EU parliamentary elections are seen as vulnerable to disinformation, but some countries are policing false stories

1. Michael Peel in Vilnius 7 HOURS AGO
The six continually updated screens in front of Sergeant Tomas Ceponis’ desk in
Lithuania’s defence ministry do not transmit conventional military data. On one, he can
monitor the most popular stories in the Russian language. Another display shows how
content is being shared via social media, while a third tracks trending online news about
several countries including neighbouring Belarus.
“I believe in the 21st century we have to be ready not only to fight in kinetic wars, but in
information wars, too,” says Sgt Ceponis, whose work at the Lithuanian army’s strategic
communications department makes him part of an unusual military-civilian network in
Lithuania to police alleged “fake news”. “We think if you can connect intelligence guys
with psychological operations guys, it’s probably the best.”
Lithuania sees itself as being on the frontline of a Russian offensive to sow misinformation
in the western world. European politicians have become increasingly spooked by the
spread of conspiracy theories, such as recent stories that President Emmanuel Macron
planned to hand the French regions of Alsace and Lorraine to neighbouring Germany.
That follows claims of Kremlin-backed meddling in the 2016 US presidential poll and the
UK’s Brexit referendum the same year, as well as the row over the poisoning in the UK of
Sergei Skripal, the former spy — in which the two men accused by London claimed on
Russian television that they were tourists.
The Big Read Fake news
Fake news: How Lithuania’s ‘elves’ take on Russian trolls
EU parliamentary elections are seen as vulnerable to disinformation, but some countries are
policing false stories
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2. Marine Le Pen, president of France's National Rally party, left, meets Russian President Vladimir Putin © AP
“People realised, ‘Holy shit, this is like something out of a cold war thriller,” says an EU
official from another formerly Soviet-occupied state about the Skripal incident. “The
Russians have weaponised disinformation. It’s another side of the same coin as bringing
the Ukraine electricity grid to a halt.”
For the EU, one of the biggest sources of dread is the potential for such manipulation to
play a role in the European parliamentary elections due in May. These elections have
taken on greater importance this year because of the rise of far-right and anti-
establishment parties — many with a pro-Russian bent — challenging the status quo
across the continent.
They are also uniquely vulnerable to outside interference. A combination of low turnout
and protest voting means successful propaganda campaigns could reap high returns as
small groups of motivated voters can have a major influence on the results.
Lithuania, like other neighbours shaped by Soviet-era Communist domination, has long
pushed for a tough approach to disinformation both at home and at an EU level. Vilnius’
strategy is notable for the way it relies on close co-operation between groups in society —
such as the media and the military — which in other respects have a more adversarial
relationship.
“Ten years ago there was no way to discuss these issues at all, because [EU] colleagues
thought ‘it is not our business, it’s freedom of speech and that’s it’,” says Linas
Linkevicius, Lithuania’s foreign minister. “It took time to convince them that lies are not
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3. freedom of speech.”
The question is how much the experiences of this country of fewer than 3m people,
formed by a very particular history with Russia, could — or should — be scaled up to a
multilingual bloc of hundreds of millions, especially given the risk that opponents could
brand government anti-disinformation work as censorship.
Lithuania's foreign minister Linas Linkevicius © Charlie Bibby/FT
So far, European efforts to guard against misinformation have been modest. They have
also been dogged by legitimate concerns over how much state authorities should be
involved in defining, still less tackling, the wide range of outright factual falsehoods and
contested narratives often grouped under the unhelpful shorthand of fake news. The idea
of involving institutions such as the military in combating disinformation — as Sgt
Ceponis is doing in Lithuania — causes deep anxiety in parts of the EU.
“There is a cultural issue here,” says one diplomat from a western EU state. “Do you come
in really heavily and slam down the full weight of the state to expose this? Or do you
expect that this is part of having a free media space?”
The EU’s desire to fight back against disinformation has increased as more and more
member states have experienced problems. In one case in 2016, Germany saw a barrage of
claims by Russian media and politicians that foreign immigrants had abducted and raped
a 13-year-old ethnic Russian girl named “Lisa” in Berlin. The authorities were criticised
for being slow to discredit the story, though defenders of the German handling of the case
say the need to check facts and preserve “Lisa’s” privacy made it hard to move quickly and
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4. decisively. In Spain, the government has accused Russia of spreading disinformation in an
effort to deepen the crisis that erupted in 2017 over Catalan secession (Moscow has denied
the claim).
In December, EU leaders branded the spread of “deliberate, large-scale, and systematic
disinformation”, including as part of hybrid warfare, an “acute and strategic challenge for
our democratic systems”. They called for an “urgent response that needs to be sustained
over time” including to safeguard the integrity of the European elections.
The EU response ranges from investing more in debunking false information to pressing
social media companies to do more to curb their circulation. In late January, the
European Commission said Facebook and other businesses needed to hire more
independent fact-checkers and take down more fake accounts. Facebook said that before
the European elections it would create a public database to show who was paying for
politically driven advertisements and how often they were viewed.
Julian King, the EU’s security commissioner, stresses that Brussels wants to see more
action on disinformation but has no plans to be a “fake news” referee. “We are not saying
whether particular pieces of information are true or false, or good or bad,” he says. “What
we are trying to do is find a way of increasing transparency and provenance so an
audience has a way of contextualising the information they are given.”
European commissioners Mariya Gabriel and Julian King discuss the code of practice signed by online platforms to fight
disinformation © AFP
Some officials in Vilnius and other central and eastern European capitals view the
problem in starker terms. They see a landscape of ever-growing propaganda, including in
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5. Lithuania’s case via television stations that broadcast heavily in Russian.
