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SouthFront
SouthFront (sometimes written South Front) is a multilingual website registered in Russia. It has been accused of being an outlet for disinformation and being under the control of the Russian government, and is sanctioned by the US Treasury and banned by social media platforms for this reason.
Writing in 2019, the European Union's East StratCom Task Force analyzed site meta-data and reported, "South Front is registered in Russia, money donated to the site goes to Russia and the editor is named Anastasia. But the most compelling evidence for South Front’s being Russian is in the content...South Front is loyally relaying whatever suits the Kremlin, pretending not to be Russian."[2] Two days after that report appeared, SouthFront anonymized their videos, removing Russian text that had listed the name of their video editor as "Natasha."[3] The second report also cited WHOIS information for southfront.org, showing the domain was registered on April 30, 2015, with Russian registrar REG.RU.[4]
Disinformation and far right links
In April 2020, Facebook and Twitter deleted many pages and accounts they said were linked to "Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior" by Russian actors, mentioning
South Front as having "pushed misleading articles, questioning the results of the 2020 presidential election and the efficacy of Covid-19 vaccines."
[5] According to
EU vs Disinfo, however, both
SouthFront and Crimea-based
Newsfront were able to evade much of the Facebook effort.
[6][7]
In February 2022,
Meta (formerly Facebook, Inc.) took action against both
SouthFront and
NewsFront, for a new round of deceptive activity.
[5] The Facebook report said that a network of fake accounts claiming to be people from
Kyiv amplified content from "websites masquerading as independent news outlets, publishing claims about the West betraying Ukraine and Ukraine being a failed state."
[8]
In 2022, the US Treasury department said, "Although it previously focused on the 2020 U.S. presidential election,
SouthFront has also spread information suggesting that Ukraine or NATO could use chemical weapons within the country with hopes to blame it on Russia."
[9]
In 2017, researchers at
Oxford University's Internet Institute studied the collaboration of
SouthFront with two US-based sites,
Veterans Today and its sister site
Veterans News Now.
[11] Veterans Today is "a
fake news site actively pushing the Kremlin party line," according to
University of Washington professor
Kate Starbird.
[12]
Philip N. Howard, one of the paper's coauthors, told
McClatchy DC that the three websites underlay "an entire ecosystem of junk news about national security issues that is deliberately crafted for U.S. veterans and active military personnel...a complex blend of content with a Russian view of the world – wild rumors and conspiracies."
[13] The Oxford researchers concluded that the three sites were more successful on Twitter than on Facebook, saying "on Twitter there are significant and persistent interactions between current and former military personnel and a broad network of Russia-focused accounts, conspiracy theory focused accounts, and European right-wing accounts."
[11] SouthFront representatives responded to a
Politico story about the Oxford study with an email saying they had no connection to Russia's government, adding that describing them as part of a Kremlin network was "contrary to the principles of freedom of speech and .. discriminatory against Russians."
[12]
In 2020, the
US State Department described
SouthFront as part of Russia's "
disinformation and
propaganda ecosystem," where Russian state actors team with others whose connection to Russia was less clear, in order to get wide attention for their ideas. According to the State Department report,
SouthFront "combines
Kremlin talking points with detailed knowledge of military systems and ongoing conflicts and attempts to appeal to military enthusiasts, veterans, and conspiracy theorists."
[14]
In 2021 and again in 2022, the
US Treasury announced sanctions against
SouthFront, calling it in 2021 "an online disinformation site registered in Russia that...attempts to appeal to military enthusiasts, veterans, and conspiracy theorists, all while going to great lengths to hide its connections to Russian intelligence."
[15][9]
In April 2021, the
Southern Poverty Law Center reported that
far-right conspiracy theorist
Jack Posobiec had tweeted 28 links to
SouthFront between November 2019 and August 2020. In return,
SouthFront promoted Posobiec as well, and cited his tweets in their posts.
[16]
The 2022 Treasury report alleged that
SouthFront was sanctioned in part for being "owned or controlled by, or for having acted or purported to act for or on behalf of, directly or indirectly, the
FSB" which is Russia's successor to Soviet Union's
KGB.
[9]
Source -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SouthFront
