
A Powerful Russian Weapon: The Spread of False Stories - r721
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/29/world/europe/russia-sweden-disinformation.html
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hackuser
The gist of it below. I know that's a lot of excerpts, but it's too important
to overlook.

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 _Now, though, disinformation is regarded as an important aspect of Russian
military doctrine, and it is being directed at political debates in target
countries with far greater sophistication and volume than in the past._

...

 _The fundamental purpose of dezinformatsiya, or Russian disinformation,
experts said, is to undermine the official version of events — even the very
idea that there is a true version of events — and foster a kind of policy
paralysis._

...

 _Russia exploits both approaches in a comprehensive assault, Wilhelm Urme, a
spokesman for the Swedish Security Service, said this year when presenting the
agency’s annual report. “We mean everything from internet trolls to propaganda
and misinformation spread by media companies like RT and Sputnik,” he said._

...

 _Tracing individual strands of disinformation is difficult, but in Sweden and
elsewhere, experts have detected a characteristic pattern that they tie to
Kremlin-generated disinformation campaigns. Continue reading the main story

“The dynamic is always the same: It originates somewhere in Russia, on Russia
state media sites, or different websites or somewhere in that kind of
context,” said Anders Lindberg, a Swedish journalist and lawyer.

“Then the fake document becomes the source of a news story distributed on far-
left or far-right-wing websites,” he said. “Those who rely on those sites for
news link to the story, and it spreads. Nobody can say where they come from,
but they end up as key issues in a security policy decision.”

Although the topics may vary, the goal is the same, Mr. Lindberg and others
suggested. “What the Russians are doing is building narratives; they are not
building facts,” he said. “The underlying narrative is, ‘Don’t trust
anyone.’”_

...

 _Last year, the European Parliament accused Russia of “financing radical and
extremist parties” in its member states, and in 2014 the Kremlin extended an
$11.7 million loan to the National Front, the extreme-right party in France.

“The Russians are very good at courting everyone who has a grudge with liberal
democracy, and that goes from extreme right to extreme left,” said Patrik
Oksanen, an editorial writer for the Swedish newspaper group MittMedia. The
central idea, he said, is that “liberal democracy is corrupt, inefficient,
chaotic and, ultimately, not democratic.”

Another message, largely unstated, is that European governments lack the
competence to deal with the crises they face_

...

 _Moscow’s targeting of the West with disinformation dates to a Cold War
program the Soviets called “active measures.” The effort involved leaking or
even writing stories for sympathetic newspapers in India and hoping that they
would be picked up in the West, said Professor Mark N. Kramer, a Cold War
expert at Harvard._

