Putin's "win the battle without firing a shot" strategy--no longer just for Trump, Turner and Stein [View all]

[DFW]

A deliberate disinformation campaign to cause great uncertainty about vaccines in Western nations is coming to light, from the USA to the EU

Here's a link: https://www.thedailybeast.com/russian-vax-disinfo-push-used-every-trick-in-the-book?ref=home

But, just in case it's behind a paywall..................

From the article in The Daily Beast:

"The effort to buy their way into social media popularity in Europe may not have been(Russian marketing agency) Fazze’s only gambit, however. The Daily Beast found a similar attempt to seed the same talking points and content to American audiences—part of 'a multi-phase operation that employed almost every trick in the book,' according to Jack Stubbs, director of the social media analytics firm Graphika."
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"Russia’s role in the disinformation campaign first became public thanks to a French YouTuber, Léo Grasset. In May, Grasset received an offer from Fazze offering him money if he would hype a false claim about supposedly high death rates from Pfizer vaccines. The YouTuber went public with the strange offer, prompting a handful of other influencers to come forward with similar offers."
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"Some of the accounts appeared to target audiences in the U.S. where vaccine skepticism has been high, including a news page for The Villages, a popular retirement community in Florida, and a COVID-19 news page for an NBC affiliate in Mississippi, which has one of the lowest vaccination rates in the United States. Other posts targeted generic healthcare-focused Facebook pages in New York, Oklahoma, New Jersey.
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"“Parts of this activity, particularly the use of one-time burner accounts to post documents on a collection of sites including Reddit and Medium, resembled tactics associated with a suspected Russian operation known as Secondary Infektion,” Stubbs explained. Secondary Infektion operators were linked to one of the more notorious efforts to meddle in Britain’s December 2019 elections with the publication of controversial leaked documents from the country’s National Health Service."
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One obvious troll "commented," after a post dissing Pfizer, “I advise you to read it before you decide to vakinize with it [Pfizer].” Right, watch out before you "vakinize," there, people. I think they need a new English spell-checker over at Directorate 74455.