TADEAS:
Ordinarily, Western commentators would be lining up to denounce a country like Ecuador for blocking the communications and internet access of one of its own citizens. But because the person silenced here is Assange, whom they hate, their heartfelt devotion to the sacred principles of free speech and a free press vanish.
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The tensions between Ecuador and Assange center on the debate in Spain over Catalan independence. On October 1, 2017, the autonomous region of Catalonia held a referendum for independence. The Spanish government declared this referendum illegal. Protests and arrests of Catalan activists ensued, as well as the seizure of ballots and raids on polling stations by the government in Madrid.
In the midst of this crisis, former Spanish Prime Minister Felipe González reportedly requested that Spain’s most powerful media conglomerate, Grupo PRISA, which owns El País, “offer a firm response” to the independence movement in Catalonia. The media corporation complied, devoting its full resources to opposing Catalan secession.
El País, days later, began depicting Catalan activists as a tool of the Kremlin. The paper published an article alleging that not only Assange, but also Edward Snowden, were helping Russian propaganda networks spread “fake news” about Catalonia. El País repeated these claims in subsequent stories, which were echoed in reports from other anti-separatist organizations, such as the Spanish think tank Elcano Royal Institute, Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Research Lab, and NATO’s StratCom.
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while these accusations are being taken seriously, they — like many claims about “fake news” and foreign online propaganda campaigns — are not being critically scrutinized or journalistically verified, and have little evidentiary support.
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One of the more methodologically unsound tactics used is to depict not only RT and Sputnik, but anyone who is quoted or even retweeted by them, as assisting in the spread of Russian state propaganda. During his testimony for the U.K. fake news committee, David Alandete from El Pais stated that “RT and Sputnik are at the center of this. Assange and Snowden are a very handy source for them; anything that Assange says is a quote and a headline.”
Assange was mentioned multiple times in RT and Sputnik’s coverage about Catalonia, but the stories quoting Assange comprised only a small minority of their discussions of these political events. Analysis of Sputnik and RT’s stories based on both Media Cloud’s data and their tweets reveal that only 1% to 3% of RT and Sputnik’s stories about Catalonia also mention Assange. Additionally, most of these references to Assange are centered around a few isolated quotes and events, in contrast to RT and Sputnik’s continuous coverage of the situation in Catalonia more generally.
Rather ironically (given the claims about bots and trolls promoting messages about independence in Catalonia), there is clear evidence of Twitter bots spreading messages about the crisis in Spain — but those were non-Russian bots and they were spreading propaganda that was opposed to Catalan independence. This is hardly the first time that Western governments and its allies have been caught using fake online activity to spread Western propaganda, but few western commentators care except when Russia or other U.S. adversaries do it.
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The pattern of events seen here is not specific to Julian Assange, Ecuador, Spain, or any one country. It is a global, systemic problem. This situation an illustrative example of what happens when political tensions around internal divisions, in this case Spain and Catalonia, build and break. In the aftermath, people struggle to explain what they see as an injustice, and conclude that some foreign person or group interfered to bring about a problematic situation by spreading propaganda or disinformation.
This narrative grows and shifts the focus away from internal problems and divisions by unifying people against this new external enemy, much the way patriotism surges during a war. This sentiment can then be exploited as a tactic of manipulation for those seeking to support their own agendas, and leveraged to pressure external parties. It is also an extremely powerful tool for stigmatizing any internal, domestic dissent aligned with, if not controlled by, the foreign villain. Meanwhile, internal tensions continue to build and conflicts escalate, with their actual causes ignored in favor of pleasing, simplistic, self-vindicating storylines about foreign interference.