When the State Tweets:

When the State Tweets argues that the Kremlin has transformed the institutional legitimacy of diplomacy into a covert disinformation engine. Rather than relying solely on covert troll farms or state media like RT, Russia deploys hundreds of verified embassy, consulate and diplomatic accounts across major social media platforms as “trust instruments.” It leverages their inherent authority as official government accounts, and the policies of deference they benefit from to shield lies, bypass moderation, and inject doubt into global media ecosystems.Drawing on high-profile case studies—the Bucha massacre, MH17 and the Salisbury poisonings—the book demonstrates how Russia’s diplomatic messaging has shifted into an offensive mechanism for epistemic demolition. The strategy rarely aims to persuade public opinion outright; instead, it contaminates evidence, renders documented facts suspect and makes the truth exponentially harder to defend.To counter this, the book rejects content-level approaches—which the Kremlin and its affiliated actors easily reframe as Western bias or “censorship”—and instead considers an epidemiological, public-health model. By shifting focus from the sender to the host, it supports calls for population-level psychological inoculation, in the form of “prebunking,” sustained media literacy programs, and robust rapid-response surveillance to build long-term herd immunity against strategic manipulation.