The history of the exploits and valor of Russian soldiers is an integral part of the national identity of Russia, and today it is increasingly being subjected to attempts to discredit and revise. As part of the 2020 study of the Kribrum company, an attempt was made to trace the process of spreading inaccurate or completely falsified information about the Great Patriotic War in social media.
The subject of the research was publications distributed in the Russian-language segment of social media in the period from 2014 to the present. The volume of messages is over 4.7 million.
Download the study: link.
Interview with the founder of "Kribrum" Igor Ashmanov with a detailed analysis of the research on falsification of history.
Findings from the study
Experts draw conclusions about a constant and significant increase in the number of publications with unreliable facts about the events of the Great Patriotic War. The study says that this negatively affects the level of historical and cultural education and national identity of young people and adolescents.
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The authors of the study argue that foreign accounts, in particular from Ukraine, the Baltic States, Kazakhstan and other countries, are actively involved in the discussion of topics, which are often the primary sources of "theses". For example, the authors of the study note that the term "victoriousness" begins to be actively used on the eve of May 9th. All researched theses begin to grow in social networks from 2014-2015. Moreover, the spread of this neologism has been growing for several years. This, in turn, speaks of its artificial implementation in the Russian segment of social networks.
Falsifications and manipulations of historical facts are used for political and geopolitical purposes. The number of publications about the "occupation policy of the USSR" after the end of the Great Patriotic War increased during the "Crimean Spring". The overwhelming majority of reports assert the "occupational" nature of the USSR's foreign policy, after which this feature is transferred to modern Russia, the study says.
In the year of the 75th anniversary of the Victory in the Great Patriotic War, accusations against the USSR of unleashing a military conflict are especially actively spread, theses about the "alliance of Stalin and Hitler", the role of the "Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact" and others are used. These topics are intensively used for political purposes, opening up the opportunity for various kinds of public figures and communities to create with their help a new information agenda, the basis of which is made up of false arguments and facts, the study says.
The generalized thesis “we have nothing to be proud of” is gaining more and more popularity on the Internet, within the framework of which messages are disseminated where images of war heroes are discredited, “new” details of military operations are given, “true” motives of the state leadership - in general, everything that makes pride in Victory The USSR in World War II is unfounded, and the image of the Soviet army and the image of the Soviet soldier are unattractive.
The report argues that in 2015, Facebook took the leading place in terms of the number of negative messages, where, as the authors assure, the number of foreign accounts writing negatively about the role of the USSR in World War II is almost 2 times higher than that of Russia. This gives researchers reason to believe that the social network is involved in advancing this agenda.
In 2019, Twitter came out on top, overtaking Facebook and VKontakte in terms of indicators. In the Russian and post-Soviet social media segment, Twitter is known for its popularity among opposition-minded users. Together with this, the growth in activity in 2019 of users accusing the USSR of the beginning of the war may be associated with an attempt to politicize this topic, the report says.
About predictions and counteraction
Further dissemination of “falsified history” in social media, in the absence of countermeasures, will inevitably lead to an irreversible deformation of the perception of historical reality. Moreover, the volume of this kind of destructive content will only grow, increasing the number of its recipients.
The most effective way to counter such information campaigns is the creation of ideologically stable meanings, and their systematic promotion.
When developing methods of "delivering" content, it is important to take into account the trends and patterns of modern social media, track the effectiveness of ongoing information campaigns, work more with popular bloggers, create "viral" content and be ready to promptly adjust tactics.
Press conference on research results
The constant heating of topics and an increase in the concentration of negative theses - such an assessment of the scale of discrediting the role of the USSR in the Great Patriotic War on the Internet was given by experts - participants in a press conference in TASS, held in an online format on the eve of the country's main holiday.
They discussed in detail the results of a study of information campaigns on social networks aimed at falsifying historical truth, discrediting the feat of the Russian soldier and the role of the Soviet Union in the 1945 Victory. Volgograd residents also took part in the discussion.
