DISINFORMATION

Fearmongering of world conflict and glorification of Russian liberators. In the disinformation scene, nothing new

Infosecurity.sk presents an overview of disinformation trends that have been on the rise in the last two weeks:

• Passions were inflamed in particular by US President Biden's decision to allow Ukraine to use US long-range missiles on Russian territory. Disinformation campaigners tried to portray the support for the victim of aggression as a restriction of peace negotiations, an unjustified escalation of tensions or NATO's direct involvement in the war. Their traditional scaremongering about global conflict and nuclear war was thus once again based on flawed and manipulative narratives.
• Some disinformation actors have predicted a reduction or cessation of Western support following the election of Donald Trump as US President. They presented the aid as indebting the EU and funding the Zelensky regime, which is depriving ordinary European citizens.
• The topic of the war in Ukraine was also accompanied by posts that heavily glorified Russia, for example through videos allegedly showing the abundance of goods in Russian shops and therefore the ineffectiveness of Western sanctions. The extra-parliamentary politician Pavol Slota summarised his visit to Donbas using a number of Kremlin propaganda narratives. In particular, he spoke of welcoming the Russian liberators who had supposedly put an end to the Bandera's activities in the region.
• Domestic themes were dominated by criticism of Ivan Korčok's entry into Progressive Slovakia (PS). This move, according to critics, is meant to prove that Korčok will serve the party's leader, Michal Šimečka. Ľuboš Blaha, for his part, conspired that Korčok's role as a Western agent was to dominate the PS all along, for which he was to use Šimečka. He described the PS as "a project of the dark Soros forces behind the scenes, which have announced the recruitment of mercenaries because they want to gain power".

Is a third world conflict on the horizon?

Narratives have long been appearing in the Slovak information space, through which disinformation actors try to manipulate and scare the general public that another conflict of global proportions is inevitably coming. However, it is not Russia's aggressive actions that are being blamed for the escalation of tensions, but Western support for Ukraine.

Whether we are talking about narratives of NATO's direct involvement in the war or the threat of nuclear war, in recent days the disinformation agents have particularly exploited US President Joe Biden's decision to allow Ukrainian forces to use long-range missiles (supplied by the US) to strike on Russian territory. Similar decisions by the UK and France have been equally disreputed.

Among the first to react from the disinformation scene was (quite expectedly) MEP Ľuboš Blaha. In his post on the Telegram, the vice-chairman of the SMER-SSD party described the American president as a fool, thanks to whom the world is supposed to be "on the threshold of the third world war". He accentuated the Kremlin's proclamation of the so-called red lines and threats to provoke a nuclear war. Blaha continued in a similar vein in the following days. On 19 November, he threatened that the world was "millimetres away from nuclear war". He continued his favourite discipline – the appeal to emotion and fear – when he spoke of families, children and Slovakia to be at risk.

The problem with Blaha's rhetoric, in particular, is that he makes no mention of the primary culprit in any escalation of tensions. At the same time, however, it fits naturally into the mosaic of narratives that the MEP has been spreading for a long time and that are very much in line with Russian propaganda. In this fictitious reality that Blaha is trying to feed his audience, the tensions are not caused by Russian aggression, nor by the North Korean soldiers currently involved in the war, but, in Blaha's words, by "psychopaths from the West".

Milan Uhrík, chairman of the far-right Republika party, described Biden's decision as "the apocalyptic decision of a departing grandpa". In another post, the MEP in turn presented the situation in a highly manipulative manner as a decision to "shell Russia with US missiles" and went on to scare that the EU also wanted to escalate the war. In doing so, Uhrík applied a false optic that not only problematically simplified the latest developments, but also once again (and very likely deliberately) forgot to name the key factor that has undermined the peace.

In other words, the focal point of the Slovak disinformation response to the US administration's decision was a narrative that either omitted or secondarily legitimised Russian aggression in Ukraine. Either the victim of the attack or the Western states, which support Ukraine also by building up its defence capabilities, were labelled as warmongers. At the same time, some actors, such as Marek Géci (Republika), tried to give the impression that Biden's decision was somehow subject to the approval of NATO members (including Slovakia). However, this was not a move under the auspices of the Alliance, so the arguments that NATO was directly involved in the conflict with Russia with this development do not hold water either (we analyse the content tuned in this way below).

