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Met the police
Police released CCTV showing the two men at Gatwick Airport
When British authorities announced on Wednesday that they suspected two suspected Russian agents in the poisoning of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Salisbury, they broadcast CCTV footage of suspects arriving at Gatwick Airport.
Two of the images, framed, began to spread in social media, driven by pro-Russian conspiracy theorists and suspicious accounts of trolls. They showed the alleged agents – Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov – through a gate of no return to the airport.
The images had identical timestamps. How could two men be in exactly the same place at the same time, a flood of tweets is asked.
Speaking on state television, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said that "the exact date and time were superimposed on the image" or that the Russian agents had "mastered the march." simultaneous ".
His comments were echoed by pro-Kremlin accounts on Twitter and on the Telegram messaging app, very popular in Russia. Users suggested that CCTV footage had been manipulated. They mocked the British authorities and claimed that it was an MI6 operation.
Soon, it would not necessarily be important that the background of CCTV images not be identical; that the camera was at a different angle; Google Maps shows that the gates of Gatwick are a series of almost identical corridors that the two men could easily have missed, close to each other.
What would matter, is that some people who follow the story start to question what was real and what was not. Some might even begin to question the very idea that there was a real and reliable version of the events.
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Google
One still from Google Maps, showing the exit gates at Gatwick Airport
Russia denies any involvement in the Skripal case, and its embassy in London has not responded to a request for comments from the BBC, but analysts say the Russian state is now the main representative of a new type of information war.
An undefined network of Russian state actors, state-controlled media, and army of bot and social media trolls would work in unison to spread and amplify multiple narratives and plots around cases like poisoning. Skripal. The goal is no longer to deny or disprove an official version of the events, but to flood the area with as many competing versions as nothing seems to make sense.
"What is really striking is that the Russian machine is not broadcasting a single message, it is pushing dozens of messages," said Ben Nimmo, a prominent member of the Atlantic Council studying disinformation in Russia. "The idea is to confuse people."
Other theories circulating on Wednesday included the claim that the suspects were British actors, stars of a (non-existent) series of KGB Spy aired on British television in the 2000s. Another suggested that the attempted assassination in Salisbury and the death of other Russian nationals in Britain were part of a MI6 plot. "Why are all these horrible events happening only in Britain?" asked Russian MP Andrei Klimov on public television.
"The more different theories, the more different Google results will be," Nimmo said. "So instead of seeing two or three different versions of the story, you see 20 or 30. And for someone who does not follow the story regularly, it gets more and more confusing until they give up, and at that moment the Russian disinformation had its effect. "
The first evidence of this tactic goes back to the 2000s, but in 2014, Malaysian Airlines' MH-17 flight was shot down over the Ukraine, killing 298 people. The evidence indicated a ground-to-air missile provided by Russia fired from rebel-held territory in eastern Ukraine.
Russia had already been accused of deploying crude misinformation about its actions in eastern Ukraine and its annexation of Crimea, but its reaction to the destruction of MH-17 was on a different scale. . at full speed, "said Nimmo.
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In the days and months following the collapse of the planes, the Russian media and the pro-Kremlin social accounts launched a large number of conflicting theories: a Ukrainian Su-25 fighter jet was radar captured near MH- 17; this video evidence shows a missile fired by the government, not a separatist territory; that Ukrainian fighters had taken MH-17 for Vladimir Putin's plane in an attempt at assassination; that the CIA was behind.
"MH-17 is really the classic example," said Samantha Bradshaw, researcher in computer propaganda at the University of Oxford.
"You've seen a whole series of contradictory conspiracies and narratives, linked to various hashtags and social campaigns, and the goal was to confuse, polarize, and distance them from reality."
The technique has developed and evolved in the years following the attack of the MH-17, with Russia linked to misinformation campaigns about its actions in Syria, the US elections of 2016, the ## 147 ## Assassination of Boris Nemtsov Alexander Litvinenko in London.
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A key element of recent years has been the use of humor and ridicule. When a British investigation revealed in 2016 that Russian President Vladimir Putin "had probably approved" the assassination of Litvinenko, a hashtag – #amprobable approved – has spread on Twitter, with tweets suggesting that M Putin had "probably approved", climate change and more.
In the hours following the appointment of the suspects in the Skripal case, a flood of almost identical tweets used images of comedians, historical figures and Hollywood spies – from Joseph Stalin to Jason Bourne –
The official account of the Russian Embassy in London has even been published, displaying an image of the two suspects of Skripal wearing the Novichok toxin next to a picture of the British police in biohazard costume. On the news bulletins of the Russian state, the presenters reported the news with a mixture of disbelief and sarcasm.
"The strategy is optimized for the Internet, it is destined to become viral," Nimmo said. "That's why teasing and sarcasm and meme attempts are so much part of that … it's misinformation at the information age."
In 2015, the European Union was sufficiently alarmed by Russia's misinformation for having created a working group – the East Stratcom team – tasked only to counter the perceived threat. The small team tries to demystify fake stories in real time, but it would be overwhelmed by the amount of material available.
Peter Wilson, the British ambassador to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, said earlier this year that the OPCW had counted more than 30 different Russian theories around the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal.
The effectiveness and scope of this type of misinformation operation in the West is debatable. A YouGov survey conducted earlier revealed that 75% of Britons thought the Russian state was behind Skripal poisoning, while only 5% thought Russia was innocent. But the sheer volume of Russian misinformation exported abroad remains a source of major concern, said an EU official who is working on the issue but was not allowed to speak about it publicly.
"Some people like to think that this tactic was used around Brexit and that it was gone, or that it was used around Skripal and flew away, but it takes place 24 hours on 24, "he said. "Others also use misinformation, of course … But this aggression, this export of news stories overseas, is really something where Russia is the number a world. "
