Russian Disinformation in the Global South and Its Threat to Democracy

• In Event: Russian Disinformation Activities

Abstract

The invasion of Ukraine has underscored the Kremlin’s relentless violence and concerted efforts to propagate deceptive narratives concerning the so-called “special military operation” globally. Moscow’s disinformation strategy has evolved into a comprehensive revisionist campaign of information dissemination, aiming to challenge the prevailing Western-led liberal order across online platforms in a more expansive, expedited and coordinated manner than ever. In an era where the foundations of democracy are increasingly threatened by revisionist influences, and individuals are susceptible to radicalization through online disinformation, such operations pose a substantial risk to the global trajectories of democratic development. So far, much of the scholarly investigations and available literature predominantly examine the implications of misinformation within advanced liberal Western democracies. However, we posit that these trends pose comparable, if not greater, risks to countries of the Global South. In this context, we pose the following inquiry: How is Russia’s disinformation strategy, specifically directed towards countries of the Global South, structured? To explore this question, we adopt the “interest-action” framework developed by Ofer Fridman (2022), which seeks to explain Russia’s foreign actions by delineating three tiers of interest – strategic, operational and tactical.
To operationalize our research inquiry, we examined official Russian diplomatic channels on Telegram, a widely used instant messaging social media platform within both Russia and the countries comprising the Global South. The data collection spans from January 2022 to October 2023, covering six languages (English, Russian, Arabic, French, Spanish, and Portuguese). Our dataset comprises data from over 90 countries and consists of more than 120,000 individual messages published by Russian embassies. To perform a comprehensive analysis, we employed two distinct machine-learning-associated methodologies for text analysis. First, we used a deep-learning language processing model and then a clustering algorithm. Both were used to identify the type of content and congruence between channels’ content.
The findings indicate an important alignment among channels, revealing a centralization in the dissemination of disinformation. Notably, Russia exhibits a strategic approach to crafting disinformation narratives, curating them based on the global salience of specific events and adjusting its messaging to reflect evolving trends. We also find that Moscow effectively disaggregates its disinformation into global, regional, and local issues in ways strongly similar to our framework. This indicates deliberate alignment with issues pertinent to targeted nations, all while maintaining thematic coherence with the Kremlin’s revisionist discourse. Furthermore, results demonstrate a dramatic surge of disinformation messages from February 2022 onward, a surge that has been sustained since then.
These findings suggest a fundamental shift in Russia’s disinformation strategies following the invasion of Ukraine, characterized by a departure from prior designs and manifesting a top-down dissemination approach that enhances congruence across diverse channels and platforms in a much more pronounced way. Moreover, these campaigns exhibit an increasing alignment with the Kremlin’s talking points, strategically influencing information at various levels – local, regional, and international – to bolster the Kremlin’s standing among the target countries’ populations and undermine Western perspectives. Additionally, our results indicate a purposeful structuring of disinformation campaigns to loop back toward Russia’s overarching global revisionist narrative. This involves a progressive integration of local and regional issues into the international discourse, thus reinforcing the interconnectedness of disinformation efforts with broader geopolitical objectives.
The outcomes of our study have important implications for international security and the overarching reinforcement of democracy on a global scale. First, our findings provide evidence that Russia has embarked upon a strategic commitment of its state apparatus to unconventional methods of global disruption, transcending its decentralized approach reliant on third-party entities such as RT, Sputnik, and the Internet Research Agency. This development introduces new challenges at a juncture where China pursues similar objectives in the Global South and the allure of illiberalism gains traction amongst certain emerging powers. Second, our results shed light on the expansive scope of Moscow’s revisionist agenda on a global scale, underscoring the imperative to broaden the scope of our strategies for democratic resilience to encompass nations within the Global South. This necessitates a reconceptualization and a re-imagination of the global democratic project, one that embraces pluralistic interpretations of democracy to counterbalance Russia’s revisionist illiberal discourse.

Authors

• David Dubé, McGill University

• Jean-Christophe Boucher, University of Calgary