The interest of the SMER-SSD party in this topic was confirmed by the post of Igor Melicher, who serves as State Secretary at the Ministry of Defence. Melicher even managed to overcome his low standards of communication – he described the permission to use American missiles without any legitimate logic as "a demonstration of cowardice and active denial of democracy". Notwithstanding the fact that this is a highly manipulative statement, Melicher has exposed the parameters of the reality in which he operates. Not only is he ignorant of the US political system, but he sees it as cowardice to provide aid to a victim of aggression. He considers the decision of some European states to join in this move to be "proof of the absence of a foreign policy of their own and confirmation of dependence not so much on the US administration as on liberal-progressive circles within the US Democratic Party". In doing so, he attacks Slovakia's natural allies and also reveals the true face of so-called sovereign foreign policy towards all cardinal points of the world - which ultimately amounts to servility to Russian (and no other) interests.

Since the posts containing narratives about the third world conflict have been dominant in the Slovak information space in recent weeks, we also looked at them using the analytical tool Gerulata Juno. We used it to analyse the most popular posts on Slovak Facebook that contained the keywords "world war", "nuclear" or "missile". We excluded from the list those posts that did not contain problematic narratives. We then evaluated the posts based on the total number of interactions (the sum of all reactions, comments and shares).

The post with the most interactions belongs to Robert Fico. In it, the Prime Minister described US President Biden's decision to allow the use of US weapons systems on Russian territory as an unprecedented escalation of tensions. He reverted to his manipulative rhetoric about seeking a peaceful solution, which in the long term has rather played into the narrative of Russian propaganda. According to Fico, the US decision came "with the clear aim of completely frustrating or delaying the peace negotiations". He also did not forget to use his favourite narrative of Western-backed "mutual killing of Slavs in Ukraine" to play the Kremlin's favourite card of Pan-Slavism. Fico has long presented Western support for Ukraine as militant actions that harm Slovak interests. These are, or so it seems, primarily lined with rapprochement with Russia and China.

The second post was again published by Robert Fico. In the video, he assesses his official visit to Serbia, during which he also met President Aleksandar Vučić. In addition to contradictory statements about the EU's so-called double standard and attacks on the media, Fico also returned to accusations that the West "wishes for a continuation of the war in Ukraine". According to Fico, the war also suits President Zelensky. Although the Slovak Prime Minister operates on the assumption that there is evidence for his claims, he does not offer any in his speech by default. Also in this post, Fico talks about escalating tensions or limiting peace negotiations. He even adds to the collection by threatening a conflict of "unprecedented proportions". And once again, the Prime Minister blames the American side – he resigns himself to naming the aggressor whose attack on a sovereign state under the false argument of demilitarisation and denationalisation led to the destabilisation of the region in the first place.

The third post belongs to the profile of Ľuboš Hrica, who can be considered the long-standing face of the Slovak disinformation scene. Hrica continuously comments on the political situation in Slovakia from Italy, trying to pose as the voice of the reasonable (ordinary) people – but he can be seen more as an untrained political commentator who lacks the relevant education and hides the dissemination of disinformation (or various dubious opinions) behind unrestricted freedom of speech. In a piece which began by commemorating 17 November (30th anniversary of the Velvet Revolution), he referred to the USA as warmongers and talked about the outbreak of World War III. In addition, he laid his rhetoric on the Russian propaganda narrative of Ukrainian Nazis (as a legitimizing tool to justify aggression), to which he also compared the US Democratic Party.

The next post in the series was published by Matúš Šutaj Eštok. In the video, the Minister of the Interior and chairman of the Hlas-SD party, like his disinformation compatriots, tried to discredit the decision on long-range missiles. However, he did not focus only on the US, but also on the UK and France. Firing missiles at Russia, according to Šutaj Eštok, "will only bring more deaths and an escalation of the conflict" - with this statement, he builds on the long-present manipulative (or at least logically fallacious) argument that Ukraine should not defend itself at all for the sake of preserving lives. It is a narrative that inherently proposes servility to Ukrainian sovereignty and compliance with the demands of the aggressor. This intention is often accentuated by the specter of dragging Western states (especially NATO members) into a direct global conflict with Russia. And this scaremongering was not absent in the statement of the Minister of the Interior, who, despite Slovakia's membership of Euro-Atlantic structures, is threatening "harsh retaliation from Russia".

