In a thorough study conducted for the London-based Center for the Analysis of Social Media (CASM), researcher Carl Miller analyzed accounts sharing two pro-invasion hashtags in the early hours of the war in Ukraine. His conclusion is clear: the pro-Russian discourse is gaining points in Africa and Asia. “We Westerners tend to see our information space as much more universal than it is. And that blinds us to reality,” he warns.
L’Express: What did you discover while exploring messages relating to the war in Ukraine on social networks?
Carl Miller: This study challenges the idea that has been circulating in recent weeks that Ukraine has won the information war. In reality, it is far too early to tell. I have personally always been a little skeptical of this reading, which reminds me of observations from the days leading up to Donald Trump’s US presidential victory in 2016 or the eve of the Brexit referendum.
In our small virtual world, it seems that no one thinks differently from us. It was exactly the same after the invasion in Ukraine, on my social networks: it was an uninterrupted parade of messages expressing sympathy for the Ukrainians and total indignation against the invasion. And then we started researching, isolating pro-Russian hashtags and there a whole new world opened up to us and we realized that something else was happening.
That is to say ?
In the early days of the war, we identified two pro-invasion hashtags: #IStandWithRussia and #IStandWithPutin, which were rising in Twitter trends. We dug into the accounts sharing them to find out who was behind it. In fact, it was a mixture of real and fake accounts. Their common points? 1. None of the Twitter profiles carrying these hashtags claimed to be from Europe. 2. None of the messages shared were directly aimed at Westerners, even if their content spoke about it. There were a lot of comments about Western hypocrisy, aggression and expansionism of the “West”, anti-colonialism, but also messages about solidarity between the Brics countries. [NDLR : Brésil, Russie, Inde, Chine et Afrique du Sud].
There are also publications recalling Russia’s role in aiding liberation movements in Africa and Asia. But at no time does this content seem directed towards Western public opinion. They target all these other information spaces around the world, in particular India and South Africa and, to a lesser extent, Ghana, Nigeria, Malaysia, Indonesia or Singapore. What to conclude? That we Westerners tend to consider our information space to be far more universal than it actually is. And in many ways, that blinds us to what’s really going on.
What is the geographic distribution of the influence operations you have identified?
To carry out this mapping, we have grouped the messages by linguistic areas, which often overlap with geography. We realized that the distribution was absolutely not random. We have identified a few “clusters” of linguistically similar accounts, but with some particularities. For example, there is a pro-BJP Hindi group, the ruling party in India. Then another small group from another language, Tamil, a language spoken by a community in southern India.
One group collects messages in Sindhi and Farsi languages, a mixture of Pakistani and Iranian identities. We have also identified a South African cluster, close to a larger African group. Finally, there is a “cluster” that is not defined by language or national identity. It was in this group that we saw the biggest spike in account creations on the day of the invasion.
Was the Brics group specifically targeted and if so, why do you think?
China wasn’t, and we didn’t see much activity in Brazil, so it’s not for all of the Brics. But it could well be that through this kind of operation, Russia is trying to reactivate a diplomatic alliance around the Brics to try to counterbalance the Western hegemonic centers of gravity. If Moscow wants to build a new geopolitical and economic axis in the world, the BRICS are a convenient platform. These are emerging economies, to which the Russians can turn to, at the very least, try to prevent their companies from participating in Western sanctions.
How do you explain that despite the precedents of Trump’s election or Brexit that you mentioned, Western observers are struggling to see the progress of this pro-Russian discourse?
This is a mistake that could not be more universal, which happens throughout our lives. We tend to think the world looks like what we see of it. This is linked to cognitive biases, in particular confirmation bias. We will consult this or that account in search of evidence that largely supports our view of the world, simply because doing the opposite is exhausting!
But this is also due to the functioning of these networks. Both their algorithms and the way users use them: the people we choose to follow, the pages we visit, which put us in information “bubbles”.
Finally, it is true that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is remarkably successful in portraying the war as a conflict between Russia and the West. Moreover, in the West, this reading is fairly consensual. The idea that this is the first stage of a much broader Russian aggression and that it forces a review of the European security architecture creates an opportunity for Russian influence operations elsewhere in the world, where support for NATO is much more mixed and sometimes turns to hostility.
