Context
Stories in the ‘Context” section are not fakes. We publish them in order to provide greater insight for our readers about the techniques, methods and practices used by the Russian government in its information war.
Things are not going well. American scientists prove that responsible for the thoughtless assimilation of the fake news are, among others, the mechanisms necessary for a development created already in the childhood. First, some statistics. According to the international research published in the beginning of this year by Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, 7 out of 10 people are afraid that fake news is used as a weapon. Over…
By Mark Stencel, for Duke Reporters’ Lab he number of active fact-checking projects around the world now stands at 156, with steady growth driven by expanding networks and new media partnerships that focus on holding public figures and organizations accountable for what they say. And elections this year in the United States and around the globe mean that number will likely increase even more by the time the Duke Reporters’ Lab…
By VOA News (Moscow) – The deaths of three Russian journalists investigating their country’s military presence in the Central African Republic last week has cast renewed attention on a shadowy group of private mercenaries with alleged ties to the Kremlin. The bodies of war correspondent Orkhan Dzhemal, documentary filmmaker Alexander Rastorguyev and cameraman Kirill Radchenko were delivered to Moscow Sunday morning — nearly a week after unknown gunmen ambushed their…
By Aric Toler, for Bellingcat On 8 August 2014, the Security Services of Ukraine (SBU) held a press conference at the Ukraine Crisis Media Centre in central Kyiv describing how they believed that Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 (MH17) was not the true target of the missile launch that killed 298 people on 17 July 2014, but instead Aeroflot Flight 2074 (AFL2074/SU2074). The intent of the downing of the airliner was…
By Polygraph Dmitry Polyanskiy First Deputy Permanent Representative of the Russian Mission to the UN “We also have a lot of reasons not to trust particularly Bellingcat which was repeatedly caught red-handed by Internet users by voicing anti-Russian or anti-Syrian allegations based on fakes. And these fakes are largely exposed in the Web. Internet users have a lot of questions about Bellingcat financing, important American and Western funds that traditionally…
By EU vs Disinfo No, in fact the EU is not “legalising paedophilia”. But a controversial TEDx talk about the nature of paedophilia has recently incited fighters against paedophilia in Serbia to warn that this was just a beginning of a campaign since ‘modern Europe is planning to introduce such perverted attitudes in the Balkans’. The claim that ‘the Strasbourg Court does not acknowledge the Russian law on preventing paedophilia’ is seen…
It is vital for Kremlin’s representatives to convince the West that the disinformation spread by them is not just a position taken by Moscow and its selected experts. In order to do that, it is necessary to find the right persons that have or have previously had a high status in a Western country some time ago. In this way they are seeking to send the message that says: “It…
By EU vs Disinfo Since the US election in 2016, Facebook has worked with improving its knowledge of and resilience towards information operations that are using the platform to spread disinformation and sow discord. On 31 July Facebook announced that they had removed 32 pages and accounts from their platforms (Facebook and Instagram) for “coordinated and inauthentic behaviour.” Facebook concludes so far that the actors behind the accounts (called ‘bad actors’ by the platform)…
And unlike previous efforts, WhatsApp is giving the fact-checkers an important tool to reach the public more easily. By Shan Wang, for NiemanLab Another big national election means another big collaborative fact-checking initiative. But this one will get a small but important assist from the Facebook-owned messaging behemoth WhatsApp — where a healthy share of the world’s misinformation gets distributed. Comprova, a fact-checking collective made up of 24 newsrooms around Brazil,…
By Sarah Hurst (@XSovietNews), for StopFake Russian authorities say 25-year-old Colin Madsen from Missouri died from hypothermia in Buryatia under the influence of drugs. His mother, Dana Madsen Calcutt, a doctor, is determined to prove that he was murdered, and has recently received a forensics report that concludes Colin’s death was a homicide. US embassy officials say they can’t acknowledge homicide as the cause of death unless Russia does this,…
