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The Unfreedom Monitor: Zimbabwe Country Report

Kudzai Chimhangwa

Amsterdam: Global Voices Advox (2022), 28 pp.

"The government of Zimbabwe and the ruling ZANU PF party are bent on ensuring that the status quo is preserved at all costs. As evidenced by findings in the Civic Media Observatory, the digital sphere has been identified as a threat to the country’s national security, insofar as deposing the curre ... more

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The Informational Dictator's Dilemma: Citizen Responses to Media Censorship and Control in Russia and Belarus

Samuel A. Greene

PONARS Eurasia (2022), 9 pp.

"The findings described in this memo strongly suggest that "softer" strategies of media cooptation are more effective than harsher, more coercive approaches to media control. In Russia, where the Kremlin has-until very recently-used a combination of commercial pressure and political influence to pus ... more

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Media and Democratic Backsliding: Lessons from the Turkish Case

Eylem Yanardagoglu

Athens; Berlin: Hellenic Foundation for European & Foreign Policy (ELIAMEP); Centre for Applied Turkey Studies (CATS) (2022), 7 pp.

"In Turkey, the AKP came to power in 2002 at a time marked by a relatively pro-European Union and pluralistic outlook in politics. The democratic backsliding in Turkey has been more obvious since 2007 and the start of the AKP’s second term in power. It deepened especially after the 2016 coup attem ... more

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Is Telegram a “harbinger of Freedom”? The Performance, Practices, and Perception of Platforms as Political Actors in Authoritarian States

Mariëlle Wijermars, Tetyana Lokot

Post-Soviet Affairs, volume 38, issue 1-2 (2022), pp. 125-145

"This paper examines the practices, performance, and perceptions of the messaging platform Telegram as an actor in the 2020 Belarus protests, using publicly available data from Telegram’s public statements, protest-related Telegram groups, and media coverage. Developing a novel conceptualization o ... more

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Russia's Vigilante YouTube Stars: Digital Entrepreneurship and Heroic Masculinity in the Service of Flexible Authoritarianism

Anna Schwenck

Europe-Asia Studies, volume 74, issue 7 (2022), pp. 1166-1189

"Combating illegal parking and drinking in public is the raison d’être of Russia’s best-known law-and-order youth initiatives, StopKham and Lev Protiv. These initiatives enforce and promote neotraditional morals amongst young people by challenging alleged offenders on camera and uploading the e ... more

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Authoritarians on a Media Offensive in the Midst of War: The Informational Influence of Russia, China, Turkey, Iran and the Gulf States in Southeast Europe

Rumena Filipova, Vladimir Shopov

Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung (KAS) (2022), iii, 127 pp.

"The publication analyzes the emerging trends of foreign authoritarian-state disinformation in the context of the war in Ukraine in a comparative manner focusing on 7 states of Southeast Europe (Bulgaria, Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, North Macedonia, Montenegro and Albania). It examines ... more

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Russische Medien in Deutschland. Die Bundestagswahlen 2021 – Zwischen Einflussnahme und Desinformation

Susanne Spahn

Potsdam: Friedrich Naumann Stiftung (2022), 29 pp.

"Während in Russland immer mehr unabhängige Medien der staatlichen Kontrolle unterworfen und als „ausländische Agenten“ gebrandmarkt werden, nutzen die russischen Staatsmedien die Meinungs- und Pressefreiheit in Deutschland, um ungehindert Desinformation zu verbreiten. Nach acht Jahren Berich ... more

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Russlands unabhängiger Journalismus: Der harte Überlebenskampf unter totalitären Repressionsmaßnahmen

Sergej Parkhomenko

Potsdam: Friedrich Naumann Stiftung (2022), 39 pp.

