The Russia-Ukraine Information War

President Biden: Six days ago, Russia's Vladimir Putin sought to shape the very foundations of the free world, thinking he could make it then to his menacing ways, but he badly miscalculated.

Brian Lehrer: President Biden there with one of the most interesting lines about the war in Ukraine from the State of the Union address, not that Putin is bad everybody agrees about that, but that he miscalculated, misjudge the political and emotional temperament and temperature of the world.

Joining me now is a guest who has been struck, particularly by the failure of Putin's disinformation machine. The same one that's been so effective at helping Donald Trump get elected and dividing the American people. Sinan Aral is the director of the MIT initiative on the digital economy and author of the book The Hype Machine. Now, he's got a Washington post-op-ed, called "Ukraine is winning the information war." Sinan, thanks for giving us some time. Welcome to WNYC.

Sinan Aral: Thanks, Brian. Thanks for having me.

Brian Lehrer: Your article starts with some historical information, more comparisons beginning in 2008, with Putin's invasion of Georgia, and then more into the social media era, how he used Facebook and Twitter during his invasion of Ukraine in 2014. What happened then?

Sinan Aral: Well, Putin and Russia are historically expecting to win the information war, whenever they are in the geopolitical sphere. In Georgia, and in the annexation of Crimea, they were way ahead of the social media platforms and of Ukraine and the international community, but this time around, I think it's a different story. They are finding themselves losing the information war, in part, because President Zelenskyy has been so effective in his communication and in part, because the social media platforms are much more prepared than they used to be to deal with this kind of war.

Brian Lehrer: You write in this article, and in your book, The Hype Machine that Russia's misinformation campaign in Crimea, the invasion of Ukraine in 2014, accounted for the lion's share of the largest spike in partially true, partially fake news stories in the platform's history. Can you describe that gray area of partially true, partially false, and how it's manipulated?

Sinan Aral: Yes. We did a study, which we published in Science in 2018, where we studied all of the verified true and false news stories that ever spread on Twitter from 2006 to 2017. One of the categories of information we studied was what we call mixed, which means that the fact-checkers called these articles partially true and partially false. When we tracked partially true, partially false information over those 10 years, we found one spike that was four times larger than any other spike over that decade, and that was during the annexation of Crimea, the two months of the annexation of Crimea.

When we looked into those stories, we found that these were stories that were essentially propagating the exact narrative that Sergeĭ Lavrov was propagating in the public sphere. They were essentially stories on social media designed to support the Russian view of the annexation of Crimea. It was overwhelming every other type of what we call mixed news in Twitter's recorded history.

Brian Lehrer: So interesting. What about in the US presidential campaigns, especially in 2016, those who aren't explicitly in your op-ed?

Sinan Aral: This op-ed was about Russia and Ukraine. I focus mainly on the stories there, but as we know, through the reporting and the science of multiple different research teams and investigative journalists, Russia conducted a very large information war campaign during the 2016 US presidential election. I think something like 126 million people in America, voting-aged Americans saw misinformation directly coming from Russia during that election. I think it was something like 20 million Tweets, from accounts with something like 6 million followers. It was a very large and concerted effort during that election.

Brian Lehrer: This time, during these past seven days of the invasion of Ukraine?

Sinan Aral: I think this time we have two factors that are different. We have a Ukrainian President that has really made it his main weapon to try to win the hearts and minds of both the international community, the Ukrainian citizens' community, as well as Russian citizens, to try to counter Putin's narrative at home in Russia. In addition, the social media platforms have done a lot more this time around than they did in Crimea, than they did in Georgia, or even than they did in the US presidential campaign. We're seeing the outcome of that. We're seeing unprecedented international community support.

I think you are reporting and other people's reporting on the unprecedented steps of sanctions of disconnecting Russia from Swift of the EU sending military supplies and armaments of Germany about facing on Nord Stream 2 and about facing on their long-standing policy of not sending arms into foreign conflicts. These are all in part because of a war of information of President Zelenskyy to essentially win the hearts and minds of the international community.

