Since the start of the Ukraine war, the Russian propaganda machine has been running at full speed – and it’s working. The US media and politicians also play an important role here: fake news also seeps into Western society.
Even Vladimir Putin’s justification for the invasion of Ukraine reads like disinformation. Russian troops had set out for a “special military operation” in the neighboring country. The word “war” is still banned in Russia today – the propaganda works. But not only in Russia itself. US experts on information manipulation have now established that there are synergy effects between Russian fake news, US reporting and statements by American politicians and activists, particularly in the US.
Propaganda ping-pong: US media and politicians support Kremlin disinformation
Russian propaganda is currently fighting a two-front war: on the one hand, it must keep the Russian people in the dark about what is actually happening in Ukraine in order to justify the war, which must not be called that. On the other hand, the Kremlin is trying to make itself felt and to spread its crude theses abroad.
Both tasks seem to be working at the moment – at least in part. While in Russia a large part of the population still does not know, or does not want to know, about the war, American media, right-wing politicians and Moscow activists are spreading disinformation in the United States.
One name keeps coming up: Tucker Carlson. The Fox News presenter has a loyal following: around three million Americans tune in to his show “Tucker Carlson Tonight” every day, in which he has often spread half-truths full of polemics or even false information. This shows his talent for leaving hints in the room that can easily be (mis)interpreted.
During the corona pandemic, Carlson liked to work through the vaccination debate: He explained vaguely and ambiguously that the government was using the vaccination against the corona virus as “social control”, only to mention Bill Gates the next moment. Because he has “great power” over what we do with our bodies, as the “NZZ” reports.
Tucker Carlson as a starting point for fake news
Ever since Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine, Carlson has also found a new favorite topic. In several comments, he adopted Russian war propaganda, which disparaged the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyj.
Carlson serves as a resource for some right-wing Republican politicians and activists who are happy to share or recycle his posts.
Last month, for example, Carlson unprovenly repeated a right-wing conspiracy narrative that President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, was allegedly involved in funding a bioweapons laboratory in Ukraine.
Right-wing politicians and activists jumped on this disinformation, as did the Kremlin—a feedback loop.
Two conservative Republican congressmen, Madison Cawthorn and Marjorie Taylor Greene, also delighted Moscow last month by condemning Zelenskyy without evidence, using conspiratorial terms that drew bipartisan criticism. Cawthorn called Zelenskyy a “criminal” and his government “incredibly corrupt”, while Greene similarly called Zelenskyy “corrupt”.
In addition, former Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, a Democrat, sought to soften Putin’s crackdown on independent media in Russia. Reporters and other citizens in Russia face up to 15 years in prison for not following the Kremlin’s line in spreading what Moscow considers “fake” news about the invasion of Ukraine.
Gabbard made the claim that “what we see here [in Amerika] experience is not so different from what we experience in Russia”.
Russian state television recently hailed Gabbard as “our friend Tulsi” while airing a Carlson interview with her in which Gabbard accused Biden of “lying” about his true motives in Ukraine. Earlier in Warsaw, Biden said that Putin “cannot remain in power.”
According to disinformation experts, the false narratives of the US right and the Kremlin took some new turns during the war. Both the abundance of conspiracy-heavy messages have increased, as well as those that are obviously false.
“A two-way stream of conspiratorial narratives”
“We often see a two-way stream of conspiratorial narratives flowing from the American right-wing information ecosystem to the Kremlin and back again, creating a feedback loop that reinforces and supports the messages of both groups,” said Bret Schafer, who leads the information manipulation team at the Alliance for Securing Democracy, the British “Guardian”.
Schafer noted that the feedback loop “is best exemplified by recent efforts to link Hunter Biden to a US-led bioweapons program in Ukraine.
Here one can clearly see how a popular domestic narrative merges with a foreign disinformation campaign that seems more familiar and therefore more plausible to certain target groups.
Schafer added that “influential American conspiracy theorists first pushed the narrative and then had it reinforced and legitimized at the highest level – the Russian government”.
Thomas Rid, a professor at Johns Hopkins University, has been researching Russian information warfare for years. He told the New York Times: “One wonders if the US right influences Russia or if Russia influences the US right. The truth is: they influence each other – they push the same narratives.”
“Putin and his oligarchs are aware of their influence in right-wing American politics and exploit it whenever they can,” said Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse.
There is also a clear preference for Putinesque rulers in some corners of the Republican Party, beginning with Trump. All of this shows that more transparency is needed for the American people to understand who is influencing their policies and why, Whitehouse added.
Assessing the effects of the feedback loop between Moscow and parts of the American right is “always extraordinarily difficult,” explains Schafer. But if influential political figures and pundits repeated the same narratives on the most-watched news channels in Russia and the United States, those narratives would reach large audiences.
Given that many in this audience dislike and distrust “mainstream” media, no amount of fact-checking and objective reporting can change attitudes toward accepting certain untruths as facts, Schafer said.
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Source: Stern
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