Russia has mobilized “an entire ecosystem” of disinformation to prey on global fears that have accompanied the outbreak of the coronavirus, according to President Trump’s top counterpropaganda official.
“We’ve seen adversaries take advantage of a health crisis where people are terrified worldwide to try to advance their priorities,” Lea Gabrielle, who leads the State Department’s Global Engagement Center, told a Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee. “So we’ve been watching the narratives that are being pushed out — false narratives — around coronavirus. Unfortunately, we have been able to assess that accounts tied to Russia — the entire ecosystem of Russian disinformation — has been engaged in the midst of this world health crisis.”
Gabrielle, a former human intelligence officer and Navy fighter pilot, told lawmakers that the coronavirus deceptions have been driven by a vast array of human-operated and automated social media campaigns, as well as state-run media outlets. Her testimony placed the coronavirus falsehoods among a “tsunami of lies” promulgated by the Russian government at any given time.
“It includes Russian state-funded media, official accounts, proxy news sites that spin conspiracy theories under the guise of journalism, and then legions of false social media personas,” she testified. “Many of those were not bots, but we saw thousands pushing out false information.”
Kremlin officials have made similar allegations in recent days, claiming that foreign adversaries are trying to “sow panic” in Russia.
“Unfortunately, we always face this situation,” Russian President Vladimir Putin said Wednesday. “We can only counter them by providing timely, comprehensive, and authentic information to the country’s citizens. Thank goodness, we are not facing any critical developments for the time being, but people should be aware of what is really happening.”
The mayor of Moscow placed the capital city on “high alert” on Thursday “due to the threat of the novel coronavirus infection (2019-nCoV) spreading in Moscow,” according to state-run media.
Putin has various motives for spreading disinformation about the United States and other Western allies, including a desire to “hide the truth of its activities to enrich a small circle of cronies at the expense of the welfare of the Russian people,” Gabrielle wrote in her prepared testimony.
Putin regards anti-Western propaganda as an important tool for convincing Russian citizens to remain content with the oligarchic system of government he oversees, according to Gabrielle.
“As part of this effort, the Kremlin seeks to create a fictitious ‘enemy’ — the West more broadly, and the United States more specifically — of the Russian nation and Russian people, and to discredit the ‘enemy’s’ form of governance and actions at every turn in order to justify the system in place in Moscow and distract from any troubles inside Russia,” she wrote.
Gabrielle claimed that people around the world were becoming more aware that disinformation about the coronavirus was being pushed on them.
“I think it’s well known at this point that there are false narratives out there around coronavirus, and that’s very helpful for people who are scared right now in the midst of this crisis, that they need to go to accurate sources of information like the World Health Organization and the CDC for accurate information on how to protect themselves,” she told lawmakers.
Gabrielle declined to describe specific false narratives spread by Russian officials, because “repeating false narratives actually reinforces them,” and “oftentimes people believe the first version of a story that they hear — and it’s an uphill battle to undo that.”
But she noted that her team had produced a series of reports on how foreign powers are trying to capitalize on the outbreak.
“I think what’s important is exposing and showing enough supportive data or supportive analysis to expose the problem,” she said during the hearing. “But what we don’t want to do is — we don’t want to share our tradecraft with our adversaries.”
When pressed about whether anyone in the Trump administration was undermining her work against Russian disinformation, Gabrielle said she hadn’t experienced anything like that.
“I can only speak to what I’ve seen and the support that I’ve received, and I’ve seen full support from this administration to the Global Engagement Center and its efforts to counter foreign propaganda and disinformation, reflected by the $138 million budget request to Congress, which I truly hope Congress will support,” she said.
The State Department official urged the senators to be clear-eyed about Putin’s intentions.
“The Kremlin’s goal is to separate and divide us,” Gabrielle said. “It’s classic subversion. So the more we can all work together — bipartisan, nonpartisan — working together on countering propaganda and disinformation, the better we’ll be as a country.”
