RT UK’s Facebook audiences’ interpretation of Russia’s strategic narrative of the Syrian conflict

Study of participative war has tended to focus on digital content produced by civilians and combatants in the region, but foreign citizens also participate by interacting with international broadcast coverage via social media. Russia’s international broadcaster, RT, is accused of promoting Russian foreign policy goals and being a tool of ‘information war’ with the West. Its coverage has been shown to promote Russia’s strategic narrative of the Syrian conflict, legitimating Russia’s heavily criticised pro-Assad military interventions. However, how these narratives are interpreted by foreign audiences and thus their actual consequences are not well understood. Based on data from an interview study with 26 Facebook users who interacted with RT UK, this paper asks whether and how RT’s narrative of Syria resonated with them. RT’s narrative appealed to these individuals’ disaffection with domestic media and politics, and residual feelings of betrayal around Britain’s involvement in the Iraq war. These results reveal the localised mechanisms by which RT was able to disseminate its strategic narrative around the conflict, and how this simultaneously functioned as an effective tool in Russia’s ‘information war’ with the West.