The measures taken by Western countries today to combat disinformation are not effective enough. This point of view is given in the report of the British analytical center in the field of international relations Chatham House, the text of which was read by RT.

As indicated in the document, in order to change this situation, a number of changes must be introduced into the laws of Western countries that will allow more successfully regulating the information space.

“The misinformation is largely due to the ineffectiveness of the protective measures taken by the dominant digital companies. It is necessary to develop a new regulatory framework with the active participation of former security guards - journalists and regulatory entities, ”the report says.

In addition, traditional media are invited to consider the model of behavior described in the report as “strategic silence.” In accordance with it, media representatives are advised to avoid "engaging in the plans of political actors who resort to scandalous, attention-grabbing statements on the verge of misinformation and propaganda."

The danger of such unhealthy sensations, the authors of the report explain, lies in the fact that they can be used as "a means of manipulating an accelerating news cycle, which tends to respond to new news feeds."

Again Russia

The authors of the report name Russia as one of the potential distributors of misinformation. It is noted that Western analysts allegedly managed to establish the fact that Moscow conducted disinformation campaigns in the context of topics such as the armed conflict in Syria, the crash of the MH17 flight in Ukraine, the 2016 presidential election in the United States and the midterm vote in the US Congress in 2018, as well as poisoning Sergey and Julia Skripal.

The director general of the Center for Political Information, Alexei Mukhin, in an interview with RT, noted that it was no coincidence that these examples were chosen at Chatham House.

“Today, more and more people in the West are beginning to understand that Russia's actions in Syria are stabilizing the situation, that it has not interfered in the US elections, and that the role of Ukraine should be reconsidered in the issue of the MH17 disaster. Of course, all these factors worry our Western partners, respectively, after analyzing the situation, they decided to go through the censorship of information flows, ”Mukhin explained.

The report indicates that attempts to influence Western public opinion are also being made by Iran, China and the DPRK, but the main threat still comes from Moscow.

“Russia remains the main source of misinformation entering Europe. The US and the European Parliament have found that misinformation is also used by other government actors, such as Iran, China and North Korea, ”the document says.

The report notes that in order to counter such campaigns in EU countries such as the Czech Republic, Finland, France, Great Britain, Germany, Sweden, Spain and several others, special services were organized and laws and regulations were adopted that expand the powers of governments and authorities in the field of control over the information space.

Also, experts from Chatham House pointed to the active role in this issue of NGOs, supported by the government, which organize monitoring services and sites that verify the information published in the media.

Recall that in October a resolution was introduced in the European Parliament (EP), which also called for the development of an effective strategy to combat the allegedly existing Russian misinformation.

“The European Parliament expresses its deep concern about the extremely dangerous nature of Russian propaganda ... and calls on the commission and council to develop an effective and detailed strategy that provides for swift and decisive opposition to Russian disinformation strategies,” the document said, which RT reviewed.

At the same time, the EP refers to the data of “several investigations” about the alleged Russian “influence campaigns”. However, examples of such shares are not given.

Network threat

The report notes that the US Congress decided to take a different path, strengthening control over social networks. This is due to the fact that, according to the Pew Research, 49% of American adults receive news and share it through social networks.

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American parliamentarians fear, the authors of the document write, that the "extreme separation by party lines" to which US citizens are exposed may be used by Russia.

In this regard, the Senate Intelligence Committee held hearings in 2018 with senior executives from companies such as Facebook, Twitter and Google. Since January 2019, three congressional committees have initiated checks on the activities of Internet giants to find out how their activities affect American citizens, the report says.

Against this background, the US Senate on October 8 again accused Moscow of “interfering” in the 2016 presidential election, releasing a report on it called Russian Use of Social Media. It said that Russia, “flooding social networks with falsifications, conspiracy theories and trolling, as well as speculating on existing differences”, allegedly tried to sow distrust of democratic institutions and American each other among American citizens.

Russia has repeatedly stated that it denies such allegations by Washington, which have no evidence, and their authors pursue domestic political goals.

Censor the Internet

A report from the Chatham House Royal Institute of International Affairs notes that in order to combat disinformation, the United States and the European Union need to combine efforts to control the information space, as well as to motivate traditional media and social networks to carefully filter out the news messages they receive.

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“Disinformation threatens democracy on both sides of the Atlantic. For too long, digital services intermediaries have shown the indifference inherent to monopolists remote from regions that bear the brunt of the consequences of their activities. That is why the EU and the US, as allies representing democratic values ​​and having technological experience, are obliged to join forces and lead the discussion on this issue, ”the report concludes.

Political analyst Mikhail Sinelnikov-Orishak, in a conversation with RT, noted that the United States does not particularly need advice from European analysts at Chatham House, since it already controls its information space quite well.

“The United States itself makes excellent use of these technologies to impose its own picture of the world. Few people dare to object to their media and Internet giants. And if they are answered with their own weapons, including working on social networks, they will be indignant, since alternative points of view simply do not fit into their picture of the world, ”the political scientist explained.

In turn, Alexei Mukhin believes that the appearance of such analytical materials suggests that in the near future social networks can tighten the policy regarding users whose opinions do not coincide with the position of the western political establishment.

“This is, first and foremost, an attempt to censor the Internet and establish control over information flows, because the official Western propaganda clearly does not cope with its functions,” the expert noted.