Russian Information Operations Impact Quality Of Democratic Politics, EU Liberal Party Says

The Euro­pean Lib­er­al Forum (ELF), the offi­cial polit­i­cal foun­da­tion of the Euro­pean Lib­er­al Par­ty, has recent­ly pub­lished a pol­i­cy paper exam­in­ing the effect of Russ­ian infor­ma­tion oper­a­tions. The paper argues that Russ­ian infor­ma­tion oper­a­tions should not be viewed either as inef­fec­tive or giv­en too much weight but that they do lead to a dete­ri­o­ra­tion in the qual­i­ty of demo­c­ra­t­ic pol­i­tics. Accord­ing to the paper’s abstract:

Novem­ber  2021 Infor­ma­tion  oper­a­tions  are  crit­i­cal  for  Russia’s  strat­e­gy against the West. Rus­sia is unlike­ly to over­pow­er  the  West  through  its  mil­i­tary  strength,  but  its  infor­ma­tion oper­a­tions hold an almost unlim­it­ed promise  of  increas­ing  polar­iza­tion,  and  under­min­ing  West­ern   uni­ty.  Nonethe­less,  there  is  a  bur­geon­ing  belief  that   infor­ma­tion oper­a­tions are not a major prob­lem due  to  the  lack  of  mea­sur­able  effects  of  them.  Cor­rect­ly   under­stand­ing how infor­ma­tion oper­a­tions are effec­tive  are  crit­i­cal  for  coun­ter­ing  them  ade­quate­ly.  This   brief aim to con­tribute to this knowl­edge by sur­vey­ing  what we know about the effec­tive­ness of infor­ma­tion  oper­a­tions and sug­gest­ing rec­om­men­da­tions on how  to improve democ­ra­cies’ infor­ma­tion resilience.

Read the full paper here.

The ELF paper sug­gests the fol­low­ing pol­i­cy rec­om­men­da­tions to decrease the vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty to infor­ma­tion operations:

• Increase media lit­er­a­cy, fact-check­ing, and media monitoring
• Put pres­sure on social plat­forms to mod­er­ate content
• Improve data pri­va­cy protection
• Reduce fake accounts by using dig­i­tal iden­ti­ty verification
• Flag­ging fake news and pri­or­i­tiz­ing trust­ed sources