"Der Journalist und Verleger Sergej Parkhomenko ist ein international gefeierter Menschenrechtsverteidiger, Oppositionsaktivist und unter den russischen Medienschaffenden einer der wichtigsten Partner für das Internationale Journalisten- und Mediendialogprogramm (IJMD) der Friedrich-Naumann-Stiftun ... more

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Winning the Web: How Beijing Exploits Search Results to Shape Views of Xinjiang and COVID-19

Jessica Brandt, Bret Schafer, Elen Aghekyan, Valerie Wirtschafter, Adya Danaditya

Washington, DC: Brookings Institution (2022), 47 pp.

"For months, our team has been tracking how China has exploited search engine results on Xinjiang and COVID-19, two subjects that are geopolitically salient to Beijing — Xinjiang, because the Chinese government seeks to push back on condemnation of its rights record; COVID-19, because it seeks to ... more

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Choosing Propaganda: Media Selection and Politics in Putin's Russia

Ashley Katrine Blum

Los Angeles: Doctoral Thesis University of California (2022), xiv, 160 pp.

"The results of this dissertation suggest that most Russians are aware, at least to some degree, of the biases of state media. Nonetheless, they still consider these sources to provide valuable information. This, in part, stems from beliefs about the access these news outlets have to information and ... more

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Digital Authoritarianism in the Middle East: Deception, Disinformation and Social Media

Marc Owen Jones

London: Hurst & Company (2022), 303 pp.

"By the time readers arrive at the end of Jones’s astonishing examination of social media in the Middle East, they will be completely persuaded that it is now impossible to tell whether anything they read online is true. Replete with bots and sock puppets, trolls and dupes, this online world is bo ... more

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The Great Firewall of China: How to Build and Control an Alternative Version of the Internet

James Griffiths

London: Zed Books (2021), xv, 423 pp.

"China's 'Great Firewall' has evolved into the most sophisticated system of online censorship in the world. As the Chinese internet grows and online businesses thrive, speech is controlled, dissent quashed, and attempts to organise outside the official Communist Party are quickly stamped out. Update ... more

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Information Bedlam: Russian and Chinese Information Operations During Covid-19

Edward Lucas, Jake Morris, Corina Rebegea

Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA) (2021), 20 pp.

"Based on a literature review through January 2021, evaluated at an expert seminar, this policy brief provides a baseline analysis of changing tactics, narratives, and distribution strategies in Russian and Chinese information operations (IOs) relating to the covid-19 pandemic. Key findings: China c ... more

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Democracy and Fake News

Serena Giusti, Elisa Piras (eds.)

London; New York: Routledge (2021), xiv, 232 pp.

"This book explores the challenges that disinformation, fake news, and post-truth politics pose to democracy from a multidisciplinary perspective. The authors analyse and interpret how the use of technology and social media as well as the emergence of new political narratives has been progressively ... more

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Cyber Capabilities and National Power: A Net Assessment

London et al.: International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) (2021), 174 pp.

"This report sets out a new methodology for assessing cyber power, and then applies it to 15 states: Four members of the Five Eyes intelligence alliance – the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia; Three cyber-capable allies of the Five Eyes states – France, Israel and Japan; F ... more

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Cyber Capabilities as a New Resource of Power Conflicts in the Digital Sphere

Jason Chumtong, Christina Stolte

International Reports (Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung), issue 1 (2021), pp. 95-105

"Interestingly, traditional sources of power, such as military and economic strength, are not a prerequisite for success in cyberspace. It is true that the premier league of cyber powers also includes many traditional major powers in its ranks. But states need very few resources to build their cyber ... capabilities and exploit them to project influence, as the examples of international outsiders like Iran and Venezuela demonstrate. In some ways, cyber capabilities even seem ideally suited to allowing small and medium-sized countries to increase their influence because they represent an effective tool of asymmetric warfare. Even though they require relatively few resources and low-threshold technology, they have the potential to inflict considerable damage when deployed against other countries Attacks on poorly protected public authorities, businesses, or even infrastructure can cause serious damage to other countries. The risks for the attacker are reasonably low because attribution of the attacks is usually difficult and time-consuming. On top of this, the evidence is seldom clear, and consistent denial of any involvement is part and parcel of cyber warfare. This is also one of the key differences from previous power struggles at the international level. While the global battle for power and influence has always been accompanied by visible demonstrations of power and the accumulation of status symbols, the struggle in cyberspace takes place under the radar. This makes it especially difficult to identify shifts of power occurring today. Particularly in the field of information warfare, an area of growing importance in both national and international conflicts, states that were never previously on the radar as global players are now increasing their international influence. Yet, these countries recognised the potential of digital technologies at an early stage and are exploiting them with great success. Many of them have a wealth of experience in this respect due to having deployed the tools of information warfare against their own citizens and political opponents for many years. They can now direct this expertise towards other countries to wield global influence." (Conclusion, page 103) more

