I stumbled across something the other day about Russian interference with a link to the Department of Culture, Media and Sport report of February 2019. Looking back, I can see I didn't mention it at all at the time, probably because Brexit was dominating the news. The link was in a blog, Brexit Uncovered, HERE. The report, called Disinformation and Fake News is quite a piece of work, see the whole thing HERE.
However, the bit that caught my attention was section 6, Foreign Influence in Political Campaigns, HERE.
What was fascinating to learn was that when the government responded to an interim copy of the DCMS report on-line, by 30th November 2018, over 25% of the unique page views had come from Russian cities.
More than this the report says (paragraph 238):
In the month following its publication, over 63% of views of the report online were from foreign IP addresses (whereas, on average, 80% of viewers of Reports are UK-based), and of these, over half were from Russia. Furthermore, two-thirds of viewers were new visitors, meaning they had not visited the parliament.uk website before (in comparison with the majority of Reports, where only around 30% are new visitors). The following table shows the unique page views by city, illustrating this high proportion from Russia:
The table shows nearly 20% of page views came from Moscow, it was in fact the top city. Another 3% came from St Petersburg, where the Russian troll factory is located. Clearly some Russians were very interested in what the Select Committee was looking at. By comparison just 17.8% came from London. Almost as many came from Novosibirsk in Siberia as came from Edinburgh or Bristol!
You have to ask yourself why?
Then in four paragraphs the report reveals what is known about Russian interference in the referendum campaign and the governments complacent response that although there had been some attempted interference, it had no 'material impact'. Here they are in full:
241.When the Secretary of State was questioned in oral evidence over what constitutes “successful”, Rt Hon Jeremy Wright MP, responded: “We have seen nothing that persuades us that Russian interference has had a material impact on the way in which people choose to vote in elections. It is not that they have not tried, but we have not seen evidence of that material impact”. It is surely a sufficient matter of concern that the Government has acknowledged that interference has occurred, irrespective of the lack of evidence of impact. The Government should be conducting analysis to understand the extent of Russian targeting of voters during elections.
242.The Government also cannot state definitively that there was “no evidence of successful interference” in our democratic processes, as the term “successful” is impossible to define in retrospect. There is, however, strong evidence that points to hostile state actors influencing democratic processes. Cardiff University and the Digital Forensics Lab of the Atlantic Council have both detailed ways in which the Kremlin attempted to influence attitudes in UK politics.
243.Kremlin-aligned media published significant numbers of unique articles about the EU referendum. 89 Up researchers analysed the most shared of the articles, and identified 261 with a clear anti-EU bias to the reporting. The two main outlets were RT and Sputnik, with video produced by Ruptly. The articles that went most viral had the heaviest anti-EU bias. The social reach of these anti-EU articles published by the Kremlin-owned channels was 134 million potential impressions, in comparison with a total reach of just 33 million and 11 million potential impressions for all content shared from the Vote Leave website and Leave.EU website respectively. The value for a comparable paid social media campaign would be between £1.4 and 4.14 million.
244.On 17 January 2019, Facebook removed 289 Pages and 75 accounts from its site, accounts that had about 790,000 followers and had spent around $135,000 on ads between October 2013 and January 2019. The sites had been run by employees at the Russian state-owned news agency Sputnik, who represented themselves as independent news or general interest Pages. Around 190 events were hosted by these Pages (the first was scheduled for August 2015 and the most recent was scheduled for January 2019).
Russia, through Kremlin owned channels, published anti-EU articles that had a reach over three times as great as all the content published by the Vote Leave and Leave.EU websites.
I confess this was news to me. I knew the government had confirmed there was Russian interference and had said it was not successful but I hadn't quite realised the extent of it or Russian interest in the DCMS report.
Let me summarise:
- A known policy aim of Russia is the weakening of the EU which it sees as strategic competitor
- The 2016 referendum was a golden opportunity to achieve a big step toward that aim.
- The Russians are known to have been involved in the 2106 US presidential campaign and elsewhere.
- They spent the equivalent of £5.54 million on social media campaigning in the referendum
- Their campaign had a potential reach three times greater than the combined reach of both the main leave campaigns
- The Leave side narrowly won the vote
- The Tory party has received significant funding from Russian-born sources.
- The current Tory PM is friendly with very senior Russian figures with Kremlin links
- The government admits there has been interference but that it was not successful
- A parliamentary report into the events, completed in March 2019 has still not been published.
No wonder it hasn't.