The authors, Russian entrepreneurs in the field of information technology, artificial intelligence and software development Igor Ashmanov and Natalya Kasperskaya, director of the analytical department, spoke about the main findings of the study, the mechanisms and ways of disseminating inaccurate information in social media, as well as identifying signs of importing an "exposing" agenda. of the company that conducted the study, Artem Kuritsyn and Deputy Director of the Higher School of Contemporary Social Sciences, Moscow State University named after M. V. Lomonosov Alexander Grebenyuk.
According to Alexander Grebenyuk, the study titled "The Great Patriotic War: Manipulations, Falsifications and Information Attacks in Social Networks" was the result of "titanic work" carried out by the specialists of the Kribrum company with the consulting and methodological support of the Faculty of the Higher School of Contemporary Social Sciences of Moscow State University. Lomonosov.
Large-scale information attack
The main reason for its appearance was a large-scale information attack that Russia has been subjected to for more than a decade. Even such a sacred date for the heart of every Russian as May 9 is regularly tolerated. And what is most regrettable is that the target of these attacks is primarily Russian youth.
Alexander Grebenyuk spoke about the method and tools that were used in preparing the report. This method became digital sociology - a new direction of social analysis of social processes. It differs from traditional collection methods in that it is of interest to a person's activities in social networks, the activity of groups and communities in which he is located. This method is looking for an answer to the most important question: how do the processes that take place in social networks affect the world around us, on social, economic and political reality?
The results of applying digital sociology in the study were clearly demonstrated by Artem Kuritsyn. Experts have studied how the process of spreading falsified facts, manipulation in social media related to the Great Patriotic War occurs. For their research, they selected several large topics for manipulation and falsification, most popular today on social networks.
The term "Victory"
Firstly, it was decided to investigate the term "victoriousness", which appeared in 2005 and began to spread widely in 2014. The next block was called “We have nothing to be proud of”. It contains a large amount of information that one way or another tells social media users that Victory Day is not a reason to be proud. The third direction is the identification of communism and fascism - a rather popular topic today, where the leaders of the two countries during the Great Patriotic War are compared. The fourth direction has long and stubbornly tried to show that it was the USSR that was the culprit for the outbreak of the war, and finally, this is a bloc with accusations of the USSR in the occupation policy, which are being transferred to modern Russia.
There is a linear growth on many topics, Artem Kuritsyn emphasized, speaking about the results. This applies, first of all, to the theme of “victoriousness”, designed to destroy the perception of the Victory Day and to propose in return, or better to say, to impose the thesis that May 9 is not a reason for pride, but a day of sorrow.
Another conclusion of the study was the fact that the agenda was imported. If you look at the geography of the authors who disseminate messages, then its ratio in the periods from 2014 to 2016 and from 2017 to the end of 2019 is very interesting. If in the first period there were more Ukrainian authors than Russian, then in the second the number of Ukrainian authors decreases and the number of Russian ones increases.
What's more remarkable: the number of messages is growing every year. “We have been researching social networks for a long time, the processes that take place in them, and we can say that even the most popular Internet memes do not last so long. They begin to fade away and are only used locally by individual users. Here we see the dynamics growing every year,”said Kuritsyn.
It is also worth noting that social networks Twitter and Facebook have become the main online platforms for spreading the term "victory", although the social network VKontakte is still the most popular in the Russian segment.
Thesis "The USSR is the culprit for the start of the war"
Researchers saw similar processes during the dissemination of the theses "USSR - the culprit of the outbreak of war", "USSR, Russia - occupier".
As for the latter, the frequency of mentioning this thesis is much higher than that of the "victoriousness". If "victoriousness" spreads only on May 9, the term "occupier" is almost constantly present in the information space.
“Its active distribution starts in 2015. Although the preparation was back in 2014, added Kuritsyn. - But in general, these dates can be applied to each thesis. This is probably due to the socio-political and geopolitical processes in the world and in the neighboring countries, the former CIS”.
