Context

New EU Action Plan on disinformation: Will it fulfil expectations? Foreign interference in France’s “yellow vests” protests? Automated Twitter activity spotted, but no direct link to Russia so far.

Since 2016, when Tsai Ing-wen of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) was elected as Taiwan's president after the pro-independent Sunflower Movement, waves of disinformation have engulfed traditional and social media platforms in Taiwan — and much of it can be traced back to China.

"Any statements about Russia’s alleged involvement are nothing but slander. Source: TASS Russian News Agency, December 10, 2018 MISLEADING Moscow didn’t pull the trigger, but may be attempting to amplify impact.

What just happened? Did Russian state media decide to drop disinformation and replace it with democratic debate? Since when has criticism of the authorities been allowed on prime-time Kremlin TV?

The growing stream of reporting on and data about fake news, misinformation, partisan content, and news literacy is hard to keep up with. This weekly roundup offers the highlights of what you might have missed.

“#Famine in 1930's in USSR was common tragedy for Ukrainians, Russians, Kazakhs, other Soviet people. Stating that it was ethnically targeted(#Holodomor) is wrong & misleading.

“Khodorkovsky's puppets are fulfilling an order from the West, trying to sabotage Russia's defense industry. But that is not the same as writing fake news about ‘hundreds of dead‘ from the non-existent ‘PMC Wagner’.

“If someone looks at a map of the areas that he’s put martial law in affect, these are all of the pro-Russian areas, the areas that either he did not vote in the 2014 election because they were part of their own new country, Lugansk and Donetsk People’s Republic, or that Poroshenko lost.

“Everyone does it, so what’s the problem? The notion that Western countries themselves run state-orchestrated disinformation campaigns is a popular pro-Kremlin defensive line.

The moment when the disinformation campaign around the Azov Sea started was not when Russia seized three Ukrainian vessels and their crews after opening fire at them on November 25.