He went on Telegram, the encrypted messaging platform, to speak directly to the Russian people to counter Putin's own narrative at home. Obviously, he has pleaded with Ukrainian citizens to fight for their country, and even pleaded with foreigners, to come into Ukraine to fight to save Western democracy. While we're seeing upwards of 500,000, which will soon be 1 million, 2 million refugees leaving Ukraine, we're actually seeing people cross the border in the other direction to come fight. I think that a lot of that has to do with the information war that he's been waging.

Brian Lehrer: That's so interesting. The Germany story that you referred to is so interesting, that they stopped the pipeline for oil and natural gas from Russia that they were building for so long, despite US objections. Now, they have halted that and sending weapons to Ukraine, something that Germany did not want to do. I guess public opinion plays a role in their decision to do that. Did you say earlier, and I didn't see this in your op-ed, maybe I missed it, were you given credit to Twitter and Facebook, the much-maligned Twitter and Facebook, for actually doing a good job this time of tamping down Russian disinformation?

Sinan Aral: They're doing better than they have done in the past, in terms of their policies. I think they could still be doing a lot more. Just to give you a little bit of a feeling for what they are doing. Facebook has spun up a Special Operations Center, staffed with native Russian and Ukrainian speakers to monitor misinformation about the war. They're adding warning labels to war-related images that its software, the texts, are more than a year old and so definitely can't be about this war. They've restricted access to content from state-affiliated Russian media outlets, like RT and Sputnik.

YouTube is restricting access to Russian state-owned media outlets, removing those channels from recommendations, limiting their content and reach across the platform. Twitter has banned all ads in Ukraine and Russia. They're adding labels to Tweets with links to Russian state-affiliated media. They're downranking this content in their algorithmic timelines.

The one outlier, which I think is worth pointing out is TikTok. TikTok is obviously Chinese-owned. They have no real comprehensive policy on policing the information about the conflict. They are blocking state-owned Russian media in the EU, but this information is flowing freely in Ukraine and Russia, and to the extent that now TikTok has been dubbed by some observers, war talk, in part because TikTok itself is organizing videos about the war coming out of Ukraine and Russia into a convenient, "discover playlist" with the same name, war talk, where you can watch videos of Ukrainians and Russians, some of it, much of it misinformation, some of it real information flowing freely in Ukraine and Russia.

Brian Lehrer: You wrote, which is very interesting to me, it's as if Putin doesn't realize that social media has transitioned from text-based to video-based information since his last invasion of Ukraine in 2014. The last thing, assuming the war continues, do you see the next phases of information warfare or has Putin basically already lost the propaganda war for global hearts and minds?

Sinan Aral: I think that it's really important to note that while the information war is important, we can't disregard the fact that the actual war is the story. The actual war is the story. There are troops in 40-mile long columns coming towards Kiev. Cities are being surrounded, cities are being bombed, people are losing their lives. It is a devastating and horrific story that I know you and many others are focused on. I'm not trying to make the argument that the information war is somehow paramount. I do think that the information war is a really important part of the story, because it motivates the protests in Russia. It motivates Ukrainian citizens to defend their homeland. It motivates the international community to unify against this invasion, and it will affect decisions in the country, in Russia and in the international community.

I think that what will happen going forward, is that we will see Russia try to make inroads in the information war. I think the fact that they hit the Television Tower yesterday, was an example of how it's clear that they see that they're losing this war, and they want to do everything they can to shut down the information channels that Zelinsky is using so effectively. I hope he keeps speaking. I hope that this information keeps flowing in a way that can help bring an end to this conflict, but at the end of the day, it's the conflict itself that's the real story.

Brian Lehrer: Sinan Aral, Director of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy, and author of the book, The Hype Machine. Now he's got a Washington post op-ed called "Ukraine is winning the information war." Sinan, thank you so much.

Sinan Aral: Thanks for having me, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer, WNYC, much more to come.

 

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