According to Igor Ashmanov, the history of all these accusations began in the years of perestroika. Before that, everyone who participated in the war did not skimp on praising Russia and the Soviet Union for defeating fascism. And only in the nineties there were accusations that the USSR unleashed a war, its soldiers raped millions of German women, etc.
What the expert fully agrees with is the conclusion about the constant, almost linear growth of such messages. “This is a completely unnatural story for any topic,” he stresses. - Topics usually have a hat-like schedule: a pretty steep slope - a topic emerges and then fades away. This does not happen here, there is constant heating."
The expert also commented on the fact of importing the agenda, as well as the fact that the main players in discrediting the historical truth are not the most popular Facebook and Twitter in Russia.
“This pretty clearly shows the sources of this whole case, because both Twitter and Facebook do not work in our jurisdiction, they have their own ideas about beauty. The moderators of Facebook and, most likely, Twitter are mainly Ukrainians who are hostile to Russia,”he said. - The agenda import says not only that many messages, memes and all sorts of fictions about the role of Russia in World War II appear in the West, but also that this is more and more rooted in our country, more and more accounts are writing this inside Russia. The situation is getting worse. It takes root in the minds of Russian users, and in particular, in the minds of young people. The concentration increases, and these are no longer just some popular topics that are sometimes discussed, there is a continuous pumping,which takes on politicized forms and is necessarily used to discredit the current leadership of the country and the current current policy of Russia."
The main goal is to reorganize the world
Natalya Kasperskaya decided to look at the situation from the point of view of children and adolescents, how young people perceive this topic, because all these theses are not intended for adults, mature people who grew up in the Soviet Union, where there were clear and understandable ideological attitudes, a single textbook history, and above all, for the younger generation.
In the minds of modern schoolchildren and students, war is no longer something with which large social groups previously actively contacted, Alexander Grebenyuk supported Natalya Kasperskaya. People have grown up, there was a generation gap between young people and grandparents.
“There is no transfer of knowledge or experience, and today's youth draws a lot from the Internet. Unfortunately, any information war, manipulation, can only be subject to widespread ignorance and a low level of historical knowledge,”he says.
At the same time, Grebenyuk believes that everything is not as bad in Russia as, for example, in a number of other states, where the picture of historical knowledge can completely change within 5-7 years.
“There is a catch phrase:“There is nothing more changeable than history”. We are not all that bad. It is the correct presentation, the popularization of historical knowledge based on facts that is a very good medicine for developing immunity in our youth from falsification. We must talk more, give more specific examples. The state should do this. We need a unified textbook, a unified approach to the interpretation of history, based, of course, on facts. And in the case of our youth, we must use all the modern channels that are available to promote information,”he is convinced.
Society must react
According to Natalya Kasperskaya, there are a few more things to do. This is the cleansing of the information space or the creation of a situation in which obvious falsifications and stuffing will not only be condemned by the community, but also be illegal.
The second is the need to create value benchmarks. This is a history textbook that is factual. All these facts are confirmed, not invented or written by anyone. Third, seeding the media space with positive content. “It's no secret that now enemies are working in our space without any opposition: what they want, they write. These messages are distributed and we are not doing anything,”says Kaspersky. According to her, it is necessary to create clean sources, and it should not be one, but several resources, in which they would talk about various aspects of the war, the real state of affairs, give examples, memories of veterans who have already passed or are still living.
“We see a decrease in the criticality of thinking among young people when they receive information,” added Artem Kuritsyn. - In our research, we cite such theses as "victoriousness", "nothing to be proud of", "The USSR is to blame." As you can see, they are quite short, so they are easily learned by those who have no desire to figure it out. More complex designs would require verification. If the reader wanted to understand whether they are writing the truth, it would take some, albeit a little, research. Read something, find out. But since we see a decrease in the criticality of information perception, this process is extremely rare."
