Pro-Russian vaccine misinformation finds home on US Facebook group

The quick distribution of a single report from an obscure Ukrainian website to a crowd of Facebook users emphasizes that parent Russian websites can easily feed false information to the American Internet world. In fact, one of the websites that covered this report was identified this week by the US Department of State as part of a network of bogus misinformation websites used by the Russian government.

As different nations compete to produce successful coronavirus vaccines, disinformation experts are steadily steadfast in their misleading claims and propaganda aimed at compromising the efforts of competitors to develop antidotes. Holding a drum. False information can cause distrust and fear of vaccines and threaten government leaders’ expectations of ending a pandemic. And once the vaccine’s success is confirmed, the United States, which plans to administer 300 million doses to Americans starting next year, could be a major target.

Brett Schaefer, an alliance misinformation fellow for the protection of US democracy, said the vaccination over the US vaccine applies to the long-standing parental Kremlin false alarm strategy.

“The West seems to be leading something they try to do damage,” Schaefer said. “Because they’re on the verge of bringing their own vaccines to the market, or they’re starting the trials, wondering what others are doing in the hope that their citizens will seek answers. Let’s.”

Russia is proud to soon become the first country to approve the COVID-19 vaccine. However, scientists have raised serious doubts and the country plans to start a mass vaccination in October.

The unsupported allegation that five out of fifteen Ukrainians died during a U.S. coronavirus vaccine trial, in partnership with a Russian-backed separatist rebel in the Luhansk region of Ukraine in July. It was first announced on the website Lugansk Media Center. A false report reported that the other eight were also hospitalized. However, the vaccine is not currently tested in Ukraine, according to the global database of vaccine trials maintained by both the World Health Organization and the National Institutes of Health.

No comments were received from the Lugansk Media Center.

This report was featured by NewsFront, a site for Russia, and was shared over 20,000 times on Facebook’s public groups and pages, including some of the largest vaccination groups in the United States.

NewsFront was identified as a “proxy website” by the Russian government in this week’s State Department report, and uses state-funded media, social media accounts, and English-language websites to spread false information. I explained in detail.

“Vaccines are never safe!” One Facebook user wrote and shared a NewsFront article called Vaxxed Vaccine Information from a Facebook group based in Florida.

The claim is also driven by the U.S. and French-speaking QAnon Facebook group, promoting a conspiracy theory that President Donald Trump is conducting a covert campaign against “Deep State” enemies and child trafficking circles. ..

And it seems to have influenced a new wave of memes aimed at sowing doubts about the vaccine.

“I’m a little curious. Do you want to take a vaccine with a 33% mortality to feel safe from a 0.06% mortality virus?” Ask one meme shared 14,000 times in one Facebook post I will.

Facebook did not return a request for comment.

Elise Thomas, a researcher at International Cyber, has produced little traction in past articles, but the wrought site Lugansk Media Center, a fringe site that has been working to build that profile, is not arriving at false information. “It was definitely a success,” he said. Australian Policy Center.

Thomas said that as scientists enter the final stages of testing candidate vaccines, fringe and propaganda websites can encourage more online falsehoods to be tested in the coming months.

“They fully understand that vaccines are a hot topic,” said Thomas, who traced the origin of the claim online. “This is probably what we’ll see in the coming months.”

This article was contributed by David Klepper, AP writer in Providence, RI.

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