Russia is amplifying conspiracy theories about the L.A. protests

NBC News

21 hours ago

Protests against immigration raids in Los Angeles have triggered a flood of falsehoods and conspiracy theories online, and Russia has sought to exploit and amplify them, experts say.
Russian media and pro-Russian voices have embraced right-wing conspiracy theories about the protests, including one that alleged the Mexican government was encouraging the demonstrations against President Donald Trump's immigration policies. Mexico has strongly rejected the accusation — which was repeated by Trump's chief of homeland security — as utterly false.
The episode illustrates how foreign adversaries are taking advantage of genuine divisions among Americans, a tried-and-true strategy in information warfare, analysts say. Right-wing American voices online are pushing the idea that the protests in Los Angeles are not what they appear and that a secret, leftist cabal tied to Democratic politicians and the billionaire philanthropist George Soros is orchestrating unrest, experts said.
'We are following a playbook that we've followed many times before. We're seeing a lot of the same tropes, even a lot of the same exact conspiracy theories that we've seen circulate around previous protests,' said Darren Linvill, a professor at Clemson University who studies social media disinformation. There were echoes of how falsehoods spread during the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, he said.
'People are, as they tend to do on social media, believing the messages that they're inclined to believe,' Linvill said. 'And influencers are taking advantage of that, oftentimes with false or sort of purposefully misleading content.'
Right-wing users have posted baseless assertions that the Democratic mayor of Los Angeles, Karen Bass, has ties to the CIA and is orchestrating protests to oust President Donald Trump. 'Bass is a political warlord. She's utilizing her expertise to encourage these riots—to try to topple Trump & you,' wrote conservative podcast host Liz Wheeler on a post on X.
Moustafa Ayad of the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, an international nonprofit that focuses on 'safeguarding democracy,' said there were parallels to how social media users have reacted to previous protests or to hurricanes that struck the Southeast last year.
'I liken it to the aftermath of Milton and Helene last year,' Ayad said. 'We have a crisis or a conflict point that is occurring, and there are numerous narratives that are being spread online that the government is somehow involved in the protests, paying protesters, or this is a deep-state plot against the United States by the CIA and other government actors,' Ayad said.
From the political left, narratives online have focused on how the federal government and the military were allegedly preparing to use lethal force, while right-leaning voices warned of plots to oust Trump and cause chaos in American cities, according to Ayad.
'It's a bit like being on a seesaw, just gyrating between those two things,' he said. 'Sadly, there's this giant reinforcing loop that just builds further steam as the protests continue day to day.'
Baseless claims of Mexico fomenting violence
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem on Tuesday repeated baseless assertions online that the Mexican government was encouraging violent protests. Mexico's president, Claudia Sheinbaum, quickly responded, rejecting the accusation as 'absolutely false' but saying she was confident that the 'misunderstanding will be cleared up.'
The Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Conservative and pro-Russian social media accounts cited an outdated video of the Mexican president as the basis for their claims she was fomenting protests in Los Angeles, according to NewsGuard, a fact-checking website. The video was taken from a press conference on May 24, nearly two weeks before the start of the L.A. protests.
The Mexican president's remarks were taken out of context. Sheinbaum was referring to a proposed tax by the Trump administration on any income earned by Mexican immigrants that is sent on to their families in Mexico. She criticized the proposal and said at the time: 'If necessary, we'll mobilize' against the tax.
Conservative commentator Benny Johnson then posted the May 24 clip of Sheinbaum after protests began last week in Los Angeles and wrote that she was calling for protests in the United States. The post has received 6.7 million views. At a news conference on Monday, Sheinbaum made clear her government opposes any violence associated with protests. 'We do not agree with violent actions as a form of protest.'
An opportunity for Russia
Bret Schafer, a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund think tank's Alliance for Securing Democracy, said Russia's information operations online were embracing pro-Trump portrayals of the protests as a leftist violent assault.
'Russia is in effect cheering on Trump's response and suggesting that it's warranted,' Schafer said. 'They have certainly intimated that these protests are being staged or funded by the radical left.'
Russian news outlet Komsomolskaya Pravda quoted a Russian blogger in L.A. saying the protesters were not migrants but 'militants' who arrived on buses. Russian nationalist commentator Alexander Dugin wrote on X that the protests were an insurrection, a 'nationwide conspiracy of liberals against not only Trump but against American people in general.'
Viktor Bout, the Russian arms dealer dubbed the 'Merchant of Death' by U.S. and British authorities who was released in a prisoner exchange in 2022 after spending 11 years behind bars in the United States, also weighed in on the protests. Russian media outlet Pravda quoted Bout comparing the demonstrations to the 2014 Maidan protests in Ukraine against what was then a pro-Moscow government, with Bout claiming the L.A. protests were highly organized.
Pravda also quoted Sergei Markov, a former adviser to Russian President Vladimir Putin, saying the United States was in the middle of a 'civil war' pitting coastal states against interior states.
Sputnik reposted a viral image of a pallet of bricks, asking why it was near the protest sites. But fact-checkers at Lead Stories geolocated the photo to a construction site about 3,000 miles away, in New Jersey.
Beijing accuses Washington of hypocrisy
China, however, was taking a different tack. Instead of leaning into pro-Trump narratives and repeating right-wing conspiracy theories, Beijing portrayed America as a country in turmoil. Chinese media and pro-China voices argued the American government's response to protests in Los Angeles was 'heavy-handed and therefore hypocritical' in light of Washington's criticisms of other countries' treatment of dissent, according to Schafer.
An affiliate of China's global television network reminded viewers that then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had praised protests in Hong Kong in 2019 as a 'beautiful sight' but asked if the American government viewed the L.A. protests in the same way. A pro-Beijing commentator, Li Jingjing, denounced what she called U.S. interference in other countries' affairs even as it denounced protesters on its soil. 'US hypocrisy at its best,' she wrote in a post.
The pervasive online image of the supposed pallet of bricks frequently shows up when there are street protests, according to the Social Media Lab, a research team at Toronto Metropolitan University.
'It's catnip for right-wing agitators and grifters,' the lab said in a social media post.
'The fact that these types of fake images are used isn't a coincidence. It's part of a pernicious & persistent narrative that protests against government policies are somehow inauthentic,' it added. The approach is 'meant to make these movements seem less legitimate or less worthy of public support.'