I would advise you, if you are more interested in that subject, to look at the website of the NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence in Riga. They did extensive research where they employed these algorithms. They looked for news or posts on social networks like Twitter and Facebook concerning NATO's forward presence mission. What they came up with was surprising. Of all the posts or tweets about NATO's presence in Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, or Poland in Russian, 80% of them came from Russia, with bots or somebody writing these things. You have probably read articles about these big houses in St. Petersburg where people are employed to write stuff. It was 80% in English, and 80% in Russian. There was no Latvian because they have problems with the knowledge, and then the centre of excellence is not writing algorithms or generating them in Latvian. It's difficult. We have difficult grammar, so it's difficult for them, but in Russian and English, up to 80%.
They tried their best, but they didn't succeed. Maybe in some parts of the Russian-speaking population in Latvia, it had some effect, but not in a very substantial way. In English, I don't know. Maybe the author who writes those articles follows some of these bots and reads fake news there, but they didn't succeed. They tried, and there was one case.
Right away, after Germans were stationed in Lithuania—a framework nation, like you in Latvia—they put out fake news that Germans raped a young girl. It took Lithuania half a day. There were officials out in the news, and it was on every official news site, putting the facts and saying it's wrong, and where it comes from. It didn't catch on. But Russia tried. They do this. They test and they look. Okay, if it doesn't work they don't employ it, but if something else works they will use that. They're good at it.
We have developed, in many of our countries, cyber-defence. They have developed cyber-attacks. They excel at this. They're probably the best. I don't know if the Americans do that, employ this, but they do, and they are really good. Defending is harder.