“We are observing new tactics of disinformation”

Herr Güllner, the longer the war in Ukraine goes on, the more intensive and imaginative Russian propaganda becomes. There have even been fake covers for well-known German, French and Spanish satirical magazines. How dangerous is that?

For a long time we have been observing the development of new forms, techniques and tactics. It doesn’t surprise me, and it’s not the first time’s happened, either. However, what we can say is that activity in these areas has been boosted by the war. Information is being manipulated across many different levels. Some are visible and managed by the state, while others are concealed, almost reaching into the sphere of secret services. We must continue to take that very seriously.

At the EEAS you are currently deeply involved in investigating attempted manipulation. The first annual report on threats from targeted disinformation and interference from abroad came out in February 2023. What trends are you observing?

We are observing more and more state coordinated and funded activities which are aimed at manipulating entire information spaces. It’s no longer a matter of disseminating individual stories, but about wide-ranging destabilisation. The aim is to make people lose their trust in the media in general. It is for precisely that reason that we should be very careful in our use of “disinformation” as a term.

Why?

Disinformation is increasingly becoming a term used in political campaigns, such as simply dismissing the views of the opposing side as disinformation. These cases are generally about content above all. You can argue points, debunk falsehoods and fact check. That is all right and proper. But incidents of disinformation are now about more than that. We’re interested in the techniques used to manipulate information, and much has changed recently in that regard.

Could you give me an example?

Let’s take the example of increasing adaptation to local conditions. It is increasingly the case that campaigns are no longer just happening in one or two languages. Instead, they are playing out in many regions at the same time. The most surprising finding may be that they are using all the channels. It’s no longer just obscure networks which have been built up in social networks, or some websites pretending to be information channels. What’s happening is that people are quite blatantly spreading disinformation through diplomatic channels, such as the accounts of Russian embassies and consulates.

What is Russia trying to achieve through these disinformation campaigns? Is it just a matter of rallying their own population around the war? Or do they want propaganda messages to take hold in other countries, too?

Both dimensions are factors. In Russia itself it’s about keeping the population onside. The central narrative is: “The West is attacking us and we’re just defending ourselves.” Of course, stuff like this would not catch on in the West. As I have already touched on, in this case it’s less about circulating individual narratives, but about widespread destabilisation and sowing mistrust. Their method involves latching onto existing dissatisfaction and amplifying it. It is like what we saw during the Covid-19 pandemic, where fringe voices were boosted in a targeted way in order to create the impression of a broad consensus in opposition to government measures.

Increasingly sophisticated technologies are available to manipulate facts. Is there a risk that in future, large parts of the population will not be able distinguish between truth and lies without professional help?

In the long term, we can see this risk, yes. It was particularly evident when the Russian double agent Sergei Skripal was poisoned. On the one hand there was the information from the British government, but the Russian side then didn’t just put one counter-narrative into circulation: there were many different versions. Some observers counted 20, while others identified over 80 of them. It was no longer about contrasting one way against another. What it aimed to do was to create as many different versions and variants that in the end you didn’t want to believe anything anymore.

An international team of researchers has recently uncovered a firm based in Israel which offers the manipulation of elections as a service. What is your assessment of that?

It’s extremely problematic. It’s a development which shouldn’t just prompt us into reflection but also into action, because it demonstrates a clearly identifiable trend in how disinformation campaigns are being commercialised. Today it is still relatively easy for us to attribute certain campaigns to a given external actor. But in future that will be much more difficult.

Some fake news sounds so ridiculous that you can hardly imagine it taking hold in the population at large. Do we ever worry too much?

No. All I can do is warning against laughing at content like this and thinking it isn’t really a problem for our democracy. We must always think about the underlying structures as well. I always like to stick to an image which the Filipino journalist and Nobel prize winner Maria Ressa keeps coming back to. In her words, the content we see is just the bullet. Behind that there’s a weapon, a whole system which generates and disseminates disinformation. We must look at this system and ask ourselves, are we really well placed to respond to it? Do we know what’s going on? And how can we defend ourselves against it?

Lutz Güllner is Head of the Strategic Communications Division at the European External Activities Service (EEAS) in Brussels, which works on exposing and combating foreign disinformation.

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The report – a summary of the key points

The first EEAS Report on Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference Threats (FIMI) came out in February 2023. It analysed a sample of around 100 cases of information manipulation which were uncovered between October and December 2022. These were dominated by the Russian disinformation campaign in the context of the war in Ukraine. Ukraine and its representatives were directly targeted in 33 cases. The primary motive behind the attack in 60 out of 100 cases was to support the invasion.

Other findings:

• Diplomatic channels are a key element in cases of information manipulation and influencing from abroad.
• Techniques of imitation are becoming more sophisticated and in some cases whole magazine covers have been faked. Information manipulation and influence from abroad is multilingual. Cases were identified in over 30 languages, including 16 EU languages.
• Information manipulation and influence from abroad largely consists of images and video material. The ease and low cost of producing and distributing images and video material online makes these the most popular formats.