In many ways this info op is similar to previous Russian-outsourced campaigns, but it's unique in the extent to which African Stream staff previously worked with state media. Over and over again we saw LinkedIn profiles with RT, Press TV, TRT, and CGTN employment.
I’m currently vet shopping to try to get my 6 year old mini aussiedoodle on Prozac. I hope yours is slightly less high strung!
We conducted our own analysis and the content was egregious. The screenshots in the article (e.g. “Vaccine from China might be a rat killer.”) are emblematic – not exceptional – examples of content the entire network was pushing.
A few months back Chris and Joel shared assets linked to the network with me and my former research assistant Gaute Friis.
What makes the network Reuters discovered different is that it spread falsehoods to reduce trust in Chinese-made COVID-19 vaccines among people in Southeast Asia, which could have plausibly led to COVID deaths.
The op we analyzed involved astroturfing by fake accounts, for example accounts pretending to be Iranians criticizing the Iranian government’s treatment women. While the network shared some falsehoods, the overwhelming majority of the posts were non-falsifiable astroturfing content.
Back in 2022, together with Graphika, the Stanford Internet Observatory analyzed an info op that has since been attributed to the US miliary cyber.fsi.stanford.edu/io/news/sio-...
Stanford Internet Observatory collaborated with Graphika to analyze a large network of accounts removed from Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter in our latest report. This information operation likely or...
Thanks to @hyemin.bsky.social at Lawfare for great edits.
These findings are part of a report on this topic that we will release that same morning.
Join us for a webinar on Monday, April 22 at 9am PT to hear our findings, along with actionable recommendations to increase the CyberTipline’s effectiveness. stanford.zoom.us/webinar/regi...