Have you measured it in online publications?
Yes, we found a plethora of pro-invasion posts referring to NATO’s intervention in Libya, for example. They denounce the “double standards” of Europeans, quick to defend human rights and state sovereignty when it suits them, but to invade a state for their own interest. This is the danger of these influence operations: they work precisely because they are based on a grain of truth. These messages tap that sensitive chord. It starts with a truth and ends with a manipulation.
How long has Russia been engaged in this information war?
The color revolutions were a shock and the annexation of Crimea in 2014 a turning point: the Russians realized the need to control the information spaces on which they felt they had lost their footing. Regarding the scope of these influence operations, Western journalists and researchers have probably focused too much on the effects of these campaigns at home, on elections or cyberattacks targeting a particular state.
Furthermore, we have mobilized a lot of attention on Facebook and Twitter, the most widely used social networks in the West, when in reality, the information war is taking place in many other spaces: small regional platforms, classifieds sites, but also Wikipedia.
Have you seen a real increase in the volume of propaganda or influence operations targeting Africa in recent years?
It’s quite difficult to measure. But in the research we conducted, posts from South Africa stood out with a real organic adoption of hashtags. One of the main voices that made them rise to prominence on Twitter was Jacob Zuma’s daughter, who has 200,000 followers and whose profile picture displays the message “I stand with RussiaFor South Africa, therefore, these hashtags are not simply the work of an army of trolls guided by Russia.
Can personalities like Zuma’s daughter or other influencers have direct ties to the Kremlin?
I cannot say that Jacob Zuma’s daughter or anyone else was paid by Russia to share these messages. But it is clear that this practice is one of the variations of influence operations. Keep in mind that this obscure trade of influencers continues to grow, it has become a real industry in recent years. And one of the big trends in influence operations is precisely to blur the lines between real voices and fake profiles.
How do these influence operations work, behind the scenes?
The landscape is constantly changing, so it is very difficult to have a complete overview of the situation. One thing is certain: there is an increasingly close hybridization of influence techniques. There is a wide range of them. Some are illegal, some are not. Some are manipulations on social networks, others are done elsewhere. Some are operated by robots, it is also possible to buy fake accounts on social networks by the thousands, not to mention compromised profiles (which were real and have been hacked) and real accounts, “useful idiots” in a way so. These people are targeted because they already have pro-Russian opinions, which will be amplified.
In addition, there are targeted harassment operations. It is often forgotten that these campaigns are not only about propagating a belief, they also want to prevent the sharing of any contradictory narrative, hence the continued aggression of journalists and researchers who expose these operations.
Considering all these tactics, can we speak of a coherent Moscow strategy?
The underlying objectives can be identified and they have probably evolved. For a long time, Westerners considered that Russia was seeking to create a kind of political polarization in the targeted states. This is a truism that does not sound very convincing. In South Africa, for example, I don’t think they’re trying to create polarization, rather they’re looking – by addressing the general public, politicians, influencers or thinkers – to build popular support to war in the long term. Or at least to discourage these countries from taking sanctions against Russia and supporting the Western camp.
You say that it is urgent to take into consideration the rise of pro-Russian discourse elsewhere than in the West. What is the risk otherwise?
Again, let’s beware of declaring Ukraine a winner in the information war too soon. This is a dangerous approach, because it makes us extremely complacent and unaware of what is really going on in many parts of the world. Since the publication of our report, I have been contacted by many journalists from Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and India. They all told me the same thing: “The information spaces we find ourselves in are much more contested.”
You know, there are a lot of genuine people who love Putin and say, “Well, Russia is brave and really moral.” And there’s also an awful lot of really suspicious activity, loads of TikTok accounts relaying pro-Putin content all day long. Failure to react to these dangers is extremely dangerous. We have to be constantly worried about how the internet can be manipulated to legitimize autocrats – and the internet doesn’t have a very good track record in this regard. Today is perhaps the most important moment in the history of the Internet in this regard.
In short, yes, I think we need to be alarmed and take more seriously the idea that the West is very unpopular in different parts of the world.