Tackling Disinformation: Why Russia, China and Iran are Pushing Coronavirus Fake News

This article is part of IranWire's ongoing coverage of Covid-19 disinformation in different countries, in partnership with Health Studio.

By Florencia Montaruli for Health Studio

State actors in Russia, China and Iran are all spreading the same disinformation regarding coronavirus in an effort to denigrate the Western world, and specifically the United States.  Covid-19 disinformation has flourished since the start of the pandemic, fueling what has been called an “infodemic” of conspiracy theories and falsehoods alongside genuine efforts to contain the coronavirus.

A recent report by Canada’s intelligence service (CSIS) accused Russia, China and Iran of spreading Covid-19 disinformation to promote their strategic ambitions. The declassified report that named the trio of countries was entitled “Covid-19: Global Effects and Canadian National Security Interests”. 

The report said Russia was “actively spreading disinformation blaming the West for the virus” as part of a broader campaign to discredit the West, promote Russian influence and push for an end to Western sanctions. 

According to a special report by the US State Department’s Global Engagement Center last August, Russia’s disinformation and propaganda ecosystem consists of five main “pillars”: official government communications, state-funded global messaging, the cultivation of proxy sources, the weaponization of social media, and cyber-enabled disinformation. 

The report stated that China, meanwhile, “is focused on a propaganda campaign that protects its own reputation and domestic legitimacy while touting its pandemic aid abroad” while the Iranian regime’s “increased disinformation campaign” sought to “shift blame for domestic shortcomings in handling COVID-19 to foreign actors (especially U.S. sanctions)”.

Russia Deployed Coronavirus Disinformation to "Sow Panic in West"

A European Union document published in May 2020 also revealed that Russia has deployed a “significant disinformation campaign” against the West to exacerbate the impact of coronavirus, generate panic and sow distrust. 

The document, produced by the EU’s foreign policy arm, the European External Action Service (EEAS), said the Russian campaign had pushed fake news online in English, Spanish, Italian, German and French, using contradictory, confusing and malicious reports to make it harder for the EU to communicate its response to the pandemic. 

Professor Stephanie Carvin, an associate professor at the Norman Patterson School of International Affairs in Canada, has said: “In the case of Russia, it’s just the continuation of trying to sow discord within Western democracies, whether by amplifying conspiracy theories or by just trying to discredit certain initiatives that governments are doing.”

Subsequently the EU vs Disinfo database observed that much of the disinformation about coronavirus emanating from Russia had cited, without evidence, claims that coronavirus was a US-made biological weapon.

The EEAS document listed examples published in countries from Lithuania to Ukraine, including false claims that a US soldier deployed to Lithuania was infected and hospitalized with Covid-19. It added that between January and mid-March, the Russian state-funded Spanish-language channel RT Spanish was the 12th most popular coronavirus news source on social media.

In Western Europe, Russian media outlets have been less successful in reaching the wider public compared to, for example, those in South America, but they still provide supporting links and narratives for anti-EU organizations to create and polarize debates, where previously there were none. 

SouthFront, a multilingual online disinformation site registered in Russia which primarily targets military enthusiasts, veterans and conspiracy theorists, had spread dangerous claims related to Covid-19. The US State Department’s report has also highlighted disinformation in SouthFront’s content, such as the claim that the US was using coronavirus to advance its own financial goals, and articles questioning whether vaccines were really necessary.  

The EEAS report also cited riots at the end of February in Ukraine, a former Soviet republic now seeking to join the EU and NATO, as an example of the consequences of such disinformation. It said a fake letter purporting to be from the Ukrainian health ministry had falsely stated there were just five coronavirus cases in the country, adding that Ukrainian authorities say the letter was created outside Ukraine.

“Pro-Kremlin disinformation messages advance a narrative that coronavirus is a human creation, weaponized by the West,” said the report. It quoted fake news stemming from Russia in Italy – which suffered one of the deadliest initial outbreaks of coronavirus – alleging that the 27-nation EU was unable to effectively deal with the pandemic, despite the series of collective measures being taken by governments at the time. 

China Concerned for its International Reputation

The Chinese app Alibaba was used to spread Covid-19 disinformation throughout 2020

Professor Stephanie Carvin adds that Moscow and Beijing have respectively engaged in COVID-19 disinformation for different purposes. “I think,” she writes, “they [China] are predominantly concerned with their international reputation and their perceived failure to be transparent with regards to the pandemic in their own country. And they have been asserting that the pandemic may have actually started in other countries like Italy.” 

More recently Chinese state-affiliated media has also blamed Australia for being the first source of Covid-19, claiming that the virus might have reached China in 2020 in an Australian shipment of frozen meat.

Since the global public health crisis was first announced in early 2020, Beijing has aggressively pushed a pro-Chinese narrative on Western social media platforms such as Facebook and particularly Twitter. These narratives variously claim that both Europe and the United States have failed in their response to the coronavirus; that China has weathered the storm better than most; and that the U.S. created the virus as a biological weapon – a long-debunked claim.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian shares false claims from a Canadian website about the origins of SARS-CoV-2

The Canadian Security Intelligence Service has cited the example Zhao Lijian, the spokesman for China’s Foreign Ministry, who posted an article on Twitter claiming the novel coronavirus was created in a US military lab. He cited as evidence a publication Montreal-based conspiracy theory website called Global Research.

