France uncovers a Russian disinformation campaign in Europe | Hacker News Reader

France uncovers a Russian disinformation campaign in Europe

economist.com

88 pointsdoener40 comments

> Viginum said it had uncovered a Russian network of 193 websites which it codenames "Portal Kombat".

+1 for codename style!

This story has been flagged. I'd like to know by whom.

It does not affect only Europe. It is everywhere where Russia has interests. And currently way more influential that it should be.

For the ones of you that speaks French, try to search on YouTube or the average social media topics like "France + Russie + [an African country speaking French (e.g Mali)]".

It is a festival of trolls pro-Russian that will try to explain that Vladmir Putine and Wagner are the solutions to Africa corruption problems (no irony). And that the USA and France are terrible colonial powers supporting the power in place.

ITT Yandex translated Russian comments. depressing

Are they trying to convince them as well that nuclear energy is evil and that they should turn their plants off and switch their economy to being dependent on "green" Russian gas instead? /s

My favorite conspiracy theory is that Chernobyl was orchestrated exactly for that purpose.

That's similar to a plot point in the movie Cloud Atlas, where some in the oil industry try to sabotage a nuclear plant.

I visited the Pravda site listed, the top story is a picture of Elon Musk retweeting a Harambe joke. I checked his twitter, and he did retweet the post.

It definitely has a pro-Russia bias, but calling it "uncovering a disinformation campaign" seems generous.

If you look at the IPs, there are 100s of domains hosted on them, the sites are all the same but the news is different. If you translate the news, 80% of it is patently false:

dnr-news.ru berdyansk-news.ru melitopol-news.ru news-makeevka.ru nikolaev-news.ru news-odessa.ru chernigov-news.ru volyn-news.ru kramatorsk-news.ru kirovograd-news.ru

For example this article: https://volyn-news.ru/society/2024/02/12/4228.html

Edit: Are you talking about this? https://pravda-en.com/ - If so, I don't see the article you're referring to? The top post is about Tucker Carlson.

>: Are you talking about this? https://pravda-en.com/ - If so, I don't see the article you're referring to? The top post is about Tucker Carlson.

Click that post, it's Elon Musk retweeting a Harambe joke.

> Russia has been at the forefront of internet disinformation techniques at least since 2014, when it pioneered the use of bot farms to spread fake news about its invasion of Crimea.

The idea that Russian or Soviet propaganda has ever (in the last 50 years) come close in potency to Western propaganda is itself a massive lie and propaganda campaign.

By the time the USSR collapsed, many Soviet citizens had positive/neutral views of Western culture if not politics. It was a total soft power defeat.

The meat of the article may be true, all countries and large orgs create propaganda, but this framing that we in the West are somehow playing "catch-up" is utterly false and misleading. Modern Russian propaganda is relatively pathetic and Putin himself admitted as much in his recent interview (which is itself a poor piece of propaganda for many reasons).

> The idea that Russian or Soviet propaganda has ever (in the last 50 years) come close in potency to Western propaganda is itself a massive lie and propaganda campaign.

Brexit, I'd say one was pretty successful. In one of the largest to disrupting the EU trade between UK [0]

Donald Trump, a scare for the almost part. [1]

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jul/21/russia...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_projects_of_Donald_Tr...

Only UK is to blame for brexit.

From the vote yes. From the propaganda leading up to the vote, no.

The biggest propaganda piece was probably the NHS bus with the 350 million.

Nailed it. Articles like these only bolster the idea that we are fighting an advanced adversary, when we are the advanced adversary to all targets.

Good propaganda changes the mix on the equalizer, you don't even have to lie, you distort the existing signal in ways that the receiver is unaware of. Look at race baiting in in markets with lots of racists as great example.

That isn't to say that Russia is not doing this, but much of it we wouldn't see. It would be in short run targeted ads on facebook, reddit or truth social.

> By the time the USSR collapsed, many Soviet citizens had positive/neutral views of Western culture if not politics. It was a total soft power defeat.

If by propaganda you mean "having a demonstrably better quality of life", then yeah, the West had a better propaganda machine which successfully persuaded many in the Soviet Union that maybe our system wasn't so bad after all.

But if we take a more narrow definition of propaganda that doesn't include actually having a better lifestyle, the Soviet Union propaganda machine had a lot more work on their hands in order to persuade a substantial portion of the West that their system worked. Under that definition of propaganda I think it's no contest which propaganda machine was more effective—to this day we have people in the West who will insist to an Eastern European's face that life in the Soviet Union wasn't so bad.

> and Putin himself admitted as much in his recent interview

Why would he say anything else though? He’s never going to get on camera and be like “yeah bro, our propaganda is bussin and all you western schmucks keep falling for it, it’s great.” His statements on the efficacy of it should be taken with a grain of salt.

The kind of state propaganda you are talking about is a completely different thing.

Russia is explicitly paying for trolls, hackers, and bot farms to muck around in other countries with the explicit intent of advancing their geopolitical agenda and sowing confusion in countries that could respond.

Their ability is control news narratives is a different topic (although you also seem incredibly naïve as towards Putin's control over media within Russia).

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