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Friday, July 31, 2020


 

Disinformation about "Disinformation" reaches new heights (or lows)




There has been so much disinformation about alleged "disinformation" attempts by Russia (in particular) as well as others like China, it's hard to single out any one campaign as worse or more non-substantive than the rest. But the New York Times and the Associated Press gave it a good try this week with an article headlined by the Times "Russian Intelligence Agencies Push Disinformation on Pandemic".



Note the categorical assertion in the headline. Not "Intelligence agencies say X" or "Sources: X", just "X". AP at least went that far with its "US officials: Russia behind spread of virus disinformation" headline, but even that, when you get one or two steps removed (e.g., on a TV news broadcast or on someone's post on Facebook or Twitter), quickly becomes "Russia is spreading virus disinformation". If you have any hope that the "US officials" qualifier will make readers remember that "US officials" also assured us (it was a "slam dunk") that Iraq had Weapons of Mass Destruction, I'm afraid I have to disappoint you. Americans' acceptance of statements by "US officials" remains undiminished.



The key "reveal" in these articles, which AP tells us "had previously been classified, but officials said it had been downgraded so they could more freely discuss it", is this: “United States intelligence reports have identified two Russians, Denis V. Tyurin and Aleksandr G. Starunskiy, with ties to the G.R.U. [what those "ties" are isn't specified] and who make sure the messaging and disinformation drafted by the intelligence officials are pushed by InfoRos ["a site controlled by the Russian government" per the NYT] and on InfoBrics.org and OneWorld.Press ["a nominally independent site that U.S. officials said had ties to the G.R.U.” per the NYT, again with no clue what those "ties" might consist of]. AP says that "Officials said they were doing so now to sound the alarm about the particular websites and to expose what they say is a clear link between the sites and Russian intelligence.” Of course this “clear link” is a case of “trust us” because we are given no information whatsoever to prove that link.




Ironically, The New York Times article was written by David Sanger, the Times' long-time "national security reporter". Can we describe him as having “ties to the CIA” who “makes sure that messaging and disinformation drafted by intelligence officials is pushed by the New York Times”? I’m pretty sure that would be accurate.



The second irony is the claim that "sounding the alarm about the particular websites". Who gets their news from InfoRos or OneWorld.Press or InfoBrics.org? No one I know, and I am a voracious consumer of multiple news sites as well as Twitter and Facebook. I had never even heard of any of these sites (but now I have, thanks to these articles!). What is the readership of these sites among Americans? The article doesn’t say. But we can get a clue by using Twitter search features. Surely if these sites have any effect whatsoever on American opinion, that will show up on Twitter.

On Twitter, I searched for tweets that appeared before July 27 (the day the NYT and AP articles appeared online), in English only, containing links to or mentions of the three sites. The results were eye-opening to say the least.

Searching for inforos.ru turned up these results:

The most recent tweet linking to inforos.ru was on June 16, more than a month ago. It had no likes and no retweets, and was from someone with just 563 followers. The pattern continued from there:

March 10, no likes, no retweets, 482 followers

April 18, one like, no retweets, someone with 261 followers

April 11, no likes, no retweets, 71 followers

April 1, no likes, no retweets, 76 followers

March 20, no likes, no retweets, 783 followers

Feb. 22, no likes, no retweets, 696 followers

Feb. 10, one like, no retweets, 26 followers



That’s it for 2020. Grand total: 8 tweets, 2 likes, 0 retweets, seen by a maximum of 2,958 people. Of the 8 tweeters (all different), none were clearly identified as Americans; the ones who were identified were from Slovakia, South Africa, and Finland. In other words, Americans aren’t even reading these sites.

And what about the tweets that did link to articles on inforos.ru? Not one qualifies even remotely as "disinformation". Here's an example: “Russian coronavirus vaccine to be tested on ferrets and primates”. I must admit I haven't actually researched this, but I feel confident that whoever wrote this article didn't make it up. Like this example, all the rest were straight news articles, not disinformation.

Searching for InfoBrics.org turns up a few more results, 27 for the month of July, an average of one per day. Not exactly a whopping number. Compare that the nytimes.com. I stopped counting at 250 links, and I hadn't gotten past July 26 — one day's worth of links (I tried one way of searching and got 41,500 links to the Times on July 26. I'm not sure that's correct, but it may be).

