Securing Democracy Dispatch

Belgian authorities’ recent raid of more than 20 addresses, including Huawei’s Brussels offices, as part of an investigation into alleged bribery of members of the European Parliament could bring more European leaders to recognize Huawei’s threat to European telecommunications, Research Analyst Etienne Soula writes.

Venezuela’s TeleSUR is not just state media. It is also a clearing house for propaganda originally created by state media outlets of Russia and the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC). TeleSUR uses systematic content-laundering practices to cement autocratic narratives in Latin America, Investigative Data and Research Analyst Peter Benzoni finds.

Russia is unlikely to agree to a ceasefire agreement. The United States ought to ask Moscow to move off their maximalist demands before pressuring Kyiv to make further concessions to resolve the war in Ukraine, Managing Director David Salvo tells DW News.

External shocks have forced the EU to recalibrate its approach to geopolitics, with some success. But Brussels must “move the needle more decisively”—including in “the fight against foreign information manipulation and interference”, Senior Manager for Europe and Fellow Vassilis Ntousas writes in Encompass Europe.

Russian diplomats and state media focused on two main narratives this week:

• Ceasefire Negotiations: Russian officials and state media reacted to the US-Ukrainian ceasefire agreement by outlining the Kremlin’s conditions to accept the plan. TASS declared that Ukraine must abandon aspirations to join NATO and commit to a non-bloc, non-nuclear status. Russian propagandist Vladimir Soloviev recalled that Russian President Vladimir Putin declared in June 2024 that any ceasefire must include the withdrawal of Ukrainian troops from the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics, as well as from Kherson and Zaporizhzhia oblasts. Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson Maria Zakharova asserted that Russia needs sustainable peace in Ukraine, not a “respite for rearmament.” Lenta.ru emphasized that Moscow welcomes Chinese peacekeepers in Ukraine but strongly objects to a European peacekeeping force.
• Violence in Syria: Russian propaganda outlets drew attention to last weekend’s killings of civilians in Syria. On March 6, Lenta.ru reported about an uprising of recently ousted dictator Bashar al-Assad’s supporters against the new regime of Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham in Latakia, Jabla, and Khmeimim. Two days later, Russian propagandist Vladimir Soloviev lamented “mass killings” of “thousands” of peaceful Syrians and praised the Russian military for harboring civilians from Latakia and Tartus at their military base in Khmeimim. Former RT journalist Rachel Blevins accused the United States and the EU of covering up “death squads” controlled by Syrian interim leader Ahmed Hussein al-Sharaa. RT’s Going Underground used Julian Assange’s comments to blame the United States for “deliberately fostering sectarian divisions” to overthrow Assad, which Assange alleged led to “the carnage” and “massacres” of Alawites and Christians.

The PRC’s diplomats and state media focused on two main narratives this week: 

• Two Sessions: PRC messaging closely followed the country’s “Two Sessions” that took place last week. State media relayed Foreign Minister Wang Yi’s speech criticizing the United States, reaffirming the PRC’s claims over Taiwan, and denouncing the “chaos” brought on by violence in Gaza. Xinhua, CGTN, and the Global Times highlighted China’s advances in AI and many PRC accounts promoted foreigners who praised the country. China Daily amplified a former UN official’s appraisal of China’s “stability and innovation” and promoted “a young foreign journalist (…) break[ing] misconceptions about China’s democracy”.
• Tariffs and Fentanyl: On X, PRC diplomats pushed back in a coordinated manner against US accusations that Beijing is to blame for the flow of illegal drugs into the United States. PRC embassies and diplomats based in Canada, Cuba, France, Mexico, and the ASEAN region all promoted a white paper that documented steps taken to control “fentanyl-related substances” in China. Similarly, PRC embassies in countries including Fiji, India, Sri Lanka, and the United States amplified the same “timeline of China’s fentanyl control policies”. The PRC Embassy in Italy, the Mission to the EU, and Xinhua argued that tariffs would not stem the flow of drugs.

Russian influence network manipulates AI chatbots: The Russia-based influence operation known as “Pravda” is distorting the output of artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots by flooding the web with pro-Kremlin falsehoods, according to NewsGuard’s audit of an earlier report released by the American Sunlight Project. The audit revealed that ten leading AI chatbots repeated Pravda’s false narratives 33% of the time in response to prompts about prominent pro-Kremlin talking points. Senior Fellow Bret Schafer told the Dispatch, “The threat posed by state-sponsored spamming sites is often dismissed because many of those sites receive little to no traffic. This research, like prior research into manipulation of search engines and social media, points to the fact that, collectively, they do serve a purpose by flooding the zone with preferred narratives that can game not only our perceptions of reality but also information systems and large language models.”

CISA slashes funding for election cybersecurity: The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) ended nearly $10 million in annual funding to two cybersecurity initiatives, including one dedicated to sharing information about cyber defenses with state and local election officials. Research Assistant Krystyna Sikora said, “CISA’s change in posture on election security invites aggression from the United States’ foreign adversaries. Despite increasingly brazen attempts by Russia, Iran, and the PRC to interfere in last year’s presidential election, it remained secure and ran smoothly. This success can be attributed to years-long efforts to strengthen partnerships between the federal government and local election officials. Foreign adversaries will continue to refine their strategies and techniques to undermine elections, including at the state and local level, and it is vital that election workers are equipped to meet those challenges.”

In Case You Missed It

• Italian public broadcaster Rai cancelled Russian propagandist Vladimir Soloviev’s previously scheduled appearance on a news program amid protest from a European Parliament vice president, whom Soloviev subsequently lambasted on Russian news.
• Meta will roll out a “community notes” feature on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads for US users next week, mirroring X’s user-driven fact-checking model.
• A former senior Facebook executive alleged that Meta considered offering the PRC access to user data and the ability to censor posts it disapproved of in exchange for access to the Chinese market.
• US President Donald Trump announced that the US government is working with four groups interested in purchasing TikTok from its Chinese owner, ByteDance.

US, Ukraine come to agreements after talks in Saudi Arabia. Managing Director David Salvo quoted in DW News

“We assess that the PRC, Russia, and Iran will very likely use AI-enabled tools to attempt to interfere with Canada’s democratic process before and during the 2025 election. … Threat actors are most likely to use generative AI as a means of creating and spreading disinformation, designed to sow division among Canadians and push narratives conducive to the interests of foreign states.”

—Canada’s Communications Security Establishment in a recent report on potential threats to the country’s democratic processes in 2025.

The views expressed in GMF publications and commentary are the views of the author alone.