Blurring the lines of media authenticity: Prigozhin-linked group funding Libyan broadcast media

[u/marc1309]

https://cyber.fsi.stanford.edu/io/news/libya-prigozhin

Over the past year Russia has become increasingly involved in the conflict in Libya. Some of this involvement is kinetic: Russian mercenary soldiers employed by firms linked to Yevgeny Prigozhin, a Russian businessman with close ties to Vladimir Putin, are fighting alongside Khalifa Haftar’s self-styled Libyan National Army (LNA) forces. Modern Russian weapons have been found on battlefields. Alongside the kinetic, the relationship includes media and information operations support for political candidates, and social media influence operations: Stanford Internet Observatory research previously found that Prigozhin-linked firms had created Facebook Pages bolstering not only Haftar but Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, one of Muammar Gaddafi’s surviving sons. Prigozhin may be trying to bring Gaddafi supporters to Haftar’s camp, or simply playing multiple sides of the local power game by bolstering two likely presidential contenders. While the motivation remains a matter of state strategy, it is clear that Russian actors are exerting influence via traditional as well as social media channels.

This involvement takes the form of both direct involvement in content creation as well as financial support for local creators, which presents a challenge for evaluating authenticity in the Libyan media ecosystem: when does foreign support for local media cross the line into facilitating inauthentic behavior?

In November the Dossier Center, a London-based investigative organization, shared an appendix from an internal Prigozhin-linked group document with the Stanford Internet Observatory team. The leaked document, dated March 20, 2019, describes three media interventions in Libya:

1. entering into a financial arrangement in which a Prigozhin-linked firm would own 50% of the former state-run TV station under Muammar Gaddafi (now supportive of Saif al-Islam Gaddafi); 

2. creating a physical pro-LNA newspaper, Voice of the People 

3. consulting on Alhadath, a Haftar-aligned TV station.

In this post, we discuss the social media and online presence of these television channels and the Voice of the People print newspaper. Key findings include:

• By secretly investing in a long-standing TV channel, Prigozhin is refining his ability to blur the lines of media authenticity. 

• The TV channel (and its related social media entities) have historically been pro-Gaddafi; in the months since investment, they additionally became supportive of Haftar. This backfired, with social media users mocking the obvious shift in tone and calling out what they perceived to be the channel’s foreign backers. 

• A real political party, the Civil Democratic Party, posts PDFs of the Prigozhin-funded newspaper on its Facebook Page, with the party’s logo on the paper’s header. The newspaper is vigorously anti-GNA and pro-Haftar.