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There is a lie being told about Anas Sarwar on the internet. The Scottish Labour leader, the story goes, is plotting for Pakistani Muslims to take power so they can “dictate” what is taught in schools.

One right-wing influencer, the former actor Laurence Fox, shared an old video of the Glasgow politician talking, rather uncontroversially, about greater south Asian participation in elected politics. Fox posted: “Sharia law is coming.”

Scottish Labour dismissed a series of accusations about Sarwar on social media. “This is an attempt by individuals with a hard-right agenda to use dog whistles to poison our politics,” a spokesman for the party leader said.

It is not only individuals, however, pushing the Sarwar video. It is also the Kremlin. And it is doing so — in a big departure from its conventional propaganda tactics — in a language understood by only 1 in 40 Scots.

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This kind of race-baiting about Scotland, the UK and other European countries is not unusual from government or pro-government media in Russia. The ultra-conservative nationalist television channel Tsargrad responded to the news of Humza Yousaf, a Pakistani, it said, becoming Scotland’s first minister with the headline “Glasgow has fallen”.

For more than a decade, Kremlin agencies and their proxies have been pushing stories they believe will help undermine western democracies and promote the talking points of the Putin regime, especially on Ukraine. However, it is new to see this kind of content aimed at Scottish audiences in a minority language.

So what is happening? Why do Russian propagandists have Gaelic speakers in their sights? Why would they target a relatively small linguistic community? Well, it is not just Gaels.

The rise of artificial intelligence means it is now cheaper and easier than ever to generate news, fake and real, in different languages, including ones badly served by mainstream media.

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NewsGuard, a US group that rates the reliability of news sites, believes the scheme is designed to manipulate chatbots to make other AI products spew out Kremlin propaganda. It thinks the plan is working. “By flooding search results and web crawlers with pro-Kremlin falsehoods, the network is distorting how large language models process and present news and information,” NewsGuard said in March. “The result? Massive amounts of Russian propaganda — 3,600,000 articles in 2024 — are now incorporated in the outputs of western AI systems, infecting their responses with false claims and propaganda.”

The term disinformation in recent years has turned into another word for “lie”. For experts, it is something much more that: an industrial-scale, military-grade effort to disorientate or demoralise an adversary using information that ranges from the accurate to the twisted to the completely fabricated.

Tommaso Canetta, of the European Digital Media Observatory, said moving into languages such as Gaelic was part of a broader attempt to flood the internet with Russian disinformation. “It is a strategy to create as much noise as possible,” he said, adding that because the network was largely automated any extra investment required to translate content from Russian or English into Gaelic was minimal.

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Thanos Sitistas, a researcher at Greece Fact Check, an organisation that investigates claims online and in media … suggested that the Gaelic platform had become more targeted since it was launched in late December. “They have adapted their content for Scottish audiences,” Sitistas said, pointing to a recent article about polling indicating greater support for independence. “They are picking it up and then spinning it to give it more traction.”

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Kremlin-linked outlets have previously assumed a linguistic link to support for Scottish independence, even though there is little real-world evidence for it. Joanna Szostek, an expert in Russian political communication at Glasgow University, wonders whether this is why they are using Gaelic. “I think the Kremlin has long been keen on the idea of winning over Scots who dislike and distrust the British establishment — distrust in the ‘mainstream’ is often associated with belief in disinformation,” she said. “Perhaps they think such people might be prevalent in the Gaelic-speaking community? Or, speculatively, this could just be a way for certain Russian propagandists to extract money from state backers for an unusual project. Disinformation is an industry, after all.”

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