Soft power, sharp power? Exploring RT’s dual role in Russia’s diplomatic toolkit

ABSTRACT

This article examines the multilingual audiences of Russian outlet RT on Facebook. RT is a state media outlet known for spreading strategic Kremlin narratives and disinformation in support of Russia’s domestic and foreign policy objectives to large and multilingual global audiences. RT serves as a central pillar of the Russian information influence apparatus, and an instrument of both ‘soft’ and ‘sharp power’, the latter describing the use of information manipulation to interfere with foreign public spheres. While many studies have concentrated on the English-language content of RT to understand its impact on Western democracies, in this article, we examine the sharing of RT content across all six RT languages, and we investigate what audiences from the six language communities share RT content on Facebook. We find ideologically diverging patterns across these communities, with particular resonance for RT content targeting the political faultlines in different regions and countries and conclude that RT’s role as a tool for sharp power is now dominant.

KEYWORDS:

• Facebook
• multilingual audiences
• news sharing
• Russia
• sharp power
• soft power

Acknowledgements

Authors would like to thank Jane Tan, a Software Developer in the Digital Media Research Centre, QUT for her help with the collection of the data as well as anonymous reviewers for their work on the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 This manual assessment is different from what CrowdTangle identifies computationally as the ‘Page Admin Country’: the administrators of a page can be located in a country that is different from the country or countries targeted by the page, and ‘Page Admin Country’ is available only for Facebook pages, but not for groups or verified profiles.

2 All translations except the English-language cluster are made by coders.

3 In Eng.: Alternative for Germany

4 In Eng.: National Democratic Party of Germany

5 In Eng.: Patriotic Europeans against the Islamicisation of the Occident

6 In Eng.: The Left

Additional information

Funding

This project was supported by funding from Australian Research Council Discovery project DP200101317 'Evaluating the Challenge of “Fake News” and Other Mal information'.