12/06/2023

RT? What’s That?

New research from NewsGuard shows that 79% of Americans don’t know who controls the top source of Russian disinformation

(Dec. 6, 2023—New York) New research from NewsGuard shows that Americans lack the information they need to protect themselves from false claims made in foreign propaganda, despite the attention paid to the spread of misinformation online. In a survey conducted for NewsGuard by YouGov, 79% of Americans failed to identify that the Russian government controls the top source of Russian disinformation.

The survey found that Americans have no idea that RT—the leading source of Russian disinformation—is controlled by the Kremlin. The research found that only one in five Americans knows who controls RT, which is a website and broadcaster that also manages numerous social-media accounts, including a YouTube channel that has been among the popular sources of news on YouTube in the U.S.

After the European Commission required that platforms remove RT, YouTube removed the channel, but as NewsGuard has reported, RT videos continue to appear on the platform and when then do, there is no warning from YouTube that these are produced by an entity controlled by the Russian government. In 2013, RT became the first news channel on Google’s YouTube to achieve 1 billion views, according to YouTube. To mark the occasion, a senior YouTube executive appeared on a celebratory RT broadcast, praising RT’s reporting as “authentic” and without “agenda or propaganda.” More recently, RT declared on its YouTube home page that it was “the most watched news network on YouTube,” with “over 10 billion views.”

RT was required to register under the Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA) in 2017. Under the FARA law, the U.S. Justice Department deemed RT a “foreign principal,” acting as a “proxy of the Russian government,” serving as its “principal international propaganda outlet.” FARA became law in the 1930s, requiring disclosure by distributors of content when Nazi Germany sent propaganda pamphlets and books into the U.S. The law was also enforced against the Soviet Union through the Cold War, requiring disclosure of the propaganda source. For reasons that are not clear, the Justice Department has not required that online distributors disclose the foreign control of the content they allow on their platforms.

“The government of Vladimir Putin succeeded in hiding its control over RT, formerly called Russia Today, which has taken advantage of the open internet to become one of the most popular sources of news online in western democracies,” said Gordon Crovitz, co-CEO of NewsGuard. “The social media platforms have failed to give their users effective warnings about who’s feeding them the news. RT is the best argument for the Justice Department applying disclosure requirements to the social media platforms just as it did to pamphlet and book publishers in the print era.”

RT.com gets a score of 20 points out of 100 from NewsGuard, whose Nutrition Label write-up of RT warns news consumers, “Proceed with maximum caution: This website is unreliable because it severely violates basic journalistic standards.” It fails several of NewsGuard’s nine basic, apolitical criteria: It repeatedly publishes false or egregiously misleading content; it fails to gather and present information responsibly; fails to correct errors; fails to handle the difference between news and opinion responsibly; has deceptive headlines; and fails to provide information about content creators. Read the full Nutrition Label for RT here.

Among the false or egregiously misleading claims that RT has made in recent years: That the U.S. operated bioweapons labs in Ukraine, a claim the Putin government made to justify its invasion of Ukraine; that the Ukraine government is dominated by Nazis; and that the Russian government had not poisoned opposition leader Alexei Navalny or former Russian spy Sergei Skripal. A selection of false narratives from NewsGuard’s ongoing reporting, and their corresponding debunks, can be viewed in the NewsGuard Russia-Ukraine Disinformation Tracking Center here.

In addition to operating the RT website in the U.S., RT also has websites in French, German, Spanish and Arabic.

Details and Methodology:

NewsGuard commissioned an October 2023 study with YouGov that polled a nationally representative sample of 1,147 Americans. The survey asked: “Do you know who controls the news source called RT?”

All figures, unless otherwise stated, are from YouGov Plc. Total sample size was 1147 adults. Fieldwork was undertaken between 19th – 21st October 2023. The survey was carried out online. The figures have been weighted and are representative of all US adults (aged 18+).

 

About NewsGuard 

Founded by media entrepreneur and award-winning journalist Steven Brill and former Wall Street Journal publisher Gordon Crovitz, NewsGuard provides transparent tools to counter misinformation for readers, brands, and democracies. Since launching in 2018, its global staff of trained journalists and information specialists has collected, updated, and deployed more than 6.9 million data points on more than 35,000 news and information sources, and catalogued and tracked all of the top false narratives spreading online.

NewsGuard’s analysts, powered by multiple AI tools, operate the trust industry’s largest and most accountable dataset on news. These data are deployed to fine-tune and provide guardrails for generative AI models, enable brands to advertise on quality news sites and avoid propaganda or hoax sites, provide media literacy guidance for individuals, and support democratic governments in countering hostile disinformation operations targeting their citizens.

Among other indicators of the scale of its operations is that NewsGuard’s apolitical and transparent criteria have been applied by its analysts to rate news sources accounting for 95% of online engagement with news across nine countries.