ANATOMY OF PROPAGANDA: TOP 3 EVENTS OF THE WEEK

Official representatives of the Russian Federation use international platforms to voice propagandistic slogans, federal channels broadcast blatant fakes, and Roskomnadzor reported on the results of the fight against dissent in the online space.

Minister of Foreign Affairs of Russia, Sergei Lavrov, used the temporary presidency of the Russian Federation in the UN Security Council to broadcast propaganda narratives. At the meeting of this body, he made some tendentious political statements against the United States and Ukraine. Lavrov accused the United States of "destroying globalization" and Ukraine of "Nazism". UN Secretary-General ,Antonio Guterres, made a counter statement instead and said that Russia's invasion of Ukraine "causes massive suffering and destruction for the country and its people" and called for "urgent effective countermeasures".

Federal TV channels in Russia stopped being mass media sources and have turned into instruments of state propaganda. But while in the past, manipulation of information was limited to arbitrarily placed accents, now, under the guise of facts, deliberately false insinuations are being transmitted. The state TV channel "Russia-1" showed footage of a destroyed Russian missile hitting a high-rise building in Uman in the Cherkasy region, claiming it was a result of shelling by the Ukrainian military in Donbas.

Roskomnadzor (RKN) reported on its fight against dissent on the internet. RKN has blocked over 160,000 resources "with deliberately unreliable information" about the war in Ukraine since February 24 of last year in the Russian Federation. It is noted, in particular, that since February 2022, more than 4,300 video services have been blocked, "spreading advertising with files about 'SMO'." An automatic search system for prohibited content called "Oculus" has been launched in Russia. In December 2022, the system was tested, and since January 2023, it has begun to be integrated with working monitoring systems.