The online post by Global Research had alleged that the pandemic was “a cover operation by the One World Order” to use vaccination to reduce the global population and create “a digital control system”.

There is no credible evidence supporting this theory. It is worth noting however, that digital surveillance already exists in many developed nations. Most notoriously, China itself uses its own digital infrastructure to monitor its own citizens, including Muslims in the Xinjang autonomous region and participants in the recent Hong Kong protests.

Global Research is described by the as a “Canadian conspiracy publication” that also publishes content showing Russia’s response to COVID-19 in a positive light, while also claiming Moscow is the victim of “Western conspiracies”.

Iran: Lack of Transparency Results in Risk to Health

According to the same Canadian report, the Iranian regime has ramped up its own disinformation campaign in order to blame foreign actors for its domestic shortcomings in handling Covid-19. 

As IranWire reported in April 2020, the assertion that “Covid-19 is an American creation” and false claims that King Salman of Saudi Arabia had died from coronavirus were some of the lies about Covid-19 that the International Union of Virtual Media, an Iranian disinformation network, before its websites were seized by the FBI.

The IUVM network published a wide range of coronavirus-related disinformation before its websites were pulled last autumn

In early March 2020, then-US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo declared: “The Iranian leadership is trying to avoid responsibility for their grossly incompetent and deadly governance. Sadly, the Iranian people have been suffering these kinds of lies for 41 years. They know the truth: the Wuhan virus is a killer, and the Iranian regime is an accomplice.” 

In March 2020, Jafarzadeh Imen Abadi, an Iranian parliamentarian, had tweeted blaming the United States for the coronavirus outbreak.  

The Iranian regime is known to be {{ __452927_videocomponent__video component__ }}" style="" target="_blank">concealing a significant amount of information about the extent of the coronavirus outbreak in Iran. The true numbers of Covid-19 cases and deaths are likely to be far higher that the regime is admitting.

This lack of transparency poses a significant risk to the population’s health, as the case of New Zealand has demonstrated that a well-informed population is able to manage the threat posed by Covid-19 more effectively.

Iran has also claimed that US sanctions are blocking its access to medicines and hospital equipment during the pandemic. But the US sanctions program contains specific provisions that allow for the sale of medicine, medical devices and humanitarian aid to Iran, as the US State Department underscored in a March 2020 Iran Covid-19 Disinformation Fact Sheet.

An anti-US mural on the wall of the US Embassy in Tehran

Iranian media outlets and officials, as in Russia and China, have also claimed that coronavirus might be the result of a US biological attack. In March, the commander-in-chief of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Hossein Salami, publicly made this claim without offering any proof. A few days after, on March 12, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei also wrongly claimed there was evidence that Covid-19 might be a “biological attack”. 

The governments of Russia, China and Iran have demonstrably found in the pandemic an opportunity to spread disinformation online. Disinformation, originating from anywhere in the world, can erode trust in democratic institutions and the preventive measures that a government implements to fight Covid-19, in turn exacerbating a public health emergency. 

In fact, disinformation about Covid-19 has already had a measurable impact on citizens’ behaviour, according to a study conducted by the University of Toronto and published in the Harvard Kennedy School Misinformation Review. This study found that disinformation about the virus was associated with lower levels of public compliance with social distancing protocols. 

False conspiracy theories spread by Russia, China and Iran

Coronavirus is a biological weapon developed by the United States in a laboratory: This false claim has been shared by state actors and media in Russia, China and Iran. International bodies such as the World Health Organisation, as well as countless scientific reports (including some of the very first published in China at the start of the pandemic) have all confirmed that the novel coronavirus emerged in the city of Wuhan, China and spread from there. Furthermore, they all agree the virus is the product of natural evolution, in line with the findings first published in the bniomedical journal Nature Medicine in early 2020. As Science Daily correctly summarizes, “The analysis of public genome sequence data from SARS-CoV-2 and related viruses found no evidence that the virus was made in a laboratory or otherwise engineered.”

The pandemic is a covert operation allowing a global elite to reduce the world’s population through vaccines and create a digital control system. The pandemic has breathed new life into a decades-old conspiracy theory that claims a totalitarian world government is seeking to kill off most of the world’s population. This is provably not the case, and it never has been, but in times of crisis many more people are more likely to believe outlandish conspiracy theories because of the heightened threat to their lives and livelihoods. This tendency has been opportunistically seized upon by state actors in Russia, China and Iran.

Coronavirus originated in Italy (or Australia) and not in Wuhan, China. This false story has been spread particularly by Chinese actors but also by Kremlin-controlled media outlets. In an attempt to clear up its tarnished international reputation, the Chinese government initially helped to spread the claim that SARS-Cov-2 originated somewhere other than Wuhan, even though – as mentioned above – China’s own scientists were observing otherwise at the time. 

US sanctions on Iran are responsible for the current public health disaster in this country. This claim is repeated near-daily by representatives of the Iranian regime and security agencies. Despite not being accurate, it helps Iranian officials avoid responsibility for their bad management of the pandemic in Iran. The US State Department has repeated on several occasions that sanctions are not by themselves preventing aid from getting to Iran.