OneWorld.Press is the third site cited by the NYT. It is more popular; with 90 tweets citing it between July 1 and July 26, so around three per day (still not exactly a whopping number). There were a total of 76 retweets, fewer than one per tweet. To think that a site like this has actual influence is delusional. Donald Trump can tweet the most inane tweet and get a hundred thousand retweets!

It should be clear that the claim that U.S. intelligence agencies are making this information public to "sound the alarm about the particular websites" is completely bogus. As noted above, this "warning" has given those three websites vastly more exposure than they ever had by themselves. To view any of these sites as having the slightest influence on American public opinion is a joke. Which tells us that "sounding the alarm" wasn't the real motivation behind this story at all.

And what about the content of these sites? Even if no one is reading them, surely they contain "disinformation", right? Not really.

The articles single out OneWorld.Press for publishing an article entitled "The COVID-19 Plandemic Is An Experiment In Manipulating The World". It's an opinion article from someone with a fringe point of view. But it's not a Russian government point of view, and it's no more bizarre than Trump's claims. Without irony, the Times writes about this article: "Without evidence, OneWorld.Press claimed that the accusations about Russian intelligence’s propaganda efforts were being spread by officials who aimed to hurt President Trump’s re-election chances." What other explanation is there? As noted above, it surely isn't to "sound the alarm" about websites no one even knew existed. It's these articles that are the real story, not the articles they're writing about.

And how influential was this article? Exactly two people tweeted it out, one living in the U.K. and one living in Russia; one got no likes and no retweets, the other got seven likes and three retweets. How influential? Not influential. So the AP and NYT have now given it a million times more exposure than it ever had!

We're told that “InfoRos published an article, also published by Tass news agency, that said the United States was using the pandemic to impose its view of the world.” But this was simply an article describing a speech by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov:

“"We have to state that even in the conditions of a pandemic, our American colleagues and their allies do not abandon their attempts to escalate confrontation, to use the current situation to impose their point of view, their vision of world order, which they call an order based on rules. As you know, they invent the rules themselves," Lavrov said. He noted that the US increases pressure on the countries who lead an independent foreign policy as well as criticizes the World Health Organization (WHO). "We hear baseless accusations against the People’s Republic of China and the Russian Federation. The calls to suspend unilateral sanctions for the period of the fight against the coronavirus, sanctions that hinder humanitarian deliveries of medicine, equipment and goods, are being ignored," the minister explained.”
Even if Lavrov were lying or spreading misinformation (he isn't in this case), an article about what he said would not constitute disinformation, any more than the daily articles repeating Donald Trump's latest lies and misinformation would.

How influential was that article? This article was linked in a grand total of 11 tweets, which got a total of 15 retweets. How influential? Not influential.


Finally, we're told that “InfoBrics.org published reports about Beijing’s contention that the coronavirus was originally an American biological weapon.” The headline of that article claims that "Beijing believes COVID-19 is a biological weapon", which is false, but happens to be a claim that has been repeated in multiple places in the U.S. press (and been repeated by U.S. politicians). It talks about “The recent statement by the Chinese spokesman Zhao Lijian, formally accusing the US of bringing coronavirus to China.” This must be the most mis-referenced tweet in history, because I have been this claim repeated countless times. What Lijian actually tweeted was this [emphasis added]: “When did patient zero begin in US? How many people are infected? What are the names of the hospitals? It might be US army who brought the epidemic to Wuhan. Be transparent! Make public your data! US owe us an explanation!” This is not even remotely a "contention that coronavirus was an American biological weapon". So unlike the other two linked articles, this one is indeed misinformation. But again, misinformation that has been repeated, possibly even originated, right here in the U.S. And no worse than the similar misinformation, also widespread and repeated by American media and politicians, that the virus was a biological weapon created in a Chinese laboratory.

How influential was that article? Exactly two tweets linked to it, one from a man with 1195 followers who tweets in German and another from a Turkish journalist with 540 followers; between them there were seven retweets. It's unlikely any American ever even saw these tweets or that article.

