Spain involved over Russian social media activity on Catalonia

Spanish media have already accused Moscow-subsidized outlets consisting of Russia today and Sputnik — that have Spanish language services — of gambling a destabilising position in the disaster brought on by using Catalonia’s banned October 1 independence referendum.

Defence Minister Maria Dolores de Cospedal told reporters the government had mounted that “many messages and interventions through social networks come from Russian territory.”

But she insisted that authorities had no longer installed whether the Russian government become in the back of them or now not.

Cospedal become responding to a journalist who asked about “Russia’s interference in making ready messages that might alter the internal workings of a few nations,” pointing especially to the Catalan disaster in Spain.

She did not supply specific examples of the sorts of messages that had been diagnosed.

The El Pais every day wrote an article Friday denouncing “the extreme campaign by using Russian media which are close to the Kremlin,” whose “propaganda machine” it accused of siding with the pro-independence movement.

In advance Friday Spain’s foreign Minister Alfonso Dastis stated there has been proof of hobby via “Russian networks, hackers.”

“They are no longer exclusively aimed in opposition to Spain, but it’s a manner of destabilising the european,” he told Spanish radio.

Spain’s authorities spokesman Inigo Mendez de Vigo, in the meantime, said disinformation on social networks become a “severe trouble.”

“The foreign minister will improve this trouble which Europe have to take very significantly,” he introduced, declaring that strategic communications and the combat towards disinformation were at the schedule at an european overseas ministers assembly on Monday in Brussels.

On Thursday, US widespread Curtis Scaparrotti, the commander of NATO forces in Europe, demanded Russia “prevent meddling” in ecu elections amid subject over Kremlin interference inside the Catalan disaster.

Moscow is also suspected of interfering in final yr’s US presidential election and Britain’s Brexit vote, and Scaparrotti said he become worried by “Russian malign impact” in different countries.