“Do you know who the greatest propagator of disinformation in the history of the world is? The U.S. government,” U.S. Senator Rand Paul spoke bluntly at a Senate hearing in May.
Paul cited a series of examples for his assertion, one of which was the United States invading Iraq in 2003 under the pretext of “weapons of mass destruction.”
The presentation of so-called “evidence”- a test tube containing white powder — by then U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell at a UN Security Council meeting on Iraq has a lasting place in the world’s hall of shame.
For a long time, the U.S. government has been spreading disinformation and weaving a dark web of rumours on more obscure occasions to manipulate public opinion, demonize other countries and maintain its own hegemony.
RUMOR MILL
“Bots” have manipulated public opinion in the Russia-Ukraine conflict, said researchers from the University of Adelaide, after they analysed 5,203,764 tweets, retweets, quote tweets and replies posted to Twitter between Feb. 23 and March 8, containing hashtags related to the crisis.
“We found that between 60 and 80 percent of tweets using the hashtags we studied came from bot accounts” during the first two weeks of the Russia-Ukraine conflict from Feb. 24, said co-lead researcher Joshua Watt, an MPhil candidate in Applied Mathematics and Statistics from the University of Adelaide’s School of Mathematical Sciences.
“Social media has created a new environment where public opinion can be manipulated at a very large scale,” Watt said.
The researchers asserted no further findings about the origin of the tweets, but did find that some bots “are pushing campaigns specific to certain countries, and hence sharing content aligned with those timezones,” U.S. magazine Monthly Review reported in early November.
“The data does show that the peak time for a selection of pro-Ukrainian bot activity corresponded with being between 6 p.m. and 9 p.m. across U.S. timezones,” the magazine said.
In May this year, General Paul Nakasone, director of the U.S. National Security Agency and commander of U.S. Cyber Command, revealed that the Cyber Command has been conducting offensive information operations in support of Ukraine.
“We’ve conducted a series of operations across the full spectrum: offensive, defensive, (and) information operations,” Nakasone said in an interview.
In the Ukraine crisis, “we are facing a classic propaganda trap, with a propaganda campaign that uses both public and private transnational media. And blogs and social media are actively joining this campaign,” said Feodor Voitolovsky, director of the Institute of World Economy and International Relations of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
Similar operations were previously found by Australian researchers. In June 2020, a report by the Australian Institute, a Canberra-based independent think tank, revealed that there were many bot-like, U.S.-related accounts on social media spreading rumours that the coronavirus is “a bioweapon created by China.”
“The United States are masters of using all means to conduct such information and propaganda campaigns,” said Voitolovsky.
(Xinhua/NAN)
