Russia May Be Spreading Vaccine Misinformation to Undermine Efforts to Immunize People (seattletimes.com) 277
The New York Times reports on what's apparently a new Russia-aligned disinformation campaign to "undermine the effort to immunize people" — and more. (Alternate URL here)
Both Russia and China have worked to promote their own vaccines through messaging that undermines American and European vaccination programs, according to the State Department's Global Engagement Center. But in addition to overt messaging promoting their own vaccines, Moscow has also spread conspiracy theories. Last year, the department began warning about how Russia was using fringe websites to promote doubts around vaccinations... The aim of various Russian groups continues to be to exacerbate tensions in Western societies, a key foreign policy goal of Moscow, according to American officials briefed on the disinformation efforts...
In recent weeks, the nature of Russian disinformation has also begun to shift, some officials and outside experts said. Recent postings spreading false information have suggested that the Biden administration is intent on mandating that Americans get vaccines that are failing against the coronavirus. The campaign also comes as President Biden warned President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia last month to rein in ransomware attacks emanating out of Russia and aimed at critical American infrastructure. Though the ransomware attacks are separate from the disinformation campaigns, the warning was the latest effort by United States officials to prod Russia to rein in destructive digital incursions... The Biden administration is actively monitoring Russian misinformation and is trying to counter it by encouraging the public to get vaccinated and promoting the safety and efficacy of Western vaccines, according to an administration official who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss potentially sensitive information...
Much of the disinformation efforts are posted on websites with little to no moderation... Measuring the impact of the disinformation efforts is difficult, given the deep divisions over vaccinations that already exist in the United States and Europe; exploiting splits among Americans is a typical Russian tactic.
Even on the hard-right discussion forums, some users have fingered the cartoons as being Russian in origin, though the postings have continued.
In recent weeks, the nature of Russian disinformation has also begun to shift, some officials and outside experts said. Recent postings spreading false information have suggested that the Biden administration is intent on mandating that Americans get vaccines that are failing against the coronavirus. The campaign also comes as President Biden warned President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia last month to rein in ransomware attacks emanating out of Russia and aimed at critical American infrastructure. Though the ransomware attacks are separate from the disinformation campaigns, the warning was the latest effort by United States officials to prod Russia to rein in destructive digital incursions... The Biden administration is actively monitoring Russian misinformation and is trying to counter it by encouraging the public to get vaccinated and promoting the safety and efficacy of Western vaccines, according to an administration official who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss potentially sensitive information...
Much of the disinformation efforts are posted on websites with little to no moderation... Measuring the impact of the disinformation efforts is difficult, given the deep divisions over vaccinations that already exist in the United States and Europe; exploiting splits among Americans is a typical Russian tactic.
Even on the hard-right discussion forums, some users have fingered the cartoons as being Russian in origin, though the postings have continued.
Is anyone surprised (Score:2)
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Re:Is anyone surprised (Score:5, Insightful)
Why? (Score:2, Interesting)
Why?
Re:Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why?
The only answer I can come up with is: to sow discord in a geopolitical rival.
Re:Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
The only answer I can come up with is: to sow discord in a geopolitical rival.
Seems like reason enough, given the little spymaster who's running things over there.
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The only answer I can come up with is: to sow discord in a geopolitical rival.
That's not "the only answer I can come up with", that is the answer. Read some Aleksandr Dugin (not his more recent, somewhat harebrained stuff) for the philosophy behind it, a weak US means a comparatively less weak Russia, in other words a stronger Russia. And while the US is slowly tearing itself apart from within, there's no balance to Russian aggression.
Having said that, given the excellent job a legion of nutcases in the US are doing to undermine their own country's vaccination, you wonder why the
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given the excellent job a legion of nutcases in the US are doing to undermine their own country's vaccination, you wonder why the Russians are bothering...
This suggests the question, "would the legion of nutcases in the US be so successful at undermining their own country's vaccination efforts without Russian contributions", and to be fair I have no honest answer for that solely because it's so difficult to determine an answer to so complex a question, but I believe that the answer is no.
