Information war in the Russian media ecology: the case of the Panama Papers

Recent media ecologies are often characterized by their apparent excess and availability of information, in which elites have lost power to a multitude of citizen users. The 2010s, however, are marked by a new information battlespace, as governments, militaries and news organizations have arrested the initial chaotic free-for-all of the Internet. It was into this environment that the ‘Panama Papers’ were leaked in April 2016. We employ this story to illuminate some of the workings of information warfare in the contemporary Russian media ecology. We reveal the sophisticated gatekeeping work undertaken by a range of actors (state, journalists, news publics) in this ecology and their treatment of information across its historically established (television) and emergent (social) media forms.