The Underdog Fighting Against Disinformation in Moldova
Propaganda and disinformation campaigns flourish in Moldova. At WatchDog, a determined band of media monitors are guarding against Russian threats to democracy.
By Justin Mitselmakher and David Tapia
Few countries have been as targeted by Russian disinformation campaigns as the Republic of Moldova, but this phenomenon has not gone uncontested. A gutsy think-tank with a bulldog as its logo is doing everything it can to expose Russian interference in Moldovan affairs.
WatchDog’s tightly-knit team works out of a small warren of offices by a rose-filled courtyard in the center of Chisinau, the capital. A Russian cultural center, thought to be a hub for Russian operatives in the country, is just a block away.
“Russian propaganda affects the future of Moldova in the most direct way. Eventually, it impacts on the elections and who will be the next rulers of this country.” — WatchDog’s media content manager Ecaterina Miscisina
Sandwiched between Romania and Ukraine, Moldova is vulnerable to disinformation operations due to its complex history, location and Russian-speaking heritage. Had the Russian invasion of Ukraine succeeded, few Moldovans believe their country (with a population of barely three million) would have been able to withstand annexation. It has only a small military, which makes it an easy target, but it is doubtful a conflict would arise. Instead, Russia has been trying to capture the country by winning the information war.
While propaganda flourishes on television, disinformation campaigns in Moldova seethe in a social media cesspool. Telegram and Facebook are among the most popular platforms in the country. The 30-plus crowd gravitates toward their content-specific channels and pages in search of discourse, debate and information. But without a trained eye, the most circulated topic of the day might just be a lie.
In February, Sputnik Moldova, a now-banned Russia-affiliated Telegram channel in Moldova, buzzed with a viral post of a seemingly official government document summoning Moldovans born from 1996 to 2004 to the Ministry of Defense. Rumors of a mobilization spread and fears of a Russian invasion were heightened as the war in Ukraine approached its one-year mark.
The Watchdog team implemented their system of early alerts, where they monitor disinformation as it disseminates in real-time and provide their findings to authorities so false news can be debunked. The defense ministry issued a statement denouncing the viral document as manipulated, contrasting it with a real example of a summons.
Historically, parts of Moldova have belonged to Romania, the Ottoman Empire and the Russian Empire, and finally the Soviet Union. Because of these ties, the official state language is Romanian, but a large part of the population speaks Russian, making it easier for Russia to launch disinformation campaigns. On top of that, after the invasion of Ukraine, Moldova began the process of applying to join the European Union, which Russia opposes.
The monumental task of monitoring television news and digital media is extremely time-consuming for the WatchDog team. Currently, they monitor eight Russian-speaking television stations, after six others were suspended in June 2022 by the Commission for Exceptional Situations in Moldova for broadcasting blatant propaganda on the Ukraine war.
“Even though I speak Russian very well, it takes time to translate the news I track for my report,” said Rodica Prigari, one of Watchdog.MD’s media monitoring experts. Each team member forwards data from the news channels for analysis and compilation in a report, which is then dispatched to several television partners in order to improve their news coverage.
But progress within the television broadcast community can be slow. “We have several projects with them and have provided training, but the quality of the news has not improved to where we would want it to be,” she added.
“When you have a war at your borders, and when you see the Russian influence, and when you see how it spreads and its effects, you just cannot ignore it.” — Watchdog project coordinator Doina Dragomir
The problem with Moldova’s Russian-language channels is not so much about telling bare-faced lies on air; it’s about biased storytelling and the framing of narratives, especially when it comes to the Ukraine war.
“You don’t see any images from the battlefield or bombings. It makes the war look like the special military operation the Russians want it to be,” said Prigari. “They only broadcast one story every few days about the war and it’s more like a press release from the Russian Ministry of Defense.”
Some political parties, like the Sor Party, have grown increasingly pro-Russia since the Ukraine war began. Headed by Western-sanctioned oligarch and fugitive Ilan Shor, the party came under investigation in May for alleged bribery during the elections for governor in the autonomous Gagauzia region, which the Sor candidate won.
“The Sor party tactic is to switch attention from the war in Ukraine to the general problems that Moldova faces,” Miscisina said. “Their narrative is that our government is incompetent, they can’t deal with the problems of our country, and the rest is all an excuse.”
In June, the Moldova Constitutional Court ruled the party “unconstitutional” and ordered its immediate dissolution after alleged destabilization attempts through Sor party-funded protests.
One of the popular tropes of Russian propaganda and disinformation is that Moldovan president Maia Sandu is a Western puppet and that NATO is trying to drive the republic into war in Ukraine. According to Miscisina, Russia-backed troll farms boost viewership of these themes through sponsored videos on Facebook and other social media.
The first step to combating disinformation for Watchdog starts with monitoring “everywhere we see that the disinformation is spread,” Dragomir said. But Watchdog also has its own presence on all major social media platforms. It releases videos, either self-produced or clips from television segments, on topics ranging from corruption to the energy crisis.
Video content is presented in a direct manner, either with experts in conversation with a presenter or talking right to the viewer. A scroll through the Watchdog.MD Facebook page shows a balanced amount of Romanian and Russian-language segments, emphasizing their mission of being far-reaching and effective across all audiences in the country.
Younger Moldovans tend to be more media savvy and are better at detecting disinformation than the 30-plus crowd that their videos target, but their efforts are “not enough to cover it all,” Miscisina admitted. She spent four months in 2022 studying the impact of Russian narratives about the Ukraine war at Stony Brook University’s Marie Colvin Center for International Reporting on a community solutions fellowship from Irex, the Washington-based global education specialists.
Amelia Solomon, a third-year international relations student at Free International University of Moldova, said her county’s population is divided between being pro-democratic and stuck in older, Soviet beliefs:
“You have so many sources and you don’t even know what to believe. It’s like a fight, you know? Even with my parents, we have this political division.”
Many people in post-Soviet countries have issues with trusting mass media after the fall of the USSR when everyone realized the content presented on television was a lie, said Anna Glushko, a reporter for Prime TV in Moldova and a correspondent for Germany-based network Deutsche Welle, who attended a training session with Watchdog in May.
Most would rather trust the opinions of a neighbor or something they read on social media, Glushko added. However, Moldovan journalists are at a special advantage in deciphering information coming out of Ukraine because of their Russian, and to a lesser extent their Ukrainian, language skills.
“It’s harder for our Romanian colleagues who don’t have those language skills because they have to rely on English sources for translation,” Glushko said in Russian. “It becomes a game of broken telephone.”
Monitoring television and social media, producing reports and being one of Moldova’s leading think tanks is a round-the-clock job. The Watchdog team says their drive lies in being of service to the public.
“You want to be a part of the change, you want to help people understand, you want to increase media literacy and increase the resilience of the population,” said Dragomir. “We feel that we have an impact. And we will continue to do it.”