Another legitimate question might be whether the difference would be very large, and I am less certain about the answer to that question. On one hand you have the argument th
Putin is ex-KGB (Score:2, Insightful)
I think he's playing with fire. Americans are nuts and if things get much worse we're gonna need a big 'ole war to distract from the working man's problems. China's too big, the EU would bring the whole world down on us, but Russia's in the Goldilocks zone of countries we could start a war with. They can't really fight back but they can be a quagmire that'll give our ruling class an excuse install a dictator.
Re:Putin is ex-KGB (Score:5, Interesting)
This tells us nothing about geopolitics and everything utter absence of reality in whatever news diet you're consuming. Russia is the single most powerful nuclear armed nation on the planet. It has the most nukes, it has nukes with best reach on the planet and it has the biggest and most evasive nukes.
Fighting "EU" whatever that means, would not remove US as a nation from the surface of the planet. EU has no nuclear deterrent, and isn't a nation. Fighting China would likely cause significant damage to US, but since pretty much all known flight paths for Chinese nukes go through the same route that North Korean ones go, and since they have a tiny fraction of the arsenal that Russians have, and since their ballistic nuke subs have the run the SSC shallows gauntlet to get into launch positions in the Pacific, it's actually conceivable to have a war with China without total destruction of US as a nation.
Russia is literally the one nation on the planet where survival of US is in fact a statistical impossibility should it start a war with it. Not only does Russia's geography afford it incredible diversity of launch paths into North America, but it's nuclear submarine fleet remains big and operational and its air force still routinely trains for delivery of doomsday nukes anywhere in US, including as far away as Guam.
The old Soviet collapse joke from Russia very much applies today. To understand it, you need to know that in Russian, words "state" as in States in US, and word "staff" are homonyms - same word with two different meanings.
So USSR has collapsed and Russia is cutting budgets for all forces including strategic nuclear forces. In a meeting, a high ranking general comes in to deliver the message to the more junior staff they will have to start "cutting down the number of staff". Upon hearing this, one of the junior leaders gets visibly animated, and makes a suggestion: "I think we should start with Texas and proceed North!"
Again, America is *nuts* (Score:4, Insightful)
We are nuttier than a fruit cake. A little thing like nukes isn't even gonna slow us down. When the American SW runs out of water in 10, maybe 20 years and we've got water refugees fleeing Az, NM and large chunks of CA and they're putting massive pressure on the rest of the country things are gonna get even crazier.
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America's foreign aid to Israel isn't even 1% of Israel's GDP and Israel isn't allowed to actually USE it for anything, they're required to turn right back around and give it do US contractors like Lockheed. It's just a way of giving huge handouts to the contractors with one step in the middle.
America's aid to Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and all the other countries in the region however comes in the form of enormous pallets of unmarked cash they can do whatever they want with.
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and I don't think anyone not living here truly understands just *how* nuts we are.
Shit, I've had motherfuckers wave guns in my face and I didn't even blink, I just talked smack until they put it away.
Most people think I'm sane; normal; well-adjusted. I'm a fucking American. I'm too much of a hippie to listen to a gun, and too much an asshole to care if I offended it.
I'm not even religious.
Who gives a fuck about nukes? We have missile defense. It either works, or it doesn't, and we'll find out soon enough when China tries to invade something. They never won a war against anybody but thems
Re:Again, America is *nuts* (Score:4, Interesting)
We literally prop up the entire national of Israel (there goes my karma) because about 1/4 of our population thinks doing so will bring Jesus back to Earth.
Absolutely wrong. If there's one thing that Covid has taught us it's that most leaders don't do what their followers want them to do, they do what they want to do and then convince people that they wanted them to do it. The UK planned to create the nation of Israel and T.E. Lawrence told them it would be a stupid idea because it would only lead to another thousand years of strife. Shockingly they listened and decided not to put their stamp on it. Sadly, the US also listened, and said "that'll be a good way to handle the Islamic problem" (that is, that it's a growing faith) and we went balls out on the whole program.
Money thrown down the Israel hole is being thrown down specifically for the oppression of Palestine, more specifically as a means of promoting strife in the region in general between Islam and Judaism so that supposedly Christian nations don't have to get directly involved.
