“If I’m constantly living in a state of heightened suspicion, that really breaks down relationships between people,” DiResta said. “The core concept is erosion of trust,” said Renee DiResta, director of research at New Knowledge, an organization that studies disinformation campaigns. The AIDS story undercut support for America in target countries, according to a 1987 State Department report, and fueled hysteria during a time when HIV positive patients were dying who could have benefited from clear-headed allocation of funds for research and treatment. It also spurred several documented physical attacks on American travelers. In Bulgaria, at one point adoptive parents had to certify they would not allow their adopted children to be an organ donor or be a part of medical experiments, archival adoption papers show. In May of 1991, Turkey suspended intercountry adoptions because of the rumor, the State Department reported. The "baby parts" story led to foreign countries making it harder for American parents to adopt children. In some cases it ends up getting rehashed by Fox News or even making its way in some form to President Trump's tweets and speeches. In the modern era, a bogus story may get its start on 4chan, the extreme message board, or fringe areas of Twitter before being picked up by partisans with more followers and start making its way up the social media and media food chain. Russian disinformation agents during the Cold War seeded baseless hoaxes like these in newspapers worldwide to undermine the United States. government laboratory, based on some shaky suppositions and using lots of qualifiers. Later, a doctor with a Russian connection appeared, offering various caveated explanations that suggested details for how the virus may have been created in a U.S. ![]() The entire basis was the printing of a purported anonymous letter to the editor of the Indian paper. It was later picked up by a Russian magazine and TASS, the Russian state-owned news service.įrom there it went worldwide, appearing in hundreds of newspapers, and, in 1987, anchor Dan Rather read a news item on it on the CBS Evening News. had invented AIDS, a KGB disinformation campaign known as "Operation Infektion," according to reports, former intelligence officers, and notes taken on the intelligence agency’s documents by a defector and former KGB archivist, Vasili Mitrokhin, reported on by intelligence historian Christopher Andrew in his book, “ The Sword and the Shield.” In the 80’s the Russians planted a story in an Indian newspaper that the U.S. The first is a state-sponsored news outlet to provide a baseline of communications, such as RT (Russia Today) or Sputnik. “Don't look to the United States as this ‘shining city sitting on a hill,’” she said, describing the Soviet attitude, “but actually as this bunch of hypocrites who are pretending they're a shining city sitting on a hill but actually what they have is a facade.” Methods and sourcesĪ successful disinformation campaign, then and now, requires three elements, said Watts. for featuring any kind of tension between races in the United States to suggest that this is a highly discriminatory society,” said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a University of Pennsylvania communications professor. ![]() ![]() ![]() The practice in Russia dates at least back to the 1880’s, when it was deployed by the Tsarist secret police, the KGB’s predecessor. “It's putting out false information to confuse, really, and distract and to make you question real information.”īut the Soviets under Joseph Stalin elevated “dezinformatsiya” to its own government agency, aggressively spreading lies against their political opponents and misleading citizens with bogus propaganda on a mass scale. “Disinformation is just lies,” said Kara Swisher, editor of Recode, a tech-news website.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |