Research

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) spread disinformation about the efficacy of vaccines and the virus’s origins, a shift from Beijing’s previous disinformation campaigns, which had a narrower focus on China-specific issues such as Tibet, Hong Kong, and Taiwan.

UW recently analyzed pro-Kremlin discourse in some segments of German social networks. This article is focusing on similar processes on French-language social media.

Find the PDF file here. The GLOBSEC Vulnerability Index measures vulnerability towards foreign influence in eight countries: Bulgaria, Czechia, Hungary, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Romania, Serbia and Slovakia on a 0-100 scale, where 0 is the most resilient and 100 the most vulnerable.

Kremlin-funded Sputnik has a limited reach in the Western Balkans, but the outlet has found a means of using local media for spreading its content.

in English In August 2020, President Putin surprised the world by claiming to have approved the first vaccine against COVID-19.

The 2021 Disinformation Resilience Index study covers four Visegrad countries (Czechia, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia) and six Eastern Partnership states (Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova, Ukraine).

Misinformation, best understood as false or misleading information whether or not it was intended to mislead, has long been recognised as a problem worldwide.

One high-profile theory of why people share fake news says that they aren’t paying sufficient attention. The proposed solution is therefore to nudge people in the right direction.

Pro-Russian disinformation, local elections and the COVID-19 epidemic were the strongest factors influenced Ukrainians’ media consumption and their communications on social media networks in 2020.