Untitled episode

the clever thing with Russian conspiracy theories and and disinformation is there's always like a Tiny Seed of Truth in it [Music] if you're a journalist just don't engage because once you start doing that you find yourself doubling down and the danger of that is that you stop seeing the other side you become so convinced in your own argument and so convinced with your investigation that it

must be the one thing that you all you're fighting hundreds of people on Twitter about that you don't look for the other side and that's the most dangerous thing about this moment of polarization for all of us I think is that we stop questioning and to get to the truth you've got to keep you've got to keep doing that as much as possible that changes again

with the fog of War um which is something we you know we've all seen recently with Ukraine for me uh I I really sort of realized how hard it was to get anything anywhere near the truth in the war in Syria so I was based in Beirut for for quite a lot of it and we were all sort of a lot of the journalists were based

in countries around Syria trying to report on Syria as much as possible but it was one of the hardest Wars to report on because most of the time we couldn't get in so we were sort of stuck on the borders of Syria trying to give an impression of what was happening talking to people who are coming out but the people who are coming out are obviously

from one section of society they're the ones desperate to get away from Assad but you're not hearing the other side you could go in if you went um with you know that they would give you permission but then you're on a government tour basically you're seeing what they want you to see not very much else and occasionally we would be able to go in for like

a two-day raid or something or a three-day raid but you knew that every minute you were there it was so dangerous and you would you know there were dangers of kidnap killing in a way that normally if you wear a press jacket that wouldn't happen here you would have to hide you'd have to take off anything that would identify you as being from the West make

sure you didn't have any money on you you know totally clean your mobile phone before you went in in case you were sort of captured and you'd have to go in disguised and you couldn't be there for very long which makes it really hard to try to show the world what's happening so we became quite reliant on effectively citizen journalism on seeing what people were sending

out now we'd sort of already seen some of this in the Arab Spring where citizen journalism and the social media had probably their best moment you know that every time we have arguments now about anonymity online for example you know the one shining example of when it really worked was the Arab Spring because in countries with oppressive regimes you know places like Egypt people could take

on a blogger you know any any name as a blogger or a Twitter handle and they could keep sending out visions of the you know the sort of things that they were experiencing they could put out the truth in a way that those regimes had never really allowed before they have such censored media sense of social media often and suddenly it was breaking through and we

sort of a lot of journalists this became the moment when they realized that this is actually quite powerful you know rather than us going in trying to understand the country in two days you've got people who've lived through it all their lives telling you what's happening showing you the nuance and it's an incredibly important tool but quite soon but before the Arab Spring was even over

we also realized it was a very dangerous one because there a couple of people who a lot of journalists followed who they quoted who turned out not even you know they weren't even there you know there's a guy in the Philippines who was sort of pretending to be I don't know why you do that but people do and you have to be aware of that all

the time so you know whenever I was in Egypt I'd have to I would arrange to meet in secret places some of these Anonymous bloggers just to make sure that they were you know they were absolutely authentic um and just to check their credentials so that from then on you knew you could rely what they were on what they were saying um but in Syria that

just wasn't possible so there was suddenly you were getting more more information online and on Twitter and on social media than you ever had before from a war that was taking place as it happened as it was unfolding you were seeing bombs you were seeing um Barrel bombs going through the sky you were seeing people injured you were seeing children sort of covered in wounds in

a way that we very rarely had got to see before you know an entire cross-section not just what one media organization had managed to capture but then how do you know if it's true Russia was obviously very active in the Syrian war and Russia has always been very good at disinformation and they immediately sort of cottoned onto this so although the world had changed in the

the same as any other citizen journalist that they were relying on so what what do you do they also started campaigns to discredit people describe you know if you were seeing what looked like a chemical weapons attack they'd say it was fake it had been put on this was actors they dressed up they're all alive and well um they the Russians also often do sort of

false flag operations which is fascinating and dark and horrendous where they'd start to say we're getting reports that Rebels are going to carry out an attack on themselves and you always know where they're going to attack because they start putting this information out they start telling you that they're going to attack themselves in order to blame the Russians and then lo and behold a day later

they've been hideously attacked there are lots of people dead and the Russians sort of say we told you they were going to do this uh and you you know where where does the truth lie how do you begin to make sense of that um one of the great things that came out of the Syrian War though and if you haven't already I'm sure many of you

have but um do follow bellingcat which uh Elliott Higgins a great guy who was sort of sat at home in Leicester I think and just had like this amazingly um amazing Fascination for for different types of weapons and started geolocating some of the images that were coming out and started looking at almost doing forensic investigations on what you could see to try to work out if

they're authentic and he's been incredibly successful so more recently in the Ukrainian War we've sort of seen some of the images that the Russians have put out and bellingcat who sort of had this wonderful service you can sort of follow what they're doing they've been able to identify the images they're using are from the Chechen wall you know from a totally different place in a different

time and they haven't even bothered changing like the metadata that goes with it so it's sort of it's incredibly obvious they also through that through the Syrian War managed to sort of perfect their skills of being able to identify just by looking at the image find clues of where they are whether it could whether it could possibly be authentic and in Ukraine it's come in really

handy where there have been moments for example where the Russians have said we we didn't carry out those attacks this must just be the ukrainians making it look like we've blown things up or we've we've killed civilians we haven't been killing civilians and they've sort of shown bodies that have and they you can identify the time by the fact that some of the buildings around them

have already been blown up and so it must have been after the Russians came in not before you know so they've been able to challenge them every time they put out a narrative they go away and investigate all the all the facts that they've put in there and what you can identify from the pictures and whether you can just completely challenge their narrative and and that

that has proved to be completely invaluable learning how to make sense of Russian disinformation is probably the the most important skill for all of us to navigate the modern world because this isn't going away and it's spreading from you know War but beyond that too I mean I did an investigation for the times a little while ago um I mean how many people here got the

