“According to the study of the London Analytical Center of the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), three years after the imposition of sanctions against the Russian state media in the European Union, their sites and online services continue to work actively and collect a significant audience.”, – WRITE: www.pravda.com.ua
Source: “European Truth” with reference to Spiegel
Details: According to the research, Russian state media are especially popular in Germany. In particular, five blocked domains recorded more than 50,000 visits per month, and three of them even 100,000 visitors each.
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In total, 58 domains related to 26 organizations have been identified to which the EU has imposed sanctions. In about three quarters of cases, the required locks were not effective.
Among the tested sites: Russian foreign TV channel RT (formerly Russia Today), RIA Novosti State Information Agency, Lenta online newspaper and the state TV channel The first channel, which, according to ISD, had more than 5 million visits per month in the entire EU. The leader is RIA Novosti out of more than 10 million visits.
“Three years after the first restrictions, sanctioned media remain mainly active and accessible in Member States,” the ISD concludes.
According to the study, these media also played a “central role in spreading harmful propaganda and polarization of target groups” during the Federal Elections in Germany in February and the Presidential Elections in Poland in May.
According to the study, the compliance of sanctions with European providers remains “inconsistent”. Less than a quarter of content access attempts were effectively blocked by the three largest providers in six EU Member States studied.
The most effective sanctions were imposed in Germany and France, where ISD tests blocked from 43 to 57 percent (Germany) and from 24 to 48 percent (France) domains.
However, as noted in the analysis, “through the settings of users on final devices, router or applications such as VPN services, requests can still be routed through third-party providers such as Cloudflare or other services, which still allows access to blocked content.”
The media and their online services were banned by the European Commission in March 2022, shortly after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Russia, in order to counteract the Kremlin’s misinformation and respond to an aggressive war.
At the end of July in Latvia, the National Council for Electronic Media (NPLP) blocked access to a number of Russian sites, in particular to resources for the recruitment of soldiers to participate in the Russian Federation against Ukraine.
Similar decisions to blocking access to sites that are spreading Russian propaganda have been approved by NPLP earlier.