Russian President Vladimir Putin and Fox News' Tucker Carlson. Images via Getty.
Unraveling viral disinformation and explaining where it came from, the harm it's causing, and what we should do about it.
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In the days following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a consensus emerged outside of Russia: The Kremlin had lost the information war.This thesis took hold because Russia’s initial attempts to convince the world it had a valid reason for invading a sovereign country failed spectacularly, as open-source researchers and journalists on the front line quickly and easily debunked fake videos and the obvious false flag operations the Kremlin was using as pretexts for war.Add the sophisticated and slick use of social media by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and other Ukrainian officials, plus viral stories of Ukrainians facing down Russian forces, and it’s easy to see why people might have believed the information war had been won.
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The conspiracy may not have originated in the Kremlin’s disinformation department, but they’ve done everything in their power to keep it in the news.As well as pushing out this narrative via its army of cyber trolls, the government’s highest-profile figures continue to push the conspiracy at every opportunity to help convince their own citizens that the war is justified.“The Pentagon has placed biolabs all along the Russian border,” Sergei Lavrov said in an interview earlier this week. “Ukraine is their biggest project. It's a clear threat to international peace and security.”
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Last week the Russian Defense Ministry released documents that claimed to prove that the U.S. was training migratory birds to carry bioweapons from Ukraine into Russia.And now it’s claiming that Hunter Biden is involved, knowing full well that use of his name will result in another cycle of credulous reporting from America’s hugely influential right-wing media machine.On Thursday night, the conspiracy came full circle when the person who shared the original Twitter thread that caused the biolabs conspiracy to explode told his 51,000 Telegram followers that Carlson was helping spread the conspiracy among the ”normies.”“Say what you want, but the most-watched news show in America is talking about Hunter Biden’s connection to biolab funding in Ukraine via Rosemont Seneca,” he wrote on his Telegram channel. “The normies are being herded on a collision course with the truth. They are on the cusp of piecing it all together. Make no mistake, this is culminating into a mass realization the likes of which the world has never seen.”Want the best of VICE News straight to your inbox? Sign up here.