ACTIVE MEASURES
ACTIVE MEASURES

Summary/Abstract: The term active measures refers to a summary of political actions taken by the former Soviet Union as well as by Russia's national security services today to influence the direction of world events along with the gathering of intelligence data and the production of politically correct assessments of them. Active measures include media manipulation, fake news, special actions that include violence, and they have been used since 1920, including misinformation, propaganda, false news, fabrications, but also assassinations, pressure and political persecution. Active measures are clandestine actions launched to advance the goals of Soviet foreign policy and increase its influence in the world. These activities have long been used by the Soviet Union, but the intensity has increased greatly along with the effectiveness of these measures. Only in the last 5 years, interventions in political systems in accordance with active measures have been observed in the United States, Germany, France, Great Britain, Ukraine, North Macedonia, Montenegro, Austria, Bulgaria, in the Baltic country. and in many other states. One of the methods of active measures is the phenomenon of fake news, which is at least as old as the press itself. However, the ease of establishing media, social networks and their algorithms have multiplied and accelerated the dissemination of rumours, lies, propaganda and conspiracy theories. Another relevant case of active measures interference is the 2016 US presidential election. From 2017 to 2019, the US Senate Counter-Intelligence Commission launched an investigation into Russian efforts in 2016 to interfere with US election infrastructure. The commission published a three-volume report on Russia's anti-election efforts, Russia's use of social media, and on the US government's response to Russian activities. The decline in the market and the digitalization of the media have drastically reduced the number of media organizations and professional employees, especially of correspondents from other cities who were a reliable source of information by the local community and filtered news. With the reduction of media capacities, the possibilities of fake news increase and the challenge of today is to find a way to win this battle. The phenomenon came to the fore even more globally after the US presidential election in 2016 and during the referendum in the UK on secession from the European Union when fake news on the political scene was read more on Facebook than real news. Russian users had posted over 45,000 orders for Brexit in just 48 hours before the referendum. Since 2016, the use of the term fake news has increased by 365%. Another interesting issue to research and analyze is the extent of the impact on citizens through active measures that is related to commercial advertising, which were not key to the operations of fake news factories and were not an accurate measure of operations and goals, although the media and citizens were initially focused on this aspect of the activities.

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