According to the Washington-based company Omelas, which put together an artificial intelligence-enabled dashboard to track Russian propaganda, Russian Spanish-language outlets—generously doling out Kremlin propaganda on Ukraine—outperformed their U.S. counterparts on audience engagement by a ratio of more than 3 to 1 in the last two weeks of January.
“They want to disrupt [and] politically influence the discourse in any or all of these countries to make it more difficult for the people to understand what is actually happening,” said Andrew Gonzalez, a program manager at Omelas who conducted the study. “On Ukraine, if they’re able to discombobulate the people from understanding what’s going on, it makes it much harder for the government to generate support for some type of retaliation or countermeasure.”
Dating back to the Cold War, Russia has long tried to cultivate ties with leftist regimes in Latin America and has kept up strong relationships with countries such as Nicaragua, Cuba, and Venezuela as they have doggedly stayed socialist into the 21st century. The Soviet Union has long had a willing audience in the region for narratives that paint the United States as an imperial power.
But researchers and experts have still been alarmed by the speed at which Russian propaganda began dominating Spanish-language digital airwaves during the ongoing Russian troop buildup along Ukraine’s border. According to Omelas tracking, during the last half of January, Russian government-owned outlets drummed up 1,600 posts that referenced Ukraine, including videos, articles, and social media content garnering 173,200 engagements—such as likes, shares, and comments—which was nearly 40 percent of engagements by users on Spanish-language stories about the crisis. Russia’s state-backed outlets more than doubled the output of the second-most prolific publisher of Spanish-language content on Ukraine, the Venezuelan opposition paper El Nacional, and U.S.-based outlets, led by Univision, CNN, and Telemundo, which published only 722 posts on the crisis.
Russia’s message has resonated. Popular posts on RT’s channels falsely asserted that the conflict over Ukraine could be a Western ploy to drum up arms sales and that the United States had put together a disinformation campaign to paint Russia as an aggressor. Russian forces invaded and annexed part of Ukraine in 2014, and Moscow has amassed more than 100,000 troops and heavy weapons close to the Ukrainian border since last fall.
Spanish speakers commenting on the content on Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook appeared to be “really supportive of Russia,” Gonzalez said. Russian outlets, he said, “know how to put their finger on the pulse of any issue and generate the engagements needed to make their narrative dominant.”
Отсюда
Ну, блин, они-то знают, что такое жить не в витрине Капитализма как в Германии, а на его задворках да под доктриной Монро 200 лет