The people at the top clearly don't believe anything from the bible that they don't want to believe. They are not people of faith in the religious sense. They have faith that the parts of the bible they like apply to their lives, which is really faith in themselves. Most of them don't have any idea where their opinions came from, either.
Stop putting words in my mouth (Score:2, Troll)
Re:Stop putting words in my mouth (Score:4, Interesting)
Like the old saying goes you can always count on America to do the right thing after they've done everything else.
Also not true. For example WWII, you could say that we did everything wrong and then jumped in, finally doing something right. But we only got in because it was impossible to do anything else at that point, we were waiting for mop-up all along and probably would have waited much longer if things had gone differently. And what did we ultimately do? Wound up on top of the world for decades. We waited until everyone else had been kicked in the dick, and we did it on purpose, using excuses about lack of public support even though we knew the holocaust was occurring. And we deflected from that by creating the nation of Israel, obviously we are the good guys right? Except that we deliberately sold war supplies to the bad guys, the government knew it was occurring and did nothing to stop it so that it could seize the corporations involved after the fact and redraw dynasties in the process. It was the rich fucks in charge helping to murder the Jews (and many others) solely to cement their position atop the turd pile.
America rarely does the right thing, and then only when forced. This does not really differentiate it from other nations, all of the biggies among which were practicing colonialism before the USA was even thought of (where do people think America learned this shit in the first place? Mostly from our daddy, the UK) but it's still something to keep in mind.
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The EU still has a nuclear deterrent in the form of France. They just lost the brits.
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Really now? French share their nukes with EU nations, and allow EU leadership to command their targeting?
Since when?
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I see that in addition to not reading this post, you also spent last half a decade under a rock, utterly isolated from all geopolitical news. If a proxy war cannot be what parent is referring to because there are multiple such wars ongoing right now.
That's not how Empires go out (Score:3)
You do know we entered Afghanistan (Score:2)
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The US military capabilities are not good if stealing something is the goal. It would have to be "give us money or we nuke you" and that will not work. There may be an attempt though.
That’s not how it works. A country with resources, like oil, gets the “offer” that we move in our companies, extract and refine it, while they get some raw deal like 3% or we will pour on the pain with sanctions or level their country one way or another. Then we not only get the lions share of the resource, we control its production too, all while under the guise of bringing technological advancement and business opportunity.
Kill lots your enemy's people and damage economy (Score:5, Insightful)
If the proles reject the vaccines because of the lies, some of them will die. Others will be disabled, and the economy will be further damaged by the lockdowns that prove necessary because of the lack of vaccinations.
All with credible deniability
Re:Kill lots your enemy's people and damage econom (Score:4, Insightful)
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Russia doesn't really have working vaccines, so they don't care about that part. They'll all get the virus, many of them will survive it.
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But I guess Putin doesn't give a crap about them either.
Authoritarian leaders aren’t widely known for their altruistic concerns. He uses them for his own ends all while hand feeding them such ridiculous claims but often in a charismatic way such that somehow they swallow it whole and adore him.
Re:Why? (Score:4, Insightful)
Conservatives have long said "Better dead than red!". Russia says "OK"
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And also, let's not forget better Russian than Democrat [amazon.com] dumbshits. If I were emperor (ho ho ho) I would ship anyone who puts one of those shirts on to the region formerly known as the USSR immediately, preferably Siberia, with no return ticket. It would make the most satisfying reality show ever, too.
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Why?
You don't remember the attempted insurrection a few months ago?
Re:Why? (Score:5, Interesting)
Why? Because the more resources and effort an enemy government has to spend with internal problems, the less focus it can have on whatever your side is doing. Hence, the absolutest best thing that could happen, from the perspective of China and Russia, would be a new civil war in the US. In this situation the US would be focusing almost entirely on its internal chaos, and almost nothing in whatever they're doing, so they do all they can to cause exactly that. But even if it never descends into an actual civil war, any internal chaos they can cause is better than none, as the reverse, that is, a fully peaceful, unified, and harmonious US would be able to focus entirely on them.
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Luckyo propaganda
What's that?
In the US (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:In the US (Score:5, Interesting)
The Fox News line seems to be that [foxnews.com] the vaccine is safe, because it was developed under Trump, and Biden is trying to take the credit.
