Social media platforms are widely used for sharing information. Although social media use is generally benign, such platforms can also be used for a variety of malicious activities, including the dissemination of propaganda, hoaxes, and fake news to influence the public. The availability of inexpensive and ubiquitous mass communication tools has made such malicious activity much more convenient and effective. In this paper we study how blogs act as virtual spaces where malicious narratives are framed and then further disseminated through social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook. To discover how such disinformation campaigns work, it is necessary to examine the link between blogs and social media platforms and the role they play in media orchestration strategies, more specifically cross-media and mix-media strategies. We have carried out an in-depth examination of information networks, using social network analysis and cyber forensics, to identify prominent information actors and the leading coordinators of several disinformation campaigns. The research methodology we have developed reveals a massive disinformation campaign pertaining to the Baltic region, conducted primarily through blogs but strategically linking to a variety of other social media platforms, e.g. Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and VKontakte.

Humour entertains, but can also be used for propaganda purposes if it reaches a large audience and influences their emotional response to specific topics. The article focuses on humour as a comprehensive concept: elements of humour that serve a propagandistic function, including shared knowledge, the target audience, the perception of humour, the functions of humour, and the communication process, are identified and analysed in New Year’s Eve programming on Russian television.

This research paper examines and assesses how members of the Somali jihadiinsurgent group al-Shabaab have attempted to influence the mass media for strategic communications purposes. Using the group’s activities between the years 2005 and 2017 as a case study, this paper asserts that al-Shabaab’s attempts to influence the mass media for news coverage purposes, despite its own operational security concerns since it withdrew from Mogadishu in 2011, is forward-looking, fast-paced, aggressive, and by and large successful. But the conclusions also assert that despite the group’s focused strategic communications and its opportunistic use of Propaganda of the Deed, its successes correlate directly to the failure of the poor and generally uncoordinated communications efforts of the international coalition working to counter it. The generally poor handling of strategic communications by an expensive combination of the Somali government, the African Union Mission to Somalia (AMISOM), the United Nations (UN), and some members of the international community has allowed the strategic communications of al-Shabaab a relatively free, unchecked, and unchallenged passage. In some cases related to major attacks, al-Shabaab’s strategic communications are even viewed by members of the mass media as more authentic, realistic, timely, and truthful, than those of those of the coalition working to counter it.

In declaring Russia the successor state to the USSR in 1991, the Kremlin sought to retain and restore its political and economic influence in the socalled post-Soviet area—Central Europe, the Baltic countries, and Central Asia. The Kremlin-controlled media are currently engaged in strengthening the myth of the Soviet Union as a success story. In today’s Russia, and in Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, the three Baltic countries occupied by the USSR after the Second World War, a narrative combining the ideas of ‘Soviet investment’ and ‘ungrateful Baltic people’ is being popularised: the Baltic states are clearly demonstrating their lack of gratitude for generous Soviet era policies, while attempts to describe the Soviet occupation from the Baltic point of view are dismissed as falsification of history. The purpose of this article is to describe the main directions used in Soviet propaganda to deceive society about the socio-economic situation in Latvia, and in the Baltic states in general, during the first decade of the Soviet occupation (1940–1950). The article also offers insight into the socio-economic realities of the period of occupation and the current topicality of the issue—links between Soviet propaganda and the current communications policy of the Russian Federation.

The aim of this paper is to examine the role of historical narratives in extremist propaganda, seeking to show how and why they are used to enhance the impact of such propaganda. To that end we use the concept of the ‘competitive system of meaning’, which lies at the heart of extremist propaganda and forms their grand overarching narrative. Through the use of two constructs, in-group/outgroup identity and crisis/solution, propagandists form a cylindrically reinforcing narrative. This paper is exploratory in nature, and is envisaged as the first step in much more detailed research into the role of historical narratives in extremist propaganda. It seeks to show the importance of historical narratives to propaganda by identifying and exploring five ways in which such narratives are exploited to reinforce the extremists’ ‘competitive system of meaning’.

Fuelled by Russia’s annexation of Crimea, the question of how authoritarian regimes like Russia seek to influence information domains of foreign states has received unprecedented attention within the disciplines of security and strategic communications. However, we have yet to examine more deeply the Russian conceptualisation of information space and the Kremlin’s ability to exert control over its domestic information domain. The present study contributes toward filling these gaps by providing a more holistic understanding of the term ‘information space’ as it appears in Russian scholarship, and by analyzing the effectiveness of the economic and legal tools used by the Kremlin to establish control over the domestic information space. Ultimately, the study finds that whilst the Kremlin has been able to exert considerable influence over content production and distribution in certain spheres of the broader information space, it clearly enjoys only limited control over the new, increasingly Internetdominated spaces and environments.