Mogherini: EU counter-propaganda group reveals over 3000 cases of disinformation by Russian-speaking media over two years
The EU’s operational working group for strategic communications, called the East StratCom Team, has identified more than 3000 cases of disinformation from Russian-language media over two years, said EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Federica Mogherini.
"It is important for us to analyze, predict and react to disinformation. For this reason we created the first working group on strategic communications within the framework of the European External Action Service (EEAS), focusing on Eastern partners and Russian-speaking communities. Over the past two years, the East StratCom group has identified over 3000 cases of disinformation,” Mogherini said while speaking in Brussels on Monday at the conference titled "Hybrid Threats and the EU: the state of affairs and the outlook for the future."
She stressed that mere opposition to disinformation alone is not enough, and it is necessary to focus on explaining EU policies with maximum transparency, telling real stories about its positive impact on people's lives.
"This is exactly what the East StratCom group is doing in the Eastern Partnership countries, including during the eve of the November summit of the Eastern partnerships”, continued Mogherini.
She said that the EEAS has set up an operational working group for the same reason, to improve strategic communications in Arabic.
"All these actions are aimed at what we call ‘resilience’. We want to preempt, to do so in order to know in advance how to react and minimize the damage from a potential attack. In other words, our goal is to reduce the ‘surface’ potentially vulnerable to attack," she noted.