One government official says she can watch Russian language programmes on as many as
10 TV stations, which often buy Russian content because it is cheaper than EU
programming and can be shown without translation. She says the output mixes “really
nice to watch” shows on fashion and science with programmes that extol the supposed
benefits of Russian imperialism and chip away at the growing weaknesses in the west.
“They are using issues like Brexit and the tensions in the US as examples of really bad
things happening in the west — like the west can’t manage itself,” the official says.
Lithuania has a rising number of legal means to tackle alleged sources of disinformation —
although officials insist these are aimed at stopping blatant factual fabrications and
standardising broadcast rules, rather than stifling legitimate debate. Authorities can order
electronic communications providers such as servers to shut down for 48 hours without a
court order if they are used to mount a “cyberincident”, such as a disinformation attack.
Edvinas Kerza, vice-minister of national defence, says a strong approach is needed
because of what he says is a broad pro-Kremlin information assault. He points to how
information attacks are being integrated with cyber attacks, including a case last year in
which hackers used a breach of a TV station to publish a false story about the defence
minister and then publicise the article in an emailed press release embedded with
malicious code. “They put next-generation software in a Word document,” Mr Kerza says.
“Everything seems to be so real — it’s even sent from a news portal’s email server.”
Lithuania's military monitors alleged fake news
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6. Another striking point about Lithuania’s counter-disinformation campaign is how far
it stretches into wider society. The best known examples of that are the so-called “elves” —
volunteers who set out to combat Russian trolls. Their constantly shifting membership
numbers in the thousands and includes journalists, IT professionals, business people,
students and scientists.
“It’s a movement, not an organisation,” says one elf, an ecommerce manager who uses the
name Hawk because he fears being targeted if he uses his real name. “There was an
understanding that it was time to do something, not just sit on the sofa and watch TV.”
In a coffee shop in Vilnius, Hawk describes how the elven ideal is to expose and combat
false claims and contested narratives as fast as possible. There are different types of elves
— some are debunkers of false information, others run “blame and shame” online
campaigns against pro-Kremlin trolls. He says his adversaries have become smarter,
focusing more and more on “finding the weak points in Lithuanian society” — sometimes
chiming in on both sides of an issue to stoke controversy. “In Lithuania we work in one
direction, even the media which are competitors,” he says. “When we need to defend our
country against propaganda and fake news, we are united.”
Another innovation is the website Demaskuok.lt — also known as Debunk.eu — created by
a collaboration of the military, journalists and civil society. It has been funded by Google
Digital Innovation Fund and the Baltic media outlet Delfi. It scans an estimated 20,000
articles a day from more than 1,000 sources against a database of trigger words and
narratives, including that Lithuania is a failed state or is being reoccupied by Nato.
Flagged content is then physically reviewed for potential further action, which could
include aggressive debunking.
Recommended
Vaidas Saldziunas, Delfi’s defence editor, scrolls through example stories tackled by the
site. These include false reports that a Nato vehicle knocked a boy off his bike and killed
him, tales of biological weapons tests in the Baltic states and claims of a UFO being shot
down over Lithuania. “A lot of people don’t really read beyond the headlines,” he says.
One group of hackers managed to smuggle a false story of a Nato plan to invade
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7. neighbouring Belarus into a news organisation’s feed for a week.
The site already works in Lithuanian and Russian and is expanding into English — and
perhaps other EU languages. Mr Saldziunas plays down concerns about conflicts of
interest as journalists collaborate closely with institutions they report on in other spheres.
“We can write a critical story about the military — and still have co-operation with the
military,” he says. “This is the topic that everybody drops everything for.”
However, this level of co-ordination makes some fellow EU states uneasy. Countries such
as the Netherlands have historically been suspicious that government involvement in anti-
disinformation might compromise media independence and freedom. “We have to be
careful,” says a diplomat from another western European country. “You can’t translate
one solution the Baltic states have found to other situations. You can’t have one size fits
all.”
The journalist Vaidas Saldziunas
Some critics see the focus on disinformation as a way to avoid dealing with the
reasons for the rise of anti-establishment parties. The extent of influence of Russian
propaganda is inherently unknowable, which makes it a convenient bogeyman and can
allow EU politicians to avoid responsibility for their own political mistakes. The idea of
aggressive rebuttals of pro-Kremlin narratives is also contentious if it involves
governments appearing to take sides on the way the media talks about contested versions
of history.
The EU is also an unwieldy institution to tackle disinformation. It does not have its own
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8. Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2019. All rights reserved.
intelligence service. It has beefed up its East Stratcom task force, whose EUvsDisinfo
debunking site received more than 600,000 visits last year, but the operation still only has
16 people. EU diplomats say the site has received extra resources to “further
professionalise” it after it was forced last year to retract three inaccurate accusations of
disinformation against Dutch news media, in a case that spawned outrage in the
Netherlands. It emerged that one piece was mistranslated by non-Dutch speakers at a
Ukrainian NGO, while another was satire that the complainant mistakenly took at face
value.
Another EU initiative — for a pan-bloc “early warning” channel for member states to raise
the alarm about emerging disinformation threats — is still at an early stage.
But its creation is a sign of fear about how disinformation has pushed the balance of views
in the bloc closer to Lithuania’s outlook — especially as the European elections approach.
Sgt Ceponis says he sees the country’s growing anti-disinformation architecture as a
“temporary measure to solve a specific problem”, but warns that he does not think it will
be solved any time soon. “We are living in this information conflict time,” he says. “So we
should not pretend this is not happening.”
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