By EU vs Disinfo With the European parliamentary elections approaching in less than a month’s time, we devote this week’s Disinfo Review to a brief summary of the ongoing disinformation trends surrounding the elections. First, a reminder: Russia’s disinformation campaign against the EU – and by extension, its electoral process – has been underway for five years. It is not a new feature of the European political landscape. The Kremlin’s…
By EU vs Disinfo As NATO turned 70 last week, pro-Kremlin media obviously felt obliged to draw their audience’s attention to NATO’s atrocities and expansive nature, not to mention some broken promises. What first draws the reader’s attention is the coordination. In Russian the guidelines about which themes to cover, who is to be treated positively, who should have negative coverage and who should be altogether ignored is called the…
By EU vs Disinfo “Guantanamo Near Donetsk: Ukraine has been building a concentration camp for the separatists.” In April 2015, this message headlined a story published by Zvezda, the official outlet of Russia’s Ministry of Defence. The story also told that “according to documents found at the facility, the construction was financed by the European Union.” Zvezda’s publication was not an isolated event. In a matter of one week in 2015, different Russian media…
By EU vs Disinfo In May, EU citizens will choose their representatives to the European Parliament. The choice we make at the ballot box will have a substantial impact on how the EU works for the next five years. In the EU, the right to vote also means the right to make an informed decision. An informed decision means getting your facts right and not getting manipulated. You and you…
A number of Russian and pro-Kremlin media distributed information about criminal cases allegedly opened against Ukraine’s president Petro Poroshenko in the European Union and the United States. The websites Ukraina.ru, “Narodnyi Korrespondent”, «Gazeta.RU» , and other media outlets quote Ukraine’s presidential candidate Yulia Tymoshenko who made the claim during a press conference in Lutsk on March 23. According to Yulia Tymoshenko, the anti-corruption investigation against Poroshenko was opened by a Cyprus…
Scores of Russian media circulated stories last week claiming that in 2014 Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko allegedly wanted to exchange Crimea for membership in the European Union and NATO. The source of this claim is former Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili, who from May 2015 until November 2016 was the governor of Ukraine’s Odesa province. Saakashvili told Ukrainian journalist Dimitri Gordon that Poroshenko told him Ukraine should get used to the…
By EU vs Disinfo From deadly mother in-law to nazis in power in all possible places, the EuvsDisinfo team has collected more than 5000 disinformation cases since November 2015. But what’s behind those cases? What are the channels that emit disinformation narratives? And perhaps most importantly, how does the world look from the viewpoint of Russian state-owned TV? To answer those questions a report titled “How Russian media foments hostility towards West“, published by…
By EU vs Disinfo The EU is the place for women to be. And numerous initiatives taken up by EU institutions are helping women advance in their professional lives and develop personally. However, the way pro-Kremlin outlets see it – being a woman in the West is no piece of cake. Women, especially Western women, are often in the scope of pro-Kremlin disinformation. For example, in the well-known disinformation narrative about the inevitable Islamisation…
By European Commission The Commission has received monthly reports from Google, Facebook and Twitter addressing actions taken during January 2019 towards implementation of the commitments on electoral integrity. These three online platforms are signatories of the Code of Practice against disinformation and the Commission asked them to report monthly on their actions undertaken ahead of the European Parliament elections in May 2019, in particular on the scrutiny of ad placements,…
By EU vs Disinfo Russian filmmakers were not successful at this year’s Oscar award ceremony. It might have been different if pro-Kremlin outlets were part of the competition. Their ideas are at least as creative as the best products from the Dream Factory. If such a category existed, the Oscar for the fantasy movie would go to those pro-Kremlin outlets who told a story about Poland building an empire, stretching from…
