Reflexive control (reflexive management) is a system of scientific approaches to achieve the goals of influencing various target audiences and elicit a desired response or desired behavior from them.
One of the reflexive control methods is the dissemination of disinformation (or misinformation that, in fact, is not a direct lie, but it disorients the target audience). A vast number of official national bodies and public initiatives have been established to deal with this problem. However, there are special operations conducted by Russian actors and intelligence services that use reflexive control in their work and do not fall under the mandate of organizations countering disinformation.
One example of these social network operations was the spread of true news (on November 18-19, 2023) that took place in 2017.
Information about this case was collected by the Ukrainian OSINT initiative. During 48-hour sharing posts in English, French, Italian, Russian, Ukrainian, Arabic, Greek on various media platforms, about 843 basic posts were published on Facebook and Twitter alone without consideration posting on Telegram. Cumulatively, these posts have garnered several million reposts, comments and responses. At the same time, the highest engagement indicators show more than 17 thousand reposts of just one post on FB, 23 thousand retweets and 5.3 million views of just one tweet.
Such technology is called ‘seeding’ where a certain narrative is ‘sown’ in social networks as a seed. However, ‘seeding’ can be tracked using media monitoring tools.
What was this ‘seeding’ about?
The posts were written in different languages about the values of Anna Muzychuk, a young Ukrainian chess player who had already won several chess championships. She is indeed a young heroine of Ukrainian sports.
These ‘seeding’ posts told that Anna Muzychuk refused to participate in a chess championship held in Saudi Arabia because she did not agree with that country’s laws, which required to cover her head and not to leave her hotel without a male escort. Anna Muzychuk, who stood up for women equal rights, refused to accept an invitation to the championship in protest against these rules which she felt were degrading to women.
Everything stated in the ‘seeding’ posts was true except for one fact the posts avoided to mention about. The story about Muzychuk’s refusal to come to the championship took place in 2017, that is, six years ago.
Between 2017 and 2023, Saudi Arabia has introduced a number of reforms, including one that allows women to travel around the country and public places without a male escort. That is, in fact, this demarche of Anna Muzychuk has lost its relevance. However, the relevance of her values and belief that certain Muslim traditions institutionalized in law insult dignity of women has not been lost. In other words, it is likely that now Anna Muzychuk has the same principled stance as she had six years ago.
Thus, such popular posts and Muzychuk’s principled stance will absolutely be monitored by those who follow pro-Muslim and anti-Muslim sentiments in the world and in Ukraine. After all, this is a public stance of a sportswoman, and therefore it has a political weight. Such a statement attracts the attention of media, journalists, and public initiatives. It also expresses the attitude of Ukrainian opinion leaders towards Islam and the laws of Muslim countries such as Saudi Arabia and its key partners.
So why was it necessary to bring up a story that took place five years ago specifically on November 18-19, 2023? What is the point of this?
On November 20, 2023, Volodymyr Zelenskyi actually stated in his daily talking that Qatar’s government had taken an active role in mediating the return of Bohdan Yermokhin, a young man who had been deported from occupied Mariupol to the Russian Federation where he had reached the age of majority and could be mobilized to go to war in Ukraine.
It is a Russian atrocity to abduct a child from Ukraine and to send him back to kill Ukrainians for Putin when he comes of age. Qatar and Saudi Arabia are actively involved in negotiations to help Ukraine get back its children abducted from occupied territories. Dmytro Lubinets, the Ukrainian Parliament Commissioner for Human Rights, and his colleagues have worked hard on this and other issues to return our children from the clutches of the Kremlin’s terrorist government.
Thus, the ‘seeding’ of information about Anna Muzychuk’s demarche was intended to destroy the process of searching for understanding between Ukraine and the states of the Muslim world, in particular, Qatar and Saudi Arabia. Any value contradictions between Ukrainian society committed to European values and Muslim countries which honor Sharia law should be exploited to show Qatar and Saudi Arabia that Ukraine should not be supported.
It is precisely this value gap that has become the stance of the Ukrainian chess player who has put her human rights above Muslim traditions and laws. And, in this act, the Ukrainians would be on her side.
But, every such value decision has a flip side of the coin that will be used to break our relationship. Our values will increasingly be used as our vulnerabilities.
Unfortunately, the current system of ‘countering disinformation’ which is just developing in Ukraine and the European Union countries cannot overcome such challenges, because it is not designed for these purposes. And because they are in a different realm of knowledge, in a different area of competence.
This is why, I repeat in my articles that the concept of ‘countering disinformation’ is already outdated and needs to be revised. We are internally not ready to overcome such challenges. And no one in the world is ready. This is why the attacks of the Russian intelligence agencies continue to be more successful.
Author: Dmytro Zolotukhin
Public task financed by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Poland within thegrant comp etition “Public Diplomacy 2023”