Russian Linked PR Firm Promotes Vaccine Hesitancy
A UK-based PR firm with links to Russia reportedly offered European bloggers money to promote disinformation about the Pfizer vaccine – including a fabricated claim that Pfizer is responsible for hundreds of deaths.
According to a report by The Guardian, “the agency contacted several French health and science YouTubers last week and asked them, in poor English, to ‘explain … the death rate among the vaccinated with Pfizer is almost 3x higher than the vaccinated by AstraZeneca’.” The PR agency requested that bloggers and influences ask their audiences, “Why some governments actively purchasing Pfizer vaccine, which is dangerous to the health of the people?”
The Russian government has been promoting vaccine hesitancy in western nations, including Canada, since spring 2020. These early narratives, promoted by Kremlin aligned sites, were adopted and then amplified by anti-vaccination and anti-lockdown campaigns. Among the early narratives was one about nano chips being injected with vaccinations in order to control western populations. The story was published by a Canadian conspiracy theory website, which has since been identified in a US State Department report as being part of the Russian disinformation ecosystem.
The EU’s EUvsDisinfo identified the first COVID-related anti-vaccination disinformation on Katehon, a radical nationalist pro-Kremlin website, in January 2020. According to EUvsDisinfo, 93 percent of all anti-vaccination tweets came from malicious accounts including those operated by Russian trolls.
Sehr interessant: Eine Agentur meldet sich und fragt, ob ich Teil einer „Informationskampagne“ sein will. Es geht darum, einen Link zu angeblich geleakten Dokumenten zu Todesfällen bei Corona-Impfungen zu teilen. Gegen Geld. Sitz der Agentur: London. Wohnort des CEO: Moskau. pic.twitter.com/5x0Wqx79oZ
— Mirko Drotschmann (@MrWissen2Go) May 18, 2021
In April 2020, the Italian newspaper La Republica exposed a Russian campaign to pay Italians 200 Euros each to post something positive about Russian protective equipment on social media.
An email request from the Russian linked PR company, Fazze, which was named as leading the paid anti-vaccination social media campaign, was posted by a German YouTuber with over 1.5 million subscribers. The email asked the YouTuber to share information that “showed a significant number of deaths after the Pfizer vaccination.”
As The Guardian reports, Fazze’s management is from Moscow and there are “similarities between Fazze’s message and the official Twitter account of Russia’s Sputnik V.”
New Report on Chinese Government Influence in Canada
A new report published by the Alliance Canada Hong Kong titled, “In Plain Sight: Beijing’s Unrestricted Network of Foreign Influence in Canada,” examines Chinese Communist Party (CCP) foreign influence and interference operations in Canada and provides recommendations on how to address these operations.
The report identifies seven primary aspects of the CCP’s foreign influence operations:
- Political influence
- Elite capture
- Surveillance and intimidation
- Information and narrative discursion warfare
- Academic influence & vulnerability of intellectual property
- National security
- United Front Work Department
The CCP has actively engaged in intimidation campaigns against people of Chinese ethnicity in addition to Uyghur- and Tibetan-Canadians. The report states that “Chinese authorities co-ordinate intimidation operations and use families who are in PRC-controlled regions as bargaining chips.”
According to the report, Canadians who speak out have been directly targeted by intimidation, and “activists in Vancouver had received death threats for condemning a provincial advisory council chairperson who was gaslighting Uyghurs.” Activists and dissidents have also faced targeted harassment, online attacks, and also received phone or video calls from Chinese police or relatives at local Chinese police stations. Researchers and activists are also subject to smear campaigns by Chinese and foreign media, indicating a high level of coordination.
The report notes that intimidation abroad works alongside threats against family members of dissidents. Family members in PRC-controlled regions are often used as bargaining chips to ensure the silencing of overseas dissent. This has resulted in prevalent self-censorship among the Chinese diaspora communities.
Intimidation campaigns are coupled with disinformation and influence operations targeting Canadian media and elected officials. The report also highlights that Chinese language media in Canada is significantly influenced by the CCP.
The report states that “WeChat is among the top news sources for Chinese-Canadians, and social media apps may be the single most effective and concerning factor in the CCP’s arsenal over Canadian-Chinese language media, simply for the PRC’s direct ability to censor and monitor WeChat, Weibo, Youku, TikTok [Douyin] and other Chinese media entities.”
Chinese-Canadian journalists have been fired and faced threats due to their unfavourable coverage of Beijing. The CCP exports training and journalists and will purchase Chinese-language media in Canada to ensure control over media coverage. The report cites a lack of funding for ethnic media as being a primary factor for “major gaps in communication” in the Chinese-Canadian community.
The Chinese government has also shared the Russian government tactic of creating astroturf community groups designed to advance regime interests through local “soft power” tactics. Undertaken via the CCP’s United Front, the regime has “created and mobilized shell groups, registered NGOs, and civil societies in Canada. These groups are designed to mimic legitimate community programs and activities in democratic societies, or to promote ‘Chinese’ culture. They purport as non-partisan and non-political entities while aggressively spreading pro-Beijing messages and party lines, whether in praising Hong Kong’s national security law or condemning dissent against the Beijing Olympics.”
Chinese and Russian government Whataboutism
The Russian and Chinese governments have leveraged the disturbing discovery of 215 possible children at a former residential school in Kamloops to engage in a form of moral equivalency propaganda known as “whataboutism,” whereby negative stories in western liberal media are manipulated and amplified to deflect attention away from Russian and Chinese government criminal activity and human rights abuses. Whataboutism was a frequent Cold War tactic of Soviet propagandists, who would, for example, point to the mistreatment of Black Americans whenever Soviet terror and repression were mentioned by Western media and officials.
