We’ve heard a litany of conspiracy theories since the pandemic began, but where exactly are they coming from and to what extent are they organised?
From anti-5g articles to , Russia is using to cultivate a disinformation narrative during the pandemic.
But Russia is far from the only country that’s using social media to spin the truth, according to the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.
The Chinese Communist Party is also using social media to paint a and to heap blame on the United States for the COVID-19 crisis, researchers at ASPI have found.
In March, an official Twitter account from the Chinese Foreign Ministry promoted that the US engineered COVID-19 and deployed it during a military exercise in Wuhan.
About 100 people in Melbourne protested lockdowns, vaccinations and 5G against what they called the "coronavirus conspiracy". Source: AAP
Australian conspiracy theorists are helping this kind of disinformation spread like wildfire, according to Dr Timothy Graham, a Senior Lecturer in Communication at Queensland University of Technology.
“QAnon, for example, is a really susceptible population of individuals who are ready to be co-opted and to have their already existing beliefs cultivated and exploited for strategic purposes,” Dr Graham told The Feed.
“They don’t need to get an army of 10,000 trolls and bots to jump in when they’ve already got QAnon that’ll come in and go ‘exactly, that’s the deep state again’ and ‘Trump is going to be our saviour’,” he said.
“There’s almost an unholy alliance in a sense between anti-vaxxers, conspiracy theorists and foreign disinformation because their interests converge to an extent and they each do the job of amplifying the other one’s interests and content.”
Dr Graham said in the pre-internet days, an individual or group that was unwittingly doing the work of the Kremlin was referred to as a “useful idiot”.
Russian President Vladimir Putin. Russia has been accused of coordinating conspiracy theories on the origins of coronavirus. Source: Mikhail Klimentyev/TASS/Sipa USA
He said that in the Soviet era, they were generally the elite or high-level officials but these days, due to the internet, there are “millions of useful idiots”.
“These individuals who genuinely believe there is a western government conspiracy or cover-up of vaccines and they’re being engineered or weaponised to control populations with the help of Bill Gates. When Russian disinformation comes along, all they really need to do is just help them on their way,” Dr Graham said.
“It’s almost like they make the job too easy. It’s not difficult to target these groups on Facebook and inject content into there.”
Elise Thomas, a researcher at ASPI, is concerned that the untruths spread by both non-state and state actors could damage public health messaging.
“It's definitely a concern. I mean, we saw the protests in Melbourne and around the country on the weekend,” Thomas said.
“Particularly in a public health crisis, anything that is sowing distrust in health authorities is really concerning, and could have very serious, real-world implications, particularly if anybody at those protests was infectious,” she told The Feed.
According to Thomas, one story that has achieved widespread circulation was about a USthat supposedly killed five people in Ukraine. Except, it never actually happened.
ASPI revealed that the story originated from a press release posted onto the websites of the Luhansk People’s Republic, a pro-Russian self-declared state in Eastern Ukraine.
Local residents hold their passports ahead of the opening of the Central Office of the Interior Ministry of the Luhansk People's Republic. Source: Getty
The press release hit the web the day after Russia announced it would produce its own vaccine. And it didn’t take long for the story to be shared onto a popular Australian anti-vaccination Facebook group.
“You see a lot of people repeating it on Twitter, or whatever and they have no idea that it originated from a pro-Russian Ukrainian separatist group,” Thomas said.
“They just remember they saw somewhere that Ukrainian soldiers died in a vaccine trial and they just repeated it,” she added.
But what are these countries hoping to achieve?
COVID-19 is the latest issue that has been weaponised by Russia to sow discord in the West, according to Dr Graham.
“Russian disinformation has co-opted COVID-19 to divide and polarise and drive a wedge into already existing tensions in those societies,” he told The Feed.
He said the Internet Research Agency -- which was responsible for interference in the 2016 US presidential election -- has thousands of employees working at troll farms in Russia.
At trolls farms, people are paid to “pose as someone who is concerned about these issues and try to infiltrate already existing tensions and get those likes, those retweets and that engagement to make that situation worse,” Dr Graham said.
He told The Feed that prior to the US election, IRA hired operatives to suss out divisive issues in the US -- like the Black Lives Matter movement -- that it could “dive into and whip up on social media”.
A Twitter account linked to Russia that posed as the during the election was so successful that it managed to get retweeted by celebrities like Nicki Minaj and Anne Coulter.
The Federal Government is proposing social media reform. Source: EMPICS Entertainment
More recently, the after it was revealed that it was behind the news site Peace Data, which had been hiring unsuspecting US contributors.
The site used impressively realistic AI-generated images for the site’s fake editors headshots, to appear legitimate.
But China has relied on a far less sophisticated approach, according to Dr Graham.
“The focus has been much more on trying to put a positive spin on key issues that relate to China and the way that it handled the outbreak of the pandemic,” he said.
“It's really kind of a blunt, rather non-sophisticated approach.”
‘It’s not just China and Russia’
Thomas stressed that conspiracies and disinformation are often spread by the mainstream media, as well as fringe news outlets.
“We definitely are seeing that Australia to be honest, isn't as much of a target for Russia. And it's not Russian and Chinese state media is not where the bulk of this is coming from either, it’s also coming from Breitbart, Info wars, Alex Jones, even Fox News,” Thomas told The Feed.
Dr Graham agrees that we need to pay more attention to “domestic disinformation” and identify cases where the Australian media has spread untruths.
“The problem of state and foreign interference needs to be addressed but the conditions that make that work are home-grown,” he said.
“When Australia has a highly polarised political atmosphere, when there’s little consensus and when there’s a breakdown in trust in mainstream media and democratic institutions, this is the perfect storm. It’s the perfect conditions for foreign actors to come in and make matters worse.”
“The health of our media system is hopefully something can be addressed in the months and years to come because that really is the entry point. That’s how the poison gets in.”
