NewsGuard tracks Putin’s false narratives
Russia is pumping out more than a dozen false narratives through state-sponsored news sites to justify its invasion of Ukraine.
Russia is pumping out more than a dozen false narratives through state-sponsored news sites to justify its invasion of Ukraine.
News credibility rating agency NewsGuard tracks the veracity of web-based news sites and digitally categorises misinformation, whether it be from large major daily news sites or smaller privately sponsored online publications that often have unspecified ownership.
NewsGuard completed an analysis of Russia’s news misinformation as it heightened in recent months. Reports ranged from blatant false assertions and false narratives, with misquotes of officials, to the reporting of false claims with quotes from little known sources.
Russia was also homing in on ethnic and racial issues, which can play out in Russia and Ukraine where there are long-held historic tensions.
CEO Steven Brill said NewsGuard had categorised the claims into about a dozen general themes used by three of the Kremlin’s most influential state media outlets that target an international audience: RT.com, SputnikNews.com and TASS.com.
Mr Brill said Russian misinformation typically spread from government news sites to social media which quoted the websites as authoritative sources. “People will spread them on Twitter or Facebook if they can cite an article somewhere, it seems more legitimate.”
He said the dozen claims were among 600 myths including claims about the pandemic that NewsGuard tracks.
He said myths were logged as machine readable files, which allowed artificial intelligence systems to follow their propagation online.
“We can go back and see where it started and trace where it’s gone, and who’s promoting it,” Mr Brill said. “You can trace it all over the internet, all over Twitter or any data points where you have access to machine learning.
“There are some intelligence agencies (including the Pentagon) that are using it for that purpose.”
He said reputational management firms engaged by large corporations were using the digital tools to trace the origin of claims made about them online.
Mr Brill said NewsGuard was readying to launch into Australia where it would offer the same service as in the US of categorising news sites as legitimate or risky sources.
NewsGuard has released papers on some of the news narratives Russia persistently propagates.
One is that the US pumped $US5bn into supporting the 2014 Orange revolution which saw major street protests leading to the ousting of Russian-backed Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych who fled to Russia.
“Since Yanukovych’s ouster, Russian state-sponsored media including RT.com and SputnikNews.com have frequently claimed that the Maidan revolution was in fact a coup d’etat orchestrated by Western powers.”
It said the $US5bn figure was the amount the US had pumped into Ukraine since 1991. It sourced the claim to an “obscure American anti-war activist named Patrick Welsh”.
NewsGuard says Russian state media persistently pushed the line that Nazism was rampant in Ukrainian politics and society. Voting data show the support of right wing and Nazi groups in Ukraine to be relatively small.
NewsGuard said the Kremlin claimed that the Ukrainian army was committing genocide against the mostly Russian-speaking population in eastern and southern Ukraine.
However, its claim of a mass grave of 400 bodies was a misquote of a Latvian political activist who said there were 400 unidentified bodies in a local morgue in the eastern city of Donetsk.
NewsGuard analysis:
Myth: The West staged a coup to overthrow the Ukrainian government
Myth: Ukrainian politics and society is dominated by Nazi ideology
Myth: Ethnic Russians in Donbas have been subjected to genocide
NewsGuard backgrounding of the publications:
SputnikNews.com Nutrition Label
Ironically, NewsGuard said that ads promoting America’s most iconic brands appear on these sites. Many programmatic ad campaigns did not filter which websites received advertising revenue and ads, so Russian government sites were beneficiaries.
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