How the Kremlin finds ways to spread its messages

A woman walks in front of the Kremlin's Spasskaya tower (left) and St. Basil's cathedral in downtown Moscow, on Sept 23, 2024. The online pages of RT and other related outlets like Sputnik built a worldwide audience on Facebook of more than 88 million followers, according to data released on CrowdTangle early this year. — AFP

Major American social media companies sometimes describe the task of identifying disinformation or other malevolent material pushed online by state actors as an endless game of cat and mouse.

This past few weeks several of them made a significant play in that game by booting RT and its related Russian state-owned media network off their platforms, a move that in the short term will sharply reduce the network’s audience numbers, media analysts said. But the Kremlin, when thwarted in the past, has quickly devised new ways to get its message out, they noted, and RT can move to other outlets for distribution.