East StratCom Task Force
The East StratCom Task Force is a part of the administration of the European External Action Service, focused on proactive communication of European Union policies and activities in the Eastern neighbourhood and beyond. The Team was created as a conclusion of the European Council meeting on 19 and 20 March 2015, stressing the need to challenge the ongoing disinformation campaigns by Russia.“
Mission and objectives
The East Stratcom Team is intended to develop dedicated communication material on priority issues, where EU strategic communication needs to be improved or the EU is subject to disinformation campaigns. Such products will be put at the disposal of the EU's political leadership, press services, EU delegations and EU Member States and are intended for the widest possible public audience. The Team is designated to develop communication campaigns, targeting key audiences and focused on specific issues of relevance to those audiences, including local issues. The actions of the East Stratcom Team are built on existing work and coherent with wider EU communication efforts, including activities of the EU institutions and EU Member States.Key Task Force products
The team's positive communications products are mainly focused on the countries of the Eastern Neighbourhood and produced in the local languages of those countries. They are distributed via the social media channels of the EU Delegations in the region, and are also carried on television and via other media and public events. In addition, the Task Force, in cooperation with the European Commission, led the EU's six month Eastern Partnership communications campaign culminating in the November 2017 Eastern Partnership Summit in Brussels.The team's main product to raise awareness of disinformation is the weekly Disinformation Review. This can provide valuable data for analysts, journalists and officials dealing with this issue. The Disinformation Review also brings the latest news and analyses of pro-Kremlin disinformation. Launched in November 2015, the Disinformation Review has been described as "the best weekly disinformation bulletin anywhere in the West". The full record of the Task Force's work on disinformation is available on its website . The team also runs the European External Action Service's . It is also possible to follow the team on Twitter and Facebook. This communicates primarily about the EU's foreign policy by publishing information about EU activities, as well as EU statements and press releases with relevance to the Eastern Neighbourhood in particular.
Reception
EU Member State Governments have strongly supported the Task Force since its inception and provide the majority of its staff.The European Parliament has consistently supported the Task Force and called for adequate staffing and resourcing. An EP preparatory action for 2018 – "StratCom Plus" - has allocated €1.1m for the team to focus on how to counter disinformation on the EU more systematically.
- Pavel Telicka, Vice-President of the European Parliament: "I place great value in the fact that Europe has experts who address Russia's ongoing disinformation campaigns. The quality and the substance of their work is outstanding. Their work is valuable as it indicated the alarming nature of our European security".
- Keir Giles from Chatham House about East StratCom Task Force: "a critically important capability, ESTF has quite a high credit among experts".
- European Security Union Commissioner Julian King noted that East Stratcom Task Force "gathered more than 3,500 examples of pro-Kremlin disinformation contradicting publicly available facts repeated on many languages on many occasions”; "It also launched a Russian language service from Brussels, providing updates and fact-based background information about the Union for RU language journalists. The aim is to increase visibility and more accurate representation of EU policies in the Russian language media. It produces a weekly Disinformation review. Their Twitter account ensures that the Task Force's products reach up to 2 million people per month, in addition to their regular briefings. This work is very important".
- Rebecca Harms, Member of the European Parliament from Germany and member of the Greens group: "It's important to have this Stratcom, but its interaction with national bodies is not strong enough".
- Former Danish Foreign Minister Uffe Ellemann-Jensen said that: "They provide an excellent instrument. We would of course not be able to do it in other ways".
- Former Czech Prime Minister Bohuslav Sobotka: "This team is capable of generating quality results".
- Edward Lucas, vice president at Center for European Policy Analysis, said that the East StratCom's Disinformation Review is "the best weekly bulletin on Russian propaganda in the West" next after Ukrainian similar project, StopFake, which he considers to be "the gold standard".
- According to The New York Times, East Stratcom serves as "Europe’s front line against this onslaught of fake news".
- Canadian Maclean's magazine: "As for who first noticed that Moscow was gunning for Freeland, that’s something that has yet to show up in any banner Canadian headlines. It was the European Union’s East StratCom Task Force, a unit of the External Action Service. The Task Force was set up in March 2015 as a kind of early warning system to detect incoming Kremlin disinformation campaigns".
- East StratCom Task Force in EUobserver: "Eight member states have urged the EU's foreign service to significantly expand its work on countering Russian propaganda. They said in a letter to EU head of foreign affairs Federica Mogherini that "in the face of unabated third party disinformation campaigns … we see an urgent need to further enhance the EU's StratCom capabilities East StratCom circulates online notes that debunk Russian disinformation and has attracted 30,000 followers to its Twitter account. It also promotes positive coverage of the EU in former Soviet states". More in EUobserver: "Its Disinformation Review, a weekly newsletter, and its daily tweets and infographics, should be in the laptops and phones of all MEPs and senior EU officials".
- Lawfare Blog about the team: "The task force has made some meaningful contributions to the efforts to counter disinformation warfare. Over the course of its operation, East StratCom has identified over 3,500 disinformation cases These statistics highlight the global nature of the problem, and the benefit of having a body working on disinformation beyond a single country’s borders. East StratCom’s supranational view also allows it to provide valuable insights into the broader strategy and goals of pro-Kremlin disinformation operations because it can see them as a cohesive whole, rather than isolated incidents in individual countries.
