Securing Democracy Dispatch

Rapid technological change places new pressures on democracies, but the speed of innovation offers opportunities to build democratic values into new systems. GMF Technology will explore this topic in an online event moderated by ASD Visiting Fellow Shanthi Kalathil tomorrow, May 30. Register here!

“Having exhausted overt channels for influencing Polish audiences, Russia has increasingly adopted covert tactics, relying on old and new proxies alike to fuel information operations.” ASD researchers Peter Benzoni, Larissa Doroshenko, and Krystyna Sikora explain why this pivot in Poland reflects larger trends in Russian information operations.

“The foreign-actor threat is an accelerant to conditions that already exist in [American] society”, including disengagement from civic life and fragmentation of the information space, said Managing Director David Salvo. Listen to him and Senior Fellow Bret Schafer discuss how US foreign adversaries target Americans through information campaigns on WFAE 90.7’s Charlotte Talks with Mike Collins.

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

• Geopolitical Shifts: RT widely quoted US President Donald Trump’s commencement speech at West Point, where he declared that it was “not the US Army’s job to spread democracy at gunpoint”. Sputnik Japan, in turn, cited US Vice President JD Vance, whose address to graduates of the US Naval Academy mentioned that “the hegemony that the [United States] enjoyed after the Cold War is over”. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov echoed these statements by affirming that a multipolar world “is an opportunity for the nations of the Global South and the Middle East to develop” and praising these regions for “fighting neo-colonialism and strengthening sovereignty”. Lavrov also added that European leaders share responsibility for civilian deaths during recent Russian attacks on Ukraine because they “encourage” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy “and his team to continue with their criminal actions”.
• Attacks on Macron: After the “cocaine train” scandal, Russian officials and state media again targeted French President Emmanuel Macron, claiming that he interfered in Romanian presidential elections and repeatedly showing images and video of Macron seemingly being slapped by Brigitte, his wife and the French first lady. Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova speculated that Macron demanded the arrest of Telegram’s co-founder Pavel Durov last August in Paris “to influence the elections in Romania” because the pro-EU candidate allegedly “would not be able to win under any legal circumstances”. Russian propagandist Vladimir Solovyov also connected the pre-election visit to Bucharest by the head of France’s General Directorate of External Security Nicolas Lerner with attempts to “ensure that the next president of Romania would be pro-European”. Additionally, RT Arabic declared that Macron purportedly received “a slap” after his and Brigitte’s presidential plane landed in Vietnam. Lenta.ru quickly labeled it “Macron’s abuse” and Zakharova described it as “yet another Emmanuel-gate”, sarcastically suggesting that the slap could have come from “the Kremlin’s hand”.

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

• Gaza: Last week, PRC diplomatic and state media accounts generated more than 750 pieces of content that mentioned “Gaza” across all monitored platforms. CGTN Europe was especially active, relaying Netanyahu’s war plans, his condemnations of Western countries denouncing Israel, as well as dramatic images of “hundreds” of civilians rushing for aid in Rafah. CGTN, the People’s Daily, and Xinhua all amplified Hamas’ acquiescence to a US ceasefire proposal. Throughout last weekend, PRC state media accounts also highlighted that Israeli aid to Gaza amounted to “less than 1%” of what was needed. More broadly, PRC state media highlighted the “heartbreaking” plight of Gaza’s population, with human–interest stories like that of a local doctor who lost nine of her ten children in an Israeli airstrike.
• US-South Africa Relations: PRC state media outlets relayed Trump’s confrontation with his South African counterpart, Cyril Ramaphosa, in the White House on May 21. Xinhua described “another Oval Office ambush”, while CGTN and the Global Times dismissed Trump’s rhetoric as “conspiracy”. CGTN America focused instead on Ramaphosa making light of “the controversial jet given by the Qatari government”. CGTN Europe broadcasted several clips from an interview with a South African official who rebutted any notion of a “white genocide”, calling for the United States to keep trade channels with Africa open, and warning that US tariffs on critical minerals “are not in American interests”. Throughout the week, CGTN Africa relayed Ramaphosa’s very upbeat public assessment of the state visit.

Chatbots outperform humans in online debates, study suggests: A new study found that artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots were more persuasive and better able to adapt their arguments in online debates about sociopolitical issues than human counterparts 64% of the time when given minimal demographic information about their human opponent, such as their racial background or age. Senior Fellow Bret Schafer tells the Dispatch, “Chatbots have the advantage of not bringing emotional baggage to debates, so it is somewhat unsurprising that they are better than humans at tailoring messages that resonate with targeted audiences. Because of this, chatbots will likely become increasingly common in efforts to counter false information, but the use of chatbots to fact-check and debunk claims comes with a host of risks that must be addressed before we become overly reliant on automated interventions.”

In Case You Missed It

• Czechia’s government summoned the PRC ambassador to that country after attributing an ongoing cyberattack that has infiltrated the Czech MFA’s communications since 2022 to PRC-linked hackers.
• US Congressional Republicans’ sweeping budget bill, endorsed by Trump and dubbed the “Big Beautiful Bill Act”, includes a provision that would ban states from passing new regulations, or enforcing existing ones, on AI for the next decade. 
• German authorities charged three men of Russian, Armenian, and Ukrainian origin, respectively, for allegedly working with Russian intelligence to spy on—and potentially plot to kill—a German citizen who previously fought for Ukraine’s armed forces.
• A debunked video purporting to show NATO forces arriving in Estonia to attack Russia amassed more than 800,000 views on X. The video used footage from an Estonian independence parade in Tallinn earlier this year.

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