The Pipeline: How Russian propaganda reaches and influences the U.S.

[Nevilledog]

https://www.nbcnews.com/specials/russian-disinformation-2024-election-storm-1516/index.html

The fake whistleblower videos started popping up last fall, the work of a small but prolific Russian group that researchers call Storm-1516.

Much remains unknown about Storm-1516 — one prong of Russia’s propaganda operation — but it has produced some of the country’s most far-reaching and influential disinformation.

The Storm-1516 campaigns rely on faked primary sources — audio, video, photos, documents — presented as evidence of the claims’ veracity. They are then laundered through international news sources and influencers to reach their ultimate target: a mainstream Western audience.

At least 50 false narratives have been launched this way since last fall, according to a count NBC News assembled with researchers. The narratives aim to diminish Western support for military aid in Ukraine following Russia’s invasion, a contentious issue in Congress. The videos also back the re-election of Donald Trump, who has pledged to halt military aid to Ukraine, while painting the former president as a victim of a “deep state.” And they attack Vice President Kamala Harris.

*snip*

[Kid Berwyn]

1. Tucker Carlson is another vektor.

The role of Tucker Carlson in Russian state media’s propaganda strategy

OCTOBER 10, 2023 | THE MOSCOW TIMES / via Institute for Strategic Dialogue

ISD Senior OSINT Analyst Elise Thomas writes an op-ed for the Moscow Times on Russian state media’s reliance on American far-right news personality Tucker Carlson. Elise, along with other ISD analysts, has long studied Russian influence campaigns and argues that Tucker’s content gives them ammo to back up their narratives in a much better way than they ever could. “Their tactics may change, but their strategy remains broadly the same: stoking existing divisions and turning up the dial on polarisation, rather than seeking to invent new issues with no basis in reality.”

Following this strategy, Russian state media has often relied on the ex-Fox News Channel anchor and his “knack for polarisation.”

“This benefits Russian propagandists because it allows them to piggyback off Carlson’s knack for polarisation. Russian news hosts take clips of Carlson’s shows and build their own segments around them, following his lead on topics and expanding on his narratives. In some ways perhaps it’s only the logical conclusion that one of them would eventually just cut out the middleman and make an entire show based around Carlson’s clips.”

Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Carlson “used a March 2022 episode of his primetime show to give oxygen to a bizarre conspiracy theory about the supposed development of US bioweapons in Ukraine.” The conspiracy had been making the rounds in fringe online circles after a QAnon follower came across an old Russian disinformation campaign, combined it with the origins of COVID-19 and then added on the events in Ukraine.

“Leaked memos from the Kremlin to Russian state media in the week following the full-scale invasion contained instructions stating that it was ‘essential to use as much as possible fragments of broadcasts of the popular Fox News host Tucker Carlson.’ His assertions that NATO and the West provoked the violence in Ukraine has clearly won him fans in Moscow.”

Continues…

https://www.isdglobal.org/isd-in-the-news/the-role-of-tucker-carlson-in-russian-state-medias-propaganda-strategy/

Tucker is a traitor.