And, to be clear, although this particular article did in fact qualify as misinformation, it is by no means representative of the material which appears on Infobrics.org, which is straight news reporting mixed with analysis that focuses on the actions of the BRICS countries. The lead articles as I write this (July 31) are headlined "Russia Offers to Supply Anti-Covid Drugs to India", "Russia Delivers Second S-400 Systems to China Amid Flaring Tensions With The US", and "India, Russia to Fund Joint R&D in Renewable Energy." Analysis articles include such things as "Will Hezbollah seek revenge against Israel?" and "Pompeo has signalled the start of a new Cold War with China". No disinformation to be seen anywhere.

I noted above the comparison with the influence of Donald Trump, not just with his tweets but with extensive coverage of his every utterance (and tweet!) by mainstream news sources, both broadcast and print. Russia, for example, has been accused of trying to "weaken faith in American democracy". Really? Is there anything they could do, overtly or covertly, that would have the tiniest fraction of the influence of Donald Trump's assault on mail-in voting, just to name one area?


And as an illustration of that, facing the article described above on the New York Times home page was an article with this headline and subhead: "Misleading Virus Video, Pushed by the Trumps, Spreads Online. Social media companies took down the video within hours. But by then, it had already been viewed tens of millions of times."

Tens of millions of times. So again, if Russian intelligence agencies really wanted to push disinformation on the pandemic, is there anything they could do they could remotely compare to that? Of course not. And instead, we get links to articles, allegedly (with no proof provided) produced by those Russian intelligence agencies, on sites which no one has ever heard of, which got exactly two tweets to mention it.

It's important to note the role of the Times and AP here. They were fed this story by the intelligence agencies. But they were the ones who chose to run with it. Neither chose to examine the nature of these sites, and to note, as I have above, that these are almost completely unknown sites with little to no readership in the U.S., and whose articles have almost no presence on social media. Neither really examined the articles in question, or the sites in general, as I have above, to note the completely bogus nature of the claims made by the intelligence agencies. Even if the underlying claim by the intelligence agencies ("two Russians with ties to the GRU are feeding stories to some media outlets") is correct, and we have absolutely no way of knowing if that's true, the efforts of these two people isn't having the slightest effect in the United States, and this would still be a non-story. Instead, it's headline news in major media outlets, helping to exacerbate tensions between the U.S. and Russia, in turn helping to justify spending a billion dollars a year on war. And also helping (however admirable the motive might be) to undermine Trump because "Russia" is doing something bad (allegedly, of course) and Trump isn't doing anything about it (just like the completely unproven "Russia is paying the Taliban bounties to kill Americans" story).

So this story does not just tell us about the intelligence agencies, it tells us about American journalists as well. Are they just poor journalists, or are they willing, even eager, collaborators with the intelligence agencies? I'll leave that judgment to the reader.







 

Headlines for July 31, 2020




Click here to listen to this week's segment on Loud & Clear Radio.  
Headlines with an * are the ones we managed to fit in in our allotted time slot.

Worst, Most Misleading & Funniest Headlines for July 31, 2020


*Russian Intelligence Agencies Push Disinformation on Pandemic

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/28/us/politics/russia-disinformation-coronavirus.html
AP link: https://apnews.com/3acb089e6a333e051dbc4a465cb68ee1
Hard to imagine that anything qualifies more as “disinformation” than this article. 
“United States intelligence reports have identified two Russians, Denis V. Tyurin and Aleksandr G. Starunskiy, with ties to the G.R.U. and who make sure the messaging and disinformation drafted by the intelligence officials are pushed by InfoRos and on InfoBrics.org and OneWorld.Press.”

“Many of the articles created by Russian intelligence were published on InfoRos, a site controlled by the Russian government, and OneWorld.Press, a nominally independent site that U.S. officials said had ties to the G.R.U.” Who the hell gets their news from InfoRos or OneWorld.Press or InfoBrics.org? No one I know. What is their readership among Americans? The article doesn’t say.

The New York Times article was written by David Sanger. Can we describe him as having “ties to the CIA” who “makes sure that messaging and disinformation drafted by intelligence officials is pushed by the New York Times”? I’m pretty sure that would be accurate.

