For Russian diplomats, disinformation is part of the job

While governments and social media companies are trying to suppress Russia’s state media, and disinformation about the war in Ukraine it spreads, the Kremlin’s diplomats step up to the plate.

Russian consulates and embassies around the globe use Facebook, Twitter and others to divert blame for atrocities and undermine the international alliance supporting Ukraine.

The tech companies responded by adding additional labels to Russia’s diplomatic accounts, and by removing accounts from search results and recommendations. However, the accounts remain active and continue to disseminate disinformation and propaganda in nearly all countries. This is partly due to their diplomatic status which gives them an extra layer of protection against moderation.

Russia’s diplomatic corps is a global network of propaganda with hundreds of accounts on social media across all continents. The same claims can be reused and modified for different audiences in different countries. There have been no steps taken to reduce that effort.

“Each week since the beginning of the war these diplomats have posted thousands of times, gaining more than a million engagements on Twitter per week,” saidMarcel Schliebs, disinformation researcher at Oxford Internet Institute at Oxford University. He has analyzed more than 300 social media accounts that are linked to Russian consulates, embassies and diplomatic organizations.

Some Russian embassies in the U.K., Mexico and elsewhere are particularly active and spread propaganda and falsehoods to support the invasion.

The Russian missile attack that killed 50 people at a Ukrainian railway station. The Russian Embassy in the U.K tweeted that Ukrainians were responsible. Talk about Russian war crimes According to the Embassy, it’s an attempt by Britain to make Russia look bad. Who are these Ukrainian soldiers fighting for their country’s freedom? The embassy claimed that they were actually Nazis working under U.S. orders.

These and other conspiracy theories were tweeted by the Russian Embassy in London on Monday. Each post received hundreds to thousands of retweets and comments, as well as likes from thousands of other Twitter users.

“They must know better, but that’s what it’s like living in and working for a totalitarian regime,” saidNicholas Cull is a University of Southern California Professor who studies the intersection of diplomacy, propaganda. “A totalitarian regime requires a media bubble. It is difficult to censor at home and requires you to communicate your message to a foreign and domestic audience. That’s what this is.”

Diplomats are the representatives of their country, and they have been known to push their nation’s points of view. Russian diplomats are well-known for disinformation spreading by the Kremlin. Russian diplomats used social networks to spread disinformation regarding the invasion of Crimea 2014 and the poisoning Russian dissidents.

They are often allowed to speak freely because they are representatives of a foreign country.

Sometimes they even attempt to rewrite the history. This was the case in 2019 when Russian diplomatic accounts used #TruthaboutWWII as a hashtag to destort the Soviet Union’s initial non-aggression deal with Nazi Germany. Researchers from the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab revealed the disinformation campaign. They found that Russian diplomats were a key part of the sophisticated disinformation apparatus, as well as state media and social media bots.

“The Kremlin tends to employ a full spectrum model of propaganda,” the Atlantic Council researchers concluded.

Tech companies and governments have taken other steps to stop disinformation from Russia’s state media since the Russian invasion of Ukraine. European Union bans outlets such as RT and Sputnik. Meta blocked those outlets from its platforms, including Instagram and Facebook. The tech companies also blocked these outlets from advertising revenue and increased efforts to label their accounts.

A message requesting comment from the Russian Embassy in America was not immediately returned.

In the weeks and months prior to the February invasion, there was a noticeable rise in pro-Russian propaganda about Ukraine.

Schliebs’ research shows that the accounts were tweeting around 2,000 times per week right after the invasion. This led to more than 1,000,000 comments and retweets.

That engagement fell after Twitter announced earlier this month that it would no longer promote more than 300 Russian accounts or include them in search results, a technical move known as “demotion,” designed to limit the accounts’ reach. The accounts Schliebs tracked still receive about half a million likes.

Twitter and Facebook have added “Russian government organization” labels to many of these accounts to ensure users know the source of the information. Schliebs discovered that many accounts don’t have labels. Only about one third of the accounts he looked at had labels.

A Twitter spokesperson said the company has already labeled 260,000 Tweets from Russian accounts since Feb. 28 and is continuing to add labels to accounts “on a rolling basis.”

Schliebs said that tech companies responded to Russia’s invasion by comparing their actions with those following the 2020 U.S. elections, Jan. 6, 2021 attacks on the U.S. Capitol, COVID-19 pandemic, and the 2020 U.S. presidential election. Trump, then-President, was removed from Twitter after inciting violence before the Jan. 6 Riot. However, the Russian diplomats – who spread conspiracy theories about Russian atrocities and blamed Ukrainians – are allowed to continue.

“By no means am I defending him (Trump), but I fail to see the consistency in that policy,” he said.

Meta implemented similar changes in order to label Russian diplomatic accounts, and to reduce their reach on its platforms.

The company also removed a Russian diplomat-spread post last month that suggested the deadly air strike against a Mariupol children’s hospital was a hoax.

Schliebs saidPlatforms like Twitter and Facebook could be too harsh on diplomatic accounts. It could increase Russia’s animosity toward U.S.-based technology companies. (Facebook, for instance, has been labeled an “extremist” organization.) It could force Russia and its supporters to move onto Telegram, which is less transparent and where regulators and researchers can’t see what their messages are.

As the Russian Embassy in London tweeted last week, it’s a shift Russia’s diplomats are ready for.

“Meet our DiploFamily on @telegram,” it wrote.