Posted on 04/28/2020 3:53:52 PM PDT by spintreebob
A publicly-released European Union report on disinformation campaigns related to the novel coronavirus is watered down and less detailed in describing Chinese government activity compared to an internal assessment, according to a copy of the document obtained by CyberScoop.
The internal assessment from the European External Action Service (EEAS), the EU’s diplomatic service, was more direct in describing Chinese efforts to manipulate public perceptions of the pandemic. The document, which also covers Russian and Iranian disinformation efforts, singled out “official Chinese sources” for making a “continued and coordinated push” to deflect blame for the virus’s spread. It pointed to reports that China was running “a global disinformation campaign” to both shield itself from criticism and “improve its international image.”
But the public report that the EEAS posted online Friday was less direct in its criticism of Beijing, and said that “other actors,” in addition to China, were deflecting blame.
The New York Times reported earlier Friday that some EU officials had softened the report, and delayed its release, following pressure from Beijing.
Peter Stano, a spokesman for the EU, said in an emailed statement that the “preparation and circulation of internal documents/reports and publishing of material designated for public/media consumption are two separate processes with different procedures, contents and timelines.”
Since emerging in Wuhan, China late last year, the coronavirus has killed nearly 200,000 people worldwide, crippled economies, and exacerbated tensions between global powers. Alongside the race to contain the virus and develop a vaccine, trolls and bots have flooded social media to persuade people that governments like China, Iran, and Russia are handling the crisis better than the U.S. and countries in Europe.
President Donald Trump has repeatedly referred to the illness as the “Chinese virus” in an attempt to blame Beijing as COVID-19 has ravaged the U.S.
The 25-page EEAS internal assessment hints at how geopolitical pressure is factoring into the global response to the virus.
The public report documented some Chinese state-backed disinformation efforts, but the internal assessment is blunter on a variety of fronts. It states that Chinese officials had been aggressively pressuring the French government with “disinformation messages” related to the pandemic, an anecdote missing from the public report. Also left out was a description of a network of bots in Serbia that praised China’s response to the pandemic, along with a mention of Taiwan reporting roughly 200 fake news sites originating in China.
The internal document concludes that governments in the Middle East are increasingly turning, “legally, or not” to spyware to surveil their citizens. The EEAS assessment also reflects on the limits of Russian efforts to spin positive domestic narratives about its response to the virus.
As the COVID-19 situation on the ground becomes worse in Russia, reporting on state-controlled media is generally getting more sober, the assessment states. Overall, the Kremlin is experiencing the shortcomings of its own disinformation ecosystem, which normally supported its policies.
You can read the full internal report at the url
Europe is a land of spineless cowards...the Red Chinese know that they have *nothing* to fear from them.
was just about to post this, when Tucker has it on his show today.
25 Apr: The Atlantic: Internet Speech Will Never Go Back to Normal
In the debate over freedom versus control of the global network, China was largely correct, and the U.S. was wrong.
by Jack Goldsmith, Harvard Law School professor & Andrew Keane Woods, Professor of law at the University of Arizona College of Law
Today, the platforms are proudly collaborating with one another, and following government guidance, to censor harmful information related to the coronavirus. And they are using their prodigious data-collection capacities, in coordination with federal and state governments, to improve contact tracing, quarantine enforcement, and other health measures. As Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg recently boasted, “The world has faced pandemics before, but this time we have a new superpower: the ability to gather and share data for good.”...
As surprising as it may sound, digital surveillance and speech control in the United States already show many similarities to what one finds in authoritarian states such as China...
In the great debate of the past two decades about freedom versus control of the network, China was largely right and the United States was largely wrong. Significant monitoring and speech control are inevitable components of a mature and flourishing internet, and governments must play a large role in these practices to ensure that the internet is compatible with a society’s norms and values...
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/04/what-covid-revealed-about-internet/610549/
The Atlantic writers - both connected to Lawfare!
Wikipedia: Jack Goldsmith
In addition to being a professor at Harvard, Goldsmith is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.
***He is a co-founder of the Lawfare Blog along with Brookings fellow Benjamin Wittes and Texas Law professor Robert M. Chesney
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Goldsmith
loads of stuff by Woods on their website:
18 Oct 2019: Lawfare Blog: China and the Hypocrisy of American Speech Imperialism
By Andrew Keane Woods
(Andrew Keane Woods is a Professor of Law at the University of Arizona College of Law. Before that, he was a postdoctoral cybersecurity fellow at Stanford University. He holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School and a Ph.D. in Politics from the University of Cambridge, where he was a Gates Scholar)
There is no easy answer to the very difficult question of if or how American firms should do business in China. But, unfortunately, resolving this question is made harder because the debate is marred by a general lack of analytical clarity and is instead being driven by uninformed moral outrage, free speech absolutism, and American exceptionalism...
The first problem is the sheer hypocrisy of those most loudly critical of American firms self-censoring in order to appease the Chinese government...
Another distasteful and unconstructive thread running through the current debate is America’s moral superiority because of its robust speech rights. At the core of the argument that U.S. firms should not do business in China—or if they do, they should somehow not comply with Chinese rules—is an argument about China’s speech constraints and, therefore, its moral inferiority. But, as I’ve said before, evaluating China along welfare or human rights grounds is not so simple. Speech rights are much less robust than in the West, to be sure, but China has shown extraordinary concern—and done more than any other country—for its poor...
https://www.lawfareblog.com/china-and-hypocrisy-american-speech-imperialism
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