The European Union’s East StratCom Task Force is mandated to detect, document and debunk Kremlin disinformation, i.e. verifiably false or misleading information that could cause public harm.
The Task Force’s publicly available database contains over 13,000 cases, which allows study of patterns in the narratives of Kremlin disinformation. Any issue – from migration to unemployment or COVID-19 – can be narrated according to five core narratives: elites vs the People, threatened values, threatened sovereignty, the imminent collapse and “Hahaganda” – a portmanteau that combines “haha” and “propaganda”. This report uses the pandemic to study how disinformation is spread by Kremlin-controlled media according to these five core narratives Narration is a core element of human communication.[1] People tend to process information through narratives rather than factual statements. We do not accept a statement because of its factual accuracy, but based on whether it lies within an appealing narrative or is narrated by an appealing person or entity. The EU-funded database on Kremlin disinformation,[2] which has been maintained by the European External Action Service East StratCom Task Force since late 2015, currently contains over 13,000 cases. This allows study of the patterns of narratives in Kremlin disinformation. The East StratCom Task Force is mandated to detect, document and debunk Kremlin disinformation. According to the European Commission’s Action Plan against Disinformation,[3] disinformation is understood as verifiably false or misleading information that is created, presented and disseminated for economic gain or to intentionally deceive the public, and could cause public harm. At the time the Task Force was established, Russian state actors in the field of disinformation were seen as the greatest threat to the EU.[4]
The East StratCom Task Force collects cases of disinformation for the database, delimited by three factors: (a) a claim must be either directly or indirectly connected to Russian state actors; (b) a claim must be verifiably false; and (c) there must be malign intent. To put it simply, a claim that is factually wrong, such as that “Vladimir Putin is the biggest man in the world”, would not make it into the database, even though it is verifiably false. Nor would a value statement such as “Vladimir Putin is the greatest man in the world”. It is possible to agree or disagree with this statement, but it is not verifiably false. A claim that “Vladimir Putin is the most popular leader in the world”, however, can be verified and can be said to have malign intent. Should such a claim be found in an outlet connected to Russian state actors, it would be added to the database. The mandate of the East StratCom Task Force is limited to media outlets connected to Russian state actors. Claims made by European individuals or in EU-based media outlets are not covered, unless they are openly attributed to an outlet owned or managed by a Russian state or state-affiliated actor. All of the current more than 13,000 cases of disinformation in the database have been inputted manually from information provided by a network of experts in EU member states and partnership countries. Each individual case is attached to a “debunk”, which explains the lack of factual support for the claim. These cases constitute a corpus of text available for further study. It is possible, for instance, to easily establish that Ukraine has been targeted by Kremlin disinformation more than any other nation in the world. Roughly one-third of the cases concern Ukraine. Among EU member states, Germany and Poland top the list of Kremlin targets. In comparison with their size, the Baltic states are highly over represented. While the database’s individual cases are collated according to their factual rather than narrative function, the totality of the collection can be used to identify narrative patterns. First and foremost, the database exploits certain keywords. It is easy to identify the number of cases devoted to the topic of NATO[5] or to the COVID-19 pandemic,[6] to various countries and in which languages. Identifying the narratives, however, demands an entirely different approach. A “narrative” is the how in storytelling. In journalism, the term often used is “spin”; in dramaturgy the term is “plot”. As noted above, we communicate through narratives. We do not simply relay facts or figures – we express wishes and fears, and other sentiments, and we create relations and a rapport with our interlocutors.
via Utrikespolitiska institutet: Narrating Disinformation: The Templates for Kremlin Lies