Wired Falsely Blames Russian Disinformation for Spurring Calls of Texas Civil War After Border Crisis
“A Russian disinformation campaign is deploying everything from high-ranking lawmakers and government officials to lifestyle influencers, bloggers, and powerful state-run media outlets to stoke divisions in the United States around the Texas border crisis,” reads a Wired article published earlier this February. The article attributes the origins of this disinformation to Dmitry Medvedev— the Deputy Chairman of Russia’s security council— who expressed on X the border crisis is “another vivid example of the US hegemony getting weaker.” Wired explains this spurred state-run Russian media like RT and Sputnik to further circulate the narrative. The piece also alleges it had exclusive data from Logically showcasing a coordinated Russian-backed attempt to sow division regarding the border crisis on Telegram.
However, The Washington Post was one of the first outlets to employ the term “civil war” in a piece entitled “Texas blocks feds from Rio Grande park in new escalation at border,” released on January 12, 2024. While RT did release an article entitled “Washington clashes with Texas over US-Mexico border,” the piece did not include mention of a civil war, reporting on the story with seemingly minimal bias. After the Washington Post’s initial story, several media outlets followed suit to express concerns or suggest a type of civil war in Texas, including but not limited to PBS, The Nation and the Washington Post. NBC ran the most notorious headline entitled “Woman, 2 children die crossing Rio Grande as Border Patrol says Texas troops prevented them from intervening,” the subject of a recent fact-check after the outlet falsely suggested Texas border patrol caused the death of three migrants. And Medvedev only tweeted about the Texas border crisis nearly two weeks after NBC ran their initial story, meaning he couldn't catalyze the response by the US mainstream media in his X post.
Medvedev certainly perpetuated a negative view of the US in his X post, but there is no evidence to suggest his criticism of the US is uniquely threatening. And while Wired may claim to have access to exclusive data regarding Russian influence networks on Telegram, it used data supplied by Logically — a high-profile organization in the censorship industrial complex that uses government contracts to conduct state surveillance in the name of combatting disinformation. Regardless of how reliable Logically’s data is, currently available evidence supports it was primarily the US mainstream media that perpetuated alarmism over a Texas civil war rather than Russia.
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