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Retweeting Through the Great Firewall: A Persistent and Undeterred Threat Actor

Jacob Wallis, Tom Uren, Elise Thomas, Albert Zhang, Samantha Hoffman, Lin Li, Alex Pascoe, Danielle Cave

International Cyber Policy Centre Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) (2020), 56 pp.

"This report analyses a persistent, large-scale influence campaign linked to Chinese state actors on Twitter and Facebook. This activity largely targeted Chinese-speaking audiences outside of the Chinese mainland (where Twitter is blocked) with the intention of influencing perceptions on key issues, ... more

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Pillars of Russia's Disinformation and Propaganda Ecosystem

Washington, DC: U.S. Department of State (2020), 76 pp.

"Russia has operationalized the concept of perpetual adversarial competition in the information environment by encouraging the development of a disinformation and propaganda ecosystem that allows for varied and overlapping approaches that reinforce each other even when individual messages within the ... system appear contradictory. This ecosystem reflects both the sources of disinformation and propaganda—official government statements, state-funded media outlets, proxy websites, bots, false social media personas, cyber-enabled disinformation operations, etc.—and the different tactics that these channels use. Russia’s willingness to employ this approach provides it with three perceived advantages. First, it allows for the introduction of numerous variations of the same false narratives. This allows for the different pillars of the ecosystem to fine tune their disinformation narratives to suit different target audiences because there is no need for consistency, as there would be with attributed government communications. Second, it provides plausible deniability for Kremlin officials when proxy sites peddle blatant and dangerous disinformation, allowing them to deflect criticism while still introducing pernicious information. Third, it creates a media multiplier effect among the different pillars of the ecosystem that boost their reach and resonance. The media multiplier effect can, at times, create disinformation storms with potentially dangerous effects for those Russia perceives as adversaries at the international, national, and local level. In the past, Russia has leveraged this dynamic to shield itself from criticism for its involvement in malign activity. This approach also allows Russia to be opportunistic, such as with COVID-19, where it has used the global pandemic as a hook to push longstanding disinformation and propaganda narratives [...] This report provides a visual representation of the ecosystem described above, as well as an example of the media multiplier effect it enables. This serves to demonstrate how the different pillars of the ecosystem play distinct roles and feed off of and bolster each other. The report also includes brief profiles of select proxy sites and organizations that occupy an intermediate role between the pillars of the ecosystem with clear links to Russia and those that are meant to be fully deniable." (Pages 5-7) more

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Das ist keine Propaganda: Wie unsere Wirklichkeit zertrümmert wird

Peter Pomerantsev

Bonn: Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung (bpb), Sonderausg. (2020), 295 pp.

"Auf der ganzen Welt nutzen unterschiedlichste Akteure die Wirkungsmechanismen der digitalen Medien aus, um durch gezielte Desinformationskampagnen die öffentliche Meinung zu beeinflussen. Dies, so lautet die zentrale These von Peter Pomerantsev, bedrohe Demokratien und Demokratisierungsprozesse. W ... more

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I Know What You Mean: Information Compensation in an Authoritarian Country

Jiangnan Zhu, Chengli Wang

International Journal of Press/Politics, volume 26, issue 3 (2020), pp. 587-608

"How do people address information deficiency caused by rigid control of information in authoritarian regimes? We argue that there exists an internally oriented information compensation approach through which people can glean extra information from official messages domestically. This approach does ... more