From https://www.foreign.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/FinalRR.pdf
Techniques
Russian government disinformation uses a wide variety of misleading propaganda techniques to persuade and convince audiences of its preferred narratives. The Center for European Policy Analysis has identified over 20 techniques commonly used by the Kremlin to spread disinformation.3 Often, several of these techniques will be used in combination for a single article or story that promotes the Kremlin’s narrative on a particular event. These techniques include:
• Ping pong: uses complementary websites to raise the profile of a story and get mainstream media to pick it up.
• Misleading title: uses facts or statements in a story that may be correct, but the title is misleading.
• Zero proof: provides no sources or proof to validate a story’s facts or statements.
• False visuals: similar to false facts, but uses doctored visual productions to give extra weight to false facts or narratives.
• Totum pro parte or ‘‘the whole for a part’’: for example, using the opinion of just one academic or expert to portray the official position of a government.
• Altering the quotation, source, or context: facts and statements reported from other sources are different than the original. For example, a statement will be attributed to a different person than who actually said it or a quote is placed out of context to change its meaning.
• Loaded words or metaphors: obscures the facts behind an event by substituting accurate words with more abstract ones, for example saying that someone ‘‘died mysteriously’’ rather than ‘‘was poisoned.’’ The Western press has also aided the Kremlin’s narrative by using terms like ‘‘little green men’’ instead of ‘‘Russian troops’’ in Crimea, thereby maintaining a seed of doubt as to who they really were.
• Ridiculing, discrediting, and diminution: uses ad hominem attacks and mockery to sideline facts and statements that run counter to the Kremlin’s narratives.
• Whataboutism: makes false equivalencies between two disconnected events to support the Kremlin’s policies and promote its narrative. For example, comparing the annexation of Crimea to the invasion of Iraq.
• Conspiracy theories: use rumors and myths to anger, frighten, or disgust an audience. Examples include stories like ‘‘Latvia wants to send its Russian population to concentration camps,’’ or ‘‘The United States created the Zika virus.’’ Another version reverses the technique, by labeling factual stories as conspiracies.
• Joining the bandwagon: casts a certain view as being that of the majority of people, thereby giving it more credibility.
• Drowning facts with emotion: a form of the ‘‘appeal to emotion’’ fallacy, which drowns out facts by portraying a story in such a way as to maximize its emotional impact. The fake story of a Russian girl being sexually assaulted by Muslim immigrants in Germany is a good example, where, even though the story was proven to be false and widely discredited, it so inflamed people’s emotions that they were distracted from the story’s absence of facts.
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