The spring and early summer have featured two crises in America: the coronavirus pandemic and the uprisings following the police killing of George Floyd. One thing has bound them together: the difficulty of separating facts from disinformation. A major driver of this has been autocratic regimes — China, Russia and Iran — using social media to try to influence American public opinion. History may provide the key for separating fact from fiction. It reveals how and why a one-party regime used disinformation to salvage its reputation following a disaster. This happened with the Soviet Union’s 1986 Chornobyl nuclear catastrophe, whose history also reveals how such disinformation can be countered.
Chornobyl
Washington Post: The deadly fallout of disinformation
Russian Tupolev Tu-95MS strategic bombers fly over the Kremlin and Red Square in downtown Moscow to mark the 75th anniversary of the victory over Nazi Germany in World War Two, May 9, 2020.
