Around the third or fourth scroll through a news feed, there’s a point at which it’s actually hard to tell what’s real anymore. It’s not a coincidental feeling. It was meticulously and patiently engineered over many years. Additionally, the majority of the time, someone has an office in Moscow.
Social media was not the starting point of Russia’s information warfare campaign. For decades, the Kremlin has been conducting influence campaigns against Western democracies, identifying and neutralizing old tools while developing new ones. Due to their clear origins and traceable funding, RT and Sputnik were comparatively simple targets. They were suppressed by Western governments, discredited by journalists, and generally mistrusted by the public. Thus, Russia adjusted. It moved into the background, funding collaborations with voices that seemed independent and integrating stories into platforms that appeared mainstream. The recent controversy involving well-known American podcasters—people with millions of listeners and reputable public personas—showed how far that tactic had come. The number of similar arrangements that have not yet been found is still unknown.
The troll farm model, which was actively developed during the 2016 US election cycle, is still in use. Thousands of phony accounts, many of which are identical to actual people, are causing division in comment sections, amplifying extreme viewpoints, and giving marginal ideas the appearance of momentum. In addition, the Kremlin maintains a vast network of fake news websites that are designed to resemble reputable publications, complete with stolen visual identities and real-sounding URLs. When a reader clicks on a link from their cousin’s Facebook post, they have no reason to believe the “news article” they are reading was created in a building outside of St. Petersburg.
The messaging itself has undergone recent changes. The old 2022 narrative—that Ukraine required “de-Nazification”—fell apart almost instantly due to its own ridiculousness. It was challenging to market a nation with a Jewish president who was elected by the people and no far-right coalition in power as a neo-Nazi state. Russia recalibrated after realizing the failure. The idea of Western decline, the complaints of communities left behind by identity politics, and the allure of stability and traditional values are all aspects of the new playbook that travel much more effectively. In areas that the Kremlin previously found difficult to reach, that message has gained traction.
The current information war is most subtly significant in the Global South. In Africa, Asia, and South America, Russia has spent years crafting a narrative that portrays Moscow as a fellow victim of Western imperialism rather than an aggressor. Given Russia’s own lengthy history of empire and its overt imperial aspirations in Ukraine, it may seem absurd, but it is effective. Genuine memories of Soviet-era support for anti-colonial movements are held by older generations throughout the Global South. Putin’s opposition to Western dominance is perceived by those audiences as continuity rather than propaganda. Using a press release to refute that is more difficult.
Then there is the NATO argument, which could be Russia’s most potent disinformation tool. The assertion that the war was sparked by NATO expansion strikes a deep chord with viewers who are already wary of American might. Putin barely flinched when Finland and Sweden joined NATO in 2022, doubling Russia’s NATO frontier—something he would never have allowed if NATO membership truly scared him—but it doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. However, the argument can cause harm even if it doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. All it needs to do is spread more quickly than the correction. It always does on the internet.
The Biden administration made a mistake with a counter-tactic that, for a while, worked: disclosing intelligence in advance and publicly identifying Russian false-flag schemes before Russia could carry them out. This strategy deserves more recognition than it was given. The Kremlin was deprived of the necessary element of surprise when it was revealed that Russian agents had already enlisted actors and recorded fictitious atrocities to justify an invasion. It’s not a long-term fix. It necessitates trustworthy intelligence as well as political will to employ it, neither of which can be taken for granted.
Structural issues are the deeper issue. American platforms were not designed for epistemology, but for interaction. Outrage-inducing content spreads more widely than factual content. Russia has become incredibly adept at taking advantage of that weakness, but it did not create it. Foreign operations will continue to take advantage of the information environment’s permeability until the major platforms’ incentive structures are altered. As this has been going on for years, it’s difficult not to feel that the West is still treating a systemic issue like a content moderation issue and failing as a result.
