(I never put much stock into the whole Russiagate interference in the
2016 election story, especially as promoted by Rachel Maddow. However, I
was always troubled by how so many "anti-imperialist" websites like
Consortium News tended to repeat Kremlin talking points. This article
shows how this remains a real problem. It mentions Duran and Zero Hedge,
two conspiracist websites but I have a feeling that a lot of the crap
that originates on RT.com feeds Grayzone and others deemed more
respectable.)
NY Times, Aug. 12, 2020
A Bible Burning, a Russian News Agency and a Story Too Good to Check Out
By Matthew Rosenberg and Julian E. Barnes
WASHINGTON — For some of President Trump’s loudest cheerleaders, it was
a story too good to check out: Black Lives Matters protesters in
Portland, Ore., had burned a stack of Bibles, and then topped off the
fire with American flags. There was even a video to prove it.
The story was a near-perfect fit for a central Trump campaign talking
point — that with liberals and Democrats comes godless disorder — and it
went viral among Republicans within hours of appearing earlier this
month. The New York Post wrote about it, as did The Federalist, saying
that the protesters had shown “their true colors.” Senator Ted Cruz, the
Texas Republican, said of the protesters, “This is who they are.” Donald
Trump Jr., the president’s son, tweeted that antifa had moved to “the
book burning phase.”
The truth was far more mundane. A few protesters among the many
thousands appear to have burned a single Bible — and possibly a second —
for kindling to start a bigger fire. None of the other protesters seemed
to notice or care.
Yet in the rush to paint all the protesters as Bible-burning zealots,
few of the politicians or commentators who weighed in on the incident
took the time to look into the story’s veracity, or to figure out that
it had originated with a Kremlin-backed video news agency. And now, days
later, the Portland Bible burnings appear to be one of the first viral
Russian disinformation hits of the 2020 presidential campaign.
With Election Day drawing closer, the Russian efforts to influence the
vote appear to be well underway. American intelligence officials said
last week that Russia was using a range of techniques to denigrate
Democrats and their presumptive presidential nominee, Joseph R. Biden
Jr. And late last month, intelligence officials briefed Congress on
Russian efforts — both covert and overt — to stoke anger over the
nationwide racial-justice protests.
Russian officials have aggressively sought to refute the allegations.
But American officials are growing increasingly confident in their
assessment, and say the Russian tactics are evolving. Moscow, they say,
has shifted away from the fake social media accounts and bots used by
the Internet Research Agency and other groups to amplify false articles
ahead of the 2016 vote. Instead, the Russians are relying increasingly
on English-language news sites to push out incendiary stories that can
be picked up and spread by Americans, many of whom have proved as eager
as foreign powers to stoke partisan divisions inside the United States.
The Russian technique is a kind of information laundering, akin to money
laundering. Stories originate with Russian-backed news sites, some of
them directly connected to Moscow’s spy agencies, officials and experts
said. They are then picked up by Americans on social media or in
domestic news outlets, and their origins quickly become obscured. Often,
by the time a story reaches most of its American audience, there is
little to indicate that it was created to fuel grievances and deepen
political divisions.
Some of the news outlets used by Russia are well known, like RT, the
Kremlin-financed operation whose video news agency, Ruptly, put out the
video of the Bible burning. Others are more obscure, including some
directly connected to Russia’s spy agencies, and are used to actively
test themes and stories to see which ones play best.
Some stories are tailored to appeal to conservatives, others to an
audience that might be best described as the alt-left. Many of them are
made to exacerbate racial tensions ahead of the election, officials said
earlier this year, well before the recent civil rights protests began.
Some of the stories spread by the Russian news outlets are outright
fictions. But the most useful ones — the ones most likely to go viral —
are those with a kernel of truth, like the tale of Bible burnings in
Portland. It offers a case study in how the Russian
information-laundering operation works, and how potent a weapon it can be.
The video on which the story is based came from Ruptly, which regularly
streams a live feed from the protests for a few hours each night and
then clips together a short video of highlights. The livestream and the
clip later edited down by Ruptly shows at least one Bible burning after
midnight on Aug. 1, as some protesters were trying to build a fire.
Another clip shows what may have been the same Bible or a second one. A
small crowd can be seen hanging around, some of the people watching the
flames grow higher, but the scene looks and sounds as if it is far from
the main action of the protest.
The Bible appears to be used as kindling by two protesters working on
the fire. There is no discernible reaction from the crowd as the book is
put in the flames along with twigs and branches, notebook pages and
newspapers. The crowd does cheer when an American flag is thrown on the
flames.
Apart from the Ruptly videographer, only one other journalist — a local
television reporter — heard about the Bible burning, and noted it with a
single sentence in a lengthy report on that night’s protests. The story,
by KOIN, the local CBS News affiliate, also reported that a group of
women calling themselves Moms United for Black Lives Matter attempted to
put out the fire — a detail not included in the Ruptly video, which was
edited to string together a number of clips from the night. (A New York
Times reporter had observed a truck offering free Bibles at the protests
earlier that night, though it was not clear whether it provided the book
that was burned.)
Ruptly instead made the Bible burning a focus of its protest coverage
that night. The news agency tweeted the video twice on Aug. 1 — here and
here — and featured it on its website. In the tweets and text that
accompany the video on the agency’s website, the Bible burning is
presented as the night’s central event; the flag burning is secondary.
