Bowler: Russia distorts everything for its own interests

Russia is using discontent with Europe to spread disinformation, with the aim of influencing the European Union elections to be held this year. This is what the head of Social Newsgathering at EBU, Derek Bowler, says in an interview for The Geopost.

Speaking about the challenges and narratives from Russia, China that attack the EBU, Bowler also points out that there is a lot of interference from far-right parties that try to push the narrative into another sphere, which he says, is disrupting the discourse. public.

Full interview:

The Geopost: You work for EBU and help the fact-checker inside the EBU. What is the biggest challenge to be a fact-checker inside EBU?

Bowler: I think it’s probably the amount of organizations that I work with every day. I’m not just working for one broadcaster, I work for mostly 70 public service broadcasters and that comes with its own challenges, different countries, different geopolitical considerations, but also different types of content. A lot of people are working on more news relevant content, things from Gaza, maybe things from Ukraine, but then there’s another people behind that then who are looking at content that might not necessarily be as part of the news agenda might be lighter type content. So it’s a good mix but it’s the volume of broadcasters with the volume of social media content that we see is the main challenge.

The Geopost: What are challenges and what are the narratives from Russia, China attacking the EBU?

Bowler: Yeah, I think, you know, the EBU and its members parted ways with the Russian members nearly over two years ago now since the invasion of Ukraine happened. We also had an issue with our Belarusian member and we’re still very focused on the idea of protecting press freedom and making sure that our public service broadcasters have the right to be able to report without the fear of repercussions and with the ability to be able to tell the stories in a factual way and that’s a challenge for all public service broadcasters I think to be able to have that independence from external forces who maybe have an agenda that they want public service media to push I think it’s a challenge for not just public service media but also for commercial organizations. I think in terms of the narratives that people are seeing, a lot of the big ones that we’re seeing at the moment along is migration. It’s a huge topic, has been so for the last decade, especially in Europe. We’ve seen a number of countries have very tough lines in terms of the content that they have been producing based on what they see happening. But we have also seen a lot of interference from far-right parties trying to push the conversation into a different sphere, into one that disrupts the public discourse. Most recently I think we have seen, especially on the European elections coming up we’re seeing a lot of information around farmers we’ve seen a lot of protests across many parts of Europe in the last number of months in my own country in Ireland as well and a lot of this is feeding off misinformation that’s coming circulating online which is drawing people into a conversation and that they might not necessarily know the full facts behind

The Geopost: What about Russian disinformation and operation in Europe? How do you see this threat and how to protect from this?

Bowler: We’ve seen it going back as far as 2013 when we saw the first entrance into Crimea where the Russian internet agency was producing content that should we say furthered the interests of the Kremlin. And we’ve seen that continue as well across into other conflicts and into other spaces like the presidential elections in 2016 and 2020. And we’ve seen it again following the invasion of Ukraine where content that we see is projecting one incident is being completely distorted and made to look like Ukrainian propaganda. I’ll give you an example. There was a video which is quite famous now. It was known on Russian social media as the moving corpse. It was a video showing, actually showing a protest in Austria, in Vienna, and it was an environmental protest where the people were lying under tarps and one person moved. But that was actually taken by Russian affiliated accounts, made to look like this was actually happening in Ukraine with the narrative that Ukrainians were lying about the amount of people that were dying in the conflict. So, this is the kind of thing that we’re seeing. It’s important when you are working on stories or looking at content like this that you understand first of all where it’s coming from. We have a rule of three at the EBU which is the idea of our verification process is very strict. We look at the source, the date and the location. We try and establish those to 100% with the idea of being able to understand where this content is coming from, where it was shot and what date it was filmed upon. But the most important one actually for us is the source. Trying to understand not just if they’re the copyright holder of the material, but if they actually have an agenda or what is their motivation for sharing the content. So, they are the kind of indicators that we look for, but they’re for sharing the content. So, they are the kind of indicators that we look for, but they’re not anything different from the normal journalistic work that we’d be doing
/The Geopost