Mounting Russian disinformation campaign targeting Arab world

The UK’s Centre for Information Resilience (CIR) has warned of a mounting Russia-backed disinformation campaign targeting Arabic audio system within the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), spreading propaganda and false narratives to win over hearts and minds in its conflict on Ukraine.

The CIR carried out in depth open supply analysis, social media and evaluation and digital investigations to determine the extent of the campaign, which has been ongoing because the earliest days of the conflict, when Russian information channels within the MENA area began to unfold fake news, propagating the debunked claims that Ukraine has been working secret organic weapons labs, amongst different issues.

“While following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last year, the US and UK acted quickly to counteract the flow of Russian propaganda and the European Union banned its state-sponsored TV channels, RT and Sputnik, from the airwaves, in the Arabic-speaking world and across Africa, Russian misinformation has continued unabated,” stated CIR US vice-president Nina Jankowicz.

“Furthermore, our research on social media sites like Twitter has uncovered numerous reports from outlets aimed at Arab and African audiences blaming the global food and energy crises on baseless conspiracy theories related to the EU and the United States, rather than Russia’s subterfuge at Ukrainian ports and subsequent refusal to cooperate.”

CIR stated that on condition that many international locations within the international south haven’t dispatched international correspondents to Ukraine, Russian propaganda, such because the organic weapons narrative, is ready to unfold unchallenged and is often reprinted as reality in native newspapers and further amplified across social media.

Much of the social media evaluation on Facebook and Twitter appears to point out that Egypt has turn into a hub and a drive multiplier for this campaign. Jankowicz stated: “Today, RT Arabic has the second-most popular news website in the region, outperforming even Al-Jazeera.”

Dounia Mahlouly, a lecturer in international digital research at SOAS, University of London, who labored with CIR on its analysis, stated that the Russian campaign was proving remarkably profitable at spreading Moscow’s most popular messaging all through the area.

“In the Arab youth survey at the end of last year, one-third of North Africans believed it was Nato responsible for the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, with only 17% attributing blame to Russia,” she stated.

“This shows that while the audience has legitimate frustrations about certain double standards in the Western media coverage of the war in Ukraine, Russia is now capitalising on these frustrations and promoting its own brand of ‘white saviour’ narrative through a mass disinformation campaign in the region.”