Conspiracy theories are all over state media, following past patterns of disinformation.
By Amy Mackinnon | February 14, 2020, 10:28 AM
https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/02/14/russia-blame-america-coronavirus-conspiracy-theories-disinformation/
Wednesday marked the deadliest day yet in the battle with coronavirus, with 242 deaths reported in Hubei province, the epicenter of the outbreak. As the virus has spread around the world, so to have conspiracy theories cropping up everywhere from India to Australia.
But in Russia the misinformation has been particularly pointed. Russia’s spin doctors have capitalized on the fear and confusion of the epidemic to point the blame at the United States, following a well-established pattern of previous Russian disinformation campaigns and evoking a
Russia is certainly not alone in promulgating conspiracy theories about the virus. “At the WHO we’re not just battling the virus, we’re also battling the trolls and conspiracy theories that undermine our response,” said World Health Organization chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. But in Russia these theories are appearing on prominent mainstream news discussion shows such as Big Game and Time Will Tell on Channel 1, rather than just being confined to squalid corners of the internet. In late January, the firebrand leader of the far-right Liberal Democratic Party of Russia party told a Moscow radio station that he thought coronavirus was an American bioweapon or a big plot by pharmaceutical companies to get richer.
Russian efforts to undermine Western countries long predates the outbreak of coronavirus. The nature of the messaging and their singling out of the United States are typical of the Kremlin’s disinformation playbook, which loyal editors and producers are well familiar with—and know the political necessity of sticking to.
The overarching theme of the stories that appear across the Russian media, from fringe websites to prime-time television, is that the virus is the product of U.S. labs, intended to kneecap China’s economic development. Some articles have flirted with the idea that Bill Gates or Kremlin nemesis George Soros might have had a hand in the outbreak. In one of the more bizarre turns, a host on Russia’s state-funded Channel 1 floated the idea that the name “coronavirus,” is a veiled reference to its American origins, because U.S. President Donald Trump once handed out crowns at beauty pageants, and corona means crown in Latin. (Coronaviruses are, in fact, a well-established group of viruses whose name is a reference to their shape.)
There is, however, no agreement between Russia’s propagandists about who foretold the virus, with some claiming it was Nostradamus, others say it was the blind Bulgarian mystic Baba Vanga, or maybe even Stephen Hawking.
The Russian messaging fits a now well-established pattern in that it doesn’t look to persuade audiences of a single alternative truth. That would take effort, planning, and persuasion. Modern-day Russian propaganda has instead been described by the Rand Corp. as a “firehose of falsehood,” a steady stream of underdeveloped, sometimes contradictory conspiracy theories intended to exhaust and confuse viewers, making them question the very notion of objective truth itself.
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Well worth the rest of the read.
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