from The Marionettes. A Tale of the World as Political Theatre

‘Make the world gasp with horror’ (Willi Munzenberg)

The still is dark, but no one can mistake the message. A masked, black-clad man is kneeling before a fire. Next to him is a white, handwritten sign which reads ‘Black Lives Matter’. In the fire, an American bible is visible. The flames have just begun to lick the edges, but the cover remains fully legible: The Holy Bible.

The image is taken from a video that quickly went viral during the 2020 American presidential election campaign. It was filmed at a protest held by the Black Lives Matter movement in the city of Portland in late July. ‘This is who they are’, the Republican senator Ted Cruz spewed on Twitter as he shared the image on 1 August. Donald Trump Jr thundered that the anti-fascist left-wingers had reached the ‘book burning phase’.

A week or so later, the New York Times revealed that the video of the bible burning had been created by the Russian English-language television channel RT (Russia Today) and its video production company Ruptly. ‘Ruptly and RT then let Twitter take it from there’, the newspaper wrote. The film bounced onto social media via a peripheral Twitter handle (later deleted), and from there it rose to prominence through viral sharing in American right-wing nationalist circles. A minor Twitterstorm ensued during which the number of bibles apparently being burned quickly mounted and then the burning became the main point of that evening’s demonstration. In fact, other protesters barely seemed to register what was going on. The two figures clad in black responsible for igniting the fire had by all appearances only burned one single bible – or perhaps one more to provide Ruptly with extra footage.

According to the New York Times, the planted bible burning was an example of new Russian methods of disinformation where the troll factories and fake accounts on social media from 2016 had been replaced by so-called ‘information laundering’. It was an inventive name. Just like illicit cash, planted false stories could be laundered of their Russian origins by primarily being spread via existing domestic sites and accounts. The desired effect – rage and inflamed conflict – was the same, but it was harder to trace the source without trampling across citizens’ democratic right to react and express themselves freely.

The New York Times noted that American intelligence sources had warned of covert attempts to elevate American racial antagonism ahead of the presidential election. The newspaper also highlighted that disinformation was about more than downright lies, but also half-truths, and that falsehoods have the greatest effect when they are based on a small kernel of truth.

This ‘information laundering’ was hardly a new phenomenon. In books on covert political influence operations, the strategy is described as establishing a stand-alone ‘echo chamber’. Like-minded people repeat the planted news or claim and reinforce it by echoing it. In echo chambers, the fever pitch is elevated and language degrades.

The trolls in Saint Petersburg and the automated fake accounts on social media also served this function in 2016 – ‘the online equivalent of the laugh track in a studio-taped TV show’ as Thomas Rid puts it. The method was also found in the Soviet arsenal in the 1970s and 1980s. ‘Even the most blatant lies [that the Soviets disseminated] took on a life of their own’, Anton Shekhovtsov notes in his book Russia and the Western Far Right: Tango Noir. At the time, Soviet intelligence officers were given special training in how to use disinformation as a weapon. They were to track frictions, discontent and antagonism, identifying the greatest vulnerabilities and ensuring they were exploited.

When the Russia Today television channel was launched in 2005, Vladimir Putin declared it was aimed at breaking ‘the Anglo-Saxon monopoly on the global information streams’. Following the 2008 war in Georgia, those ambitions were amped up. The Kremlin felt it had been defeated in the West in the war of opinion around the invasion, and Putin began to gear up for information-based warfare in response. Russia Today was rebranded as RT (to avoid a less obvious connection to Moscow) and the content in its foreign programming shifted from positive news about Russia to blackening the reputation of the West. The idea was for RT to operate more or less like an international news agency – or propaganda agency.

In this respect, they faced a strategic challenge. If the goal was an international media breakthrough then the desired echo chamber could not be confined to Russian voices. The like-minded individuals who would comment and amplify anti-Western propaganda needed to hail from western nations. Moscow knew where its sympathisers were to be found. Many of Europe’s leading right-wing nationalists – Austria’s Heinz-Christian Strache, France’s Marine Le Pen and with the passing of time even Italy’s Matteo Salvini – began to contribute to RT broadcasts as ‘experts’. Kent Ekeroth from the Swedish far-right populist party the Sweden Democrats was another commentator who frequently appeared on air with RT.

The right-wing nationalists had nothing against besmirching either the EU or the core values of liberal western democracies while live on RT. Lies and hateful language posed no obstacles to them. After all, their political goals aligned with those of Putin’s Russia, and they were more than happy to make their voices heard.

The European alternative-right also offered its own media outlets. Online, so-called alternative media operations with right-wing and nationalist overtones began to mushroom at around this time. They were portrayed as the rebellious contenders to the ‘legacy media’ of the media ecosystem.

I carry out a randomised spot check, selecting eight European countries and forty known alternative media outlets established across them between 2007 and 2017. When I review their domain registration history, I see that the peak appears to have been around 2008–2009 when Moscow was ramping up its information war. In that period, sixteen of these forty right-wing nationalist alternative media outlets registered their domains in the space of twelve months. Seven of them saw the light of day in the space of just a few weeks over the course of November and December 2008. Registrations were otherwise fairly evenly spread across the decade in question, with a few trickling through each year.

This cluster of upstarts around the 2008–2009 period may be coincidence – online newspapers were the zeitgeist. Nonetheless, the result was a startlingly rapid and forceful strengthening of the media-based echo chamber that the Kremlin believed best served the interests of Russia.

