How Russia, China, and Iran shaped and manipulated coronavirus vaccine narratives

Top 10 accounts by tweets, likes, and retweets in tweets mentioning “vaccines” or “vaccinations” between 9 November 2020 and 9 February 2021. The fact that the Russian Embassy in Mexico received the fifth most likes and retweets is remarkable given that the embassy only posted 46 tweets mentioning vaccines during the studied period. On a per-tweet basis, the embassy’s vaccine-related tweets received the most engagement of any monitored account—roughly 795 likes and 374 retweets per post—far more than state media accounts with 100 times more followers. Likely buoyed by its vaccine messaging, the @embrusiamexico account saw the third largest percent gain in followers (70 percent) among monitored Russian accounts during the studied period. Data: Hamilton 2.0. Graphic: ASD

March 31, 2021

How Russia, China, and Iran shaped and manipulated coronavirus vaccine narratives

By Bret Schafer, Amber Frankland, Nathan Kohlenberg, and Etienne Soula 6 March 2021 (ASD) – When Vladimir Putin announced last August that Russia had granted regulatory approval for Sputnik V, the world’s first coronavirus vaccine, it signaled—albeit perhaps prematurely—not only a potential turning point in the fight to end the coronavirus pandemic but also a new phase in […]

Kaspersky Cyberthreat Real-time Map on 28 March 2021, showing Russia, Europe, and the Americas. Video: Kaspersky

March 28, 2021

The internet has become a tool for authoritarian repression – “You name it, this affects every industry”

By A. Tarantola 26 March 2021 (Engadget) – The internet was supposed to set us free. Yet in the past two decades, authoritarian regimes have quickly adapted long-held tactics to the digital age, leveraging social mechanisms and mores to maintain their grip on captive populaces. While the internet and social media revolutions may have empowered […]

Covid-19 daily cases per 100,000 population in Brazil, 27 March 2021. On 24 March 2021, Brazil recorded 300,000 Covid-19 deaths, with roughly 125 Brazilians succumbing to the disease every hour. More than a year into the pandemic, deaths in Brazil are at their peak, and highly contagious variants of the coronavirus are sweeping the nation, enabled by political dysfunction, widespread complacency and conspiracy theories. The country, whose leader, President Jair Bolsonaro, has played down the threat of the virus, is now reporting more new cases and deaths per day than any other country in the world. Graphic: 91-DIVOC

March 27, 2021

A collapse foretold: How Brazil’s Covid-19 outbreak overwhelmed hospitals – “We have never seen a failure of the health system of this magnitude”

By Ernesto Londoño and Letícia Casado 27 March 2021 PORTO ALEGRE, Brazil (The New York Times) – The patients began arriving at hospitals in Porto Alegre far sicker and younger than before. Funeral homes were experiencing a steady uptick in business, while exhausted doctors and nurses pleaded in February for a lockdown to save lives. But Sebastião Melo, Porto Alegre’s […]

Between 2010 and 2020, the U.S. fell eleven points in Freedom House’s annual report on political rights and civil liberties, Freedom in the World. Considered from a global perspective, the erosion of US democracy is remarkable, especially for a country that has long aspired to serve as a beacon of freedom for the world. A decade ago, the United States received a score of 94 out of 100, which put it in the company of other established democracies, like France and Germany. Today, whereas those former peers remain at 90 or above, the U.S. has fallen to a score of 83, leaving it in a cohort with newer democracies like Romania, Croatia, and Panama. Graphic: Freedom House

March 27, 2021

U.S. sinks to new low in ranking of world’s democracies, slipping 11 points in a decade, below Argentina and Mongolia – “These longer-term challenges aren’t going to be addressed with quick fixes. A change of president is not gonna make them go away”

By Sam Levine 24 March 2021 (The Guardian) – The US has fallen to a new low in a global ranking of political rights and civil liberties, a drop fueled by unequal treatment of minority groups, damaging influence of money in politics, and increased polarization, according to a new report by Freedom House, a democracy watchdog group. The […]

