Securing Democracy Dispatch

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Senior Manager for Europe and Fellow Vassilis Ntousas moderated a GMF discussion about how the EU should respond to foreign interference threats. Watch the full event here!

Faux news sites that promote Russian state-backed content are “meant to evoke authenticity”, Investigative Data and Research Analyst Peter Benzoni tells Logically Facts, “to create the feeling you’re exploring a real and legitimate site, much like a movie set with storefront facades but no real building behind them.”

The EU’s recently released third report on foreign information manipulation and interference reveals the bloc’s answer to the question of how to expose and attribute these operations, as well as new tools to track them, Senior Manager for Europe and Fellow Vassilis Ntousas analyzes on X.

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

• Ukraine Ceasefire Negotiations: Russian state media continued covering talks between the United States and Russia about a possible ceasefire in Ukraine. After the conclusion of negotiations in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov declared that the two delegations primarily discussed safe navigation in the Black Sea. TASS cited US President Donald Trump, who announced that the negotiators also considered territorial disputes and possible demarcation lines in Ukraine. Russian propagandist Vladimir Solovyov added that the two sides debated possible US control over Ukrainian nuclear plants, particularly the one in the Zaporizhzhia region. However, Russia’s Ministry of Defense complained on Telegram that Kyiv’s continued strikes against Russian civilian energy infrastructure violate an agreement reached between Russia and Ukraine last week and signaled the “ungovernability for external guarantors of compliance with any possible agreements”.
• Protests in Türkiye: Russian propaganda outlets covered growing protests in Türkiye and speculated about their influence on the Turkish presidential election and transition of power in Syria. RT Arabic claimed that Türkiye resembles “a warzone”, where repeated fires and clashes between demonstrators and security forces have escalated despite a ban on public gatherings. Sputnik Türkiye used an assessment by the Turkish government’s Center for Combatting Disinformation to dispute allegations that rubber bullets were used on protesters, claiming that the police only used tear gas within the “legal framework to ensure public order and safety”. Former RT journalist Cristina Martín Jiménez referred to the protests as a possible “self-coup” to consolidate Turkish President Reçep Tayyip Erdoğan’s power, while another former RT journalist, Fiorella Isabel, hypothesized that protests would ultimately benefit Israel and the United States. 

The People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) diplomats and state media focused on two main narratives this week: 

• Signal Fallout: PRC state media actively covered developments tied to the revelation that The Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg was mistakenly added to a Signal group chat used by Trump administration officials to discuss a military operation in Yemen. CGTN Europe shared US Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s takedown of the administration, while both CGTN America and CGTN Français amplified Democratic US Senator Mark Warner’s comments suggesting that the incident points to systemic abuses of security procedures within the administration. CGTN Africa, CGTN America, and CGTN Europe all covered CIA Director John Ratcliffe’s refusal to admit that including the journalist in the chat was a mistake. Xinhua highlighted US Vice President JD Vance’s texts disparaging Europe, portraying them as part of a pattern of hostility displayed by the vice president towards traditional US allies.
• China Development Forum: PRC messaging advertised the annual gathering of global business leaders that took place last week in Beijing. China Daily relayed Apple CEO Tim Cook’s silence when asked about the tariffs placed on China by the Trump administration, CGTN Global Business quoted “advertising icon Martin Sorrell”, who called the measures a “risk to global business”, and Xinhua shared Jeffrey Sachs’ prediction that the attempt to “contain China” would fail. The spokesperson for the PRC Ministry of Foreign Affairs broadcasted a summary of PRC Premier Li Qiang’s keynote speech that projected great confidence in the Chinese economy, a sentiment echoed by the PRC Embassy in Tanzania and the Consul General in Belfast.

RT secretly pays influencers to promote Kremlin narratives: RT has been paying supposedly independent influencers to promote pro-Kremlin narratives about the war in Ukraine and emphasize Russia’s commitment to “traditional values”, according to an investigation by researchers at iStories. Managing Director David Salvo told the Dispatch, “This study highlights three telltale tactics of Russian state-sponsored information manipulation and laundering campaigns. The first is to funnel support to seemingly independent, influential voices while masking the financial ties and the origin of the content to the Russian state. The second is to have those voices create content on largely benign topics to build followings before injecting political content that adheres to pro-Kremlin narratives. And the third, increasingly prevalent tactic is to cultivate a positive image of Russia as a haven of traditional values for disenchanted refugees of the ‘depraved and decadent’ West, growing an international coalition of citizens who can then shape public opinion of Russia in their home countries.”

Chatbots’ responses on China queries differ depending on language: Both American and Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots more often evaded or denied responding to questions critical of the PRC when the query was asked in Chinese than in English, a new analysis finds. Investigative Data and Research Analyst Peter Benzoni said, “If you want to combat this problem, it is important to know the mechanics of how this works. Large Language Models store their knowledge in ‘vectors’ that are mapped on a graph. This affords them the power to relate words to each other so that the word ‘king’ is much closer to terms like ‘queen’ and ‘rule’ than ‘banana’. The placement of these words in vector space is influenced by the data that models are trained on. If we want the term ‘Chinese Communist Party’ to be closer to ‘Tiananmen Square’ and ‘Great Leap Forward’ in vector space in Chinese, then we need to use a training dataset that reflects this, perhaps from Taiwanese sources. A secondary solution is to map vectors from English into Chinese, but as anyone bilingual knows, there’s always something lost in translation.”

In Case You Missed It

• Austrian authorities discovered a Russian intelligence-linked information campaign that targeted German-speaking countries online, as well as placed stickers and graffiti with far-right and nationalist content intended to appear as if pro-Ukrainian activists placed them.
• Canada’s election security task force signaled willingness to warn the public of ongoing foreign interference efforts targeting its federal election this April and identified the PRC, India, Russia, and even Pakistan as primary threat actors.
• An information campaign used images of a deceased Central African man to create a persona of a nonexistent journalist and publish articles in at least 12 outlets across West and Central Africa that promote pro-Russia and anti-France narratives, according to an investigation by Al Jazeera. 
• Belgian prosecutors are investigating whether Huawei bribes directly influenced eight members of the European Parliament’s signatures of a February 2021 letter that advocated for business conditions that Huawei finds favorable.
• Meta will ask advertisers to disclose the use of AI in the creation or manipulation of political content ahead of Canada’s elections.

This AP map shows sabotage across Europe that has been blamed on Russia and its proxies. Co-Managing Director David Salvo quoted in AP News

ΕΕ: Η Λευκή Βίβλος για την άμυνα και ο γρίφος του άρθρου 17 (EU: The White Paper on Defense and the Riddle of Article 17). Senior Manager for Europe and Fellow Vassilis Ntousas quoted in To Vima (in Greek)

Was Zelenskyy’s Pennsylvania visit ‘election interference’? Why experts say no. Senior Fellow Bret Schafer’s research quoted in PolitiFact

“Europe needs to be stronger so that our citizens feel safer. … Europe must step up today, or it risks being stepped over tomorrow.”

—European Parliament President Roberta Metsola said in a press release accompanying publication of the European Parliament’s Winter 2025 Eurobarometer survey on March 25.

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