Summary
Guerrillas of brave elves taking down hordes of dark trolls in an ideological conflict over the future of humanity. This is not the beginning of a fantasy novel but a somewhat accurate description of everyday realities in cyberspace across Europe. The “elves”—a group of cyber activists fighting pro-Kremlin propaganda and disinformation campaigns—are a growing yet little-known phenomenon. Having started in 2014 as less than 20 individuals in Lithuania, the movement expanded to 13 Central and Eastern European countries, and it counted about 4,000 volunteers by 2021. Given the size and the pace of growth of the elves, together with their successful yet unadvertised missions, it would be unwise to overlook or underestimate this movement.
Russian information operations against the Western democracies will grow in number, scale, and sophistication in the coming years. This is partially caused by the worsening state of relations between the West and Russia, partially by the global trend of the gradual shift of social and public life from the analog to the digital world. Already short of capacity to effectively counter pro-Kremlin information operations, Western stakeholders must seek and support innovative means to counter Russian information war. Cyber activism is one of them.
This paper explains how the elves have played and will play an essential role in countering Russian information operations, and it provides Western stakeholders with recommendations for how to enhance the activities of the elves. The data for this paper were collected for over a year, including through semi-structured interviews with the elves, visiting their cyber world and working with the data they have gathered, and attending their biggest international event—the Elves Academy. This paper provides a unique and comprehensive insight into the elves’ cyber realm and activities.
The elves operate anonymously and focus on fighting hybrid threats conducted primarily by the Kremlin and its proxies. Their work is voluntary, unpaid, and independent from states and governments. Their activities are strictly legal—they strongly denounce any form of criminal activity such as hacking or cyber espionage, and they mostly limit themselves to monitoring Russian disinformation and its perpetrators, such as the trolls. Most of the data they generate is shared with the public, either as media outputs produced by the elves or through articles by local media.
The elves across Europe have developed functioning international cooperation, mainly consisting of intelligence and information sharing. The Elves Academy is the best evidence of continuous and robust international cooperation. This project, established by the Lithuanian elves in 2018, has trained hundreds of elves over its three editions so far. The collaboration of the elves should be further cultivated and encouraged. Joined together under a common cause, the elves represent a group of several thousand experts on countering information operations—a force that plays and will play an undeniable role in the defense of democracies against Russian hybrid warfare.
The most important recommendation for how to support the elves is to initiate a dialogue with them to learn about their needs directly from them as the needs of the chapters differentiate significantly across Europe. Each chapter can be reached through its official channels—either social media, official email, or website—or in some cases through its official spokespersons who have stepped out of anonymity. Finally, the very least everyone can do for the elves is to acknowledge their activities, read their media outputs, show public appreciation of their work, and help them spread their message.
