Kremlin’s cyber weapons spark fears and fantasies

MOScOW: From Donald Trump’s election to Brexit and the Catalan crisis, accusations that the Kremlin is meddling in Western domestic affairs have heightened fears over Russian hackers, trolls and state-controlled media.

While the first accusations against Moscow came following a 2016 hack attack on the US Democratic Party’s servers, they rapidly multiplied after Trump’s election, revealing a whole range of tools used by the Kremlin to serve its interests.

Fears initially centred on mysteri- ous Russian hackers who supposedly worked for Moscow’s security services as part of a cyber war but then shifted to a flood of online articles and social media posts aiming to explain Moscow’s position and play up the failings of Western democracies.

In the latest episode of the saga that is dominating Trump’s presidency, Russian state television channel RT, accused of broadcasting Kremlin propaganda abroad, complied with Washington demands in November to register as a “foreign agent” in the United States.

A few weeks earlier, social media giant Twitter announced it would stop distributing content sponsored by RT and linked news agency Sputnik while Facebook and Google promised to do more to fight Moscow’s “disinformation”.

Panic has spread across the Western world: Madrid is worried about Russian-controlled “manipulation” of the Catalan crisis, while British analysts see signs of Russian influence in the Brexit vote and concerns are growing in Germany and France over possible interference in various polls.

The Kremlin, meanwhile, has dismissed the accusations as “hysterical” and “Russophobic”, insisting there is no hard evidence for any of the charges.

Russia has worked hard to increase its “soft power” following what it perceived as a defeat in the “media war” during its brief war with pro-Western Georgia in 2008.

These efforts led to the expansion of Kremlin-controlled media for a foreign audience. — AFP