One in five Canadians have not received even a single dose of a COVID-19 vaccine. According to observers in the United States and the United Kingdom interviewed by The Strand, a state-sponsored influence campaign directed by the Russian government to increase sales of Russian vaccines is a driving force.
Social media users—including University of Toronto students—are often exposed to manipulative disinformation techniques, planting residual doubts about the safety and effectiveness of getting vaccinated, according to studies by public health researchers.
How foreign influence efforts are affecting Canadians
The United States Department of State identified these allegations in August 2020. Their report singles out Canadian website Global Research as a major proponent of COVID-19 vaccine misinformation, with links to the Russian government, which provides a key example of how manipulation tactics work in practice.
Global Research’s Instagram account has over 1,300 followers, while its current Twitter account has over 1,500 followers. In August 2020, the State Department report recorded 279,291 followers on Global Research’s Facebook account and 37,300 followers on its Twitter account, though both accounts have since been taken down. The outlet’s YouTube channel is still active, growing from 35,800 subscribers at the time of the report to around 39,000 today, accumulating over 5,000,000 views across its videos.
A study by the Stanford Internet Observatory—by request of the United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence to track the activity of the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence service—identified seven authors whose works were published or republished by Global Research under fake personas likely linked to the GRU. The researchers identified these authors as fraudulent by observing the usage of stolen profile pictures, faked contact information, and repeated creation and sharing of content from media outlets associated with Russia’s intelligence agency.
Exposure to misinformation directly leads to reduced intent to receive COVID-19 vaccinations, according to an experimental study published in Nature Human Behaviour by public health researchers who recruited participants in the United States and the United Kingdom.
Dr. Michel Chossudovsky, the founder of Global Research and a retired University of Ottawa Economics professor, did not respond to The Strand’s requests for comment. In 2017, he denied claims of ties to the Russian government by communicating with The Globe and Mail through a lawyer.
The embassy of the Russian Federation in Canada also did not respond to The Strand’s request for comment. However, in March, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov denied that “Russian intelligence agencies were orchestrating articles against Western vaccines and said US officials were mischaracterizing the broad international debate over vaccines as a Russian plot,” according to a statement to The Wall Street Journal.
Outside of the United States government’s report, The Strand spoke to Bret Schafer, Senior Fellow at the Alliance for Securing Democracy, a nonpartisan think tank.
By developing publicly accessible software, the Hamilton 2.0 Dashboard, Schafer’s research team collected data from foreign government officials and state-run media outlets on websites and social media to summarize official messaging on vaccinations, including Russia’s. Schafer’s team found negative coverage of the Pfizer vaccine by Russian media outlets, with over 111 Tweets mentioning “die,” “dead,” or “death” in the same message as Pfizer.
A motivation behind the influence campaign is economic competition. Schafer remarked in an interview with The Strand that from his analysis, the messaging of state-backed media outlets have promoted Russian-made vaccines while reducing trust in those produced by Western countries. “The messaging… has always been that Western vaccines are not safe, [but the] Sputnik safe. But that nuance gets lost,” he said. In fact, these efforts may have even promoted vaccine skepticism within Russia itself, including for Sputnik.
Solutions to curb the effects of foreign influence efforts
To discuss solutions to these influence efforts, The Strand spoke with Dr. Jon Roozenbeek, a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Psychology at the University of Cambridge. The primary finding with the Cambridge Social Decision-Making Lab is that learning to identify manipulation techniques in advance can best curb the influence on readers who encounter them.
Roozenbeek noted to The Strand that debunked information can lead to a “residual memory of the original misinformation” for a reader to form opinions on. A report he co-authored with Professor Sander van der Linden also found that tribalism can cause communities to immediately distrust fact-checkers, reducing the effects of fact correction after exposure to influencing efforts.
A common manipulative technique, noted Roozenbeek, is to share information that is factually accurate but lacking in context or misleading. One example, demonstrated by Global Research, is to link reports with emotionally-charged headlines about a vaccine recipient dying after receiving a COVID-19 vaccine, with a note on the lack of a causal link between the health outcome and vaccine administration buried within the body of the article.
Roozenbeek remarked that another technique is for a person to create a profile that falsely claims to be a member of a particular social group and then promote extremist points of view to discredit that group. Examples of such groups could include people who support COVID-19 vaccination or restrictions to curb the spread of the virus.
To counter these techniques, readers could be trained on how to identify examples of manipulative techniques. A free video game called “Go Viral!” co-developed by Roozenbeek’s team is one example. The New York Times also published an interactive game on speaking with a person skeptical of vaccination, developed with a physician at the University of Sherbrooke.
The Strand also spoke with John Silva, the Senior Director of Professional Learning at the News Literacy Project, a nonpartisan educational nonprofit, to learn how to speak to people with strong beliefs about vaccination.
Due to tribalism, he noted, a friend might become defensive if you question a source that they trust. The goal is therefore to encourage them to be “open to looking at other sources of information, and being willing to evaluate some information that might call [their] team to question.” He recommended a questioning approach instead of a confrontational one. “It needs to be a back and forth, like, ‘Okay, I will look at your source, you look at my source,’” he said. This could help a friend become receptive to information that can expand their worldview.
Vaccine disinformation can have deadly consequences: these tactics have ultimately led to reduced hospital capacity across Canada, with public health data showing that about half of intensive care unit admissions in Ontario are made up by unvaccinated patients. American data also shows that unvaccinated patients are dying at significantly higher rates. Meanwhile, Ontario—and UofT—is reinstating restrictions as Omicron sweeps across the world. However, by being aware of the motivations and techniques behind COVID-19 influence attempts, readers can better guard themselves against attempts to manipulate their beliefs with misleading information.
