Foreign Disinformation Narratives About Ecuador: An Approach to their Structure and Initial Beliefs

DOI

10.2991/978-94-6463-868-4_14How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Right to information; Russian media; crisis

Abstract

In a global context of narrative warfare, which seeks to influence public belief and manipulate opinions, false and misleading narratives promoting Kremlin interests reached Ecuador in 2019, 2022, and 2023. During these periods of sociopolitical crisis, two Russian media outlets, Russia Today (RT) and Sputnik, freely distributed content online that exacerbated citizen sentiment about the political and economic decisions of the current governments. This investigation analyzed the characteristics of 1,256 pieces of digital content from both Russian media outlets, obtained through strategic monitoring of deception actions. Two journalistic reports from national media outlets were added based on clues to disinformation narratives during the political and social crisis of the three years. Using an integrationist paradigm, a mixed approach, a descriptive scope, and a longitudinal design, the Russian publications were studied quantitatively, following categories specific to the analysis of threats of manipulation and interference of foreign information. Discourse analysis was applied to the two journalistic pieces to find beliefs. It was found that the structure of Russian disinformation narratives showed increasing sophistication between 2019 and 2023, shifting from polarizing discourse to more elaborate techniques. Both RT and Sputnik worked simultaneously and amplified the voices that worsened institutional fragmentation. In conclusion, Ecuador was identified as one of the target countries in Latin America for the Kremlin, which, through its official media, is present in the disinformation and propaganda ecosystem.

Copyright

© 2025 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Pamela J. Cruz Páez
AU  - Tania Orbe Martínez
AU  - Tatiana Sandoval
PY  - 2025
DA  - 2025/10/22
TI  - Foreign Disinformation Narratives About Ecuador: An Approach to their Structure and Initial Beliefs
BT  - Proceedings of the International Conference on Communication and Applied Technologies 2025 (ICOMTA 2025)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 140
EP  - 150
SN  - 2667-128X
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-94-6463-868-4_14
DO  - 10.2991/978-94-6463-868-4_14
ID  - Páez2025
ER  -