From AP: “The information had previously been classified, but officials said it had been downgraded so they could more freely discuss it. Officials said they were doing so now to sound the alarm about the particular websites and to expose what they say is a clear link between the sites and Russian intelligence.” Of course this “clear link” is a case of “trust us” because we are given no information whatsoever to prove that link. 

From Twitter search for tweets in English containing “inforos.ru” (prior to publication of the NYT article):
Most recent one: June 16, no likes, no retweets, someone with 563 followers
Next: April 18, one like, no retweets, someone with 261 followers
Next: April 11, no likes, no retweets, 71 followers
Next: April 1, no likes, no retweets, 76 followers
Next: March 20, no likes, no retweets, 783 followers
 Content: “Russian coronavirus vaccine to be tested on ferrets and primates”
Next: March 10, no likes, no retweets, 482 followers
Next: Feb. 22, no likes, no retweets, 696 followers
Next: Feb. 10, one like, no retweets, 26 followers
That’s it for 2020. Grand total: 8 tweets, 2 likes, 0 retweets, seen by a maximum of 2,958 people. Of the 8 tweeters (all different), none were clearly identified as Americans; the ones who were identified were from Slovakia, South Africa, and Finland. In other words, Americans aren’t even reading these sites. And that one article that the intelligence agencies are worried about? Didn’t get a single tweet mentioning it! So the NYT has now given it a million times more exposure than it ever had!

InfoBrics.org turned up ZERO tweets in English in 2020 linking to it.
[NOTE: This is what I said on the show. It was an error; apparently I made a typo when I searched. There were a small number of tweets (one per day on average) linking to InfoBrics.org]

OneWorld.Press is the third site cited by the NYT. It is more popular; 2-3 tweets each day (not exactly a whopping number) reference it, but none I saw in the last month had more than 12 retweets. NYT dings http://OneWorld.Press for publishing an article entitled "The COVID-19 Plandemic Is An Experiment In Manipulating The World". It's an opinion article from someone with a fringe point of view. But it's not a *Russian* POV, & it's no more bizarre than Trump's claims. Without irony, NYT writes: "Without evidence, http://OneWorld.Press claimed that the accusations about Russian intelligence’s propaganda efforts were being spread by officials who aimed to hurt President Trump’s re-election chances." Ya' think?

Their other examples do not remotely constitute disinformation: “InfoRos published an article, also published by Tass news agency, that said the United States was using the pandemic to impose its view of the world, according to American officials.” This was an article describing a speech by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov: “"We have to state that even in the conditions of a pandemic, our American colleagues and their allies do not abandon their attempts to escalate confrontation, to use the current situation to impose their point of view, their vision of world order, which they call an order based on rules. As you know, they invent the rules themselves," Lavrov said. He noted that the US increases pressure on the countries who lead an independent foreign policy as well as criticizes the World Health Organization (WHO). "We hear baseless accusations against the People’s Republic of China and the Russian Federation. The calls to suspend unilateral sanctions for the period of the fight against the coronavirus, sanctions that hinder humanitarian deliveries of medicine, equipment and goods, are being ignored," the minister explained.”

“InfoBrics.org published reports about Beijing’s contention that the coronavirus was originally an American biological weapon.” “The recent statement by the Chinese spokesman Zhao Lijian, formally accusing the US of bringing coronavirus to China.” No, he tweeted: “When did patient zero begin in US? How many people are infected? What are the names of the hospitals? It might be US army who brought the epidemic to Wuhan. Be transparent! Make public your data! US owe us an explanation!”