Sweden Democrats politician Kent Ekeroth launched the blog and news site Politiskt inkorrekt [Politically Incorrect] in late October 2008. He was joined on the editorial team by Chang Frick, a locally elected Sweden Democrat politician from the county of Skåne in southern Sweden. The site was framed as an ‘antithesis to the skewed, adulterated and mendacious articles being pumped out by the established media’. The tone was crude, the content strongly anti-immigrant and xenophobic. Before long, the blog had more than a million hits and was one of the biggest in the country. Following the 2010 Swedish general election, Politiskt inkorrekt claimed some of the credit for the Sweden Democrats’ entry into the Riksdag.

Politiskt inkorrekt was shut down in 2011 but was resurrected not long afterwards as Avpixlat [Depixelated], now known as Samhällsnytt [Society News]), which was also launched by Kent Ekeroth. Two years later in 2013, Ekeroth also registered the domain name for Nyheter idag [News Today], a site that named Chang Frick as its founder and publisher. These alternative media outlets stated they were funded primarily by ‘micro donations’ from their many readers, which before long was supplemented by subscription income. Fria tider [Free Times], Sweden’s third largest alternative media outlet with a right-wing nationalist profile, was also founded at around this time. It was registered in 2009 through an Estonian corporation and its founder Widar Nord seems to have opted for the same funding model. As it said on the site for a period, ‘Donate money to Fria tider – for the sake of free news’.

Before launching Nyheter idag, Chang Frick had been at the riots in the Stockholm suburb of Husby in May 2013, camera in hand. He had posted his footage on YouTube (as well as Avpixlat). Before long, RT had asked to buy his recordings. Frick has told the Magasinet Filter publication that he did not receive any payment for his clips, being rewarded instead with further assignments on behalf of the channel. The year after that, he described his occupation on Nyheter idag as follows:

I’m also a stringer (a freelancer with recurring assignments) for RT’s subsidiary Ruptly. We buy videos from them too. You might say we cooperate a bit. Not because I earn more money from RT than other channels. Not because its popular. It’s because I “ask the wrong questions”. That makes RT a natural choice.

In the early 2010s, smartphone use exploded in the western world. This technological development became the bedrock of the golden age of social media. The click community took over – it was as if it had been made for covert influence operations. It became easier than ever to create the strategic ‘echo chambers’ which had originally – before the term ‘viral’ had existed – required laborious craftsmanship and extensive journalistic contacts. A provocative online video clip could now be forwarded at lighting speed across social media with or without the aid of troll accounts and bots. International breakthroughs were now just a click away.

There were many attempts to create startling echoes of this kind in the new media landscape, although not all were successful. When the Netherlands announced an advisory referendum on the EU’s collaborative agreement with Ukraine in the spring of 2016, a threatening video surfaced on YouTube. It showed six men in balaclavas and military fatigues who supposedly represented the Ukrainian Azov Regiment, who had formerly been known for their right-wing extremism and Nazi connections. Clutching heavy arms, the men had a terrifying message to share:

‘Dear Dutch! Do not dare to cross Ukraine. It will end very badly for you. We will cause chaos – not only in your brains but also in your homes. You will regret this. We will find you everywhere. At the cinema, at work, in your bedroom, on public transit. We have guys in the Netherlands and they are ready to obey all orders.’

The video concluded with one of the masked men setting the Dutch flag alight.

The referendum had been pushed by the right-wing nationalist and populist website Geenstijl. The site also managed to gather the 300,000 signatures needed to trigger the vote, and then campaigned vigorously for a no vote. In January 2016, Geenstijl linked to the menacing video and described its contents in writing, but the video was quickly dismissed as a fake. Even Geenstijl eventually published the Ukrainian embassy’s denial.

It was not long before the Bellingcat reporting network revealed that the video had been disseminated – and presumably created – by the Internet Research Agency troll factory in Saint Petersburg.

Similar attempts to generate digital public outcries also occurred in Sweden. On Monday 20 February 2017, unrest erupted in the Stockholm suburb of Rinkeby. Police officers who arrived to arrest an individual encountered thirty or forty stone-throwing youths, many of them with their faces covered. Cars were set alight.

The incident garnered significant international attention given that just two days earlier, the American president Donald Trump had mentioned just such a riot in Sweden, stating ‘look at what’s happening last night in Sweden’. (Trump would later explain this, saying he had seen a programme about immigration to Sweden broadcast on Fox News the evening before.)

Afterwards, a number of the Rinkeby youths independently stated they had been offered 400 kronor each (around USD $35) by a Russian camera crew from the NTV channel to give them some ‘action’ for the cameras. This was denied by NTV. The incident was interpreted by Swedish government representatives as part of an increasing campaign of negativity against the Swedish state.

Footage showing western countries in disrepair are also sought after in Russian domestic propaganda. CCTV footage from the storming of the Capitol in Washington in 2021 shows an American wearing a red Trump baseball cap moving calmly among the hooligans and filming the unfolding chaos inside Congress. According to a New York Times investigation, the individual in question was Charles Bausman, an American propagandist from the right-wing nationalist sphere.

Bausman supplied his videos with commentaries to a Russian TV producer who aired them in Russia less than twenty-four hours later. Bausman, who has spoken fluent Russian since childhood, claimed the violence had been started by the FBI. Speaking to the Russian television audience, he painted a picture of the USA as a country in a state of dissolution.

The Capitol cameraman had more strings to his bow. Since 2014, he had also been running a conspicuously pro-Russian English-language news site framed as an alternative to the western media’s ‘inaccurate, incomplete and unrealistically negative perception of Russia’. According to the New York Times, a leaked email showed Bausman to be in direct contact with the oligarch Konstantin Malofeev’s Tsargrad propaganda network, and that he was not buying news from the network, but was in fact charging to reproduce it. This was denied by Malofeev.

Bausman stated, just like so many others, that he was covering the costs of the site through crowdfunding and micro donations from committed supporters. We can but doff our caps to such generous readers.