The Information War on Europe’s economy

For this, we really first have to consider the media landscape of the early 2000s.

At this time, most people still got their news from outlets that at least nominally followed journalistic standards.

Yes, you had some tabloids.

tabloids pushing the limit, but there was a solid baseline.

And in this system of information, which had strong gatekeeping limits, Russia was stuck outside of the system.

And that's why they decided to build a media outlet called Russia Today.

And the aim was to project the Russian narrative in the West and beyond.

Other pro-Russian outlets would follow that were directly and openly funded by the Kremlin.

And with this, they somehow managed to get into the European and American public debates.

But at the end of the day, everyone knew, okay, these are the pro-Russian channels.

They amplify the narratives of the Kremlin.

And these channels would only reach the fringes of our society.

But then social media changed the game entirely.

Suddenly, people all over the world were using these social media platforms and it allowed the Kremlin to reach these people with much lower media budgets.

And it was in these times that Russia started to figure out, OK, how can we use social media at our advantage? Not by just only having our own own broadcast channels, have channels set up there, but also by doing influence operations where people claim to be independent and totally unrelated to the Kremlin, but still amplify all those pro-Kremlin narratives.

And that's where these infamous troll farms start to become a thing.

You have to imagine entire office buildings full of people.

And they're all running fake accounts, posting memes, commenting on their posts.

but also more sophisticated things like fabricated news sites.

Our old friend, Evgeny Prigozhin, he played an important role in all of this.

We featured him in many Varya Diplomacy episodes.

Before he became the infamous leader of the Wagner Group, he was leading one of the biggest operations around troll farms.

It was called the Internet Research Agency.

And by some estimates, the Internet Research Agency reached around 130 million Americans on Facebook.

No, yeah, this is an interesting way to put us in the context, but what comes to my mind is how at least these couple examples you're mentioning, both in 2016, both in Brexit and in the US, were 10 years ago.