AstraZeneca vaccine during covert most of the yeah great most of the country I think did but um just as it was being it was getting to the final stage of testing and it was about to be approved uh I I had investigated a lot of Russian stuff during the brexit funnily enough um and I had lots of contacts around that world and that people were getting

in touch with me saying the Russian government was paying the money to spread disinformation around the world and on social media and making it look like it was coming from sort of influences and people who were just tweeting about this stuff basically and it's going to sound stupid because it is but it becomes a meme as a result of that and it gets spread but calling

the AstraZeneca vaccine the monkey vaccine um I absurd I know but the clever thing with Russian conspiracy theories and and disinformation is there's always like a Tiny Seed of Truth in it so they were using um you know they were using a particular type of Vector in the experiments which sort of uh originated from a chimpanzee I think uh and the Russians sort of clocked onto

that and it was the only difference between their vaccine and this vaccine and they wanted to be able to discredit hours so that they could sell more of theirs so they jumped on that turned it into an entire um I mean like some of the stuff they wanted to spread it's kind of hilarious when you look at it they said they docked it all posters from

films they sort of had um these sort of gods you know these sort of um huge King Kong sort of images of people you know this is what you'll turn into once you have the vaccine they have hilarious cartoons of sort of like people walking in to get a vaccine and then uh they even had videos so and all sort of like almost Hulk like bursting

out of their clothes and turning into monkeys and then going off I mean like it's absurd it is absolutely absurd but if you see something as ridiculous as that chances are you might you might pass it around and none of those memes were really meant for us they weren't supposed to be in spread in Europe or they were going to be spread in Europe just as

a way of sort of showing everybody that everyone should be calling it The Monkey vaccine and the moment you get that name out there people will refer to it as that even if they don't believe it and then slowly that's how people start to see it and that's that's toxic enough but their campaigns were massively focused on South America the Middle East and Southeast Asia because

those were the markets they'd identified who hadn't already bought vaccines and who were in the market for some and if they could discredit ours they could sell theirs there and you know in in the run-up to getting a vaccine we were all so worried about saving lives you know not many people were stopping and thinking about just how big a business this is I mean that

is worth billions every time you get a contract for a country it's worth an absolute fortune and also it was just an incredibly dangerous thing to be doing at the time um you know exactly when we already had so much vaccine hesitancy and so many conspiracy theories around the vaccine to be spreading this just to gain more business and you know the moment that story went

out we put it out on the front page of the times within a couple of hours you know I was getting phone calls directly from the guy in charge of the Russian direct investment fund and the Kremlin came out putting out statements about this story because it mattered to them that their thing had been exposed and they didn't want to lose tracks They had and they

needed to be able to still make you know make a claim to sort of their vaccine being better and they needed to look credible which very rarely happens normally when you put out a story about a conspiracy theory they just don't even acknowledge it they they look away but this was one that really mattered and one of the things I learned from that was just looking

at the markets where they were really specializing where they were sort of focusing South America the middle east Southeast Asia we don't look at what the Russians are doing there very often you know we look at what RT does here a lot we call it out whenever we can and I think since the Ukrainian Invasion there's sort of been this sense that oh look the whole

world now recognizes what Russia does the whole world is supporting Ukraine and that's just not true you know we've seen a lot of countries are sort of struggling to to pick a side they don't particularly want to and quite a few of them are still sort of quite supportive of Russia and if you look at those those countries if you look at sort of RT in

South America for example it's fascinating it's incredibly effective it has a huge audience it's putting out messaging that is being believed all the time if you look at the Chinese media they have people all of their sort of State TV all their journalists who are in Ukraine covering the war are embedded with Russian soldiers they're seeing the Russian side of what's Happening they're not they're not

particularly sympathetic to the Ukrainian side because they're sort of covering it very much from the Russian perspective and I think there is a danger and this goes back to what we were saying earlier about confirmation bias I think with Ukrainian War if you're trying to understand what's happening on the ground we've got to be very aware of Russian disinformation and the sort of messages that the

Russians were have been spreading for years now all over the world and how that will affect people's perceptions but also our own confirmation bias and I think I've I've sort of noticed it more than any other War I think so if you know Afghanistan and Iraq they were controversial Wars so journalists who were out there covering it you know unlike sort of Syria they could be

a bit more questioning they would they would have reports about what British soldiers weren't doing right you know they they were always questions being asked with Ukraine and it's not necessarily that we're trying to spread disinformation but I think there is just sort of a genuine sense of sympathy and and the reporting as a result does get shaped by that and I don't think we're sort

of we're very keen at the moment to sort of say the whole world is on side and the whole world sees through Russia and I don't think we're thinking enough about what's happening in the global South in places like South Africa India and Pakistan South America where that message just isn't really cutting through and we should also think about it in terms of what we know

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