Will NATO survive?; Putin: counterpart or handler?; Twitter suspends 70 million accounts, and more

The murder of a British civilian: The need for action against Russia’s use of chemical agents (Ryan Henrici, RUSI)
The death of Dawn Sturgess, one of two British civilians poisoned with Novichok, the same type of nerve agent used in last March’s attempted murder of Sergei and Yulia Skripal, escalates questions of public health to high-stakes geopolitics. The incident marks the first domestic murder of a British civilian with a chemical weapon, and presents a wake-up call to the British government and its allies to the grave realities of chemical weapons use and unchecked Russian revisionist behavior.

A checklist of Kremlin narratives in mainstream Western media (Ariana Gic, Stopfake.org)
In the fifth year of Russia’s war on Ukraine, Kremlin propaganda and disinformation continue to pollute the pages of popular and influential western media. Kremlin’s lies and manipulations are often presented as fact, or given equal weight in coverage of Russia’s undeclared and unlawful war on Ukraine, and of Ukraine in general.

Twitter has suspended 70 million suspicious accounts since they revealed to Congress that Russia used fake profiles to interfere with the presidential election (Daily Mail)
Twitter has suspended more than 70 million accounts over last two months as part of an aggressive new policy aimed at stemming the flow of disinformation on the platform. The crackdown amounts to more than a million accounts a day being deleted from Twitter, with the rate of suspensions in May and June twice the company’s October 2017 suspension rate. Twitter and other social media platforms such as Facebook Inc have been under scrutiny by U.S. lawmakers and international regulators for doing too little to prevent the spread of false content.

Twitter’s fake account purge can help turn the tide against influence campaigns (Derek Hawkins, Washington Post)
Twitter is finally taking a flamethrower to fake and suspicious accounts, following months of public criticism that it wasn’t doing enough to crack down on the bots and trolls that used the platform to spread disinformation during the 2016 election.

Fake news in Eastern Europe: 4 narratives undermining trust in the EU (Radu G. Magdin, Euronews)
Russian propaganda is not the stuff of romanticized spy movies; it is serious business treated accordingly by the Kremlin. If the West wants to counter the pernicious effects of this disinformation, it should up its game and consider the full spectrum of forms this propaganda takes, as well as its structural conditions and tactical adaptations. While the EU has documented at least 3,800 examples of disinformation in recent years, four very targeted narratives employed in Moldova and Romania offer clear illustrations of how the Russian propaganda apparatus functions. To tackle narratives such as these, the West must go beyond the usual fact-checking and elite coordination to address the sources of social polarization.