The last post in the series was published by Eduard Chmelár. The former Prime Minister's foreign policy adviser assessed Joe Biden's decision as madness, an extremely serious escalation of the conflict or even the beginning of World War III. Following the pattern of the rest of the disinformation ecosystem, he ignored Russia's blackmailing behavior and rather presented the red lines that have long haunted the Kremlin. In other words, Chmelár once again sided with Russian propaganda and war narratives that seek to deter and discredit support for Ukraine. In addition to scaremongering about dragging NATO into a war and putting the shield of a nuclear power in front of Russia, this dubious political analyst is not even ashamed to mislead by saying that "a Western nuclear power will issue direct instructions to fire missiles at another nuclear power".

New hopes: Trump can end the bloodshed in Ukraine

Many of the posts focusing on the war in Ukraine or anti-Russian sanctions glorified Russia and, on the other hand, denigrated Ukraine and its political leaders. For example, the speech of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who addressed Members of the European Parliament (EP) via teleconference, was criticised. This was followed up by Milan Mazurek, MEP for the far-right Republika movement. In the video, the latter claimed that Zelensky, as well as several MEPs, reinforced claims that continued military support was necessary for Ukraine "to wage war on Russia". Mazurek also claimed that MEPs were arguing over who would talk more about the need to send arms to Ukraine and bomb Russia's heartland.

MEPs, he said, talk about the issue "as lightly as if it were some kind of computer game " and have no real interest in finding a path to peace. They do not want the bloodshed to stop, he says, but for Ukraine to be completely destroyed and, eventually, for European territories to be destroyed as well. Mazurek said in the video that he pins his hopes on the new US President Donald Trump. The latter, he said, can reverse Biden's decision to use long-range weapons to bomb Russian territories and force Ukraine to the negotiating table.

Several other disinformation actors have also reacted to Trump's election, including Mazurek's party boss and MEP Milan Uhrik. In a video, he glorified Trump, claiming that European politicians fear that his administration will cut or completely stop funding for the war against Russia in Ukraine. Uhrík presented European aid to Ukraine as indebting the EU and funding the Zelensky regime, because of which ordinary European citizens are being deprived. He concluded by adding that "we have already helped the Ukrainians enough, and now it is high time to stop supplying weapons and feeding this conflict". He was deliberately spinning the optics in a way that attributes responsibility for the situation in Ukraine not to the aggressor itself, that is to say, Russia, but to the European Union (EU) and the other states that are helping Ukraine to defend itself.

The glorification of the US President-elect was also the subject of other posts by Milan Mazurek. In one of them he praised Trump's ambition to withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement, and in another video he presented parts of Trump's speeches about his administration's post-election plans. Within the speeches, Trump peddled conspiracy theories about deep state and the alleged conspiracy of progressive elites and the corporate media. However, he also announced the curtailing of civil rights for teachers who will support children and young people from the LGBTI+ community, as well as the destruction of the so-called progressive machine that has supposedly tried to silence Americans so far. Mazurek reportedly agrees with these steps and would like to see them implemented in Slovakia.

Like Mazurek, Tomáš Taraba, Minister of the Environment for the Slovak National Party (SNS), presented Trump's attacks on sexual minorities as a positive of his rise to power. In a Facebook post, he argued that his nominations suggest that he is serious "about erasing the progressive woke culture that considers every psychological disorder as an object of full inclusion by society". He thus degraded sexual minorities as mentally ill people and presented a position that advocates limiting their rights.

In addition to what was happening in the USA, events in Georgia were also commented on by disinformation actors. At the end of October, parliamentary elections took place in Georgia which, according to both opposition figures and independent international observers, may have been rigged. Civil protests have taken place in the country in connection with reports of violations of electoral rules, as well as a lot of disinformation or AI content aimed at discrediting opposition candidates.

