Canadian Disinformation Superspreader
The US State Department’s Global Engagement Center has identified a Montreal-based website, Global Research (globalresearch.ca) as a platform that has become “deeply enmeshed in Russia’s broader disinformation and propaganda ecosystem.”
The site received global attention in March 2020, after officials from the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs tweeted articles that falsely claimed that COVID-19 originated inside a US Army laboratory.
According to the GEC report, seven false personas created by Russian military intelligence, known as the GRU, authored at least “108 articles that appear on Global Research’s website.”
Photo: GEC Pillars of Russian Disinformation report
Much of the content published on the Global Research website over the past 8 months is dedicated to COVID-related conspiracy theories, while extremist left-wing narratives have also appeared that are critical of NATO, Israel and western democracies in more general terms.
The CBC broadcast and published a report about Global Research in late October titled “Canadian professor’s website helps Russia spread disinformation, says U.S. State Department,” which warns that “With more than 275,000 Facebook followers and a potential readership in excess of 350,000 per article, the site has the biggest reach among ‘Kremlin-aligned’ disinformation sites.”
Montreal’s Global Research is one of the most prominent outlets within a constellation of conspiracy theory platforms named in the State Department report – these platforms promote conspiracy theories that are then aggressively amplified by other platforms and social media accounts aligned with foreign regimes, reaching hundreds of thousands and often millions of online media consumers.
The objective of such conspiracy theories is to polarize our society and subvert our democracy by sowing doubt in our democratically elected leaders; our government and democratic institutions; our media; and ultimately, each other.
In the context of the pandemic, conspiracy theorists promote doubts about our health officials, the protocols that are intended to stop the spread of the virus as well as vaccines, cures and the effectiveness of wearing masks. They blame the “elites” such as Bill Gates and George Soros for the virus, accusations which are intended to provoke among others, an anti-Semitic reaction.
An article published on October 24, 2020, reached over 700,000 viewers on Facebook and was shared by a number of Facebook pages that promote conspiracy theories, including a group calling itself “Yellow Vests Canada!!” and others that appear to support malign foreign regimes.
Among the other platforms named in the State Department report are The Strategic Culture Foundation, New Eastern Outlook, News Front, SouthFront, Katehon and Geopolitica.ru. Some of the sites feature articles written by Canadian academics, including a history professor at the University of Montreal, who writes for The Strategic Culture Foundation, a platform which according to the State Department report, is “directed by Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) and closely affiliated with the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.”
Querdenken 711: COVID, Germany’s QAnon, Global Research and Iran’s PressTV
Anti-COVID mask rallies that were held in Berlin last August, where anti-vaxx conspiracy activist, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. spoke, were organized by a German organization identifying itself as Querdenken 711. According to Deutsche Welle, the group was “behind two of Berlin’s mass anti-coronavirus measures rallies, which saw right-wing extremists among its crowds.”
The organization is linked to a widely shared post claiming that a group of 500 German doctors, who have identified themselves as the “Corona Extra-Parliamentary Inquiry Committee,” have claimed that COVID-19 is hoax in a post titled “We Have A Lot of Evidence That It’s A Fake Story All Over The World” on a platform called “Collective Evolution.” Over 5 million Facebook users have been exposed to that post, according to CrowdTangle.
The post quotes an unidentified German doctor who made the claim in a YouTube video that has since been removed for violating YouTube community policies. The removed video is the only fact that is posted to support the claim made in the title of the article.
While the unidentified doctor may indeed have “evidence,” there is in fact nothing to support this “evidence” in the article or links within the article.
The post states that the unidentified doctor is part of a larger group of 500 doctors who have “signed on as representatives of an organization called the ‘Corona Extra-Parliamentary Inquiry Committee.'” However, the website that the post links to lists only three individuals and there is no information that supports the claim made in the post about 500 doctors supporting this statement.
The “Corona Extra-Parliamentary Inquiry Committee” links to another site that lists a number of names, however, the list includes individuals from various fields, some of whom are doctors.
There is no apparent evidence published in this post that would support the claim that COVID is a “fake” or a “hoax.”
This narrative supports anti-vaxx/mask conspiracy theories. Due to its broad reach on social media, it could cause those exposed to the content to downplay the seriousness of the pandemic or reject the guidance of public health officials and the protocols they have put in place.
This same post was re-published by Global Research, the Canadian conspiracy platform identified recently by the US State Department’s Global Engagement Center as being “deeply entwined with other outlets in Russia’s disinformation and propaganda ecosystem.” The September 17, 2020 Global Research re-post was shared and exposed to more than 400k Facebook users (far short of the over 5 million viewers the original post was shared to).
Analysis of social media sharing also indicates that the original post was shared by Iranian state media outlet PressTV.
It should be noted that “Collective Evolution” the platform that the piece was originally published on, frequently publishes conspiracy theories. In 2017 it published a story titled “NBC News Report: Hillary Clinton ‘Covered Up’ Elite Pedophile Ring At State Department” which was debunked by Politifact after the post was flagged by Facebook.