Criticism
An opinion piece written by Danish commentator, Iben Thranholm, published on Russia Insider October 2015, were listed by East StratCom as pro-Kremlin disinformation. Member of the Danish Parliament, Marie Krarup, upon discovery raised the issue in January 2017, demanding Foreign Minister, Anders Samuelsen, to take action and stop ‘black listing’ of opinions, which he declined as the listing in his view was correctly labeled 'disinformation in support for Russia'. In response 28 commentators wrote a joint critique stressing their concern that ‘anybody with a critical view on mass immigration could end up in the black book of EU’.
An article published October 2016 on Folkets Avis, lists several instances, where East StratCom has labelled critique of non Western immigration to EU as pro-Kremlin disinformation, regardless that neither the media or the content has any relation to Russia.
Research conducted by investigative journalists at Danish newspaper, Politiken, showed that East StratCom along with Western media falsely blamed separatists, not government forces, in Eastern Ukraine for initiating an offensive in the area of Avdiivka in January 2017. Sources used by East StratCom included InformNapalm which the article shows has ties to Ukrainian Myrotvorets. Then Foreign Minister, Anders Samuelsen, stated that his staff would hold dialogues with the team to avoid anything that could cast doubt on the work and intentions of East StratCom.
Upon discovery of being listed for publishing pro-Kremlin disinformation, three Dutch major media organisations sued the EU for libel. On 6 March 2018, a majority of 109 votes to 41 of the Dutch Parliament voted to close EUvsDisinfo. On 8 March 2018, East StratCom announced they had deleted the listings of Dutch media in their database "following a detailed review". On 9 March 2018, Dutch Minister of the Interior, who had previously opposed closing EUvsDisinfo, said that the government would make a case for closing it in the European Union. On 13 March 2018 the three Dutch media withdrew their case.
Law on illegal foreign influence
In November 2018 the Danish Government presented a bill to counter foreign influence which imposed up to 12 years of prison for sharing ‘disinformation’ in corporation with foreign intelligence services.Through the Danish Ministry of Defense, Denmark's oldest newspaper Berlingske obtained a four-page document produced by the East StratCom Task Force, with 11 alleged examples of Russian disinformation used as an internal document for the bill. The document was published in an article titled "Not a single example of influence operations against Denmark: »Government whipping up a mood«"
The examples were:
- Downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17
- Swedish Minister of Defense weapons deal with Ukraine
- Criminal case of Lisa F.
- Bombing of humanitarian convoy in Aleppo, September 2016
- Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections
- German troops raping Lithuanian girl.
- Denmark to open brothels for zoophiles.
- The 2017 French presidential election.
- Poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury
- Douma chemical attack.
- A segment about Danish island of Bornholm on Russian NTV.
An independent report delivered to the Judicial committee in the parliament debunked the eleven examples categorizing each of the examples in ranges from ‘undocumented’ to ‘fabricated’ by East StratCom Task Force.
The bill was made into law March 2019.
COVID-19
Members of the ‘Russian media research project’ at the University of Manchester were asked to comment on material in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic published on EUvsDisinfo and found the material they analyzed ‘troubling’ concluding the EU-founded body set up to fight disinformation has ended up producing it.The researchers noted two methods they found particularly problematic:
First, the context in which individual sentences were extracted from the source materials and rephrased in the form of summaries and headlines which make them sound particularly outrageous. An example was a theory claiming that COVID-19 ‘was probably created on purpose at the UK’s Porton Down laboratories’ while there was no indication in the EUvsDinsinfo database that the theory is rebuffed by the show’s co-moderater who repeatedly says he does not believe the conspiracy theories surrounding coronavirus.
Second, what the researchers label as blatant distortions done by EUvsDisinfo.
These distortions include an hour-long radio program in which the two participants briefly disagrees about historical parallels and which misleadingly is entitled ‘Coronavisus is an attempt by the Anglo-Saxons to control China’ on EUvsDisinfo.
Other examples include EUvsDisinfo attributing claims to RT Arabic for merely reporting claims made by others and inclusion of an article in the EUvsDisinfo database denying that Russia is waging a disinformation campaign around COVID-19 on questionable grounds.
The research project included an analysis of 300 articles from RT on COVID-19 of which the researchers found “23 to deal with conspiracy theories, and the overwhelming majority of these amount to rebuttals of western media accusations of Russian conspiracy mongering, or mockeries of conspiracy theories touted by others. Typical examples include ridiculing a conspiracy theory tweeted by a Hollywood actress'; and dismissing as ‘Russophobic’ US State Department accusations of Russian conspiracy-theory dissemination'".
The researchers concludes that “The European Commission’s reliance on East StratCom is jeopardising its credibility as an evidence-driven policymaker. It is giving valuable ammunition to Russian state media counterclaims that it is the EU itself which produces disinformation. “