I n late January 2020, the sensationalist Russianpolitician Vladimir Zhirinovsky made headlinesin Russian media when he falsely proclaimed thecoronavirus was a ploy by U.S. pharmaceuticalcompanies to profit from Chinese suffering. Zhirinovskyfirst made his provocative statement on the MoscowTalks radio station on January 27th. Moscow Today andother official Russian media channels quickly repeatedthe comment. By the following week global news outletsbegan reporting on the statement. For longtime Russia-watchers, the Russian state media’s use of Zhirinovsky’sdisinformation has been eerily similar to Soviet effortsto blame AIDS on the United States – a KGB effort known as Operation Infektion. Unlike the Cold War though, today millions of social media users—wittingly or unwittingly—ballooned the conspiracy theory out of control before governments could formulate and coordinate a response. To date, investigators have reported that the disinformation about coronavirus has become intractable, even for social media platform owners .This recent event adds to a growing corpus of evidence about social media-based state-sponsored disinformation activities. In late 2019, Oxford University and the Computational Propaganda Research Project reported, “Evidence of organized social media manipulation campaigns taking place is present in70 countries, up from 48 countries in 2018 and 28countries in 2017.” For example, over 140,000,000 users interacted with Internet Research Agency (IRA) content on Facebook and Instagram between 2015-2017. Andin August 2019, Twitter suspended “936 accounts originating from within the People’s Republic of China.” According to Twitter, “these accounts were deliberately and specifically attempting to sow political discord in Hong Kong,” and represented “the most active portions of a larger, spammy network of approximately 200,000accounts.”
Toward a More Ethical Approach for Countering Disinformation
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n late January 2020, the sensationalist Russianpolitician Vladimir Zhirinovsky made headlinesin Russian media when he falsely proclaimed thecoronavirus was a ploy by U.S. pharmaceuticalcompanies to profit from Chinese suffering. Zhirinovskyfirst made his provocative statement on the MoscowTalks radio station on January 27th. Moscow Today andother official Russian media channels quickly repeatedthe comment. By the following week global news outletsbegan reporting on the statement. For longtime Russia-watchers, the Russian state media’s use of Zhirinovsky’sdisinformation has been eerily similar to Soviet effortsto blame AIDS on the United States – a KGB effort known as Operation Infektion. Unlike the Cold War though, today millions of social media users—wittingly or unwittingly—ballooned the conspiracy theory out of control before governments could formulate and coordinate a response. To date, investigators have reported that the disinformation about coronavirus has become intractable, even for social media platform owners .This recent event adds to a growing corpus of evidence about social media-based state-sponsored disinformation activities. In late 2019, Oxford University and the Computational Propaganda Research Project reported, “Evidence of organized social media manipulation campaigns taking place is present in70 countries, up from 48 countries in 2018 and 28countries in 2017.” For example, over 140,000,000 users interacted with Internet Research Agency (IRA) content on Facebook and Instagram between 2015-2017. Andin August 2019, Twitter suspended “936 accounts originating from within the People’s Republic of China.” According to Twitter, “these accounts were deliberately and specifically attempting to sow political discord in Hong Kong,” and represented “the most active portions of a larger, spammy network of approximately 200,000accounts.”
