Russian Spanish-Language Disinformation On Ukraine Outperforms US Counterparts By 3 To 1, Report Finds

US media is report­ing that Russ­ian state-owned Span­ish-lan­guage media out­lets have launched a “tidal wave” of Krem­lin pro­pa­gan­da on Ukraine and are out­per­form­ing their US coun­ter­parts by 3 to 1. The report sug­gests that Rus­sia is win­ning the infor­ma­tion war on Ukraine with Span­ish speak­ers. Accord­ing to a report in For­eign Policy:

Feb­ru­ary 9, 2022 Russia’s state-owned media orga­ni­za­tions unleashed a tidal wave of dis­in­for­ma­tion at Span­ish-lan­guage speak­ers in Jan­u­ary, accord­ing to analy­sis pro­vid­ed to For­eign Pol­i­cy, in an effort that researchers believe is aimed at mud­dy­ing sup­port among His­pan­ics in the West­ern Hemi­sphere for Ukraine. Accord­ing to the Wash­ing­ton-based com­pa­ny Ome­las, which put togeth­er an arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence-enabled dash­board to track Russ­ian pro­pa­gan­da, Russ­ian Span­ish-lan­guage outlets—generously dol­ing out Krem­lin pro­pa­gan­da on Ukraine—outperformed their U.S. coun­ter­parts on audi­ence engage­ment by a ratio of more than 3 to 1 in the last two weeks of Jan­u­ary. “They want to dis­rupt [and] polit­i­cal­ly influ­ence the dis­course in any or all of these coun­tries to make it more dif­fi­cult for the peo­ple to under­stand what is actu­al­ly hap­pen­ing,” said Andrew Gon­za­lez, a pro­gram man­ag­er at Ome­las who con­duct­ed the study. “On Ukraine, if they’re able to dis­com­bob­u­late the peo­ple from under­stand­ing what’s going on, it makes it much hard­er for the gov­ern­ment to gen­er­ate sup­port for some type of retal­i­a­tion or countermeasure.”

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In Novem­ber, the Glob­al Influ­ence Oper­a­tions Report report­ed that RT en Español, the Span­ish-lan­guage chan­nel of Russ­ian broad­cast­er RT, is the sec­ond most-watched Span­ish-lan­guage news chan­nel on YouTube. The Glob­al Influ­ence Oper­a­tions Report has exten­sive­ly cov­ered Russia’s dis­in­for­ma­tion war over Ukraine, including:

• Russ­ian claims that the West, NATO, and the US are threat­en­ing Russia

• Rus­si­a’s key nar­ra­tives on Ukraine

• Russ­ian claims accus­ing Ukraine of plot­ting geno­cide against eth­nic Russians