United Nations diplomats need to develop an international policy for how to crack down on “fake news,” according to the Russian Foreign Ministry.
“One-sided and oppositely directed attempts to struggle with fake news (that) some countries make at the level of national legislations will hardly prove to be efficacious,” Ambassador Maxim Buyakevich said in remarks carried Wednesday by TASS, a state-run media outlet.
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“As a result, this will lead up to a degradation of the legal foundations normally functioning civic society and universal freedoms, which humankind has fought over centuries for.”
He called for an international “system of counteraction to the fakes,” though it seems unlikely to receive a warm welcome with other leading powers.
While President Trump has popularized the term “fake news” as an epithet within domestic politics, it has a different force at the U.N.: Moscow often denounces reports of chemical weapons attacks in Syria, for instance, as fake news, while western powers accuse Russia of using disinformation to interfere in elections and obscure its foreign policy actions.
Buyakevich said an international response is necessary to pre-empt “totalitarian” policies from emerging on a case-by-case basis.
“Practice shows along with it the risks are high, that the vigor of this struggle may force international law and commonly accepted humanistic norms and principles into the background, thus giving way to totalitarian methods of suppression of dissent, as well to removal of unwanted media or even individuals from the information space,” he said.
That address to the U.N. Committee on Information comes just weeks after a Russian journalist who had been “report[ing] recently on clandestine Russian paramilitary groups in Syria” died due to a fall from his balcony.
The topic of Russian mercenaries in Syria garnered international attention after they participated in an attack on U.S.-backed forces, which was repelled by American airstrikes. The Russian Foreign Ministry initially said that only a handful of Russians were killed in the attack, but eventually acknowledged that “several dozen” Russian citizens died.
“Russia ranks first in the European Federation of Journalists list of countries with the highest number of journalists murdered in Europe,” according to CNN. “Since 1990, 346 journalists and media staff have been killed in Europe, and a third lost their lives in Russia.”
Buyakevich maintained that “some countries [want] to use fake stories for cynical political purposes,” as TASS paraphrased. “This deals a blow to the institute of independent journalism, which is the cornerstone of civic society and violates the most fundamental principles of law like equal access to information for everyone and the freedom of expression,” he said.
