Our picksRussia’s measles disinformation; public health & terrorism; TSA staff churn, and more
· Russian disinformation and the measles surge in Greece
· Russia is tricking GPS to protect Putin
· Huawei and managing 5G risk
· The improbable rise of Huawei
· A public-health approach to countering violent extremism
· Some Mueller team members aren’t happy with Barr’s description of their findings
· One in four TSA screeners quits within six months
· FEMA tells parish it can drop floodways from new maps
· How news media talk about terrorism: What the evidence shows
· China’s pivot on climate change and national security
· For Russia, war with the US never ended — and likely never will
Russian disinformation and the measles surge in Greece (Christopher Kremidas-Courtney, Ekathimerini)
According to recent reports from international health experts, Europe is currently experiencing a 20-year high in measles cases, including in many countries where it had been mostly eradicated. Within the European Union, Greece has been hit the worst. The primary reason, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), is “vaccine hesitancy.” This is listed as one of the WHO’s top 10 global health threats for 2019. According to the WHO, “vaccine hesitancy” is defined as the reluctance or refusal to vaccinate despite the availability of vaccines.
The causes of vaccine hesitancy are multifaceted, but a major factor is the influence of news media and social media, in particular the role of bots and trolls in spreading disinformation about vaccines.
According to the recent study “Weaponized Health Communication: Twitter Bots and Russian Trolls Amplify the Vaccine Debate,” carried out by researchers from the George Washington University, the University of Maryland and Johns Hopkins and which was published in the American Journal of Public Health, the same bots and trolls that were linked to Russia’s Internet Research Agency which spread discord in the 2016 US elections are now feeding disinformation and contributing to the current measles crisis in Greece and the rest of Europe. This same study says that 93 percent of the vaccine narrative on Twitter originates from or is amplified by Russian trolls and/or bots.
The goal of this disinformation campaign is to flood the discourse with anti-vaccine propaganda, creating a sense of “false equivalence” in the “anti-vax vs pro-vax” discourse. The bots assist by repeating and spreading the same narrative on various social media platforms in the languages of the countries they are targeting.
Russia is tricking GPS to protect Putin (Elias Groll, Foreign Policy)
The Kremlin’s manipulation of global navigation systems is more extensive than previously understood.
