The EU’s intelligence service has launched a platform to address Russia’s use of media in the war on Ukraine.
EU foreign affairs chief Josep Borrell announced the formation of the Information Sharing and Analysis Center within the EU’s European External Action Service (EEAS), the EU’s foreign intelligence agency, on February 7th, during his opening remarks at a conference organised by the EEAS on Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (FIMI).
Attendees and speakers included EU officials, representatives from the U.S. and UK, and experts in media, communications, and regional politics.
Borrell said the Russian invasion of Ukraine marked a significant change in Europe’s security situation and that Russia “is using information manipulation and interference as a crucial instrument of this war.” He said the EEAS had collected 15,000 examples of intentional disinformation coordinated by Russia since 2015. New evidence has been amassing since 2022, when the EEAS set up the website euvsdisinfo.eu where examples of Russian distortion and disinformation are published.
Coinciding with the conference, the EEAS’s Stratcom division, which monitors disinformation, also released the first-ever report on disinformation against Europe. The report laid out a sample of the unit’s work in 100 instances of foreign interference through disinformation that it had detected and analysed between October and December 2022.
It concluded that Russia and China are the principal actors in information attacks on Europe, with Russia responsible for most of the negative information campaigns. The two countries have also collaborated occasionally. Stratcom also found that most campaigns focused on garnering support for the Russian invasion of Ukraine by shaping the narrative or creating alternative headlines. The report stated that
FIMI is mostly intended to distract and distort. Russia (42%) and China (56%) mostly intend to direct attention to a different actor or narrative or to shift blame (“distract”). Russia attempts to change the framing and narrative (“distort”) relatively more often (35%) than China (18%) followed by China,” the report explained.
According to the report, the campaigns mostly use images and videos, and deep fake techniques are also improving:
Impersonations of international and trusted organisations and individuals are used by Russian actors particularly to target Ukraine. Print and TV media are most often impersonated, with magazines seeing their entire style copied.
The campaigns are disseminated across diplomatic and social media channels.
In his statements, Borrell explained that the EU planned to step up its game against Russian propaganda by digging deeper into the pathways of information flow to find the source:
We are able to show that Russia has abandoned facts altogether. But today I have the feeling that it is not enough and that we need to go further … We need to understand how these disinformation campaigns are organised so that we can organise our answer and to identify the actors of this manipulation.
He added: “We have to do more research on the social media platforms, we have to study how does it flow, where does it come from, and what are the results.”
He also said that it would require working directly with social media platforms:
We heard the news that Twitter is planning to restrict this access. This would be a serious step back from early commitments. We need more transparency and accountability, not less. I call on Twitter —and on its owner—to ensure that all obligations that they have taken will be honoured.
Borrell also emphasised how, as the EU’s top diplomat, he has seen the effects of Russia’s weaponised media campaigns, particularly in Africa. He explained,
I cannot travel without facing the same questions: When are you going to stop this war? Because the consequences of this war are unbearable for us, in Africa, in the Middle East, everywhere.
Russia is creating hardships around the world and trying to convince people that it is our fault … There are campaigns that swap causes and effect. They somehow portray the Russian aggression as a necessary reaction to an alleged threat by Ukraine or the West at large … I had to discuss that with many people around the world.
He noted that the Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergey Lavrov has recently visited Mali and Eritrea, “trying to spread lies about who is guilty of what is happening there,” Borrell said.
Experts on Africa were among the conference speakers.
Politico reports that one EEAS official said the Information Sharing and Analysis Center is designed to be a decentralised platform to exchange information in real time with NGOs, countries, and cybersecurity agencies to better understand and more quickly respond to emerging threats and narratives.
