Russia´s Social Influence Media Operations

Covert influence and the challenge of attribution. Communication-led covert actions. Plausible deniability. To what extent is attribution possible?

According to C. Watts, the success of Russian cyber-enabled social media disinformation operations is due to the fact that its operations focus on ”state-to-state, party-to-party, and people-to-people approaches”:

• whereas the United States and its Western allies predominately seek to engage in state-to-state communication, Russia inverts this pyramid, zeroing in on people-to-people strategies via social media personas, both true and false, that connect directly with Western target audiences;
• traditional Soviet party-to-party approaches focused on communist political parties abroad, but today the Kremlin instead focuses on issue groups where Russia can find common ground with their adversaries;
• the Russian Orthodox Church, gun advocacy groups, motorcycle clubs, or anti-immigration research outlets all offer appealing avenues for the Kremlin to gain a physical and virtual foothold in the West;
• Russia’s state-to-state approaches in many ways trail rather than lead active measures, reinforcing successes in party and people outreach by confirming narratives and conspiracies appealing to the foreign audience they seek to win over.

In summary, Russia is ”end state driven” (Watts, 2018), not organizationally driven in the way the Western countries organize their public diplomacy, information operations, and psychological operations.

Methodology and Resources

• ***Disinformation and propaganda – impact on the functioning of the rule of law in the EU and its Member States, European Parliament's Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs, 2019, European Union, 2019, available on the internet at: Europarl
• Clint Watts, Russia’s Active Measures Architecture: Task and Purpose, 2018, Alliance for Securing Democracy, available on the internet at: Securing democracy
• Corneliu Bjola, James Pamment (Eds.), Countering Online Propaganda and Extremism. The Dark Side of Digital Diplomacy, Routledge, 2018
• Massimo Flore, Alexandra Balahur, Aldo Podavini, Marco Verile, Understanding Citizens' Vulnerabilities to Disinformation and Data-Driven Propaganda, EUR 29741 EN, Publications Office of the European Union, Luxembourg, 2019, ISBN 978-92-76-03320-2, doi: 10.2760/919835, JRC116009
• Rory Cormac, Richard J. Aldrich, ”Grey is the new black: covert action and implausible deniability”, International Affairs, Volume 94, Issue 3, May 2018, Pages 477–494, https://doi.org/10.1093/ia/iiy067
• Weisburd, Andrew, Clint Watts, and J. M. Berger, “Trolling for Trump: How Russia Is Trying to Destroy Our Democracy,” War on the Rocks, November 6, 2016. As of November 8, 2017: Waron the rocks