Social activists, parliamentarians and officials are looking for methods to combat false news about events in Ukraine that flooded the Russian segment of the Internet. The Civic Chamber of the Russian Federation has already recorded 1.4 million such fakes and calculated that more than 1 billion rubles have been spent on anti-Russian propaganda in social networks. Meanwhile, senators are discussing possible measures to bring “Western provocateurs” to justice on the Internet, State Duma deputies are preparing a bill criminalizing “military” fake news, and the Russian government has launched its own portal with verified news.
Director of the Safe Internet League Ekaterina Mizulina, First Deputy Head of the Commission of the Public Chamber for the Development of the Information Community, Media and Mass Communications Alexander Malkevich and Managing Partner of Ashmanov and Partners Igor Ashmanov Photo: Emin Jafarov, Kommersant
The Commission of the Civic Chamber (OP) of the Russian Federation for the Development of the Information Society, Mass Media and Mass Communications, which has been fighting fake news on the Internet since 2020, presented on March 1 at the round table a fresh statistics on fakes about the Russian military operation in Ukraine. The first deputy head of the commission Alexander Malkevich, who heads the working group of the OP on combating inaccurate information, immediately warned that after the start of the operation, the work of social activists has noticeably increased, volunteers are “falling down”, and it will take a long time to live in conditions of an “information war”. Last Friday, the commission was already meeting for an emergency meeting on a similar issue: then its members divided all the fake news from Ukraine into a dozen and a half categories.
As Mr. Malkevich said, the number of fakes increased even before the start of the special operation: in the two “peaceful” months of 2022, the working group of the Presidential Office counted 20 thousand such messages, while for the whole of 2020 – 35 thousand, and in 2021 – about 90 Since the beginning of the operation in Ukraine, almost 1.4 million such false news have been identified. Some of the information attacks, according to the speaker, are carried out from the territory of Ukraine: “Ukrainian cyberfighters” hunt “information patriots”, blacklist journalists and social activists , whose publics need to be “collapsed”. In this regard, the Presidential Office considers it necessary to create a “People’s Cyber Army of Russia” in order to “fill up” Ukrainian Telegram channels by all means that disseminate false information about Russia and its citizens.
Ekaterina Mizulina, a member of the OP, director of the Safe Internet League, clarified that information attacks are not only fake news and DDoS attacks, but also targeted advertising on social networks, the use of bots to phone Russians with frightening information about dead soldiers. The main goal of such attacks, according to Ms. Mizulina, is to cause panic among ordinary people, take them to the streets or send them to ATMs to withdraw cash. She said that based on the analysis of more than 11.6 million messages and comments in Russian-language accounts, the leaders in the distribution of fakes were mainly foreign sites: TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube. Also on the list were Telegram and the Russian network VKontakte.
In addition, the analysis carried out at various sites revealed 1.3 thousand advertising campaigns with coverage from 60 million to 80 million people not only in Russia, Ekaterina Mizulina continued. These campaigns are served by about 1,500 IT specialists, and advertising costs about $50,000 per day for Russia alone. “According to experts, more than 1 billion rubles. already spent on an information attack, and we believe that the amount will only grow,” she warned, advising all users to check information from safe sources.
Alexander Malkevich, in turn, urged Russians to save content that is dear to them and prepare for “digital evacuation from these platforms on their own, without waiting for us to be thrown out of there.” In relation to Russia, according to him, the BLM scenario has been launched: they want to “zombify” social network users in the Russian Federation and turn them into a penitent nation that will “ask forgiveness from the whole world for being so big, so rich, that we have so many resources natural”.
The protection of Russians from information attacks was also discussed on March 1 at a meeting of the Federation Council Commission for the Protection of State Sovereignty, where measures of responsibility for “foreign instigators of war against Russia” were discussed. “Unfortunately, among the inhabitants of our country there are victims of round-the-clock brainwashing by foreign media disinformation and social networks controlled by Washington,” complained the head of the commission, Andrei Klimov. He recalled that the Criminal Code has two articles on this subject: art. 353 (planning and preparation for unleashing or waging a war of aggression) and Art. 354 (public calls for a war of aggression). And that’s not counting Art. 275 (high treason), which the senators have already reminded Russian citizens who are deliberately working “against our Fatherland in direct cooperation with foreign anti-Russian centers,” Mr. Klimov added.
Oleg Gavrilov, Deputy Head of the Information and Press Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, drew attention to the “unacceptable behavior” of Google and Meta, on whose sites “hostile propaganda activities are openly conducted”, Russian media are blocked and fakes are freely distributed. According to the diplomat, the development of a system for bringing foreign “instigators” to justice would be “an important contribution to strengthening national security.” And Alexander Malkevich, who was also present at this meeting, called on the legislators to give Roskomnadzor and the Prosecutor General’s Office the tools to combat “information saboteurs.”
The problem of “dangerous” content was also raised yesterday by United Russia. According to its press service, State Duma Vice Speaker Anna Kuznetsova said that videos about “Russian aggression” began to appear on websites with children’s content, in connection with which the party will turn to the Prosecutor General’s Office and Roskomnadzor with a request to clear the children’s segment of the Runet from “anti-Russian aggression”. “. And the Duma members of United Russia are already preparing a bill on criminal punishment for fakes about the actions of the armed forces of the Russian Federation. It has not yet been submitted, but it can be considered at the next meeting on March 4, Sergey Boyarsky, First Deputy Chairman of the Committee on Information Policy, said on the air of the Rossiya 24 TV channel.
Finally, the Russian government is also concerned about the fight against fakes, but in a different way. On March 1, the White House announced the launch of the Explain.rf resource with verified information. According to Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Chernyshenko, it will work by analogy with the already well-known Stopcoronavirus portal.