Russia repeatedly uses the potential of the humanities to create and build messages to achieve information goals. So, for example, the entire grids of TG channels and blogs are created in Telegram — for completely different vectors, from war journalism to international relations. Thus, they are creating the illusion of pluralism.
If the situation with war journalism and economics is more or less clear, but the situation with the international topic is a little different.
For example, a person who is a local historian or a whole team is often used to run channels depending on the degree of the channel promotion and activity in a particular region.
Thus, for example, TG channel with 20k subscribers deals exclusively with Polish topics, while it should be noted that the style of graphics is common to the grid of Rybar Telegram channel.
In other cases, however, it may just be trivial reciprocal reposting, which is essentially promoting a grid of channels. Like the “Sex, Cartels, Frida Kahlo” channel from the Rybar grid that specializes exclusively in Latin America. It has larger staff, wider coverage and more posts respectively. At the same time, we can see reciprocal reposts instead of the Rybar graphic material.
And Russian propaganda has many such channels. This reach and breadth allows it to claim the title of “Alternative” media, especially when it is highlighted by the English-language version of the Rybar TG channel.
As a result, Russian propaganda has the opportunity to be rebroadcast to Western audiences. In this context, presenting the news about their regions is favorable to Russia. Now we can observe a rather substantial group of people who do not trust the usual media and are looking for alternative sources of information. Due to its breadth of awareness, Rybar channel grid can influence the formation of opinions, like the example below.
In general, NATO countries should focus on the alternative media. Blocking is unlikely to solve the problem as it will not eliminate the request for information. And it will only aggravate its search and speed up the issue of Russian propaganda.
In fact, the point is to create centralized communication channels for citizen awareness. And this project does not look difficult, it is enough just to use the Russian tactics in the context of attracting the regional specialists and centralized publication of brief theses texts presenting the specific ideas to an audience.
Author: Hlib Parfionow
Public task financed by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Poland within thegrant comp etition “Public Diplomacy 2023”
