Chronicling the weaponization of information

The 15th anniversary of New Eastern Europe serves as a perfect occasion for a deep dive into the magazine’s growing archive. For this reflective essay, I have chosen several issues from the first years (2011-15) of publication to examine how the problem of disinformation was framed and analysed in the past. This is done to follow the evolution of this phenomenon that today is a part of the wider arsenal of hybrid threats, and track how the analysis of the problem has evolved through the years. The archive reflects less a sequence of clearly separated stages in the development of the information environment than a gradual change in how that environment was understood and analysed.

Early optimism

Around 15 years ago, the perceptions of information and the broader digital space were different from what they are today. Although many people and organizations had already highlighted the dark side of new media and digital platforms, there was still hope that the internet itself might change our world for the better. It was also visible in the political realm, in the struggle between democracy and authoritarianism, particularly in Eastern Europe.

In texts on Russia, Ukraine and the Euromaidan, the internet in general and social media in particular appear as tools for self-organization, limiting the control of the media (especially those captured by strong interest groups), documenting violence, and, last but not least, strengthening civil society. This period, although the overall picture was much more complicated, could be described as an era of “digital optimism”.

The exemplary piece in this regard is Victoria Narizhna’s “A New Kind of Revolution” (NEE 1/2014). Comparing similarities and differences between the 2004 Orange Revolution and the 2013 Revolution of Dignity, Narizhna argues that the new technological tools contributed to achieving entirely “new levels of development in civil society and the public’s control over the government, while crowdfunding, a new way to raise money through social media and the internet, proved to be very effective in providing the material basis of the protests”.

The potentially positive role of the internet was also attached to the analysis of internal dynamics in Russia and Belarus. Here, a very good example is Jadwiga Rogoża’s piece, “Russia of Stability vs. Russia of Change” (NEE 2/2012). In this article we can still find the belief (very common in the first years of the internet era) that the internet is an alternative space for expression and organization outside of state-dominated traditional media environment: “The virtual world, however, has provided an almost unlimited opportunity for expression and offered new forms of organization. Internet users have engaged in creating thematic groups, looking for allies throughout Russia, fighting for their rights and interests … For Russians, the internet has become a real school of citizenship.”

The early stages of digital politics were often interpreted through the prism of empowerment rather than manipulation. A similar hope might be found in Maciej Jastrzębski’s article titled “Belarus Online”, published in the very first issue of NEE (1/2011): “the revolution through social network” continues, and there is no way to extinguish the flame. The common pattern stemming from this strand of analytical interventions was that authoritarian regimes might control traditional political space. Still, the internet creates a loophole through which the suppressed society might self-organize. 

Analysis of the role of new means of communication was also a part of Igor Lyubashenko’s article “EuroMaidan Chronicles of a networked revolt”. The analysis is nuanced and far from enthusiastic about technology, and the author avoids oversimplifications. The main focus is on how the new technology has helped protesters and changed the nature of social organization and protest mobilization: “As for communication, digital channels played a primary role in the whole process … the first calls to conduct a demonstration appeared in social media, particularly on Facebook. The specificity of the Ukrainian segment of this social networking site is that it is used by a number of popular opinion-makers as a sort of blogging and community-building platform. The message spread quickly, and the reaction was immediate.” It is important to note that Lyubashenko, who wrote his article two to three years after the above-mentioned pieces on Russia and Belarus, had already noted the negative impact of the internet on democracy. 

To be sure, even if the belief that the internet can contribute to the geographical and qualitative extension of democracy sounds naïve from today's perspective, it was, to a large extent, a commonplace idea 15 to 20 years ago. The internet's positive role in protest movements and social mobilization was genuine, such was the case of the so-called 2009 “Twitter Revolution” in Moldova. As such, we were largely unable to see the more complex picture and imagine that digital platforms could also contribute significantly to political polarization and be used by malign powers as tools against societies. Nor was there a clear divide between the periods in which the internet was used for positive and harmful purposes. At around the same time, Russia had already developed and begun deploying new digital instruments rooted in the old Soviet tradition of “active measures”.

Propaganda as a weapon of conflict

The year 2014 did not create the weaponization of information, but it made this dimension of the information environment much harder to overlook. It was also a year in which many realized that the new information space can be weaponized. In Poland’s expert community, one of the early systematic Polish analyses of this new reality was Jolanta Darczewska’s “The Anatomy of Russian Information Warfare. The Crimean operation, a case study”. One of her subsequent studies, co-authored with Piotr Żochowski, “Active measures. Russia’s key export”, stressed significantly that new tools are only some amongst many. At the same time, the weaponization of information is based on old mechanisms and tactics invented by the Soviet Union during the Cold War (or even before the Second World War) and subsequently implemented by Russia in the post-Cold War era.

These works referred to the classic positions tackling this problem, such as Richard H. Shultz and Roy Godson’s Dezinformatsia: Active Measures in Soviet Strategy, or – beyond expert literature – the Russian-French author Vladimir Volkoff’s spy novel The Set-Up: A Novel of Espionage (1982). As a footnote, Volkoff also wrote a book titled A Short History of Disinformation (1999), and towards the end of his life emerged as a supporter of Vladimir Putin.

