Russian media outlets linked to US disinformation election campaigns are aiming for a new goal: convincing Spanish-speaking countries that the Russian coronavirus vaccine works better than its American competitors, according to researchers and officials State Department.
The Russian campaign focused on Latin American nations, including Mexico, which this week signed an agreement to acquire millions of doses of the Russian vaccine, and Argentina, which last month started vaccinating its citizens with it.
Conducted on social media in Spanish and reinforced by the official Twitter account of the Russian Embassy in Mexico City, the campaign signaled a new wrinkle in Russian-influenced operations, promoting Russian industry and scientific prestige over its competitors as governments around the world run to vaccinate their populations.
The Russian vaccine, Sputnik V, was named after the first satellite to orbit the Earth, launched by the Soviet Union in 1957. Sputnik V is considered cheaper and easier to transport than vaccines made by American companies Pfizer and Moderna. But some researchers say criticism of Western vaccines on Russian markets has been misleading.
“Almost everything they are promoting about the vaccine is manipulated and disseminated without context,” said Bret Schafer, a member of the Alliance for Securing Democracy, an advocacy group that tracks Russian disinformation. “Every negative story or problem that comes out about a vaccine made in the USA is amplified, while they flood the area with any positive reports about the Russian vaccine.”
Russian government-supported media posted hundreds of news links on Facebook and Twitter that reported possible links suggesting that American vaccines may have played a role in the deaths, the researchers said. The reports left out follow-up reports that found that vaccines probably played no role in the deaths.
“This was a coordinated effort that was partly a public relations campaign and partly misinformation. It is one of the biggest operations that we have seen promoting a narrative around the vaccine in Latin America and it seems to have had an effect, ”said Jaime Longoria, a disinformation researcher at First Draft, a non-profit organization that supports journalists and independent researchers. “Russia has continually sown a narrative that has grown and was, to some extent, accepted.”
The researchers followed similar Russian efforts in Eastern European countries that are still negotiating with Russia to buy the vaccine. Disinformation researchers have also monitored Russia by spreading similar narratives in half a dozen languages, targeting countries in Central and West Africa.
China also entered the fray, adopting a similar tone of anti-American vaccine aimed at the domestic public, according to disinformation researchers. Although Russia and China do not appear to be working together, their shared interests have led to a shared narrative. Last month, a Twitter account dedicated to Sputnik V included a Chinese report that falsely claimed that the US media had remained silent about Pfizer vaccine-related deaths.
US intelligence officials noted the first increase in Russia targeting Spanish-speaking communities in August, when President Vladimir V. Putin announced that he had granted approval to Sputnik V. Since then, Russia’s campaign has intensified, said two officials from intelligence who spoke to The New York Times on condition of anonymity because they were not allowed to speak to reporters.
State Department officials described Russia’s influence campaign as a combination of Russian state-supported media outlets highlighting reports that warned of the dangers of U.S. vaccines, while promoting any reports that were enthusiastic about the Russian-made vaccine .
At the State Department, a report circulated last month describing Russia’s efforts, according to officials. A department spokeswoman said Russia tried to promote its own vaccine while “trying to sow suspicion” in the United States about western vaccines. Looking at more than 1,000 Russian-aligned Twitter accounts, the State Department’s Global Engagement Center found that Spanish accounts showed the highest engagement. Russia’s campaign, the spokeswoman said, “undermines the collective global effort to end the global pandemic.”
The influence campaign in Mexico has become the best understood among media efforts linked to the Kremlin. It was different from previous Russian disinformation campaigns, which consisted of posting false and misleading information online. As social media companies have become more aggressive in eradicating disinformation, Russian operations have focused on promoting selective news that circumvents the truth, rather than rejecting it.
The new approach was particularly effective because the Spanish accounts on Twitter and Facebook on Russia Today and Sputnik, two state-controlled media outlets, regularly rank among the most influential in Latin America, researchers at First Draft said. Russia Today and Sputnik did not respond to a request for comment.
“They cultivated a large audience and regularly rank in the top ten of the most shared stories or links,” said Longoria.
This week, Hugo López-Gatell, Mexico’s deputy health minister, said his government had signed a contract for the Russian vaccine, acquiring 24 million doses that would cover 12 million people. The vaccine will be delivered in several stages until May.
On Tuesday, the medical journal The Lancet published the results of an independent review of Sputnik V, showing that it was 91.6% effective and had no serious side effects. The news was an incentive to the Mexican government’s purchasing efforts.
In December, Facebook said it removed a Russian disinformation campaign that posted information in French, English, Portuguese and Arabic on a number of topics, including support for Russia’s vaccine.
“We know that influence operations come in different forms, including open messages promoted through state-controlled media,” said Liz Bourgeois, a Facebook spokesman. “We put clear labels on these editors so that people know who the information is coming from.”
She said Facebook has seen Russian clandestine operations mentioning Covid-19 in the past, but has found no current campaigns. Posts made by the Russian media would not be considered clandestine and would not be removed by Facebook.
Twitter declined to comment on any Russian operation targeting Spanish-speaking audiences, but said it was still investigating.
The Russian campaign featured handpicked news, the researchers said. On January 17, Russia Today Espanol tweeted that Norway was moving to investigate why 23 elderly people died after receiving the Pfizer vaccine. Three weeks earlier, the same account tweeted several reports about six people who died during the Pfizer vaccine test. The reports did not include the context of medical experts who said the deaths were probably unrelated to the vaccine.
The accounts shared similar narratives on Facebook. On January 5, Russia Today’s Spanish Facebook page shared a story with its 17 million followers, stating that a Portuguese nurse died two days after receiving the Pfizer vaccine. The story implied that the vaccine was responsible, although doctors and an autopsy concluded that the vaccine probably had no role in his death.
Russia’s diplomatic corps also used its social media accounts to promote an image that the Russian vaccine was being subjected to unfair scrutiny.
The volume of posts was notable, said Longoria and others studying Russian-influenced operations. On CrowdTangle, the Facebook tool that analyzes interactions on the site, they found that the Russia Today and Sputnik pages aimed at the Spanish-speaking audience generated more than 1,000 posts with more than six million interactions over the past year with the word “vacuna”, in Spanish for vaccine.
The researchers said Russia’s previous efforts had focused on other targets, such as the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine. A Russian effort to undermine confidence in this vaccine – including memes and posts on Facebook, Twitter and elsewhere that describe it as dangerous – peaked during the summer and early fall, according to researchers.
The campaign included suggestions that the vaccine would turn people into monkeys because it was developed with a chimpanzee virus. The target was mainly countries that were debating the purchase of British or Russian vaccines, according to an earlier report by The Times of London.
That campaign came to an abrupt halt in mid-December, after drug manufacturers announced that the Russian Sputnik V vaccine and the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine had reached an agreement to test a combination of their vaccines.
“You can see a distinct tipping point, where the stories about AstraZeneca suddenly go from totally negative to totally positive,” said Longoria. “It is very clear and clear that when commercial interests changed, so did the objectives of their influence operation.”
Oscar Lopez contributed reporting.