Securing Democracy Dispatch

Next Wednesday, June 11 and Thursday, June 12, GMF will host the 20th annual Brussels Forum. ASD’s Managing Director, David Salvo, will moderate two discussions, one about the future of American democracy and another about the challenges of regulating social media in a democracy. Check out the full agenda here!

The Dispatch will be on hiatus next week as GMF hosts the Brussels Forum. We will publish our next edition on Wednesday, June 18 and thereafter return to our Thursday schedule.

The EU announced its European Democracy Shield initiative amid mounting internal and external threats to democracy. The EU has an opportunity to develop a cohesive, whole-of-Union response if the Shield is designed as “more than a symbolic initiative.” Senior Fellow Vassilis Ntousas and Research Analyst Etienne Soula outline ten recommendations to realize its potential in ASD’s latest report.

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

• Ukraine’s Attacks on Russia: In response to Ukraine’s attacks on Russia’s airfields and bridges, Russian officials labeled Ukrainian authorities terrorists, blamed NATO for aiding them, and threatened nuclear escalation. Russian President Vladimir Putin declared that “the Kyiv regime” resorts to terrorist attacks and questioned its sincerity in ceasefire negotiations. Afshin Rattansi, the host of RT’s Going Underground, claimed the attacks would not have been possible without “NATO’s green light and assistance”. Russian propagandist Vladimir Solovyov elaborated by asserting that Ukrainian saboteurs used plastic explosives of “American origin”. However, RT emphasized that the Trump administration was not aware of the attacks, while TASS also added that Keith Kellogg, Trump’s Special Presidential Envoy to Ukraine, agreed with Putin in asserting that the EU’s support for Ukraine amounts to “a proxy war” against Russia.
• Ceasefire Negotiations: Russian officials and propaganda outlets blamed Ukraine for sabotaging negotiations in Istanbul, Türkiye, and vehemently denied that Russia has abducted Ukrainian children from the occupied territories. Putin’s foreign-policy aide, Yuri Ushakov, revealed that during the phone conversation between Russian and US leaders, Putin blamed Ukraine for sabotaging the negotiations but claimed that Russia had not taken the bait. RT also stated that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy called Russia-Ukraine talks “meaningless”. Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova insinuated that Kyiv lied about children being kidnapped by Russia because the Ukrainian delegation in Istanbul presented a list of only 339 missing children, not 20,000, as Kyiv claims. Zakharova also accused Kyiv of using this “children story” to justify the International Criminal Court’s “illegitimate” arrest warrants against several high-ranking Russian officials. Russian delegation head Vladimir Medinsky echoed this accusation, calling accusations that Russia has abducted Ukrainian children “a show for European soft-hearted aunts who themselves have no children”.

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

• Visas for Chinese Students: On May 29, the PRC MFA reacted angrily to the US ban on visas for Chinese students, calling the move “politically motivated and discriminatory” and proof of “US hypocrisy over freedom and openness”. Those statements were relayed by the PRC Embassy in the United States, as well as by CGTN Europe and the People’s Daily. China Daily denounced the US decision as a “political stunt” meant to “divide the Chinese people from their government”. Pro-PRC commentators portrayed the United States as “further isolating itself”, “undermining [its] long-term strategic and economic interests” and losing “substantial revenue”. By contrast, the PRC Consul General in Belfast, Ireland shared news about visa-free travel to China for several Gulf states. The Global Times relayed Beijing’s “unilateral visa-free policy” for “friendly countries in Latin America and the Caribbean”.
• Gaza: PRC diplomats and state media outlets continued to cover the “confusion, fear and horror” in Gaza. The PRC Consulate in Santa Cruz, Bolivia amplified an intervention by Beijing’s envoy to the United Nations, who called for an immediate ceasefire and warned that “war also has rules”. Several PRC state media outlets and some diplomats showed the Palestinian ambassador to the United Nations break down in tears during a speech. On and around International Children’s Day, celebrated on June 1 in China, PRC state media highlighted the plight of children in Gaza, sharing death tolls, relaying human interest stories of wounded infants, and contrasting Palestinian children’s suffering to US children’s comfortable lives. CGTN Europe also broadcasted the Israeli Defense Minister’s plans to build a “Jewish Israeli state” in the West Bank.

Pro-Kremlin online influence campaign impersonates Euronews: A pro-Russian online influence campaign impersonated the outlet Euronews—falsely wielding its logo on fake content and using X and TikTok accounts with AI-generated profiles purporting to be Euronews journalists—to disseminate videos that promote anti-Moldova narratives, including false claims that Moldovans are the largest carriers of sexually transmitted diseases in Europe and allegations that they are illegally immigrating en masse to Italy. Open-Source Intelligence Analyst Larissa Doroshenko assesses, “Ahead of the parliamentary elections in Moldova, Russia is amping up information manipulation in and around this strategically important country. Recently we saw messaging masquerading as legitimate French news sources to target the EU’s Moldovan diaspora. Now we see a similar strategy of spoofing popular pan-European media, yet this time with the goal to target European countries and undermine their support for Moldova’s EU integration. This is a familiar tactic. Prior to last week’s Polish presidential elections, Russia used similar strategies to smear the Ukrainian diaspora to undermine military and humanitarian support for Kyiv. As Moldova’s electoral campaign intensifies, we will surely see more of these tactics employed within and outside the country.”

Leaked documents outline Tiananmen Square censorship plan on Chinese tech platforms: More than 230 pages of leaked classified documents prepared by Chinese social-media platforms reveal instructions for multi-channel networks—companies that manage content creator accounts across multiple social media platforms—to remove any content that depicts Chinese state violence, including references to the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. These guidelines are reportedly being used to train artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots to shape discussion of the massacre, according to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Senior Fellow Bret Schafer tells the Dispatch, “We tend to focus significant attention, justifiably, on potential issues with large-language models being poisoned with bad data, resulting in chatbots returning false, misleading, or biased answers. But this example points to a somewhat simpler form of manipulation: the use of AI models to perfect authoritarian censorship or to scrub the historical record of inconvenient facts.”

In Case You Missed It

• An unknown malicious actor hacked White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles’ personal cell phone and likely used AI to impersonate her voice to contact top US government officials and business executives.  
• Meta announced that it disrupted three covert influence campaigns originating from the PRC, Iran, and Romania that used inauthentic personas to pose as local users and spread political content across several countries.
• A Trump administration report released last week about US health issues cited several studies that do not exist; experts assess that swathes of the report had probably been AI-generated.
• Two corporations will take several measures to ensure that AI-generated spoof calls do not mar US political campaigns as part of a settlement related to an AI-generated robocall that impersonated then-US President Joe Biden before a primary election last year.
• Google’s new AI video generator, Veo 3, can produce hyper-realistic deepfakes about current events, including armed conflict, elections, or the spread of infectious diseases, raising fears that it could fuel false information online, according to a TIME analysis.

Ευρωτουρκικό παζάρι με φόντο τη Μαύρη Θάλασσα – Οι διπλωματικοί ελιγμοί και η νέα παράμετρος (Euro-Turkish bazaar with the Black Sea as a backdrop – Diplomatic maneuvers and the new parameter). Senior Manager for Europe and Fellow Vassilis Ntousas quoted in To Vima (in Greek)

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