{"id":5208,"date":"2018-03-13T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2018-03-12T22:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/europeanvalues.cz\/kremlin-watch-briefing-lies-travel-fast\/"},"modified":"2021-12-16T12:21:31","modified_gmt":"2021-12-16T10:21:31","slug":"kremlin-watch-briefing-lies-travel-fast","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/europeanvalues.cz\/en\/kremlin-watch-briefing-lies-travel-fast\/","title":{"rendered":"Kremlin Watch Briefing: Lies travel fast"},"content":{"rendered":"

Weekly monitor of pro-Kremlin disinformation effort in Europe. We follow best European analysts, best counter-measures and trends.<\/strong><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Dear readers,<\/em><\/p>\n

In recent months, our team has been trying to enhance and adjust our weekly newsletter to better accommodate the needs and wishes of our readers. In order to evaluate our effort, we would like to kindly ask you to fill out this\u00a0questionnaire<\/a>. Filling it out will not take more than 10 minutes and the results will tell us if there is something that could still be improved and which parts of our product are useful for you.<\/em><\/p>\n

Thank you very much in advance,<\/em><\/p>\n

The Kremlin Watch team<\/em><\/p>\n

Topics of the Week<\/h2>\n

Social media companies should have national offices<\/strong><\/em>\u00a0in order to better understand local environments and norms. This would prevent their making mistakes while working to avert the spread of disinformation and hate speech on their platforms.<\/em><\/p>\n

A new groundbreaking study about fake news on Twitter reveals that\u00a0<\/em>lies spread remarkably faster than truth<\/em><\/strong>, reach more people, and penetrate deeper into the social network. Perhaps most notably of all, the study finds that humans as opposed to bots are primarily responsible for this trend.<\/em><\/p>\n

Europe as presented on Russian TV<\/strong><\/em>: horrifying, dangerous, terrorist attacks daily, in economic decline.<\/em><\/p>\n

Good Old Soviet Joke<\/h2>\n

Why do KGB agents always work in groups of 3? One can read, another can write, and the last one serves to keep an eye on the two intellectuals.<\/p>\n

Policy & Research News<\/h2>\n

To remove or not?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Social media companies, sometimes pressured by national governments and other times out of a voluntary sense of social responsibility, are trying to tackle the problem of disinformation and hate speech in their content. A few days ago, Facebook\u00a0removed<\/a>a video posted by J\u00e1nos L\u00e1z\u00e1r, the chief of staff of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orb\u00e1n. In that video, he says that there are no \u201cwhite Christians<\/em>\u201d left in some Viennese neighbourhoods and that Budapest might end up the same way. Facebook explained that the video violated community standards, but reversed its decision and allowed the video to gain traction just a few hours later, allegedly because it was \u201cnewsworthy<\/a><\/em>\u201d.<\/p>\n

This\u00a0VICE News<\/a>\u00a0article provides several viewpoints on the pros and cons of social media activities over recent months, with a special emphasis on the lack of clear definitions for hate speech and accompanying lack of transparency in decisions to remove questionable content. The article also quotes European Values Director Jakub Janda: \u201cAgain, we can see one of the core problems Facebook has: It doesn\u2019t have national offices that would understand the local environment and norms, so they often make mistakes<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n

How do the French plan on tackling disinformation?<\/strong><\/p>\n

The French government is working on drafting the new bill that will address disinformation in the media, especially during the pre-election period.\u00a0Le Monde<\/a>reports new details about what has been included in the draft so far. Apart from the new option for the government to request a court order in real time to remove disinformation during elections and added pressure on social media companies to report and flag disinformation, it also forces these tech firms to disclose funding of election-related content and permits the suspension of foreign state-controlled broadcasting during elections.<\/p>\n

\u201cSleeper agents\u201d in the West<\/strong><\/p>\n

Victor Madeira, senior fellow at The Institute for Statecraft, testified before the UK\u2019s House of Commons Defence Committee about the numbers and modus operandi of \u201csleeper agents\u201d posted in Britain and the US by the Russian Federation. According to Madeira, there are likely many more of them than during the Cold War, especially because travelling internationally is very easy nowadays. These agents or so-called \u201cillegals\u201d, often deployed by competing Russian intelligence agencies, usually live unremarkable and ordinary lives under false foreign identities. After their activation, they are usually tasked with collecting intelligence from people \u201con the edge of power.\u201d<\/p>\n

US Developments<\/h2>\n

From the biggest-ever study of fake news: lies spread faster than truth<\/strong><\/p>\n

This is the conclusion of an unprecedented and groundbreaking new\u00a0study<\/a>\u00a0published by the journal\u00a0Science<\/em>: on social media, truth almost always loses out to falsehoods, which enjoy greater audience reach and faster spread. The study analyzed every major contested news story throughout the entirety of Twitter\u2019s existence, totaling 126,000 stories tweeted by 3 million users over 10 years (2006-2016).\u00a0The Atlantic<\/a>\u00a0writes that \u201cby every common metric, falsehood consistently dominates the truth on Twitter [\u2026] Fake news and false rumors reach more people, penetrate deeper into the social network, and spread much faster than accurate stories.\u201d<\/p>\n

Other findings include:<\/p>\n