An OSINT-Based Anatomy of Russia’s Informational Disorder: Producers and Pipelines in RT’s Propaganda vs ANO Dialog’s Disinformation Ecosystem

Russia’s information activity is commonly described through overlapping labels such as “propaganda”, “disinformation”, and the umbrella term “influence operations”. This talk argues that part of this conceptual overlap reflects an underused organisational lens and a methodological gap: we rarely observe how such activity is produced as labour, routines, and pipelines, because the relevant organisations and processes are typically inaccessible to direct fieldwork. We address this gap with an OSINT-first research design and a reproducible OSINT workflow that treats publicly available labour-market traces as organisational evidence.

We compare two emblematic Russian entities: RT, a state-funded international broadcaster typically characterised as a propaganda outlet, and ANO Dialog, a parastatal organisation sanctioned for disinformation and embedded in Russia’s digital information control ecosystem. Using an OSINT workflow centred on labour-market data, we reconstruct organisational structure and production pipelines from large-scale CVs on Russia’s leading job-seeking portal HeadHunter, triangulated with document analysis of organisational materials and policy documents. The approach relies on transparent collection, entity resolution, role coding, and network reconstruction of personnel mobility and shared employment links.

Empirically, we examine what “propaganda” and “disinformation” look like as organisational routines. The analysis maps role repertoires, skill profiles, and career trajectories, distinguishing editorial and media production roles from monitoring, moderation, analytics, coordination, and campaign-adjacent functions. We also assess external orientation through language repertoires and labour-market positioning, including whether RT’s workforce is primarily organised around media production for foreign audiences or whether it also exhibits platform-facing monitoring and manipulation functions commonly associated with disinformation operations. By comparing these organisational footprints, the study evaluates whether the two labels correspond to distinct organisational forms or whether they conceal substantial convergence in how informational disorder is produced.