Anti-Mask Protests Spread in Canada
In August 2020, DisinfoWatch noted that QAnon and Kremlin aligned accounts on social media were promoting COVID “hoax” conspiracy theories as well as anti-mask movements and protests.
In early October, anti-mask protestors in Toronto targeted Ontario Premier Doug Ford, protesting on the street outside of his home in the Toronto suburb of Etobicoke. Protestors held up an upside down Canadian flag and poured blood on the street in front of the Premier’s home. While legal, the aggressive actions were clearly intended to intimidate the Ontario premier, his family and neighbours.
Independent MPP, Randy Hillier, has repeated COVID-related misinformation and conspiracies that have served to legitimize COVID-hoax narratives, such as by peddling bogus claims over COVID internment camps or false comparisons between COVID-19 and flu (especially in light of the scientific consensus that COVID is several times more deadly and contagious than seasonal influenza).
On October 1, Canadian conspiracy theory website Global Research, which has been identified as supporting and amplifying pro-Kremlin and pro-Beijing narratives, posted a video of Hillier questioning official COVID rates in Ontario by raising the issue of “false positives” in testing. Yet this narrative has also been used in foreign and domestic misinformation campaigns that falsely claim that COVID cases are dramatically overblown – a claim that overlooks both the prevalence of COVID-19 within the population being tested (based on issues of sensitivity/specificity of the population in question), which reduces the likelihood of false positives to an almost negligible degree, and the number of other related factors that provide additional sources of evidence, such as rising testing positivity rate, hospitalizations, etc.
Hillier also raises the specific claim that PCR tests give out false positives through high CT value. High CT value in testing is a legitimate concern, as it goes to the heart of whether a person has significant viral load (and is therefore highly infectious) or has left over genetic material from a dead virus in their system. However, that should not be equated with a false positive – as the person would, in all likelihood, still represent a positive (albeit perhaps not necessarily infectious) COVID case, and there would still be a need for contact tracing of possible contacts, etc. Indeed, this specific test has a 98.8% specificity rate, “meaning it is hugely unlikely to show a false positive, or tag someone without the virus as having the virus.”
Elected provincial representatives have a responsibility to question and challenge political leaders and health officials. Yet they also need to rely on evidence in their criticisms, and to avoid adopting misinformation narratives that erode trust in the policies that have been developed and deployed based on scientific facts in order to help protect Canadians from contracting COVID-19. While people like Randy Hillier may believe the statements they make are helping Canadians, the true impact of them is unknown; but the potential risk that it exposes his followers, who refuse to wear masks and follow COVID protocols, could put the health of Canadians at risk.
The Navalny Poisoning: Laughing About A Political Assassination
Pro-Kremlin platforms and authors have been promoting a toxic cornucopia of conspiracy narratives about the poisoning of Russian anti-corruption activist Alexei Navalny, who was poisoned with the Russian nerve agent Novichok last August in the Siberian city Tomsk.
The stories are intended to deflect attention away from the poisoning and inject doubt about the findings of a German lab and two others in France and Sweden, which independently confirmed that Navalny had been poisoned by the Russian nerve agent Novichok.
The Strategic Culture Foundation, which the US government has identified as being directed by the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, published an article by a Canadian academic that suggested the method of poisoning identified by Navalny’s team (via a water bottle to which Novichok was applied) was overly complicated and raised the possibility of an “inside job,” thereby sowing doubts about Navalny’s claim.
The EU’s Eastern Stratcom EUvsDisinfo published analysis of disinformation related to the Navalny poisoning in which it found that “Sarcasm, irony, ‘humour’ is frequently exploited as a means of disinformation,” and that “The method was used in the Skripal case and it is used here.”
EUvsDisinfo identifies a Canadian based website called “Russia Observer” that joked about the attempted political assassination, publishing this fictitious exchange:
“– Wait Boss! I’ve got it. Let’s poison somebody! That’ll change the headlines. Sure worked that last few times.
– Well, he won’t die of course – our poisons are no good – and, after a day or two we let him go to some NATO country and they’ll say he was poisoned.”
Another Canadian military expert joked that “Putin should take assassination lessons from U.S.” in a piece that ran in several Canadian newspapers including “The Hill Times,” The author frequently writes articles that are critical of Canada’s NATO mission in Latvia, and claimed that he had not heard of Navalny before the poisoning, yet felt informed enough to write an opinion about him. The writer asked, “what the hell is wrong with the Russian GRU secret service?” in reference to the Russian military intelligence who were behind the poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter with the same nerve agent in March 2018. The author then offered up this advice to Vladimir Putin – that when US President Donald Trump “wanted Iranian General Qasem Soleimani killed, the CIA did not have an agent lace his teacup with poison at a civilian airport…. That’s how the big boys take care of their nemesis.”