But Igor Ashmanov believes that the examples of other states are not suitable. “There are many examples there, completely covered up by censorship,” he is convinced. - We just don't understand it. As the great philosopher Alexander Zinoviev said, the ideological machine of the West is much more powerful and has always been more powerful than the ideological machine of the USSR and Russia today. It was simply organized not as a hierarchical pyramid, but as a market for ideological services. There, those who say not what is needed will be left without a piece of bread, without a department at the university. You know all these stories about the dismissal of journalists who were against the war in Iraq. We have different values, we go our own way. Therefore, copying the Western experience is not worth it."
For example, the denial of the Holocaust in Austria, according to Ashmanov, is a kind of imposition of a change in the world, because the Austrians are not very much "covered up" in this story, and in any case, for them this is an external story, so they are hard-pressed precisely because of it … We cannot adopt the Chinese or European experience, because we are going in different directions. We have different ideas. For us, the Victory is the pivot, because it was a real battle between good and evil, the largest in the history of mankind. We won in it and were on the side of good. We need to keep this. For them it is something different.
“For example, for small countries that fought with Hitler, this is generally a small nuisance: the head of Denmark did not even ride a bicycle to his workplace and surrendered an hour before the German attack, and then they calmly produced weapons, ammunition and food for them and all life felt good, and then others came, and now they also feel good, - Ashmanov cites the example. - For them, this is not a reason for shame. We must have our own laws, our own ideas. In my opinion, you don't need to copy anything."
History in the perception of youth
For the younger generation, very different methods are needed, he said. Because he has no understanding of what knowledge is. For them, the starting point of knowledge is the first line in Google or Yandex. And the first links, as a rule, are Wikipedia, which is not an objective resource: there is a rather strong bias in different topics. For example, it is written that Auschwitz was liberated by American soldiers, and it was on the territory of Poland, where there were no Americans.
Perhaps further work within the study will help to find such sources. It was decided to continue it with annual reports on the results, active involvement of the regional agenda, public organizations and turn to the methods of traditional sociology.
“Of course, the topic needs to be continued, to understand how it develops, what is happening in social networks, what is the behavior of this process. And, of course, evaluate how it manifests itself in the real world. What will happen next, I am not yet ready to say for sure, but something interesting and useful,”said Artem Kuritsyn.
“This is not a commissioned study, we do it in the subbotnik mode, because the topic really touches us,” added Igor Ashmanov.
Note that journalists from the Volgograd region also took part in the press conference. Correspondent "Sotsinformburo" Anatoly Sologubov said that this is not the first time the hero city has faced a serious falsification, the main initiators of which are foreign partners. One example is an attempt to install a bust of the former Minister of Defense of the Federal Republic of Germany, who served as an anti-aircraft gunner in the ranks of the German army during the Battle of Stalingrad, several years ago in Volgograd.
He also said that the regional community has launched the "Save Pobedu.ru" project. Volgograd residents plan to use the materials of the presented study and want to establish cooperation in this area.
Anton Kuritsyn replied that the company is always glad to cooperate if it is beneficial, and added that it already interacts with various government bodies and public organizations.
“The report gathers public organizations around itself,” Alexander Grebenyuk concretized. - I think that state bodies should also react to the results. There is a lot of work ahead for all interested citizens."
Addition to the topic: Facebook "accidentally" blocked posts with the Victory banner
Facebook explained the removal of a photo with a red banner over the Reichstag:
“This content was removed in error by our automated breach detection tools and is now recovered. We apologize to users for any inconvenience caused by this,”RIA Novosti quotes the words of a Facebook official.
It noted that the company is temporarily sending home content verification staff and relies on automated verification systems.
Earlier, Facebook users noticed that the social network is deleting posts with a photo in which Soviet soldiers are hoisting the Victory Banner over the Reichstag. It was noted that publications are blocked because they "violate the norms of the community regarding dangerous people and organizations."
Editorial comment
An illustrative example of historical censorship. Since the scandal with the blocking of photos received wide publicity, the owners of Facebook had to make excuses and declare "an accident." From personal experience, we add that on Facebook, any criticism of the LGBT topic and propaganda of perversion causes the post to be blocked for violating community rules and a subsequent warning to the group.