Opinion | American social media platforms should stop enabling Russia’s ‘Z’ campaign

I’m not talking about the QAnon conspiracy (though all of the above applies to it). I’m talking about “Z,” the propaganda campaign amplified by the Kremlin in Eastern Europe to gin up support for Russian President Vladimir Putin’s murderous war in Ukraine. The Z campaign started in the days after the invasion. It has now reached tens of millions of people across social media platforms. It is the rallying symbol of the Russian war machine and an effective weapon in the information war.

Strikingly, the QAnon conspiracy has been barred from promotion on YouTube, Facebook, TikTok and Twitter. But as of now, Z continues to grow.

Like QAnon, the Z campaign relies upon falsehoods to promote us-vs.-them antagonism. The Russian narrative claims that Ukraine — whose elected president, Volodymyr Zelensky, is Jewish — is ruled by Nazis. This grotesque mythology portrays NATO, the European Union and the United States as the great power backers of evildoers who kill innocents and threaten Russia. Like QAnon, whose messages purportedly come from an all-knowing Washington insider known only as “Q,” Z embraces a cult-of-personality strongman as its leader. Z’s outward similarity to the swastika is particularly insidious.

Z’s origins as a viral conspiracy are murky. It began with the images of Russian military vehicles in Ukraine clearly marked with the letter “Z,” apparently a military identification code to distinguish Russian vehicles from those operated by the Ukrainian army. The letter does not exist in the Cyrillic alphabet. But the Kremlin now claims that it stands for “victory” — because the phonetic rendering of the Russian “for victory” in the Latin alphabet starts with Z.

Like QAnon, Z has become a symbol of resentment and a messianic faith that its believers will triumph. But Z is far worse. Its central purpose is to justify a horrific war. It has become a serious information weapon pointed not only at Russian-speaking communities but also increasingly in many other languages.

Despite blocking Instagram and Twitter inside Russia, the Russian government’s own accounts continue to post on both platforms in Russian — reaching people inside Russia that circumvent the block as well as the very sizable Russian-speaking communities in Eastern Europe. Although Big Tech is frequently unwilling to share meaningful data about the scope of malign content on their services, our research suggests widespread distribution of Z — including Z-themed hashtags on Instagram and TikTok alone. (A representative for Meta, the parent company of Instagram, declined to comment on the record. TikTok did not respond to a request for comment.)

Starting in 2017, the QAnon conspiracy also began to spread like wildfire on Big Tech social media platforms. Recommendation algorithms programmed to capture user attention actively promoted it precisely because it was sensationalist and incendiary. At its peak, 1 in 5 Americans were prepared to believe that a secret cabal of blood-drinking, Satan-worshiping pedophiles held power in the United States. The conspiracy fed into wild acts of violence, including the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.

Then the Big Tech companies reversed course. Google blocked QAnon apps from the Play Store for spreading “harmful information.” Facebook announced it would remove accounts related to “militarized social movements.” YouTube followed a few days later, pulling down videos with “conspiracy theories that have been used to justify real-world violence.” TikTok brought down QAnon for promoting disinformation. Twitter did the same — pulling 70,000 QAnon accounts. Mentions of QAnon on major digital media platforms dropped dramatically, slashing audiences by more than half within days.

Big Tech, in short, is responsible for both the making and the unmaking of QAnon.

Z violates all of the company policies made to address QAnon. And yet Z continues to spread on all of these platforms. The big difference is that Z is many times more dangerous than QAnon.

So why are we blocking Putin’s banks and oil but not his digital weaponry? One answer could be that the Big Tech firms are overwhelmed by the demands of information warfare. This is partly because they failed to invest in adequate product safeguards in languages other than English — a terrible risk that is now costing us all dearly. They might simply not have built the technical systems necessary to stop the promotion of Z immediately. But this is no excuse for the lack of a clear policy. They have plenty of money to solve any problem they choose to solve.

It is bizarre to apply rules against violent conspiracies in the United States and then give the Kremlin a pass for something far worse. The moral lines in this conflict are crystal clear. The Big Tech companies must act.