Members of the project team and affiliated researchers took part in the Aleksanteri Conference 2025, held in Helsinki from 22 to 24 October. Hosted by the Aleksanteri Institute, the leading centre for Russian, Eurasian and East European Studies in Finland, the conference brought together scholars from across the region, Western Europe and North America. For the conference details, please see https://www.helsinki.fi/en/conferences/extremisms-ambiguities-ideologies-agency.
At the conference panel Disinformation and Information Manipulation: New Conceptual Approaches, Stephen Hutchings and Vera Tolz presented a joint paper titled ‘Modelling the Disinformation Lifecycle: A Russian COVID-19 Case Study.’ The paper introduces the disinformation lifecycle model, which traces how accusations of disinformation evolve across time, space and discourse. Using a five-step analytical framework, it examines how narratives shift between disinformation and counter-disinformation contexts in Russian and global media coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic. At the same panel, the project-affiliated, Manchester-based PhD student, Ekaterina Kamenskaya gave a paper ‘Soviet Approaches to the Concept of “Disinformation” and International Broadcasting in the Late 1960s.’ This paper analyses the changing understandings and usages of the term ‘disinformation’ in the Soviet-press’s critique of Western broadcasting to the USSR.
Maxim Alyukov, a Leverhulme early-career fellow at Manchester, presented two papers at the conference. His paper, Whose ‘Fakes’? Disinformation Awareness and Motivated Reasoning in Wartime Russia,’ investigates how disinformation awareness intersects with the process of motivated reasoning, reinforcing biases and helping partisans process information in ways that support their pre-existing beliefs. It was presented as part of the panel Russian Disinformation and Information Manipulation: Connecting the Production, Dissemination, and Audience Reception of Information Manipulation through Empirical Research.
Both above panels were co-organised by the (Mis)Translating Deceit project team members in collaboration with the Horizon Europe project The Long Arm of Authoritarian States, led by Chr. Michelsen Institute, Norway. Alyukov also presented another paper (with Kristian Lundby Gjerde) ‘War on Fakes: How Russian Propaganda Constructs and Deploys the Language of Disinformation.’ This paper examines how the Kremlin reflexively constructs and deploys the vocabulary of disinformation through a process of mirroring its critics, borrowing the fact-checking format from democratic media practices and assumptions about powerful media effects from Western debates on foreign disinformation. The presentation was part of the panel Developments in Russian Ideology, Society, and Regional Relations Post-2022, organised by the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs.
Stefan Janjić presented a paper, co-written with Sabina Mihelj, and titled ‘Generational Differences in Response to Divisive Misinformation: Focus Group Evidence from Serbia, Poland and Romania’ as part of the panel Worldviews Online: Generations, Governance, and Extremism in a Hyper-Connected World. This study analysed how different age groups evaluate disinformation about the war in Ukraine and LGBT+ issues. The key finding revealed distinct argumentative styles: younger participants approached claims in a "fact-checking" manner focusing on textual details, while older participants used claims as starting points for broader reflections and personal anecdotes, engaging less with textual specifics.