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Russia & China's heavy involvement in anti-vaccine propaganda

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Russia’s Anti-Vaccine Propaganda Is Tantamount to a Declaration of War.
https://humanevents.com/2021/03/23/russi...on-of-war/

INTRO: Anyone active on social media is aware that there is a great deal of passionate but ill-founded opposition to vaccination, including to the new COVID-19 vaccines. [...] As recently reported in the science journal Nature, they are people “running multi-million-dollar organizations, incorporated mainly in the USA, with as many as 60 staff each.”

Moreover, the source of much of the misinformation about vaccines comes from an unobvious source: the Russian government’s propaganda apparatus, which cultivates and exploits foreign anti-vaccine “useful idiots,” causing palpable harm to Americans and citizens of other Western countries.

This is part of a much broader and long-standing pattern of attacks by Russia. As journalist and historian Anne Applebaum wrote [...] in The Atlantic:

For decades now, Russian security services have studied a concept called ‘reflexive control’—the science of how to get your enemies to make mistakes. To be successful, practitioners must first analyze their opponents deeply, to understand where they get their information and why they trust it; then they need to find ways of playing with those trusted sources, in order to insert errors and mistakes. This way of thinking has huge implications for the military; consider how a piece of incorrect information might get a general to make a mistake.

As I’ve previously described, Russia regularly conducts health-related disinformation and propaganda campaigns intended to humiliate or disparage the country’s foreign enemies. In the 1980s, the Soviet Union concocted an elaborate disinformation scheme to blame the appearance of HIV and AIDS on U.S. military research. They first planted the story in a sympathetic Indian newspaper, then followed it up with other fake stories that cited the initial report.

A 2018 U.S. Senate-commissioned analysis by New Knowledge, a cybersecurity firm, confirmed that Russia’s infamous troll factory, the Internet Research Agency, conducts “modern information warfare” against its adversaries. Renee DiResta, the research director of the firm, described the IRA’s battle plan as a “cross-platform attack that made use of numerous features on each social network and that spanned the entire social ecosystem.” (MORE)


China and Russia Are Spreading Coronavirus Disinformation
https://humanevents.com/2020/06/05/china...formation/

EXCERPTS: Our previous article described some of the bizarre speculations and conspiracy theories circulating about the COVID-19 pandemic...

[...] American conservatives have every right to be skeptical of charges of “Russian interference.” The theory has been used by the left as a political bludgeon, implying that Trump supporters are all Russian bots. But foreign interference exists, and can take on different forms. The fact that some Democrats constantly cry wolf—“Russia, Russia Russia”—doesn’t mean that the Russian information warfare is imaginary. Russia’s health-related disinformation and propaganda campaigns are nothing new. In the 1980s, the Soviet Union concocted...

[...] According to the DNI’s report ... RT became a platform to push anti-fracking disinformation in order to damage the American shale industry. As an indication of the lengths to which Russia will go to foment strife and divisiveness in the U.S., in 2016, Russian agents organized both anti-Islam and pro-Islam protests in the same location at the same time, using separate Facebook pages operated from a troll farm in St. Petersburg.

A study by a group of American academics published in 2018 in the American Journal of Public Health found that thousands of Russian social media accounts have spread anti-vaccine messaging. ... Russia’s sophisticated, massive, and secretive propaganda apparatus, whose headquarters are at the Internet Research Agency in St. Petersburg, has been active in spreading all sorts of coronavirus conspiracies.

[...] It’s not just Russian news outlets; bots have played a prominent role in social media’s propagation of medical disinformation. According to researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, almost half of the Twitter accounts posting messages about the coronavirus pandemic are probably bots.

[...] Of course, a conversation about strategic disinformation campaigns mounted by foreign interests would be incomplete without considering China. According to the New York Times, “Chinese officials and institutions have spread talking points centered on two narratives: that the United States is to blame for the origins of the [SARS-CoV-2] virus and that the Communist Party has successfully contained the virus after a hard-fought campaign, affirming the superiority of its system.”

[...] An Oxford University study released last year reports that “China has become a major player in the global disinformation order. Until the 2019 protests in Hong Kong, most evidence of Chinese computational propaganda occurred on domestic platforms such as Weibo, WeChat, and QQ. But China’s new-found interest in aggressively using Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube should raise concerns for democracies.”

“China has adopted Russia’s playbook for more covert operations, mimicking Kremlin disinformation campaigns and even using and amplifying some of the same conspiracy sites,” according to the New York Times. Those tactics, of course, include trolls, bots, and relentless conspiracy-mongering.

[...] For the past two years, ProPublica, an independent investigative press organization, has tracked more than 10,000 suspected fake Twitter accounts involved in a coordinated influence campaign with ties to the Chinese government. These included hacked accounts of users from around the world that have been corrupted and used to post disinformation about the coronavirus outbreak.

[...] Disinformation operations are widespread. The 2019 Oxford Study found that at least 70 countries worldwide have active disinformation campaigns. “Governments are spreading disinformation to discredit political opponents, bury opposing views and interfere in foreign affairs,” writes the New York Times. And while this might be par for the course in the realms of geopolitics, and seeking commercial advantage, (such as Russia’s disparaging of American technologies), these tactics are dangerous—even deadly—when the domain is scientific and medical knowledge... (MORE - details)
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