RT, the network that runs Ruptly, also wrote an entire story about the
Bible burning.
Ruptly and RT then let Twitter take it from there.
The video was first tweeted by an account that lists two cities —
Oklahoma City and Abu Dhabi — as its users’ location and has only a few
dozen followers. It was soon after deleted. But before it disappeared,
the tweet was picked up by a Malaysian named Ian Miles Cheong who has
amassed a large Twitter following by playing a right-wing American
raconteur on social media.
Mr. Cheong added his own commentary to the initial tweet, wildly
exaggerating what the Ruptly video showed. “Left-wing activists bring a
stack of Bibles to burn in front of the federal courthouse in Portland,”
he wrote.
His tweet quickly became the basis for an entire day of outrage from
right-wing news outlets, Republican political figures and alt-right
commentators. It was Mr. Cheong whose tweet spurred the younger Mr.
Trump, Mr. Cruz and numerous other high-profile Republicans to weigh in.
It was also held up as evidence of the protesters’ depravity by
prominent alt-right conspiracy theorists like Jack Posobiec, a
correspondent for the One America News Network, which is much favored by
the president.
It has since been retweeted more than 26,000 times.
Asked about his tweet, Mr. Cheong said he “was just trawling through
Twitter looking for ‘Portland’ as I normally do” and heard talk of it of
the Bible burnings.
He did not see the stacks of Bibles being burned that he described in
his tweet. All he saw was the Ruptly video of the single burning Bible.
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“Apart from the Ruptly video,” he wrote in a direct message on Twitter,
“I don’t think anyone else got it directly.”
The Portland video represents the Russian disinformation strategy at its
most successful. Take a small but potentially inflammatory incident,
blow it out of proportion and let others on the political fringes in the
United States or Canada or Europe spread it.
Mr. Cheong, for instance, does not appear to be in any way complicit. He
regularly tweets multiple videos a night from the protests and, he said,
“It definitely wasn’t my intention to drive just the one story.”
But the Bible video fit his politics, and his tweet about it caught fire.
Russian Spies and American Conspiracies
Most of the Russian efforts garner far less notice, and unfold on far
less well known websites. American officials late last month identified
one of those websites as Inforos, an outlet that they said is controlled
by Russia’s military intelligence service, the GRU, and used to test out
various disinformation themes that target Americans, Canadians and
Europeans. Covid-19 disinformation, for instance, has spread with the
pandemic, and stories about dangers posed by the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization have by now become an old standard.
“Russian intelligence has grown more sophisticated and more highly
resourced in their use of online disinformation,” said Senator Richard
Blumenthal, the Connecticut Democrat, citing a recent State Department
report on Russian disinformation. “The methods used in 2016, seem almost
rudimentary and quaint.”
InfoRos, according to current and former American officials, sits atop a
GRU-directed network that includes two other nominally independent news
sites, OneWorld.Press and InfoBrics. Those sites, in turn, push out
stories to alt-right and alt-left sites in North America and Europe that
are receptive to the anti-establishment and often-conspiratorial
messaging pushed by the Russians.
In some instances, a straight line can be traced from the GRU-run
operations to American websites that promote conspiracy theories. One
such story appeared in January, when InfoBrics claimed a whistle-blower
had revealed that British spies and Ukraine’s former president, Petro
Poroshenko, had orchestrated the downing of a Malaysia Airlines flight
over eastern Ukraine, where Russian-backed separatists were fighting
government forces. (Investigators determined that the plane had been
brought down by a Russian-made missile.)
The story was produced by a research fellow at the Center for Syncretic
Studies, a think tank in Serbia that is similarly believed to have ties
to Russian intelligence. The article was then published by InfoBrics. In
turn, it was picked up by The Duran, an independent website based in
Cyprus that often spreads Russian disinformation.
Neither the U.S. nor allied governments have publicly identified The
Duran as having direct ties to Russia’s spy agencies. But the site is
where Russian state-sponsored disinformation and fringe theories come
together, according to a NATO cyber-analyst who spoke on the condition
of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly.
Russia favors the website and others like it because it publishes
user-generated content, allowing it to serve as a clearing house for
Moscow’s preferred narratives, the analyst said. The Duran has
repeatedly targeted NATO, and the alliance has traced the interactions
between the site and overtly Russian-backed news networks, such as RT
and its Ruptly video news agency.
The Duran itself does not have a significant reach. But it does often
feed websites in the United States and Europe that do, as demonstrated
by the false story about the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17.
The article jumped from The Duran to popular American conspiracy sites,
such as ZeroHedge and RedPill.Institute. By the time it was spreading on
social media, there was little to indicate its origins: A Times analysis
found 287 tweets that matched the exact text of The Duran’s headline,
“Ukrainian Whistleblower Reveals MH-17 Tragedy was Orchestrated by
Poroshenko and British Secret Service.” Yet 166 of the tweets linked to
Zerohedge; only 40 linked to The Duran.
“There’s more of an effort now to just keep placing these bread crumbs
onto these various sites and various blogs and then hope they get picked
up authentically,” said Bret Schafer, who tracks disinformation for the
Alliance for Securing Democracy in Washington.
From there, it is often just a matter of repetition.
“You keep kind of bringing it up,” he said. “It just keeps it kind of at
the front of people’s mind and they start thinking, ‘If it’s something
that is leaking every two weeks, there must be something more to it.’”
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