After the annexation of Crimea and the beginning of the war in eastern Ukraine, it had to be recalled that disinformation is not a product of the digital age. The Soviet Union developed and systematically employed what it called “active measures” – including disinformation, forgeries and agents of influence – decades before the emergence of social media. Contemporary Russia has adapted many elements of this broader Soviet toolkit –including disinformation – to the changing information environment.

In his 2014 analysis for New Eastern Europe titled “The Soviet Union versus the EuroMaidan”, the Ukrainian journalist Milan Lelich laid out how – in south-eastern Ukraine – the pro-Russia Party of Regions as well as other local organizations had constructed the image of Euromaidan protests as a fascist movement, coordinated by the US and threatening the social order. This was based on pre-existing and well-rooted nostalgia for the Soviet Union among the local population. Lelich already highlighted the problem that we are still struggling with today – that we live in informational silos (bubbles) and any intervention is often addressed to people in our social and political proximity and not to those who are more distant from us: “The major problem is that independent and pro-opposition media and bloggers often agitate those already agitated; they read, reprint and repost themselves. Meanwhile, the huge number of Maidan opponents remains untapped.”

James Sherr’s piece “Russia’s Elusive Search for Soft Power” (NEE 2/2014) revealed how Russia applies western ideas (in this case) in a completely distorted way: “soft power is invariably accompanied by covert measures and by harder forms of influence. Russian expressions like prinudit k druzhbe (coerce into friendship) and protiv kogo vy druzhite? (against whom are you waging friendship?) reveal an understanding of the world quite foreign to western liberalism.” Sherr concludes that Russian soft power is coupled with coercion, covert actions, and other state tools, and its purpose is to divide rather than to build attractiveness.

Since 2014, the problem of information war has gone beyond the Russian media sphere and the Russian-Ukrainian conflict. In early 2015, Matthew Kott wrote (NEE 1/2015) about the western infosphere as the object of Russian interference: “Sweden has become a significant node in the internet information war over Ukraine and the Putin regime.” The year 2014 changed everything. Digital optimism could no longer stand without pointing out the vulnerabilities of the security system in the information domain, as well as the hostile use of information. The West had started to adapt. Ukraine resisted Russian pressure. After the instruments of persuasion and pressure proved ineffective or limited, Russia also turned to more coercive and military instruments.

Disinformation as a security domain

After 2014, the vocabulary of information war entered our discourse for good. But it was not the only change. The conversation (NEE 1/2015) between Wojciech Przybylski, Jānis Kārkliņš, and Raul Rebane viewed the essence of information war as “directed, paid, informational influence on our people and our societies”. They also discussed trolling, the use of social media to spread disinformation and undermine public opinion, and the creation of the NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence as an institutional response. It was important because it highlighted not only changes in language but also the institutionalization of the information security problem.

In the same issue, Andrew Wilson, in a short but persuasive take titled “Our Blindness about Russia is Depressing”, laid out a mechanism we would today call audience segmentation or tailored influence: different narratives for France, different ones for Germany, different ones for anti-establishment groups. His key observation is that Russia Today does not tell the audience to "believe Russia", but rather encourages them to question existing sources and reinforces their previous scepticism.

A few months later, Luke Harding’s essay “Leviathan Killed Boris Nemtsov” described the strategy of producing multiple competing versions of events to make the audience stop believing that the truth even exists. He explicitly refers to “disinformation methods” and links them to RT's practices and the KGB's operational traditions. This is essentially an understanding of disinformation as we know it today. Harding’s question of “How is one supposed to know which version is actually true?” catches the main point of the disinformation logic – it is not based exclusively on convincing with one version, but on multiplying competing narratives and blurring the very concept of truth. It leads to epistemic chaos rather than the simple propagation of a single narrative.

Looking 15 years back shows the path we have taken as a community, adapting to the threats of the modern information environment. It was indeed learning by doing. The transitions from one stage to the next were not clear-cut. While the protest movements were analysed through the prism of the implementation of digital tools and opportunities, the manipulations of infospheres were already in place. In the first issues of New Eastern Europe (2011-12), the discussion of the information environment focused more on Russian domestic propaganda. In late 2015, the editorial already clearly stated that “the disinformation campaign launched by Russian propagandists is tirelessly working to divide Europe”.

The internet has accelerated all kinds of processes, but it has not necessarily made us more resilient. If anything, it has often left us more confused and vulnerable. We have certainly become better at identifying different threats and institutionalizing our responses to them. Our language, too, has expanded to include new concepts and terminology. Yet the damage caused by disinformation goes deeper than the circulation of false or misleading content. It erodes the foundations on which democratic societies depend, above all trust, solidarity and a shared sense of reality. Our responses, meanwhile, have remained largely technical in nature: training, skills development, media literacy and fact-checking.

All of these are necessary, but they are not sufficient. Information resilience cannot simply mean becoming better at identifying falsehoods. It must also mean strengthening institutional trust and social cohesion, all while ensuring the quality and integrity of the broader public information environment. Ultimately, the challenge is not only how to protect societies from disinformation, but how to build societies that are less vulnerable to its effects in the first place. Whether we are capable of doing so remains a question we continue to debate.

 

Maciej Makulski is the project lead at the In Between Analytical Group and a contributing editor with New Eastern Europe.