If that line of thought continues, eventually most vaccine hesitant people will get the vaccine.
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Do they now? Remind me, who are the most vaccine-sceptical ethnic group and who did they overwhelmingly vote for in last presidential elections in US? And what is their "team" telling them to do about vaccines?
These silly "but they are like sheep" slogans sound really good in echo chambers. But they rarely survive contact with reality outside them.
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Do you believe everything the Republican party tells you?
Let's find out. When was the last time they told you something and you didn't believe it?
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The most vaccine-skeptical group is the poor, which has a large overlap with certain ethnic groups.
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Indeed. Very much so. And I think those driving the domestic propaganda in the US literally jump on any chance to direct attention away from themselves because what they do is so blatantly obvious. That is why the cries of "CHINA!" and "RUSSIA!" are getting louder and louder, when the actual danger is right there at home.
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We have this idea that Facebook or the Russians are undermining our health, but the threat is mainstream and domestic.
This doesn't exclude the possibility that Russia wants to put even more fingers on the scale, if only for commercial and/or soft power reasons. If they go to Country X to sell the Sputnik vaccine, and Country X says "We're going to buy Pfizer/Moderna/J&J instead" then Russia can point to the turmoil and say "Really? Look, even the Americans don't trust those vaccines. Buy Sputnik for safety!".
Re:In the US (Score:5, Informative)
We are only at 70% of adults, and less than 50% of adults under 40.
I love how your second point disproves your first.
You know who watches Fox News? Adults over the age of 40.
You know who gets their information from Facebook? Young people.
Honestly all this finger pointing is pointless. The virus has mutated. The vaccines no longer work. Just look at the case in Provincetown. 74% of people infected were vaccinated, in a population that had a vaccination rate of around 60%.
The vaccination rate of that town is approximately 100% of all adults according to the city and county websites. When approximately everyone is vaccinated, yes, almost everyone who gets sick will, by definition, be vaccinated.
And yes, the vaccine still works. It is still somewhere around 70% to 90% effective, give or take. The longer ago you were vaccinated, however, the more likely you are to get (slightly) sick.
Re:In the US (Score:5, Informative)
The vaccines no longer work. Just look at the case in Provincetown. 74% of people infected were vaccinated, in a population that had a vaccination rate of around 60%.
Are you really that dumb? Vaccines do not stop you getting Covid. No vaccines can stop you getting a virus. Vaccines stop you dying of Covid once infected, and they are doing a damn good job of that.
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It's telling that people who start with a question "are you really that dumb" can usually answer "yes of course" when that question is directed at them.
There are quite a few vaccines that prevent infection. There are in fact quite a few vaccines that would be irrelevant if they failed to prevent infection, because virus they inoculate against is effectively harmless unless it's allowed to persist for decades in target tissues, at which point it functions as a long term carcinogen. Example: HPV and HPV vacci
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There are quite a few vaccines that prevent infection.
There are zero vaccines that prevent infection.
There are some vaccines that cause your immune system to respond very quickly to an infection. But you still get infected. You just don't develop symptoms and fight off that infection extremely quickly.
You may want to avoid the snark about calling other people dumb.
Re:In the US (Score:5, Insightful)
The vaccines no longer work. Just look at the case in Provincetown. 74% of people infected were vaccinated, in a population that had a vaccination rate of around 60%.
Are you really that dumb? Vaccines do not stop you getting Covid. No vaccines can stop you getting a virus. Vaccines stop you dying of Covid once infected, and they are doing a damn good job of that.
Actually, vaccines a) reduce the probability of getting COVID dramatically and b) if you get COVID, they reduce the probability of a severe case dramatically. Item a) also reduces the spreading rate reliably while item b) may not do much there for COVID unfortunately.
Incidentally, "getting a virus" is meaningless. What counts is whether it starts to multiply successfully in your body or not. The latter is called "infection". You may well "get a virus" and _not_ get infected. In fact, that happens all the time. It is a question of dosage and specific nature of exposure. There are very few infectious diseases that have a realistic chance to spread via a single pathogen instance transmission because the immune system jumps on all of them. The question is whether it jumps fast and decisively enough and that is were vaccines come in: They make the reaction faster and more aggressive because they cause the immune system to do some response steps ahead of time.