Map of the U.S. showing incidents of hate, extremism, antisemitism, and terrorism in 2020. Graphic: ADL

March 22, 2021

White supremacist propaganda in U.S. hits all-time high in 2020 – “White supremacists appear to be more emboldened than ever”

New York, NY, 17 March 2021 (ADL) – White supremacist propaganda distribution surged across the United States in 2020, with a total 5,125 cases of racist, antisemitic, and other hateful messages reported by ADL (Anti-Defamation League). Last year marked the highest level of incidents reported since ADL began tracking such data – an average of […]

Global map showing large-scale protests against COVID-19 control measures, defined as those that lead to arrests, in January 2021. Nations in green imposed large-scale lockdowns in 2021. Graphic: Al Jazeera / World Happiness Report

March 21, 2021

World Happiness Report 2021: Reasons for Asia-Pacific success in suppressing COVID-19 – Death rate in Asia-Pacific nations 42 times lower than North Atlantic nations

By Jeffrey D. Sachs 20 March 2021 (Sustainable Development Solutions Network) – […] Perhaps the most notable variation across world regions of the COVID-19 pandemic has been the far lower mortality rate (deaths per million) in the Asia-Pacific region (northeast Asia, southeast Asia, and Oceania) compared with the North Atlantic region (the US, Canada, the […]

Screenshot of the EPA Climate Change website, which was relaunched on 17 March 2021 after President Biden reversed the antiscience policies of the Trump administration. Graphic: EPA

March 21, 2021

EPA brings climate science back to website after Trump purge – “Climate facts are back”

By Richard Luscombe 20 March 2021 (The Guardian) – Canceled four years ago by a president who considered global warming a hoax, climate crisis information has returned to the website of the US government’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as part of Joe Biden’s promise to “bring science back”. The revival of a page dedicated to the […]

An Asian-American man who did not want to be identified pauses at a makeshift memorial on 17 March 2021 in front of Gold Spa, one of three spas in Georgia where Robert Aaron Long is accused of opened fire, killing eight people. Six of the victims were Asian-American women. Photo: Chris Aluka Berry / The Washington Post

March 18, 2021

Asian Americans see shooting as a culmination of a year of racism – Anti-Asian attacks rise along with online vitriol – “I’ve never been this afraid to be Asian in America”

By Silvia Foster-Frau, Marian Liu, Hannah Knowles, and Meryl Kornfield 17 March 2021 (The Washington Post) – As Helen Kim Ho learned that a White man with a self-described sex addiction was charged with killing eight people — including six Asian women — at spas in the Atlanta area on Tuesday, she imagined the stereotypes of Asian […]

Anti‐Asian hate crime incidents reported to police in select U.S. cities, 2019‐2020. Graphic: CSUSB Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism

March 13, 2021

Anti-Asian hate crimes increased by nearly 150 percent in 2020, mostly in N.Y. and L.A. – “What Trump did is that he weaponized it”

By Kimmy Yam 9 March 2021 (NBC News) – An analysis of police department statistics has revealed that the United States experienced a significant hike in anti-Asian hate crimes last year across major cities. The analysis released by the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino, this month examined hate […]

Aerial view of a power outage in Austin, Texas, on 25 February 2021, after the power grid failed during Winter Storm Uri. Austin residents with medical conditions struggled to survive amid widespread power outages and no water. Photo: Brontë Wittpenn and Ana Ramirez / Austin American-Statesman

March 13, 2021

Living in Texas feels like an exercise in survival – “The message is clear: You’re on your own”

By Karen Attiah 5 March 2021 DALLAS, Texas (The Washington Post) – As spring makes inroads down here in North Texas, the impending reopening of the state feels ominously like a death trap. At a Mexican restaurant in Lubbock this week, Gov. Greg Abbott (R)proclaimed that he would issue an executive order to open Texas up “100 […]

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Category: propaganda