Today’s tactics and techniques assessment examines this thread by Marc Owen Jones posted on 13 Sep 2022, the basis for Reuters’ article “Fake energy-saving poster urges Swiss to inform on neighbours“.
Decide to Act: Promote narrative beneficial to nation state goals (T0002)
It was shared a lot on Twitter, but mostly by an account called @DagnyTaggart369 – a dodgy-looking account claiming to be a Donbas-born Ukrainian living in the UK. Dagny (name of the protagonist in Atlas Shrugged) gets a lot of engagement and does a lot of scare-mongering about gas prices, deflecting attention from the fact Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was a key driver of this. However, the news was also spread by pro-Russian, Russian-aligned, or official Russian accounts such as @Georgegalloway and @SputnikInt and @dpol_un
The promotion of the news by Russian state media and officials suggests it’s part of this useful propaganda about scare-mongering about gas prices – no doubt designed to encourage govs to ease of caps and sanctions.
Produce: Fabricated Image (T0086)
It’s been debunked a few times, > see tweet below by @KDenkWrites. It’s a photoshopped image, and quite a good one.
I’m calling this “Fabricated Image” to specify that this is an image; the original DDB technique tag is “Fabricated Content“.
Amplify: Narrative Amplified by State Media
Amplify: Narrative Amplified by Government Official
the news was also spread by pro-Russian, Russian-aligned, or official Russian accounts such as @Georgegalloway and @SputnikInt and @dpol_un
Other potential tactics
DISARM has the tactic “Divide (T0079)” under the stage “Plan Objectives (TA02)“. I think it’s likely that the image was developed with the objective to cause division within target communities, but I can’t be sure of this.
The intention of this series is to make it easier to understand why the article has been tagged with particular tactics or techniques. Associating reporting of real-world attacks with DISARM tactics and techniques helps us get a better understanding of how they have practically been used, who’s used them, and who they’ve been used against. To do this a relevant quote from the article will be provided under the title of the associated technique. If the technique exists in DISARM, then its identifier will be included too.