The EU has also taken a negative stance on the situation in Georgia, condemning both possible electoral interference and the use of the LGBTI+ issue in the campaign to stir up negative emotions and hatred. European Commission (EC) officials in particular have called for the repeal of the controversial Foreign Influence and Family Values Acts, which in practice serve to demonise the LGBTI+ community and curtail their rights. Milan Uhrík denounced this stance as whining and argued that Georgian citizens have rejected pro-European parties because "they have common sense". That is why they supposedly reject the rainbow agenda of the West, as well as the Green Deal or being dragged into a war with Russia. For this, the EC is allegedly threatening them and "already the progressives there want to stir up another Maidan".

"Real" news from Russia speak of liberators' welcome and material abundance

Anna Belousovová, the chair of the Alternative for Slovakia party and a pro-Kremlin propagandist, tried to spread pro-Russian sentiment during the period under review. Following the example of Blaha, Gyimesi or the extra-parliamentary politician Pavol Slota, she tried to present the so-called real life in Russia in a series of videos. Like her predecessors, Belousovová filmed videos in a shopping centre, a grocery store and a city market to show that there were plenty of foreign brands and plenty of food at low prices in Russia.

None of the videos contained information about where they were filmed, but it was allegedly not Moscow. Belousovová, meanwhile, claimed that Russia was not affected by the Western sanctions because it still had plenty of Western brands, both in food, clothing and shoes. The prices were supposed to imply that all goods were affordable for ordinary Russians, but the politician did not give any other economic indicators for this and falsely argued by comparing Russian prices with those in Slovakia.

The aforementioned Pavol Slota, a representative of the political entity DOMOV - National Party, ended his tour of the Donbas with Michaela Gánovská, the founder of the website Televízia Veci verejné (Public Affairs Television), by publishing a video documentary. He drew attention to it in a Facebook post, in which he repeated the main narratives of the Kremlin propagandists about the alleged genocide of the Russian-speaking population in Ukraine or the use of the population as human shields by Ukrainian soldiers in the village of Avdijivka.

He also spoke of the destruction of memorials to Soviet soldiers fighting in World War II. The action was allegedly the work of the Banderites, who replaced the symbols with memorials to the "Nazi beast Bandera". This was primarily to play the card of alleged Ukrainian fascism, which was one of the Russian side's false pretexts for invading Ukraine.

To reinforce this narrative, Slota's piece spoke of Russia's liberation of the Donbas, where the population sees hope for good, peaceful and tranquil times. Cities in the Donbas, he said, are "rising from the ashes " and welcoming the Russians. He added to the repetition of the Kremlin's propaganda narratives by saying that during his visit to the Donbas territory he saw the real truth: "We did not meet a single person there who considered Russia an aggressor or occupier and wanted Donbas to come back under Kiev's rule."

The spectacle of opposition MPs and the "candidate of war"

Domestic topics in the past two weeks have been dominated by posts focusing on the celebrations of 17 November, the Day of the Struggle for Freedom and Democracy, which commemorates the anniversary of the 1989 Velvet Revolution. As no official events to commemorate the revolution have been announced by the government or other institutions, the opposition parties Progressive Slovakia (PS), Freedom and Solidarity (SaS) and the Christian Democratic Movement (KDH) have organised commemorative rallies in several Slovak cities.

The rallies were somewhat reminiscent of the anti-government protests, as they referred, for example, to the current themes of police violence, attacks on independent media by coalition politicians, and the government's efforts to restrict freedom of expression. On the other hand, however, they also included speeches by commemorators of the 1989 demonstrations and the accompanying political and social changes. Either way, their organisation and conduct became grist for the mill of disinformation peddlers who manipulatively interpreted the events as undignified and inappropriate anti-government protests.

According to the Minister of the Interior, Matúš Šutaj Eštok, it was "the theatre of opposition MPs, self-proclaimed bearers of the only truth". In a Facebook post, he was referring to a banner that appeared at an opposition rally in Bratislava, which contained the claim that the assassination attempt on Prime Minister Robert Fico in Handlová did not happen. Despite the fact that it was probably the sole such poster at the gathering, Šutaj Eštok presented it as proof that the opposition was pushing a "policy of lies, misleading and denial of facts".

