Disinformation groups continue to mislead about COVID-19 vaccination

While the vaccination against COVID-19 pandemic is underway in Kosovo, parallel efforts are being made to undermine the importance of the vaccine. Various accounts with doubtful authorship continue to be active with disinformation about the effects of the vaccinate. These accounts are serving as an buildup center of negative comments against vaccination by citizens wherever they could be found in online platforms.

Currently they are focused on presenting anti-vaccination protests taking place around the world, by manipulating the scope and significance of the protests through visual or photography manipulations.

The GeoPost organization, which investigates the foreign influence in the Western Balkans, found out that a disinformation campaign against COVID-19 vaccination, inflicted by Russian propaganda, has affected Kosovo like many other Western countries. it’s obvious that the source of most of misinformation about vaccines comes from the Russian government’s propaganda, which cultivates and exploits so-called ‘useful idiots’ against vaccines.

Although there is no pro-Russian influencers in Kosovo, at least among Albanians, this does not mean that we do not have fake profiles on social networks, especially on Facebook, who carry out this mission. The research showed that the group “Stop Vaccine” provides false content aiming at dividing the Kosovar society in regard to the vaccination.

Such groups, which are created in the interest of Russian state or non-state actors, use what is well-known as Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior (CIB) or Non-Authentic Coordinated Behavior on social networks and increase the audience for their own purposes and to the detriment of the society.

Another instrument of manipulation against vaccination is through Facebook Joint Groups, in which everyone contributes with false news, negative comments, and disinformation and by exaggeration the doubt about the anti-COVID-19 vaccines. One of them is the group “Diskutime rreth vaksines” on Facebook which has over 2,100 members. The content shows the clear goal; everything is against vaccination, while the published comments are simply gathered from whenever available in the online platforms.

Another similar group is the “Studentët kundër vaksinimit të detyrueshëm” Facebok page, although this has a closed small group. Another site of this nature is named ‘Kunder vaksinave’, although it is small in terms of followers, but that has the same purpose, while doing so by publishing negative comments found on the internet, in Albanian and English.

Recently, many studies have revealed thousands of Russian accounts on social networks which are spreading messages against the vaccine. Even the Russian state media and the Russian Government’s Twitter accounts have made visible efforts to raise concerns about the cost and safety of the Pfizer vaccine, which is seen as an attempt to promote the sale of the Russian Sputnik V vaccine.

In this regard, Facebook has closed hundreds of accounts which were identified as “part of a Russian-led disinformation campaign, which used social media influencers to spread false claims about Coronavirus vaccines.” On August 10, Facebook removed “a network of accounts from Russia that it linked to a marketing firm which aimed to enlist influencers to push anti-vaccine content about the COVID-19 jabs.”

Investigators called the campaign a “disinformation factory”, creating fraudulent articles and petitions on forums such as Reddit, Medium and Change, and using fake accounts on platforms such as Facebook and Instagram to amplify the content.

Venhari emphasizes that these “groups” or “pages” on Facebook, in the future can easily change the goal and target and perhaps return from STOP VACCINE into a STOP INDEPENDENCE OF KOSOVO or STOP NATO accounts.