EU struggling with propaganda
System to monitor Russian meddling has yet to issue alert
BRUSSELS — The European Union launched an ambitious effort this year to combat election interference: an early warning system that would sound alarms about Russian propaganda.
Despite high expectations, however, records show that the system has become a repository for a mishmash of information, produced no alerts and is at risk of becoming defunct.
Indeed, even before the European Parliament elections this spring, an inside joke was circulating in Brussels about the Rapid Alert System: It’s not rapid. There are no alerts. And there’s no system.
Europe’s early struggles offer lessons for other nations, including the United States, where intelligence officials expect Russia to try to interfere in next year’s presidential election. In many ways, the European Union has been more aggressive than Washington in demanding changes from social media companies and seeking novel ways to fight disinformation.
But doing so has pushed the bloc into thorny areas where free speech, propaganda and national politics intersect. Efforts to identify and counter disinformation have been not only deeply complicated, but also politically charged.
The new Rapid Alert System — a highly touted network to notify governments about Russian efforts before they metastasized, as they did during the 2016 American elections — is just the latest example.
Working out of a sixthfloor office suite in downtown Brussels this spring, for example, European analysts spotted suspicious Twitter accounts pushing disinformation about an Austrian political scandal. Just days before the European elections, the tweets showed signs of Russian political meddling.
So European officials prepared to blast a warning on the alert system. But they never did, as they debated whether it was serious enough to justify sounding an alarm. In fact, they never issued any alerts at all.
The European Union has portrayed its efforts to combat Russian disinformation as a high-profile success. But interviews with more than a dozen current and former European officials, as well as a review of internal documents, reveal a process hamstrung by disagreements like the one that killed the Austrian alert.
Now, even officials who believe deeply in the effort say that without changes, the alert system could quickly become obsolete.
Jakub Janda, who writes on Russian disinformation as executive director of European Values, a Czech-based policy organization, compared the Rapid Alert System to the stories of fake towns built to impress royalty.
“It’s a Potemkin village,” Junda said. “People in the know, they don’t take it seriously.”
Senior European officials in charge of the counter-disinformation effort strongly reject that notion and say the bloc is forging into new territory. They said the new alert system had already become an important clearinghouse for experts and officials across the bloc.
They point out that their commitment to the issue began in 2015, with the creation of a task force of analysts who scour the Internet and who have publicly debunked Russian disinformation. The alert system — a private computer network in which any country can contribute intelligence or blast alerts — was created early this year as an attempt to build on that effort.
“To be very clear, there is no similar operation going on anywhere in the world,” said Johannes Bahrke, a spokesman for the European Commission.
Bahrke said officials stand by the analysis in the Austrian case. Lutz Gullner, one of the top European officials overseeing the counter-disinformation campaign, said the absence of an alert had been a reflection of his team’s caution.
“We agreed we need to be careful,” he said. With each new piece of propaganda, he added, analysts ask, “What do we do with this? How do we define it?”
Russia’s use of European websites and social media accounts — and the rise of farright political parties, whose messages often converge with Russia’s, have only complicated such calculations. Suspected Russian operatives, for example, have used ostensibly Irish Facebook accounts to try to inflame tensions in Northern Ireland, researchers recently found. And far-right copycats in Italy have aligned themselves with Kremlin talking points.
Yet those campaigns are effectively off-limits to European analysts. They are prohibited from calling out or debunking propaganda produced by European websites or media, a limitation that is intended to guard against creeping infringements on free speech. Instead, they are restricted to tracking official Russian media sources and issuing regular reports debunking claims about Europe.
Some of the biggest supporters of the effort are also its biggest critics. They say Brussels is deliberately masking problems. Last month’s report on the elections, for instance, gave the union credit for deterring Russian propaganda. Yet the same report also says instances of Russian disinformation doubled this year.
“This is the EU advertising — that it’s doing great on this issue, when it’s really not,” Janda said.