New to me form of censorship evasion: easter egg room in a mainstream online game that itself is not censored. Finnish news paper Helsingin Sanomat has been putting their reporting on the Russian war on Ukraine inside a level of online FPS game Counter Strike, translated into Russian. This as a way to circumvent Russian censorship that blocks Finnish media. It saw 2k downloads from unknown geographic origins, so the effect might be very limited.

Notice that Twitter’s account purge significantly impacted misinformation spread worldwide: the proportion of low-credible domains in URLs retweeted from U.S. dropped from 14% to 7%. Finally, despite not having a list of low-credible domains in Russian, Russia is central in exporting potential misinformation in the vax rollout period, especially to Latin American countries. In these countries, the proportion of low-credible URLs coming from Russia increased from 1% in vax development to 18% in vax rollout periods (see Figure 8 (b), Appendix).

Schafer, B. (2021, October 5). RT Deutsch Finds a Home with Anti-Vaccination Skeptics in Germany. Alliance For Securing Democracy. https://securingdemocracy.gmfus.org/rt-deutsch-youtube-antivaccination-germany/

Cubbon, S. (2021, March 17). Fringe communities feed on RT coverage to undermine Covid-19 vaccinations. First Draft. https://firstdraftnews.org:443/articles/rt-fringe-undermine-covid-vaccinations/

Schreiber, M. (2022, March 4). ‘Bot holiday’: Covid disinformation down as social media pivot to Ukraine. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/media/2022/mar/04/bot-holiday-covid-misinformation-ukraine-social-media

The Culture of Resentment Revisited. (2021, March 11). EU vs DISINFORMATION. https://euvsdisinfo.eu/the-culture-of-resentment-revisited/

Helmus, Todd C., James V. Marrone, Marek N. Posard, and Danielle Schlang. ‘Russian Propaganda Hits Its Mark: Experimentally Testing the Impact of Russian Propaganda and Counter-Interventions’, 15 October 2020. https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA704-3.html.

Wong, E., Rosenberg, M., & Barnes, J. E. (2020, April 22). Chinese Agents Helped Spread Messages That Sowed Virus Panic in U.S., Officials Say. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/22/us/politics/coronavirus-china-disinformation.html

Golino, H., Christensen, A. P., Moulder, R. G., Kim, S., & Boker, S. M. (2020, April 14). Modeling latent topics in social media using Dynamic Exploratory Graph Analysis: The case of the right-wing and left-wing trolls in the 2016 US elections. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/tfs7c

McKew, M. (2020, May 13) Disinformation Starts at Home. Stand Up Republic. https://standuprepublic.com/disinformation-starts-at-home/

Although a blant exaggaration, it's well said