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You really have no clue what you are talking about. Your terminology makes absolutely no sense in the real world. You to not "have" COVID if a COVID virus enters your body. You "have" COVID when it starts multiplying enough to impact your system and/or start being infectious to others.
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Well, look at the posting I was answering to. That person was clearly trying to muddy the waters.
Usually "having xyz" means being infected with it and having clinical symptoms. Whether that means being sick or having a high viral load is secondary. But being exposed and your immune system kill it in short order is usually _not_ referred to as "having it".
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That is complete nonsense and a gross abuse of language. Some people will apparently do anything to push their lies...
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Read again what I wrote. I do address this point.
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At the wedding in Texas, 100% of the people infected were vaccinated. That's because they required every guest to be vaccinated. The only people available to get infected were vaccinated people because there were no others.
So, then, what can we discern about how well the vaccines work?
There were 92 people at the wedding. Without the vaccines it would have been a superspreader event. With them, only 6 people got cases.
Even with delta, the vaccines are slowing transmission to some extent along with their magn
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The point you conveniently glossed over is that of that group nobody needed hospitalized.
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Re:In the US (Score:4, Insightful)
"lie a bit"? That must be the most pro-Trump statement I have heard all day. Trump basically fabricates anything he says. If he does not lie on some statement, that is probably accidental.
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I think you have the wrong end of the stick. "Lie a bit" was sarcastic understatement. I think Trump lies every time he talks.
Makes more sense. My apologies. It is hard to separate sarcasm and disregard for reality some time.
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When you say “the dems” you mean Kamala saying she wouldn’t believe anything about the vaccine if the words came from Trump.
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Not needed (Score:5, Informative)
We have enough people [cnn.com] doing Russia's work.
Why/how do those people (Score:3)
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I do not think the FSB (the KGB does not exist anymore, for about 30 years now) is doing anything here. No need. They can just sit back and watch the fireworks. I think the last time they may actually have done something was when they may have helped to put Trump in office. That was quite enough to set the house on fire and it is still burning.
An utterly stupid self-destructive enemy is a stroke of good fortune. Why jinx it by interfering?
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So? No relevance to this story.
Never seen any (Score:2)
If you have to tell people about it, it is not very effective way to "spread missinformation".
Duh? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah... Wasn't that already obvious? If there's some issue that divides the US, there's a 99.999% chance that some country that dislikes us (yes, I do have the slightest idea, how little that narrows it down) is going to spread social "fun" to drive that wedge in deeper. That should always be assumed with literally everything and why Abraham Lincoln told us all to not believe everything we read on the Internet.
I mean seriously, if @TruPatriot1393 is telling you something that puts you at risk of having "freedom oxygen" delivered to you via intubation, that's mostly on your dumb ass for buying into that. It's a shame, not that you died or ended up having life long complications, but that it's inevitable that some other dumbass is going to repeat the exact same mistake of listening to some random person on the Internet.
And yes, everything you have read in this comment, you shouldn't believe at face value. Just head over to your region's major hospital and verify all you like, you'll note people going in and caskets coming out. There's a reason for that and I leave it there as an exercise for the reader.
Re:Duh? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'll just say this. Last year, hospital workers I knew were exhausted and shell-shocked from the overwhelming patient load, lack of hospital beds, and death left and right.
This year, it's the same, except they're pissed off because at least in this location, it's entirely preventable.
I can only imagine how people in developing countries who watched places in the USA let vaccine doses expire while their loved ones died are feeling.
Not really much we can do about it (Score:4, Informative)
There isn't a whole lot of recourse available to the west with regards to countering Russian state-sponsored disinformation. Obviously we won't go to war (which would be a horrible overreaction); and, given Europe is so dependent on Russian heating oil, we can't punish Russia by effectively isolating them economically. So all that's left is public scolding, which is rarely effective - it probably just makes Putin smile, since it confirms his strategy is working as intended.
Gas not oil (Score:3)
Europe is painfully exposed to a need for the Russians to be nice to us if we aren't to have unheated houses in the winter. Though there is some progress in providing gas imports from the Middle East, it's not enough yet.
