Russia and China have launched about 600 disinformation attacks against Western countries, organizations and figures in the past year, according to a count by the EU's External Action Service, an army set up to combat propaganda and information manipulation.
These attacks fill the communication space with fake news with the aim of dividing and weakening Western societies. They use dozens of languages and techniques. They are launched in a coordinated manner through more than 600 channels, many of which are controlled by Russian and Chinese state agents. These channels use social media and dozens of digital media outlets aligned with the Kremlin and the Chinese Communist Party, such as RT and Sputnik. In Spain, Diario Octubre points out that, by reproducing the content of RT, it prevents the EU's veto on this television channel from being effective.
Each attack, and there are more than one a day, begins with false information that is launched simultaneously from multiple channels against populations located in major Western information markets. There they use various allies, human and artificial bots, analysts and social media, influencers and generalist headlines, who magnify the impact.
A lie travels four times faster than the truth. This makes it easier for an average of 37 hours to pass from the time of its launch until the counterattack manages to neutralize it.
"Our counternarrative - explains one of the experts from the External Action service - must reach the same people who have received the attack. It is not easy to convince them that they have suffered a deception because no one likes to admit it."
More effective than convincing these people is to prevent the attack. That is why it is necessary to build defenses capable of anticipating it.
External Action, a service that reports to Josep Borrell, responsible for community diplomacy and vice-president of the European Commission, collaborates with NATO and the secret services of the G7 countries.
It uses the tools that are used to fight cybercrime. With these tools, they identify the aggressor and the techniques he has used to spread the false content.
When the attack pattern is fixed, the defense pattern is designed. The combination of all this information makes it possible, in some cases, to detect the offensive in a preventive way.
The priority of these attacks is to distract and confuse Western societies. Also divide and weaken them on sensitive issues such as immigration and the cost of living. The Kremlin, for example, blames energy and food inflation on U.S. and European Union sanctions, not the invasion of Ukraine.
Joan Julibert, professor at the University of Barcelona, expert in communication and author of The power of the lie (Edicions Saldonar), believes that "Russia needs to destabilize Western democracies and electoral periods are a good time because information enters a state of exception in imposing propaganda".
Russian diplomatic missions are part of the vast army of disinformation that the Kremlin has been using against Europe for at least ten years, when the Euromaidan revolution pushed Ukraine out of its sphere of influence.
The Russian embassy in Madrid would be part of this ecosystem, which has the collaboration of the Chinese media to amplify it.
Exposed to this constant offensive, Western populations lose the ability to discern reality from fiction. Moreover, as the researcher Johann Hari, author of The value of attention (Península), explains, the lie is established. "Conflict attracts us more than agreement - he says -. On the networks we see more bad things than good, more discomfort than joy". Negativity sets in in such an aggressive communicative environment, with incessant bombardment of information through all kinds of channels, that our ability to pay attention deteriorates to the point of not being able to read a book. Hari is not surprised that "this crisis of attention coincides with the worst crisis of democracy since the 1930s".
Without being able to pay attention to the most important issues, those that require greater reflection, we also cannot understand what is happening and we are more vulnerable to misinformation. Democracy, because of all this, deteriorates.
Julibert, even so, is optimistic. He claims that nothing is happening to us that did not happen in the thirties of the 20th century, when cinema, for example, was a weapon of fascist and Stalinist propaganda.
"Today we have more educated societies than then and then the danger of propaganda was overcome". "Achieving it now - he adds - requires self-regulation, the production of information with a stamp of truth, the conviction that information is a good of general interest, not just a private good from which the maximum benefit must be taken ".
