Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for this opportunity to appear before you today.

My name is Pekka Kallioniemi. I'm a Finnish expert on social media and disinformation, and in recent years I have mainly focused on Russian online disinformation in a series titled Vatnik Soup.

It's safe to say that during the last 10 years, Russian online influence operations have been the most effective in the world, and the Kremlin has attempted to interfere with elections and referendums around the world.

The latest example is the massive social media campaign that Russia ran before the presidential elections in Romania. An unknown pro-Kremlin, anti-NATO candidate gained over 20% of the total vote during the first round only by campaigning on TikTok. The whole election was eventually annulled due to the massive Russian interference campaign exposed by Romanian intelligence agencies.

In many countries, Russians hire and manipulate people to spread false narratives online, and Canada is not an exception. There are several prominent figures parroting Kremlin viewpoints regarding, for example, Ukraine and Syria. Tenet Media was mentioned previously, but there are also several academics, journalists and other social media personalities who spread Russia's lies online. Some of them are motivated by money and others by ideology or their egos. Some may even have become victims of Russian blackmail, or kompromat.

This is how Russia usually operates. They hide the origin of the message. It's also the reason why their messaging is so effective. They have this ability to make it seem organic and local.

Of course, all this will be—and, to some degree, already is—supercharged with the use of AI. Since February 2022, Russia's main goal with their influence operations has been to stop any kind of military aid to Ukraine. In the long term, they also try to destabilize western societies, undermine trust in democratic institutions and weaken adversaries through division and confusion.

The rationale behind this is that any—

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