
Based on more than 1,500 RT articles published last year, researchers looked for websites with similar content or metadata and limited their search to results published in the United States and Belgium, the de facto capital of the European Union. were geolocated.
Some of the sites likely distributed RT’s content with the network’s permission, the researchers said, while others plagiarized RT without its knowledge. The sites may have been ideologically aligned with the Kremlin or more concerned with driving traffic to increase visibility or advertising revenue. Some of the sites announced that they were republishing RT content. (Man Stuff News ended its copy of the article about Mr. Putin’s arrest warrant by publishing the web address of the original RT story.)
Verbatim copies of RT articles appeared on media channels affiliated with governments in Cambodia, Iran, Nigeria and Yemen, as well as on a Lebanese channel run by Hezbollah, an Iran-backed Lebanese militia. Researchers linked a website to a conservative Catholic online ministry in Texas that published posts about abortion, candle making and, in an example adopted by RT, the lack of aid after an earthquake in Syria.
The researchers found that RT was far from the only Kremlin media outlet that was laundered. As key elections approach in the European Union and the United States, Russian disinformation activists have refined their strategies. Recent videos featuring synthesized voices and other signs of manipulation by artificial intelligence targeted right-wing American voters with fake messages about President Biden. Fake news organizations founded by Russian agents mimicked real American media while promoting Kremlin propaganda; A former Florida sheriff’s deputy who received political asylum in Moscow created more than 160 such fake websites.
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2024-05-30 14:51:33
www.nytimes.com
