Russian interference seen in Catalonia crisis, security experts say
"Russian propagandists scored a victory in Spain this weekend after “boldly injecting fake news and disinformation” into the debate over Catalonian independence and seemingly influencing the election results, according to U.S. information warfare experts.
The divisive nature of Sunday’s chaotic poll, in which voters backed the Catalonia regional government’s disputed referendum to declare independence from Spain, featured Russian state-backed news outlets and social network robotic accounts leveraging the mayhem to push the Kremlin’s larger anti-Western and anti-democracy themes.
“What is so troubling is that the Russians used the same playbook and nobody seems to care,” U.S. information warfare expert Molly K. McKew told The Washington Times. “It’s the constant drumbeat; minorities are disadvantaged, the West has nothing to offer, democracy doesn’t work.”
On Capitol Hill, multiple congressional probes currently investigating the extent of Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election have zeroed in on a similar pattern of Kremlin-backed propaganda seemingly amplifying divisive social issues across Facebook and Twitter last year.
Experts say the Kremlin has perfected not promoting a single candidate but instead finding divisive social issues including race, gun control, religion or gay rights to amplify. Eastern European, or Russian, troll farms and robotic accounts then use algorithms to make “emotional hot-button topics” trend across a country’s Internet space.
Ms. McKew, who has written about Russia’s ‘Hybrid Information Warfare’ techniques and advised the Georgian and Moldovan governments, spoke to The Times from Estonia. In the Catalonian independence election, she said, Moscow appeared to pull from a playbook it has perfected in recent years.
