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One study found that many sites, many of them with no apparent ties to the Kremlin, were copying Russian propaganda and spreading it to unsuspecting people ahead of European Union elections.
By Tiffany Hsu and Steven Lee Myers
The online page called Man Stuff News caters to a certain sensibility, with categories such as “Backyard Grills,” “TV Shows for Guys” and “Beard Care. “A recent article titled “Tips for Dads During Labor” featured this little advice: “Don’t spend time together before making the decision to give birth or not. “
However, move on to your segment engaged with global news and the nature of drastic policy adjustments. In that country, a recent article downplayed a foreign arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin for war crimes. He repeated word for word an article that had appeared the day before under another byline on the website of RT, Russia’s global television channel.
RT, that the U. S. State Department. Described as a key player in the Kremlin’s disinformation and propaganda apparatus, the U. S. government has been blocked in the European Union, Canada and other countries since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Sites such as Man Stuff News, however, have helped RT overcome restrictions and continue to succeed with European and U. S. audiences, according to a new report.
Replicas of RT articles have been whitewashed thousands of times in many places, according to the report by researchers from the German Marshall Fund, the University of Amsterdam and the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a nonprofit think tank. The sites come with content aggregators such as Infowars, reviewed by conspiracy theorist Alex Jones; RT mirrors repurposed from abandoned “zombie” sites; fake local media outlets with names like the San Francisco Telegraph; and fields focused on spirituality, yoga, aliens, and the apocalypse. Numerous articles were then published on social media.
The reason for reposting RT content likely varies from site to site, but surreptitious reposting poses a specific danger in the European Union, where considerations about Kremlin-linked disinformation campaigns are rising. especially as Russia tries to weaken the Europeans for Ukraine ahead of next week’s parliamentary elections.
“This is the tip of the iceberg of Russian propaganda,” said Bret Schafer, a co-author of the report and a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund. “This was evident when we looked at the effects of search in the EU. it doesn’t show up on Russian domains, it happens, which is a double whammy because not only does it evade restrictions and bans, but it does so on sites that are less transparent than RT itself.
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