Sovereignty Index

The Sovereignty Index claims to rank how much a country truly controls its own destiny. It's a bit like someone secretly cooking up a 'real honor roll' at school and spreading it around, ranking friends they like higher and rivals they dislike lower. It looks like an objective assessment, but it's actually a fabricated story designed to push a particular agenda.

The name became known through an online disinformation campaign that appears to have originated in Russia. The operators set up a fake think tank claiming to be based in Israel, and embedded country-by-country Sovereignty Index reports on its website. The reports targeted countries that have criticized Russia's invasion of Ukraine—France, Germany, the EU, and the United States—framing their governments as puppets of foreign powers that had 'lost their sovereignty.'

These reports bear no resemblance to legitimate indices published by international organizations or academic researchers. In reality, they're closer to propaganda mass-produced quickly with the help of chatbots, dressed up with an official-sounding title.

Articles describe it this way: "They used ChatGPT to spread a 'Sovereignty Index' that portrayed Russia favorably while disparaging the West." The name alone makes it sound like a credible international index, but it's actually propaganda material from a fake think tank created to serve a specific political agenda.