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Not sure whether we would get a new Detente or if the rebranded KGB would visit someone to say 'hello' but either would be an improvement.
Oh the irony (Score:5, Interesting)
Ironically, this same disinformation comes right back to Russia (in translated form and otherwise), and gets spread amoung the Russian citizens widely. This on top of their already superstitious nature and very low trust in the government (official numbers notwithstanding). So, now Russia has some of the lowest immunization numbers in the world. They tried to keep immunizations voluntary, and got to about 5% of the population. So now they switched to mandatory immunizations (for "various groups" that just happen to cover pretty much all of the population) and the resistance and avoidance are so high that the numbers are barely moving up.
People are bribing doctors to throw away vaccine and give them a certificate.
This boomeranged right back at them. Good luck with that.
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Their vaccine isn't that good anyway, so they might not care.
What would be much worse for their government is if Russians trusted their vaccine, everybody was vaccinated, and then it didn't stop the virus. That's the case where the government looks bad. If the Russian people just look like they didn't take care of their health? That's not the government's fault, they never trusted the government to care about and take care of each citizen. That was never their thing. That's just their national character, no
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Their vaccine isn't that good anyway, so they might not care.
Politics aside, Sputnik-V isn't a bad vaccine. Its about 95% efficient, just like Moderna and Pfizer. It probably has somewhat worse side effects, though.
I don't know why it's not obvious (Score:2)
For one thing, I don't know why nationalist chickenhawks can't see that ratf***ing a super-power's response to a pandemic is about the most cost-effective way for its rivals to take it down.
Anyone in the anti-spam/anti-malware field has had the evidence around them for over a decade that the same organized crime that scams people or spreads viruses, also spreads targeted disinfo aimed at inciting violent division in the USA on behalf of the Kremlin. It's not the only bad actor here, but it's a major one.
What is happening here (Score:4, Interesting)
What appears to be happening here is that Russia had two general goals. One was to cause chaos in the West, but the other goal was to promote their own Sputnik vaccine which they were hoping would be used in more places. Unfortunately, the Sputnik vaccine turned out not to be great. https://www.thedailybeast.com/state-tv-russians-are-using-prosthetic-arms-to-dodge-covid-vaccines [thedailybeast.com]. Worse, their anti-vax propaganda in their own state run TV targeted at Pfizer, Moderna and AstraZenica apparently has spread to a general anti-vax attitude among the Russian population, to the point where they don't trust the Sputnik vaccine, and really really aren't happy with Russian now trying to also use the AZ vaccine.
At some level, this is amusing and it is funny to see how Russia has shot themselves in their own foot with this. But that's not all that is going on here. People in Russia and elsewhere are suffering and dying as a result of this. No one deserves to die because they listened to anti-vax propaganda, and the idea that people are dying because their own government spread it as just tragic. Moreover, this is fundamentally a worldwide problem, and so taking steps to deliberately interfere with dealing with a worldwide pandemic which has already killed millions and is posed to kill millions more is terrible. I can't imagine anything that is a more clear cut crime against humanity in the most literal sense of the word.
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The problem is that in post Soviet world, trust Russians have in their government is very low because of memory of horrors of USSR. This is something Americans of black ethnic minority background share with them, as their government had historical programs targeting them for medical experimentation that while nowhere near what Soviets did to their people, were still pretty damn abhorrent. Hence their low inoculation numbers. Similar problem of lack of trust.
From what we know about Sputnik V, the vaccine its
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They do if they believe it without first cross-checking. I'm sorry but I ran out of patience for the willfully ignorant who are undermining society's immunity. Darwin can have them, or Satan, whoever reaches them first.
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Cross-check with whom. You seem to forget the country these people live in.
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People are literally being raised by a combination of parents and state to be poor critical thinkers.
If you're religious, for example, you don't "want" to promote quality thought because it tends to lead directly away from religion. But equally, if you depend on low-information voters making bad decisions, you don't want people to know how to make good ones.
How do you make the populace make bad decisions? You compromise the quality of their education.
