Weaponising News: Russian digital disinformation and Western Media

Gordon Neil Ramsay, associate professor at the Faculty of Social sciences, Weaponising News: Russian digital disinformation and Western Media.

The seminar will be held in English in room M101 and online.

The invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 has led to close scrutiny of how the Russian state engages in information warfare to support its political and military aims. But the Russian state's use of digital disinformation has a long history and many different components. The structures of the digital media environment that have empowered actors like Russia to generate and disseminate information designed to persuade and mislead audiences have also weakened the capacity of traditional Western media to detect and counter false information. This lecture summarises a research project which found that Russian state-linked media exploit public trust in news outlets in Europe and North America to project propaganda directly to Western news audiences. Beyond the project itself, the lecture will consider the vulnerabilities of democratic media systems to targeted and coordinated disinformation.

Gordon Neil Ramsay is Associate Professor at the University of Akureyri and teaches on the BA Media Studies programme. His work focuses on media policy and regulation, disinformation, and the nature and effects of the decline of local journalism. His book (co-authored with Professor Sarah Oates), Seeing Red: Russian Propaganda and American News will be published in 2024 by Oxford University Press.