The YouTube channels and Facebook profiles of Russian-funded media outlets such as SputnikNews and Russia Today have been blocked in Europe and the United States for spreading information deemed false about the ongoing war against Ukraine. This also happened in Latin America with all channels Sputnik Mundo and RT en Español, including Ahí Les Va, the most popular in the region, led by journalist and youtuber Inna Afinogenova. The reason given by these platforms for closing the accounts was the increase in manipulated content such as fake montages, images and videos that favor Russia and defame Ukraine and its allies.
Since the Cold War era, Russia has been accused on repeated occasions of carrying out information operations with the aim of manipulating public opinion. With the information revolution, the nature and diffusion of state power have changed, converting cyberspace into a new, unconventional operational domain for wars, as its accessibility facilitates the existence of a multiplicity of actors and actions.
In this new terrain of combat, it is common to find electoral interference, disinformation and fake news, cyberattacks, drone attacks and financial influence as attack modalities, all of them coined under the name of threat or hybrid war, of information or Gerasimov’s doctrine.
Regarding the modality of distortion and fake news, the narratives existing in the region regarding the modality of fake news have their main origin in the translations of original content in Ukrainian, Russian and English. The Spanish fact-check Newtral and Latin American AFP Factual has so far verified a total of more than 80 frauds – false content disseminated in a coordinated and massive way with the aim of converting it into truth – on social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and TikTok about the conflict.
Such checks range from fake CNN live broadcasts to decontextualized or non-existent photographs of protests that particularly seek to discredit Ukrainian political and military actions.
Social networks and Russian media in Spanish
Sputnik Mundo’s TikTok account has around 62.6k followers. Since the beginning of Russia’s “special operation” in Ukraine, the account has been blocked for six days and 24 videos have been deleted for violating community standards, according to the media’s presenter.
One of the causes was the publication of a video on 27 February suggesting that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky had escaped from the Kiev capital to Lviv. This was originally mentioned by the President of the Russian State Duma (Lower House of Assembly), Viacheslav Volodin, and spread by other Russian state-backed media such as Tass (Russian News Agency). However, this content was false and Sputnik never rectified this information, according to an investigation by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) thought center.
According to the US organization DFRLab, on the social network Twitter, in addition to the official accounts of RT en Español and Sputnik Mundo, the accounts of the Russian embassies in Argentina, Cuba, Ecuador, Spain, Guatemala, Mexico, Panama, Peru, Venezuela and Uruguay were the ones that have shared the publications originally created by these vehicles the most. This type of content tends to justify the operation in Ukraine and affirms the need to denazify and demilitarize this country to protect the Russian people, as well as to unmask the true intentions of NATO and the United States.
Unlike what happened on the Twitter account in English, where there was a regional trend with the hashtag #IStandWithPutin or #IStandWithRussia at the beginning of the war (this trend was led by automated accounts or bots), in Spanish-speaking countries no trend was identified. similar. On Twitter in Spanish, the hashtags #YoEstoyConPutin or similar are mostly tweets used in 2015 to support Russia and its military actions in the war in Syria, and very little related to the current war. And the accounts that produced this content appear to be real and claim to be located in countries such as Venezuela, Nicaragua and, to a lesser extent, Bolivia.
The social network Telegram, on the other hand, has been a great ally for the reproduction of Russian media in the region, as it is one of the few platforms that has not censored them.
Selective censorship?
The censorship these media outlets are receiving is being called into question, as Russian media agencies are not the only ones that have spread disinformation in the region and have not rectified it. The Mexican channel Televisa, for example, published – carelessly – images and videos of military attacks claiming that they corresponded to the war in Ukraine, when, in reality, they were from the Arab-Israeli conflict. This was denounced by Roberto de la Madrid who had his YouTube channel closed for a few days due to the complaint.
This brings to light that these global platforms are becoming the judges of the truth. In some cases they get it right, and in others they don’t, since their criteria and algorithms are selective, as they ultimately seek monetization more than the truth.
