All these stories therefore do concern fakes; to that extent, RT’s inclusion of them in the FakeCheck project is uncontroversial.

However, their inclusion hardly constitutes a significant contribution to the global effort of “weeding out and correcting inaccuracies.” All three fakes were exposed within hours, and not by RT; all three occurred at least six weeks before FakeCheck was launched (and over three months in the case of the Syrian tweet).

This is, in fact, recycled content from a variety of sources.

A fourth entry covered a now-notorious article in the Washington Post, published on December 31, 2016, which claimed that Russian hackers had broken into the US electrical grid via a Vermont utility.

The article was substantially wrong, overstating both the scale of the problem and the nature of the hack. The Post was forced to correct and scale back its claims repeatedly, and was criticized both for its initial mistake and for the amount of time it took to correct it.

This is a clear case of inaccurate reporting; again, however, the original had been corrected by January 2, and the Post ran a parallel story the same day headlining that Russian hackers did “not appear to have targeted” the utility.

Once more, therefore, RT’s FakeCheck neither weeded out nor corrected the error, almost three months later; it simply recycled it.

Taking on the tabloid

The latest offering in the series, published on March 22, was more timely, and concerned articles not apparently already debunked by the mainstream media. This was a pair of reports in English tabloid the Daily Mirror focused on Russian soccer hooliganism.

The Mirror’s reporting included an article and video on a “brutal street battle” involving “Russian Ultras”, a nickname for soccer hooligans. It is the latest in a string of reports from British media (for example Sky and the BBC) expressing concern over the possibility of soccer violence when Russia hosts the World Cup in 2018, after violent clashes between Russian and English fans in France in 2016.

Source: Daily Mirror

RT pointed out that the “street fights” were a well-reported Russian tradition, part of the “Maslenitsa” celebrations, the Orthodox equivalent of Carnival.

It is also worth pointing out that the fighters in the Mirror’s video were wearing traditional embroidered Russian shirts — unlikely attire for soccer thugs. Indeed, the Mirror’s article gave no indication of why it was identifying the fighters as “Russian Ultras”.

To this extent, RT’s exposure of the report appears entirely legitimate.

However, it also contained one anomaly. The rebuttal page focused on two Mirror articles — the feature on the Maslenitsa brawl, and a separate, and much lengthier, front-page article headlined “Russia’s Ultra yobs INFILTRATED”, which RT’s own rebuttal presented as its front page.

The longer article focused on a pair of interviews (not an “infiltration”) with apparently genuine Ultra leaders, one of whom was quoted as saying, “An England fan almost died in Marseille. It could be worse next summer. If the circumstances are right ­someone could get killed.”

RT singled this longer article out for particular attention, quoting the claim that “England fans could be KILLED at World Cup” immediately after the “What’s wrong with this story?” poll.

However, it did not then address the substance of the headline which it had singled out. Nothing in the rebuttal dealt with the death threat against English soccer fans: it focused on the misidentified brawl.

It is therefore open to question why RT saw fit to highlight the headline so prominently.

This may, perhaps, be accidental, or a tabloid-style attempt to include the most eye-catching claim without then following it up. However, RT’s coverage has recently featured a number of articles defending Russian fans’ behavior and reporting criticism or mockery of Western investigations into Russian soccer violence.

In parallel, RT’s sister organization, Sputnik, has even run an article on Russian fans under the apparently reassuring headline, “We’re not looking for trouble”, together with a promotional video— giving an indication of the Kremlin’s concerns about its reputation.

Source: Sputnik video

RT’s decision to start its rebuttal argument with a headline about hooligan threats, but not to address it, could therefore also be interpreted as an attempt to discredit the (apparently) accurate part of the Mirror report by associating it with the evidently inaccurate part.

Disinformation about disinformation?

The final four FakeCheck entries also recycle content, but they appear to have done so, not to expose disinformation, but to perpetuate it.

One concerned the accusation that RT and Sputnik have been biased in their reporting on French presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron, described by RT as the “election sweetheart” and “establishment hopeful.”

Source: RT

It rejected the accusation on the grounds that Wikileaks founder Julian Assange was in fact ultimately “to blame” for negative coverage of Macron, after he gave an interview to Russian newspaper Izvestia in which he claimed to be holding information on the Frenchman.

It is true that the initial accusations against RT and Sputnik came after they reported the Izvestia interview. However, as the DFRLab demonstrated in February, Sputnik France’s coverage of Macron has been systematically hostile, while its coverage of his main rival, Marine Le Pen, has been far more positive.

Source: Sputnik France. Archived on February 9, 2017. The headline reads “Koblenz meeting: European patriots want good relations with Moscow.” The “patriots” in question are (R to L) populist or far-right leaders Marine Le Pen, Geert Wilders, Frauke Petry and Markus Pretzell.

Far from exposing partial reporting, this entry appears to ignore it.

Assange also featured in another entry, which sought to prove that he has “no ties to the Kremlin,” after former US ambassador to the OSCE Daniel Baer referred to Wikileaks as one of the Russian government’s primary channels for leaking hacked data.

However, the only “evidence” RT provided to show that Assange has “no ties to the Kremlin” was the fact that Wikileaks and Assange had denied collusion either with the Russian government or RT.