Tag "Italy"
By Francesco Bechis, for CEPA It’s official: China and Russia used the covid-19 pandemic to propagate and spread disinformation in Italy, exploiting the emergency for their own interests, according to Copasir, the Parliamentary committee overseeing the intelligence services. The bipartisan report, authored by Enrico Borghi of the Democratic Party (Pd), draws on classified material provided by Italian government agencies. In the past three months, Russia and China have transformed Italy into…
By Polygraph YouTube/Social media video“Italian Government call for arrest of Bill Gates.”Source: YouTube, May 14, 2020FALSE On May 14, the YouTube channel “prisoners0fprogress” posted a video captioned “Italian Government call for arrest of Bill Gates.” The video is in Italian with English subtitles. The video gained nearly a million views and close to 2,000 comments over a weekend and has been shared on other social networks. The arrest claim is false. The…
By Stanisław Żaryn, for StopFake In the COVID-19 pandemic Vladimir Putin sees a chance to pull Russia out of its international isolation. Therefore, the coronavirus crisis has become a tool widely used in the Kremlin’s diplomatic offensive. Russia’s foreign minister has recently rejected Western claims that behind the Kremlin’s coronavirus aid to Italy and elsewhere is political point-scoring. But when Sergey Lavrov is slamming the West for getting the Russian…
By UNIAN Italians are being offered EUR 200 for starring in a video to be shot by “Russian media”, thanking Russia and its president, Vladimir Putin, for humanitarian assistance. Such proposals are being spun via WhatsApp messenger, Italy’s La Repubblica reports. “They need 15 Italians who will say something good about Russian humanitarian aid. It better be a video or a post with photos, but they pay 200 euros for…
By EU vs Disinfo Moscow’s help to Italy in connection with the coronavirus has been covered extensively, both in international and in Russian media. In Russia, domestic pro-Kremlin outlets have reported from Italy with stories about EU flags being replaced with Russian flags and the Russian anthem sounding in the streets. On 31 March, the BBC looked into the facts behind some of these stories with an investigative article titled,…
By Christina la Cour, for Disinfo Portal Fake news and disinformation are divisive topics in Italy. There is far from consensus on the size of these problems, nor the solutions. Policy makers have introduced initiatives ranging from media literacy education to a ‘red-button service’ allowing citizens to report fake news to a special cyber police unit. Disinformation, misinformation, fake news and online propaganda—these are all concepts frequently debated in Italy.…
By Christo Grozev, for Bellingcat In a previous joint investigation with BuzzFeed News and the Insider, Bellingcat disclosed the inordinately frequent travel of two Italian politicians from the close circle of the head of Italy’s far-right party Lega Nord, and self-styled “Italian Trump” Matteo Salvini. As previously reported by Italian media and BuzzFeed, one of the frequent travelers and advisers to Italy’s deputy prime minister – Gianluca Savoini – took…
By By Sergio Germani and Massimiliano Di Pasquale, for Disinfo Portal Around 2012, the Kremlin shifted to an increasingly confrontational stance toward the West and began to implement a strategy of chaos aimed at spreading instability and disorder in Europe and North America. This strategy combined traditional “active measures” alongside modern cyber-warfare and information-warfare techniques. Consequently, around 2013, Moscow initiated a subversive active measures strategy in Italy that aimed to…
By Reuters Institute In this factsheet by Richard Fletcher, Alessio Cornia, Lucas Graves and Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, we provide top-level usage statistics for the most popular sites that independent fact-checkers and other observers have identified as publishers of false news and online disinformation. We focus on two European countries: France and Italy. We examine France and Italy as two particularly important cases, as both are widely seen as facing serious…
By Atlantic Council Read the Publication (PDF) “Russia’s interference in the US presidential election in 2016 sent a signal to the West: democratic societies are deeply vulnerable to foreign influence,” writes Dr. Alina Polyakova in The Kremlin’s Trojan Horses 2.0: Russian Influence in Greece, Italy, and Spain, a new report from the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center. Following a successful installment on Russian influence in France, Germany, and the United Kingdom,…