Facing the above article on the NYT home page was this:
*Misleading Virus Video, Pushed by the Trumps, Spreads Online
Social media companies took down the video within hours. But by then, it had already been viewed tens of millions of times.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/28/technology/virus-video-trump.html

Meanwhile, real disinformation:
*You get 2 choices for president. That's it.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/27/politics/what-matters-july-27/index.html

U.S. Warns Russia, China and Iran Are Trying to Interfere in the Election. Democrats Say It’s Far Worse.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/24/us/politics/election-interference-russia-china-iran.html
Virtually the entire article is speculation about what Russia, China, and Iran might do. And as for what they have done?
Russia, the warning said, was continuing to “spread disinformation in the U.S. that is designed to undermine confidence in our democratic process,” and it described Iran as an emerging actor in election interference, seeking to spread disinformation and “recirculating anti-U.S. content.”
The statement was short on details, reminiscent of the vague warnings that the director of national intelligence turned out starting in October 2016 that, in retrospect, failed to seize the attention of officials and voters before the last presidential election.
In a statement issued a few hours later, Speaker Nancy Pelosi was joined by the Senate Democratic leader, Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, and two key Democrats on intelligence oversight committees, Senator Mark Warner of Virginia and Representative Adam B. Schiff of California, in saying that the descriptions of malign activity were “so generic as to be almost meaningless.”
But Mr. Schiff, a frequent target of harsh criticism from Mr. Trump because he was the Democrats’ manager in the impeachment trial in the Senate, added, “I think that our adversaries, in particular the Russians, are going to amplify the false messages that the president is putting out about, ‘Well, you can’t trust absentee ballots,’ even though that’s how the president votes.”
Trump has 83 MILLION followers on Twitter, along with constant exposure on TV and on the front pages of the corporate media. The “Russians” couldn’t “amplify” his messages even if they wanted to. The entire premise is preposterous.

*The Real Reason Biden Is Ahead of Trump? He’s a Man
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/27/opinion/trump-biden-popularity.html
Peter Beinart column
A) Hillary Clinton was ahead of Trump in the polls too.
B) Hillary Clinton beat Trump by 3 million votes.
C) 146,000 Americans are dead from COVID-19.
His evidence it’s gender? “According to Real Clear Politics’s polling average, Joe Biden’s net approval rating is about -1 point. At this point in the 2016 campaign, Hillary Clinton’s net approval rating was -17 points.” But that wasn’t because of her gender.

The F.B.I. Pledged to Keep a Source Anonymous. Trump Allies Aided His Unmasking.
Subhead: After a Russia expert who had collected research on Donald Trump for a disputed dossier agreed to tell the F.B.I. what he knew about it, law enforcement officials declassified a road map to identifying him.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/25/us/politics/igor-danchenko-steele-dossier.html
The dossier isn’t “disputed”, it’s “discredited”, and if you get to the end of the article, you actually find that out. Basically a classic case of burying the lede.

Latin America Is Facing a ‘Decline of Democracy’ Under the Pandemic
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/29/world/americas/latin-america-democracy-pandemic.html
What countries? Venezuela, Nicaragua, Guyana, Bolivia and Haiti.
“In Nicaragua, President Daniel Ortega released thousands of inmates because of the threat posed by the virus, but kept political prisoners behind bars…In Bolivia, a caretaker government has used the pandemic to postpone elections.”
“And in the islands of St. Kitts and Nevis, the government imposed a strict lockdown on its 50,000 people during the campaign for general elections in June, hampering opposition efforts to meet voters while also keeping international election observers from traveling to the country.”
“democracy in Latin America has also lost a champion in the United States, which had played an important role in promoting democracy after the end of the Cold War by financing good governance programs and calling out authoritarian abuses.” 🤦‍♂️

Hong Kong Is Keeping Pro-Democracy Candidates Out of Its Election
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/29/world/asia/hong-kong-arrests-security-law.html
Compare to Ecuador and Bolivia. No headlines for those attempts to keep candidates off the ballot.

Israel Says It Thwarted a Hezbollah Raid at Lebanon Border
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/27/world/middleeast/israel-hezbollah-lebanon-fighting.html
Israel 'thwarts Hezbollah infiltration from Lebanon'
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-53511336
Hezbollah denies, but it’s Israel’s point of view that gets the headline.

Herman Cain, Former Presidential Candidate, Dies at 74
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/30/us/politics/herman-cain-dead.html
Shouldn’t this headline read “COVID-19 claims its most famous victim, Herman Cain”? This is just burying the lede. His attendance at Trump’s Tulsa rally isn’t mentioned until the 7th paragraph.
BBC headline for comparison:
Herman Cain, US ex-presidential candidate, dies after contracting Covid
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-53600376



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