Coronavirus Is Fueling Nation-State Disinformation Campaigns

(Bloomberg) -- U.S. adversaries, including “the entire ecosystem of Russian disinformation,” are propagating fake narratives about coronavirus, a U.S. State Department official testified on Thursday.

“The coronavirus is an example of where we have seen adversaries take advantage of a health crisis where people are terrified worldwide to try to advance their priorities,” said Lea Gabrielle, who serves as special envoy and coordinator of the State Department's Global Engagement Center. She was testifying on Thursday at a U.S. Senate subcommittee hearing.

Gabrielle said the Russian disinformation effort included state proxy websites, official state media, automated bot accounts and “swarms of online false personas.”

Gabrielle's comments came just days after multiple top U.S. officials called out Russia for a different disinformation operation -- one that seeks to disrupt the U.S. 2020 election.

While Gabrielle declined to offer the committee specific examples of Russian false narratives -- saying that repeating them would reinforce them -- Senator Rob Portman, a Republican from Ohio, offered one example at the hearing. Portman cited a false narrative that Microsoft Corp. Co-Founder Bill Gates, together with a lab, started coronavirus. He called the spreading claim an “absolute falsehood,” saying “there is absolutely no basis for it.”

The Global Engagement Center seeks to track, expose and counter propaganda and disinformation efforts aimed at undermining the U.S. Founded to combat extremist propaganda after 9/11, the GEC has focused more in recent years on coordinated online information operations from Russia and China. It is seeking a significant budget increase, which Gabrielle said would be used to counter Russian propaganda targeting Africa, build new technology to analyze online influence campaigns, and bolster existing efforts.

To contact the reporter on this story: Alyza Sebenius in Washington at asebenius@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Andrew Martin at amartin146@bloomberg.net

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