David Leask: George Galloway has been branded 'Russian state-affiliated media'. Is that fair?

“I work for NO Russian media,” he tweeted at Twitter Support, the rarely effective police force for the microblogging site. “I have 400,000 followers. I’m the leader of a British political party and spent nearly 30 years in the British parliament.

“If you do not remove this designation I will take legal action.”

Cue some not very friendly teasing. Mr Galloway, his critics pointed out, had failed to remove references to his show on Kremlin TV from his bio. He swiftly did so.

There is no doubt that the former Glasgow Labour MP has long broadcast on RT, the premier international propaganda outlet for Vladimir Putin’s nakedly autocratic regime. This is simply a matter of fact.

It is also true that RT is now off the air, in most democracies, after it failed to comply with basic journalistic standards in its coverage of its controller’s war on Ukraine.

So Mr Galloway’s show, sponsor-less, has been relegated to the internet.

Speaking on GB News, Mr Galloway said it was “bizarre” he had been designated as Russian media only after he stopped broadcasting on RT.

Fair point, I suppose. We’ll see what Twitter ultimately decides.

The social media giant has come under pressure to help its users navigate international propaganda and disinformation. Rather than shut down those who repeat, say, the talking points of the Putin regime, it has chosen to label them instead.

This is not an easy or uncontentious process and there are those who question whether we want social media giants deciding whose posts require a health warning.

The Scottish Tories had lobbied for Mr Galloway – described as a “pathetic propagandist” by the Greens – to be designated as Kremlin media.

But not everybody who has worked for Putin channels has been branded. Or even faced serious calls to be so.

Alex Salmond, for example, has not. Why not? Well, this gets us in to interesting and tricky territory.

Much of the Scottish reporting on RT has focused on the former first minister. This is understandable.

Mr Salmond might be politically irrelevant today. But he used to run the country. So his ethical descent to working for the propaganda network of Vladimir Putin is an obviously compelling story.

But the truth is that Mr Salmond is not an important figure in the world of Russian disinformation.

He is – or was – just filler. He gave his name and what was left of his credibility to RT with his now suspended weekly magazine programme.

Mr Salmond’s actual remarks on Russia and Putin since he started broadcasting on the channel may have been ill-judged, even ignorant, but they were also infrequent.

Mr Galloway, in contrast, has – whether by accident or design – closely echoed regime talking points.

Take last year, when he was running for Holyrood for a short-lived but fervently pro-UK party called All4Unity.

During the campaign, Mr Galloway smeared Putin’s most effective critic, anti-corruption campaigner Alexei Navalny, as a white supremacist. He did so on RT.

Mr Navalny – who is sometimes described as a nationalist – was recovering from being poisoned with Novichok. Somebody had tried to kill him, and not, I think, because of his historic views on immigration.

The campaigner is currently opposing Putin’s latest and most bloody invasion of Ukraine from behind bars after being convicted of a series of charges which western and independent observers believe were trumped up.

As recently as late February Mr Galloway – in common with Kremlin media at the time –dismissed talk of another incursion.

Since then I would argue he has been firmly on Putinist message, often and in detail. There was an example of this only yesterday.

The news last night was full of pictures of a missile strike on a railway station in Kramatorsk, on the Ukrainian side of the front line in Donbas.

Refugee civilians, including children, were killed. Ukraine and Russia blamed each other for the carnage.

Pictures show the rocket’s booster had “for the children” scrawled in Russian on its side.

The Kremlin not only said it did not use the weapon, it insisted that it could not have done so. It insisted it no longer had this particular kind of missile, the obsolete Soviet-era Tochka-U, in its arsenal. Ukraine, it added, did.

Mr Galloway retweeted such claims. He then declared a report saying the attack was Russian to be “fake news”.

I have no idea what happened in Kramatorsk other than to say Putin’s forces have repeatedly targeted civilians in this war and then lied about it.

But I can tell you the Russian military does have some Tochka-U rockets. How do I know? Well, because a 30-second Google search throws up pictures from Russian military TV Zvezda showing the missiles being fired during the exercises in February. Independent group Conflict Intelligence said Tochka-U was still being used by the Russians as recently as mid- March.

We cannot lose track of a simple reality of this conflict: THE. PUTIN. REGIME. LIES.

We are not talking about the occasional fib, or the odd nasty wee cover-up. The current Russian government has developed a crude but expansive machinery of disinformation. Its aim is not just to make you disbelieve any given fact, it is to undermine the very idea that there is such a thing as objective truth.

So expect all sorts of theories or “versions” of the story of Kramatorsk.

This, at least, was how Kremlin disinformation actors obscured atrocities carried out in Ukraine this spring, or the downing of a Dutch airliner earlier in the war, or the Salisbury poisonings.

I don’t know whether Mr Galloway should be labelled as Kremlin media. I don’t know whether it was right to ban RT. But we should try and keep track of those Kremlin “versions”. And one way of doing that is to follow the still raging Mr Galloway on Twitter, however he is designated.

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