The new Western politics: Blame Russia, but not too much
Missed a train? Lost a vote? Blame us!” reads one of the many posters recently posted on London’s underground transport system for RT, the Russianbased satellite broadcaster formerly known as Russia Today. The ads are yet another sign of just how overtly Moscow and its outlets have been reveling in their newfound reputation for driving events in Western politics. But it also points to a growing and increasingly difficult dynamic.
As the United States, Britain and other European nations obsess ever more deeply about potential Russian interference within their borders, they ironically risk playing further into the Kremlin’s hands.
President Donald Trump might remain unconvinced, but outside the White House there remains little doubt that President Vladimir Putin’s government has deliberately attempted to drive political events in Europe and the United States.
US intelligence agencies are united in their conclusion that Moscow interfered directly during the 2016 presidential election, primarily through hacking Democratic Party e-mails and disseminating their content to discredit Hillary Clinton. In Europe the evidence is even more widespread. The European Union’s counter-disinformation campaign “EU Disinfo” says it has tracked more than 1,300 examples of pro-Kremlin interference this year.
Moscow’s hand is seen as trying to drive support for the far right across the continent as well as a host of disparate causes like Brexit and independence for Catalonia. Particularly in its most recent campaigns, social media analysts believe Russia has been using an army of automated social media feeds, dubbed “bots,” to get its message across.
But it also has more traditional media arms such as the website “Sputnik” and the RT network. Both Sputnik and RT have their own considerable web presence. Google last month announced it would “derank” both to give them less prominence on Google News and other platforms.
Their stories, however, continue to be widely spread on other social media. Even directly Russian government-linked social media outlets such as the Russian Embassy Twitter feed in London have been openly “trolling” western governments and institutions, mocking them with jokes and sometimes ungrammatical rants.
None of this behaviour is entirely new — but it has increased substantially in the last two years.
Ever since Russia annexed Crimea and began a wider war in eastern Ukraine in 2014, a growing number of Western analysts have believed that Putin is deliberately doing whatever he can generate discord and chaos within the West.
Even more than the intensity of Russia’s activity, the level of attention now paid to it has increased.
Britain’s Prime Minister Theresa May recently devoted an entire speech to the topic, saying such actions “threaten the international order.”
On the surface, the volume of potential Russian interference on social media can seem massive.
According to one estimate, Russian-related Twitter feeds were responsible for more than 1.5 million election-related tweets during the 2016 campaign.
However, compared to the sheer volume of other election-related material published during the campaign, the Russian contribution is unlikely to have been the only factor.
The same is true when it comes to the rise of Europe’s far right. There’s no doubt that Russia has pushed some very divisive storylines, including around the alleged rape of a 13-year-old Russianspeaking girl in Germany — an incident authorities say was later proven never to have happened.
Those who monitor far-right chat rooms closely, however, say that Russia-related content remains only a very small proportion of the traffic.
Most simply remains homegrown, according to a report by the UK’s Royal Institute of International Affairs. That doesn’t mean Russian involvement isn’t real
Russia clearly did what it could to exploit those feelings and trends, but it did not create them.
Politicians need to find ways to address their concerns and reduce political polarisation, not look for excuses about why voters turned against them.
That is obviously easier said than done — every Western government has been desperately searching for policy solutions since the 2008 financial crisis, with often relatively little to show for it.
But that doesn’t mean it’s not policymakers continue to try. vital that