Canadians were universally shocked and horrified when news emerged about the grim discovery that the remains of 215 children were buried on the site of a British Columbia residential school.
At the turn of the last century, and well into the mid-1900s, Indigenous children were taken from families and communities, often forcibly, and relocated to government built residential schools. As the Globe and Mail has noted, “many children in residential schools faced brutal physical, emotional and sexual abuse, were deprived of food and proper nutrition, and suffered what the federal government’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission on the legacy of the schools found to be ‘very high’ rates of death, particularly during times of epidemic or disease.”
Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Missing Children Project has so far documented over 4100 Indigenous children who have died in Canadian residential schools. In 2015, the commission published a report titled “Missing Children and Unmarked Burials,” which states that “many, if not most, of the several thousand children who died in residential schools are likely to be buried in unmarked and untended graves,” like the one found in BC.
The discovery received widespread international coverage, with most Western outlets treating the nature of the discovery and the memory of the victims with respect.
In contrast, the Russian government posted a Tweet on June 10th, commenting on the discovery and stating that it “considered the state of affairs to be intolerable,” in order to deflect attention away from the multiple human rights abuses, corruption, transnational repression, assassinations, political violence and illegal invasions that the regime of Vladimir Putin has engaged in.
Meanwhile, the Chinese government’s state media platform, Xinhua, published and shared a crude children’s cartoon, leveraging the grim discovery of bodies at a former Kamloops residential school to engage in whataboutism in order to deflect attention away from its ongoing, well documented mass human rights abuses, including the genocide in Xinjiang.
Over the past years ,the Chinese government has detained and imprisoned over one million ethnic Uyghurs, who have been subjected to humiliation, torture, rape, forced labour, sterilization, and other repressive measures.
In 2019, at least 18,000 Tibetan children were placed in Chinese government residential schools where they underwent a program of ethnic assimilation. Similar schools have been set up to control ethnic Mongolians in China.
The cartoon mocking the discovery and the memory of the victims, published by the Chinese state propaganda agency, has been shared to Xinhua’s over 90 million followers on Facebook. Another piece, published by the Chinese government’s English language propaganda platform, Global Times, uses the discovery to challenge the Canadian government’s moral authority on issues of human rights – accusing it of hypocrisy – a classic whataboutism tactic employed by authoritarian regimes that engage in human rights abuse.
This Chinese state propaganda tactic has had parallels in the Canadian debate when it comes to the Chinese government’s ongoing genocide against the Uyghur minority in Xinjiang.
On June 4, 2021, during a debate in the Senate of Canada about a motion to recognize the mass human rights abuses against the Uyghur minority as a genocide, a Canadian senator who argued against the motion engaged in his own whataboutism and misdirection on the issue to justify opposing the motion.
Russian Consulate Tweet About Niagara Falls Questioned in National Media
On June 13, 2021, the Russian Consulate in Toronto tweeted that Niagara Falls was lit in Russia’s national colours on the previous night. However, an investigation by the Globe and Mail found that the Falls were in fact lit to honour the Montreal Canadians. The NHL hockey team shares the same blue, red and white colours of the Russian flag. The Globe and Mail contacted the Niagara Falls PR department about the Russian government’s tweet and they replied, “in an e-mail that the Falls were illuminated in support of the Montreal Canadiens, pointing to the message shared across social channels and also listed on the Falls’ illumination calendar.”
Tweet from the Russian Consulate in Toronto about the questionable and controversial lighting of Niagara Falls in Russia’s national colours.
The initial Niagara Falls Special Illumination Calendar clearly indicated that Niagara Falls was be lit for the Montreal Canadians and not for Russia Day on June 12.
In a strange twist of events, the Niagara Falls illumination team seems to have backfilled the calendar with the Russian Day lighting. In an email, Chris Giles, the acting manager of public relations for Niagara Parks, explains that “the delayed addition of the Day of Russian Federation was due to an administrative error.” No additional information was provided as to who applied for the lighting or when it was submitted. Giles added that the primary criteria for allowing a request for lighting Niagara Falls in national colours is whether a country is “a member state of the United Nations which Russia is.” This would mean that a country like North Korea, which engages in mass human rights abuse, would be approved to have “one of the eight wonders of the world” lit in the repressive regime’s national colours (which happen to be the same as Russia’s).
The Russian Embassy and Consulates in Canada have frequently engaged in disinformation and propaganda aimed at promoting Russian interests and nationalism among Canadians of Russian heritage. The Russian embassy in Canada regularly manipulates historical facts and has accused NATO and Canada of sparking a new Cold War. The Russian Consulate in Toronto has published and promoted images of highly militarized commemorations of historical events in the past.
In January 2021, the Russian Embassy in Canada’s Compatriots Program promoted dangerous disinformation about the Pfizer vaccine aimed at promoting vaccine hesitancy.
In the United States, the FBI is currently investigating the Coordinating Council of Russian Compatriots – a diaspora organization that is part of a networks of groups dedicated to advancing Russian interests around the world. KSORS is a partner of the Kremlin’s Russotrudnichestvo program, which in Canada tweeted disinformation about COVID vaccines.
The Russian government’s persistent engagement in disinformation and manipulation of truth has caused journalists and experts to doubt even the most benign information and tweets posted by the Russian government and its embassies and consulates.
The lighting of Niagara Falls was likely intended to provoke a sense of nationalism among Russian-Canadians and encourage support for the Putin regime. It may have also been arranged as a demonstration to the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs that the staff at the Consulate in Toronto are having an impact in promoting a positive image of Russia in Canada.
A tweet from the Russian Consulate in Canada from a ceremony glorifying Soviet colonialism with live firearms.
