Lecture format: live only. Recording will be available online after the event.

Venue: Erika-Weinzierl-Saal, University of Vienna main building, Universitätsring 1, 1010 Vienna.

The Russian state-controlled “Russia Today” media network was founded in 2005 and later emerged as the Kremlin’s primary instrument of influencing international audiences. The network’s editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan openly admitted that it was waging an information war against the West and compared RT to the Russian Ministry of Defence.

Especially since 2009, when Russia Today was re-organised into RT, this media network became notorious for targeting European and other societies with polarising and divisive rhetoric, for promoting and amplifying conspiracy theories, spreading disinformation, and subverting liberal democracy.

The report “RT in Europe and beyond” is a result of the collective endeavour of academics, journalists, experts and members of civil society, who produced the first detailed exploration of RT and its services in English, French, German and Spanish languages, as well as RT’s problematic reporting on the COVID-19 pandemic and use of conspiracy theories.

The entire report, including the introductory chapter by the editor Anton Shekhovtsov, can be downloaded here.

Dr. Anton Shekhovtsov received his PhD from University College London (UK) in 2018. Today he is Director of the Centre for Democratic Integrity (Austria), Associated Fellow at the Research Center for the History of Transformations at the University of Vienna (Austria), and an expert at the European Platform for Democratic Elections (Germany). He is the author of the books New Radical Right-Wing Parties in European Democracies (2011) and Russia and the Western Far Right (2017). He also published numerous op-eds in international media, and several academic articles in Journal of Democracy, Russian Politics and Law, Europe-Asia Studies, Nationalities Papers, and Patterns of Prejudice, among others.

 

This event will not be broadcast live. A recording will be made available after the event on RECET’s YouTube channel.