Assessing Russian Propaganda Diffusion and its Effects in America

• In Event: Global Developments in Digital Mis-/Disinformation and Potential Solutions

Abstract

Countries routinely use information resources in order to shape international attitudes and policies. This is particularly true today with the ease of disseminating information (and disinformation) online allowing operations to move with speed and scale unimaginable during the Cold War (Rid 2020). For Russia, no issue is more sensitive to their interests than Ukraine, and the movement of large numbers of forces to the Ukraine border in 2021 has added immense pressure to a country already facing a Russian-backed insurrection and the annexation of Crimea. The information or propaganda dimension of statecraft does not stand apart from these maneuvers, it forms an adjunct to them, seeking to shape how movements in a military space produce political consequences – particularly they seek to influence whether governments and publics around the world will support Ukraine in its struggle against Russian aggression.
This research studies Russian efforts to influence perceptions of Ukraine and its efforts to threaten Ukraine’s territory by using the Global Database of Events, Language, and Tone (GDELT) libraries of English language and translated online news coverage of Ukraine. GDELT is the largest openly available database of news and human events with global reach and over a billion articles. GDELT is powered by Google’s massive computational power to monitor online activity; translate it from over 100 languages; and code each article for events, themes, entities, and tonality. Data collection begins January 1, 2021 and continues into 2022 as the situation on the Russian-Ukraine border is unfolding.
The research filters GDELT for all articles that include Ukraine as a location and extracts the article and relevant metadata including the URL, themes, tone, article outlinks, headlines, authors, named entities, and enumerated events. It then segments the articles by the country of origin for each news organization. In addition, the research collects Google Search Trends and Google News Search Trends data over the same period of time to determine when search interest increases and what terms are being used to search for information and news stories about Ukraine in the United States as the US is the key negotiator in the standoff with Russia.
The research addresses the following two research questions:
How effective are Russian state outlets in influencing the coverage of Ukraine in outlets beyond their borders? Russia’s propaganda efforts have historically made use of front organizations in the media field and foreign journalists to promote agendas (Bagge 2019, 140). Does this model of covert influence translate into a digital domain? Influence here is measured in terms of the number of Russian state-controlled outlets among the outlinks of in Ukraine articles from other sources and the appearance of Russian media topics in non-Russian media over short time intervals.

Does overt (“white”) propaganda, “gray” propaganda (i.e. propaganda of ambiguous affiliation), or domestic U.S. media sources drive attention to Ukraine more? Most recent research on Russian propaganda has focused either on overt state propaganda (Carter and Carter 2021) or the covert trolling operations led by the Internet Research Agency (Freelon et al. 2020; Jensen 2018; Lukito et al. 2020). Much less is understood today about the gray outlets that tend to support the strategic messaging of a foreign state actor without any declaration of affiliation. While many overt (“white’) propaganda outlets are required under the Foreign Agent Registration Act to declare that they are state-owned media entities, gray outlets escape such labelling as they lack clear attribution. Recent research shows that unfamiliar news is often more trusted than known entities in the United States given the levels of polarization around the news media (Peterson and Alliamong, forthcoming). The relationship between media content and cognitive orientation indicated by theories of agenda setting (McCombs and Stroud 2014) will be substantiated by the correspondence between the parsed article themes at any time, and the search themes and related search terms recorded by Google.
The theoretical contributions include outlining the diffuse networks involved in of foreign influence involved in agenda setting for American audiences.

Author

• Michael J. Jensen, University of Canberra