As consumers of information, we must improve our ability to spot potentially bad-faith actors and manipulation campaigns (state-sponsored or otherwise). However, spotting these bad-faith actors and manipulation campaigns can often be quite difficult. This project first offers a set of guiding principles for identifying propaganda, and then applies those principles to examine an ongoing case study Specifically, this project examines the dissemination of Turkish political cartoons by Sputnik News—a Russian state-owned media company.
My investigation begins by defining terms--differentiating between rhetoric, persuasion, propaganda, and an influence operation. Next, I apply these concepts to examine Sputnik News's multilingual dissemination of political cartoons. I uncover and outline a systematic framework that Sputnik likely follows when producing its cartoons. I then use this framework to inspect Sputnik's Turkish political cartoons. Combining quantitative and qualitative analyses, my investigation reveals a trend—that Sputnik News's Turkish political cartoons consistently portray the U.S. and Turkey as adversaries engaged in a zero-sum game. I conclude by describing how this portrayal fits my proposed criterion for propaganda. In the closing remarks, I outline additional methods that Sputniks News uses to disseminate this propagandistic narrative to Turkish audiences and describe how such multimodal dissemination tactics are indicative of an influence operation. I also discuss policy implications and offer suggestions for further research.
The poster provided here summarizes my investigative process. A brief snapshot of my quantitative analysis and findings are included on panels 5 and 6. Using custom Python code, I extracted and compiled the keyword tag data that Sputnik News applies to each of its 2000+ Turkish cartoons. Given limited poster space, I chose to only showcase the top 7 entries for Sputnik's “Geo” tag category here. I selected this snippet because I feel it's the most revealing—Turkish speakers are the intended target audience, yet Sputnik publishes cartoons referencing the US roughly six times more often than Turkey. Such a large discrepancy supports my claim that Sputnik News is attempting to persuade the Turkish public to adopt the false narrative that these propagandistic cartoons illustrate.