The banner was also pointed out by SMER-SSD representatives Juraj Gedra, Erik Kaliňák and Richard Glück. In a Facebook video, they claimed that there is no topic that the opposition does not want to exploit to its advantage. Allegedly, it was a hyenism that no one has spoken out against and the media has been tactfully silent. Opposition politicians, they said, chose to tarnish the Day of Struggle for Freedom and Democracy with undemocratic slogans and allegedly incited the masses to aggression by comparing the democratically elected Prime Minister to a dictator. They were reacting to a speech by opposition leader Michal Šimečka (PS) at a rally in Bratislava, where he said that "in today's world, dictators, populists, extremists, politicians like Orbán and Fico are winning". At the same time, Gedra, Kaliňák and Glück falsely referred to the opposition's alleged suppression of democratic rights and freedoms - allegedly, in the past "it was they who shut down the civic media, criminalized the opposition and stole the referendum from the people".

Eduard Chmelár also verbally attacked the opposition rallies, claiming that they were "rallies of frustrated parties complaining that it is not to their liking and completely misleading debates about whether Fico, Mečiar or the communists are to blame for our current problems". Chmelár's post also attacked NGOs – in particular the Platform for Democracy - which, he said, believes "that democracy is when they rule and only they are democrats, and whoever defies them should be shut down, banned, silenced, ostracized as an enemy of democracy." Chmelár thus fed similar conspiratorial narratives about the alleged criminalization and censorship of other opinions as presented by the representatives of SMER-SSD.

The official announcement of the entry of Ivan Korčok, a former SaS nominee, foreign minister and unsuccessful presidential candidate, into the PS, also served to attack the opposition. The event was criticised in particular by Blaha in a post on the Telegram, which was also picked up by the official Facebook page of the SMER-SSD party. In the text, he denigrated Korčok, but also Šimečka and other PS members. He predicted the party's "domination by neoliberal foreigners " or "overwhelming by the robust Miklossian neoliberalism".

He accused Korčok - as in the past - of being an American agent and used extremely inappropriate vocabulary at his expense. He used adjectives such as "self-righteous hochstapler " or "slimy snake", who "has already been shoved in the anus of everyone from Mečiar to Matovič " and whose task was to take over the Sunni party. According to Blaha, the leader of the PS, Michal Šimečka, was used to achieve this goal: "Šimečka was used as a rag with which they are now wiping the floor." At the end of his post, the MEP conspiratorially stated that the PS is no longer a political party, but "a project of the dark Soros forces in the background, which have announced the recruitment of mercenaries because they want to gain power".

Several other politicians also rode the wave of criticism against Korčok. Among them was the Minister of the Interior, Šutaj Eštok. He returned to the deceptive rhetoric about Korčok as a "candidate of war" that was strongly present during the election campaign in an effort to discredit Korčok as a presidential candidate. Like Blaha, Šutaj Eštok sought to discredit Korčok by attacking his political past, as well as by misleading and distorting the facts.

He referred to Korčok as a former minister of Matovič and Heger, who "served devotedly in all covid measures, financial disruption and donation of weapons to Ukraine". In the video, he also claimed that Korčok "bears direct responsibility for all the chaos, the mishandling of the pandemic, the record price hikes, the abuse of the police and prosecutors, the unconstitutional giving of our weapons to Ukraine and the plunge of huge numbers of people into the poverty zone". Šutaj Eštok very misleadingly blamed him for a large number of negative phenomena, which he deliberately dramatized. In doing so, he brought a very simplistic parallel, claiming that by admitting Korčok to the PS, the party had signed up to everything that the previous governments of Igor Matovič and Eduard Heger had done.

Project Infosecurity.sk organized by Adapt Institute, which is supported by the Prague office of the Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Freedom, continuously monitors the activities of both Slovak and foreign disinformation actors, but focuses mainly on the former. The project activities are built upon daily monitoring of emerging disinformation, hoaxes, and conspiracy theories in the online information space. This approach allows the analysts to identify disinformation posts and narratives that resonated with the public the most, as well as to find out where they originated, and how they spread and evolved on social media. The report takes the form of a bi-weekly summary of arising trends in the spread of malicious information content online. Based on that, Infosecurity.sk can inform the public about emerging and current trends in the field of disinformation, manipulation, and propaganda.