לשם שמים confusion and increasing division.
13
Spring 2021
disinformation campaign by Russian state outlets regarding Disinformation by foreign actors has also media and pro-Kremlin 10 COVID-19.” The purpose of this effort, promoted conspiracy theories and generated according to the document, is “to aggravate the panic during the coronavirus pandemic. One and of the best-known allegations is that the virus public health crisis in Western countries” 11 to “subvert European societies.” False claims and vaccines are part of a government plot about the pandemic, largely spread by foreign involving 5G cellular technology. On July 16, powers such as Russia and China, intentionally 2020, an Italian journal published an article provoke fear and deepen fissures in American entitled “5G Technology and Induction of Coronavirus in Skin Cells.” Three of its authors society. were affiliated with the I.M. Sechenov First As misinformation propagates Moscow State Medical University, which rampantly, it remains extremely difficult to receives funding from the Russian government. pinpoint and thwart, allowing it to wreak havoc The report, which concluded that 5G radiation that could be eliminated by proper regulation. could be a main factor in promoting the Worldwide, there are 547,200 websites created production of SARS-CoV-2 within the daily, and any one of these may be used to body, was later retracted, but not before it spread fake news.12 Even if a website is found had been cataloged on PubMed, the United to be spreading false information, the Internet States National Library of Medicine’s online Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers 7 database of journal articles. Rumors about (ICANN), which is responsible for allocating connections between the coronavirus and 5G domain names, is not permitted to suspend or technology spread rapidly and detrimentally revoke an assignment based on site content.13 throughout Italy and across the world, with On social media platforms, which have policies theorists showcasing a mislabeled diagram of that enable the removal of misleading content, a guitar pedal as the wireless chip allegedly the sheer number of posts makes effective 8 included in vaccine doses. Researchers at regulation nearly impossible. Twitter users, Carnegie Mellon have discovered that foreign for instance, post six thousand Tweets per governments were largely responsible for second.14 Furthermore, for a relatively low sowing panic about COVID on social media, cost, an individual or foreign government reporting that forty-five percent of Tweets can purchase a large number of social media about the pandemic had been posted by accounts to spread false information. In 2017, suspected bot accounts. These bots circulated for example, an investigative journalist at The over one hundred “false narratives” about the Daily Beast spent $45 on a Russian website to virus, including the 5G conspiracy and claims instantaneously gain access to one thousand that hospital beds were filled with mannequins, already-created Twitter accounts.15 Another not COVID patients.9 One of the scientists issue with regulating access to social media working on the investigation stated that the platforms is controlling their application campaign “definitely matches the Russian and programming interface, or API, which allows Chinese playbooks,” underscoring a European computers to perform actions such as creating Union document that exposes a “significant or replying to posts with simple lines of code.
