Exclusivo: Russian Propaganda — en Español — Pours Into Latin America via Social Media

America’s big three social media apps — Meta’s Facebook, Google’s YouTube, and X, formerly Twitter — ban or restrict posts by such Russian state propaganda outlets as RT, Ria, and Sputnik. They adopt a laissez faire attitude, though, toward the Kremlin’s thriving services in Spanish, the third most-popular language of social media, after English and Chinese. While blocked in the European Union, Sputnik Mundo, and RT en Español are unblocked in the Americas.Aimed at the 500 million Spanish speakers of the Americas, the Facebook page of RT en Español has 17 million followers, more than double the 7.3 million who follow RT’s English language counterpart. Founded in 2009, four years after the English language news service debuted as Russia Today, RT en Español took off. RT in English flatlined due to EU bans in and American curbs. On X, RT en Español has 3.4 million followers. RT in English has 3.1 million followers.Far from marginal, RT en Español is the third-most shared source for Spanish-language information on Russia’s war against Ukraine, surpassing the Spanish language services of BBC and CNN, reports the AP. Sputnik Mundo, banned in the EU, has 623,000 subscribers.These two outlets are among the top 15 most-shared domains for Spanish posts about Russia’s invasion on X, according to recent research by the Bogota-based research associate for the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Research Lab, Esteban Ponce de León. Indicating that troll farms pump up readership, during one eight-day period last year, 171 Twitter accounts tweeted RT en Español stories more than 200,000 times.Russian propaganda en Español serves up a heavy diet of anti-American and anti-Ukraine “news.” Between 11 percent and 13 percent of all of the Spanish language stories deal with Ukraine, according to a survey conducted earlier this year by Olha Satsuk of online news site Censor.NET. Yesterday on the RT en Español homepage, eight of the 22 stories — or 36 percent — revolved around Ukraine. Sample headlines: “The leader of Parliament was the only one responsible: Trudeau excuses himself from the ovation for the Ukrainian Nazi veteran in Canada;” “Moscow: Canada is ‘at the forefront’ of those who falsify WWII history;” and “Western liberals should stop supporting Ukraine’s ‘carnival of killings.’”Presenting an alternate universe to prevailing Western views of the war, Russian-sponsored media tell Spanish speakers that Russia is reclaiming its own territories; that Ukraine is a Western puppet; that Russophobia fuels the war; and that Russia is fighting against NATO and “Nazis.” RT en Español has posted articles claiming that the massacres committed by Russian troops last year in the suburbs of Kyiv were actually staged by Ukrainian movie makers.Last year, the Ukrainian Center for Strategic Communication and Information Security analyzed Russia’s disinformation campaigns in Argentina, Mexico, and Portuguese-speaking Brazil. Key Russian narratives were: the nuclear threat, the need for peace talks, and Communist China’s support for Russia in the war. In most of South America, China has displaced America as the top trading partner.The Center’s research found that this year these themes appeared into mainstream Latin American news outlets, carrying such headlines as: “Medvedev Warns NATO of Nuclear War in Case of Russia’s Defeat in Ukraine” and “NATO’s Role in Russia’s Ukraine War May Heighten the Risk of a Nuclear Conflict.” Or, as RT en Español, tweeted last year to Latin America: “Never forget who is the real threat to the world.”“NATO and the US are to be blamed for this war, they started it, provoking the Russians, and the Russians could not take it any more — that is the line,” Cuban exile Juan Antonio Blanco, tells The New York Sun, summarizing views pushed by Russia in Latin America. The founder of the Madrid think tank Siglo 21, Mr. Blanco adds. “Now there is moral relativism: ‘We are all against war — all sides are to be treated equally.’ That never came up until the Russians were being kicked out of Ukraine.”“With the assistance of Cuba and Venezuela, the Russians have been able to get in sync with Latin American media,” Mr. Blanco says. Reflecting regional fault lines, many Latin American nations, including Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico, voted to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in a key March 24, 2022, vote at the United Nations General Assembly. Tellingly, Bolivia, Cuba, and Nicaragua abstained. Venezuela was absent from the hall.“The real impact of Russian propaganda is shifting the conversation, not only on social media,” Mr. Ponce de Leon tells the Insider. “Right now, you can hear those narratives on the street, in the coffee shop, in the restaurants.”Two weeks ago, Russia’s successful softening of the global South was on display in Havana at the annual summit of the G77, a coalition of 135 developing countries formed to increase bargaining power at the United Nations.“What did they achieve in Havana?” Mr. Blanco asked about the group that met three days before the UN General Assembly. “No one talked about the war in Ukraine cutting grain exports. But they talked about hunger. They did not talk about the war. But they talked about geopolitics.”While the Third World summit was taking place at Havana, a Russian military unit was parading at Mexico City — part of a parade marking Mexico’s Independence day. After opposition press and politicians criticized Russia’s participation, Mexico’s leftist president, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, told reporters: “We have relations with all countries in the world, and we invite everyone.” The main opposition candidate for Mexico’s 2024 presidential election, Xochitl Galvez, shot back, saying on X that Mr. Lopez Obrador “made it clear that his friends are dictators, not democrats.”A trend setter for regional neutralism is Brazil, home to a third of Latin Americans. “Brazil seeks to maintain a certain independence from the United States and the European states, but in this situation, to distance itself from Ukraine’s allies means to side with Russia,” concludes the Ukrainian Research Center. “This trend is quite dangerous, as Brazil is a model for other countries in the region to follow.”

Exclusivo: Russian Propaganda — en Español — Pours Into Latin America via Social Media

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