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Russian propaganda: is it on all networks or confined to X?

On Monday, Franceinfo published an article entitled: "Pro-Russian disinformation also invades the Bluesky social network". raising an interesting question that we hadn't really explored in our previous analyses of propaganda on networks in general, interference on social networks , propaganda on the Ukrainian conflict or propaganda on the battle of Bakhmut and Adviika. Now we ask: can this propaganda be observed on the various social networks?

The summary

X is still the most widely used network for spreading Russian propaganda in occupied territories. The themes and narratives are classic: Russia is said to be waging a "clean war", without destroying homes, and liberating villages from the Ukrainian "yoke".
On the other hand, Bluesky is currently used very little for these campaigns, and when it is, engagement is microscopic. This low impact can also be seen on other platforms such as YouTube or Telegram (at least on French-speaking channels).
Propaganda is mainly based on old assets, such as African pages on Facebook or accounts created during the Covid crisis. This phenomenon explains why the new social networks remain largely unaffected. That said, Bluesky seems to be used slightly more than Threads in this context.

In short, the French media's coverage of Russian propaganda is often far more visible than the propaganda itself.

Methodology

To answer this question, we decided to analyse a very specific battleground, where it is unlikely to find discussions coming from non-military people, not interested in the conflict, or disconnected from propaganda dynamics. We therefore chose discussions mentioning the keyword Kurakhovo, written in French. This choice naturally limits the volume of potential conversations about the war, but it provides an excellent point of comparison for assessing the presence and impact of propagandist narratives.

Why are there no networks other than X?

So, we were very excited at the idea of mobilising all our tools capable of analysing all the 360 networks like our last article on Marineland, but let's cut the suspense straight away: it's pretty clear that there's very little activity outside X.

So we can only speculate to explain this finding:

The pro-Russian assets targeting the French-speaking world have become very light. You get the feeling that these are real people connected to Russian issues and using language picked up on Telegram or elsewhere. The case of the African Facebook pages is extremely striking in this respect. The fact that new networks such as Threads are not used at all is also quite striking.
Coverage of the war through a Russian prism is much more assured in English. (This is quite logical)
Networks like Instagram, Facebook, Youtube or LinkedIn are not as interesting as X because of a lack of open logic, a lack of journalists reporting on them and a lack of structure in far-right networks. The case of Bluesky is extremely indicative as there is simply no audience, and simply few people to act as a screen.

If you are interested in the review of social networks, the appendices cover the review network by network.

Appendices

Let's start with the most active networks:

At X, it's relatively concentrated around the usual players from previous studies.

On Linkedin there are very few publications, but in fact there are some strangely similar publications referring to the Washington Post :

Even though the image that is supposed to show the Washington Post article is in fact an old article from 2017 in an illustration image from nbcnews.com : (that said, the Washington Post article is really there with the same arguments as those mentioned)

It is difficult to evaluate Bluesky accurately, and I prefer not to include any data in a graph that might appear 'scientific', given that there are barely three relevant publications to analyse. In English and Spanish, there are a few publications, but they are totally unremarkable. So the France Info hypothesis collapses: there is simply no audience for the videos or publications broadcast on this platform at the moment.

What's more, as the trending algorithm is totally dysfunctional, it's very complicated to get involved in existing conversations or to effectively relay a narrative. At most, we can note the relay of a joint French blog between X and Bluesky, but without any real impact.

The funny thing is that the term "bandériste" on LinkedIn leads to profiles already seen on LinkedIn :

On Facebook, it's the African pages that are echoing the news:

For Telegram, the fairly active activity is actually very concentrated on a very small number of channels, most of which have no more than 1,000 views. Lastly, YouTube has a few more links, with just one video exceeding 10,000 views.