72% of the disinformation campaigns are conducted by russia

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Our data draw on a wide range of media reports to identify FIEs [Foreign Influence Efforts], track their progress, and classify their features. We identified 53 FIE, in 24 targeted countries, from 2013 through 2018. Two of the cases were ongoing as of April 2019, write Diego A. Martin and Jacob N. Shapiro, the authors of “Trends in Online Foreign Influence Efforts“.

In total, 72% of the campaigns were conducted by russia, with China, Iran, and Saudi Arabia accounting for most of the remainder. In five cases press reports did not reliably report the origin of the campaign. We also identified and studied more than 40 distinct influence efforts which met some, but not all of our inclusion criteria.

The russian government has a long history of influence operations against its own citizens, including using various social media platforms to distract citizens from political issues in the country (Zhegulev 2016, Sobolev 2019). Similar tools and techniques have been used to attack democratic elections and day-to-day politics elsewhere, as is well-documented.

An excellent recent review by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute focuses more tightly on foreign influence efforts against elections in democracies (Hanson et al. 2017). Examining 97 elections and 31 referendums from November 2016 through April 2019, the authors “…find evidence of foreign interference in 20 countries: Australia, Brazil, Colombia, the Czech Republic, Finland, France, Germany, Indonesia, Israel, Italy, Malta, Montenegro, the Netherlands, North Macedonia, Norway, Singapore, Spain, Taiwan, Ukraine and the US.”

In 2016, for example, Pro-kremlin and russian state-funded media wrote negative stories against NATO’s operation in Estonia (Nimmo 2017). This information operation was not an FIE under our definition because the content was not meant to appear as though it were produced in Estonia.

The first FIE in our data began in 2013 when russian trolls launched a campaign to discredit Ukraine in the Polish Internet space (Savytskyi 2016). Fully 70% of the attacks started between 2015 and 2017. Attacks last for an average of 2.2 years.12 There are at least two FIEs which began in earlier periods ongoing in 2019, including russia under-mining the Belarus government, and russia working to reduce support for the Donbas conflict among Ukrainian citizens.

Private companies (47%), media organization (39%), and intelligence agencies (22%) are the most common actors. Media reporting was insufficiently detailed to clearly identify the responsible actors in one fourth of FIEs.

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