Shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine, big tech firms and the European Union moved to ban the country's main propaganda and disinformation channels. russia kprc2 click2houston ukraine
FILE - A man looks at a destroyed Russian tank placed as a symbol of war in downtown Kyiv, Ukraine, May 23, 2022. A new report from NewsGuard, a tech firm that tracks disinformation has identified 250 websites actively working to spread Kremlin disinformation.– After Russia invaded Ukraine last February, the European Union moved to block RT and Sputnik, two of the Kremlin's top channels for spreading propaganda and misinformation about the war.
NewsGuard, a New York-based firm that studies and tracks online misinformation, has now identified 250 websites actively spreading Russian disinformation about the war, with dozens of new ones added in recent months. “They may be establishing sleeper sites,” said NewsGuard co-CEO Gordon Crovitz. Sleeper sites are websites created for a disinformation campaign that lay largely dormant, slowly building an audience through innocuous or unrelated posts, and then switching to propaganda or disinformation at an appointed time.
The Disinformation Situation Center, a Europe-based coalition of disinformation researchers, found that some RT video content was showing up on social media under a new brand name and logo. In the case of some video footage, the RT brand was simply removed from the video and reposted on a new YouTube channel not covered by the EU's ban.