COVID-19 Disinformation: Two Short Reports on the Russian Dimension – ‘Reframing Russia for the Global Mediapshere: From Cold War to “Information War”?’

The EU’s main task force for fighting Russian disinformation is in danger of becoming a source for disinformation itself, and so of skewing policy decisions... public discourse throughout Europe... EUvsDisinfo’s misrepresentation of Russian COVID-19 media coverage ... analysed is troubling. Two ... methods are particularly problematic....

From omission … in some cases individual sentences are extracted ... rephrased [as] summaries and headlines which make them sound particularly outrageous...

To blatant distortion … item related to a conspiracy theory purportedly promoted by Sputnik Latvia ... claiming that COVID-19 had been designed especially to kill elderly Italians. The article in question, however, was clearly ridiculing a whole series of international conspiracy theories ...

inflationary manner ... an article from what probably is a Kremlin-sponsored proxy... is recorded ... as eight separate items, artificially boosting the overall tally

Terminology Problem... mis-associate ... state-funded media ... with random websites without any traceable links to Russian state structures... include... far-right sites ... critical of Putin...

Our analysis demonstrates that EUvsDisinfo’s headlines and summaries border on disinformation according to the East StratCom’s own definition of the term... relies on as many as 400 volunteers to trace Russian disinformation... state outsourcing... encourages its beneficiaries to skew their research results to reflect what they believe their benefactors want to hear