Once people have been raised in a particular environment
Playing both sides is always the winning move (Score:4, Insightful)
Get one kind of nutjob to think vaccines implant tracking chips into your head.
Get the other kind of nutjob to wish vaccines could do that and believe there is widespread support for weaponizing the tracking we already carry in our pockets for "public health reasons."
Everyone fails the covid test. It's the only virus known to man that doesn't have to infect you to fuck up your brain, with the only vaccine in the world that doesn't even need to be administered to fuck it up some more. In a different position. To spice things up.
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HIV fucked up a lot of brains in its time with massive moral panics, some of which were warranted and many of which were utterly groundless.
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lol leave it to righty to "both sides" one side not trusting the vaccine. Go back to AM radio, dumbfuck.
War Crime (Score:2)
Intentionally killing civilians is a war crime. I don't see why this should be treated differently when done via propaganda rather than via bullets or bombs.
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Act of War? (Score:2)
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It's an "act of war" but only an act of cold war. That never ended. We'll just reboot their pipeline computers at the wrong time and they'll lose a month of profit from their only industry. Whoops.
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For their program to work, Russia needs a lot of willfully-ignorant, infantile Americans to buy into a bunch of utter nonsense.
That could never happen, of course.
Get even (Score:2)
tell everyone the Sputnik vaccine makes your penis fly off into space and make lonely beeps all day.
Everyone remember the French incident? (Score:3)
A sketchy "PR firm" offered four-figure payments to French influencers to lie about the Pfizer vaccine. The influencers investigated the firm instead.
https://www.france24.com/en/eu... [france24.com]
Basically this is what the large states are doing (Score:2)
No surprise people try to pay less taxes, since the most of them are spent on these giant unconstructive apparatuses.
To boost Sputnik V sales! (Score:2)
Step 1. PROFIT.
In non-Soviet Russia vaccine lies you!
Really disappointed by the lack of Funny for the target-rich environment.
However the problem there is that not even the Russians trust the Russian vaccine test results. (As regards the story, I'm inclined towards the weakening enemies theory, though I'd go farther and say America has already weakened itself too much to be worth worrying about. Actually started decades ago when a certain political party (at the behest of their religious supporters) started
Stop Russian Hate (Score:3)
Tongue in cheek - Putin is a creep. But can we get some perspective after Russia has been blamed for all the ills in America for the past 6 years, with nothing to show for it. The virus originated in Wuhan through either irresponsible science or negligence, with subsequent criminal cover up by Chinese authorities. Quite possibly US financed the gain of function research and shared knowledge China would not otherwise possess. Idiocy of risking severe illness or half suffocating in masks rather than getting a couple of shots is solidly native in origin, Blaming foreign interference for local problems is a favorite resort of all kind of autocrats.
Re: Disinformation campaign (Score:2)
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Indeed. Also, this seems far too much on amateur level.
Re: Disinformation campaign (Score:2)
Those of us old enough to remember the cold war remember the ridiculous amount of propaganda bullshit about Russia that was fed the general population at the time Time to re-watch Rocky IV. It's hilarious viewed from this distance.
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Nice try comrade.
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You say that like the evidence of the Russian troll factory doesn't exist.
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Nope. I say it like I think the Russian government-sanctioned troll factory would not be this inept. Underestimating an opponent is really stupid.
Re:Highly doubtful (Score:4, Interesting)
I say it like I think the Russian government-sanctioned troll factory would not be this inept. Underestimating an opponent is really stupid.
They've always been this inept. They're broke AF. The wealthy have siphoned so much wealth off of the systems that keep the nation running that it's a fragile eggshell. Essentially, the processes of greed that are at work everywhere in the world, always corroding the infrastructure of society, have got out in front of Russia's ability to maintain itself, and it is on the verge of collapse. You may well say the same about the USA, and it's probably true here as well, but not equally.
To me the real story behind the story is that sufficient numbers of Americans are now dumb enough to fall for really dumb propaganda.
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Not much, he couldn't even afford a recycled uid.
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Or are you a homegrown moran?
Homegrown morans(sic) is a apparently a cottage industry on slashdot.
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The my body my choice argument ends when a woman wants an abortion. Then all of sudden it’s not her body or choice.