![\"Portrait](\"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/Irwin_220224b032-300x199.jpg\")
Irwin was a consultant on a December report put out by The Critical Mass, \u201cContaminated Trust: Public Health Disinformation and its Societal Impacts in Georgia, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine,\u201d<\/a> that looked at the dissemination of Russian disinformation in Eastern Europe and Central Asia during the pandemic.<\/p>\n The study, which was conducted from February to August last year, relied on in-country civilian volunteers, journalists, and medical professionals who logged their media consumption and submitted to in-depth interviews during a time when the pandemic raged and vaccines were shunned in the three countries.<\/p>\n For instance, by May 2021, the report says, only 428 Ukrainians had been fully vaccinated, a fraction of the total 44 million population \u2013 for comparison, by the same time 57% of Americans over 18 had received at least a single dose of vaccine<\/a>, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention<\/a>. Only 12% of Ukrainians were vaccinated by September 2021.<\/p>\n This was in part because Ukraine was concentrating its vaccination efforts on military personnel responding to fighting in separatist regions, and information purveyors, many either financed by or with allegiance to Russia, sowed skepticism in the region by spreading untruths about the disease and vaccine \u2013 including that it was part of a microchipping effort or that folk treatments like eating copious amounts of garlic could keep illness at bay.<\/p>\n Russia wanted to sell its vaccines, while these three countries instead favored others, the report says, namely the AstraZeneca and Pfizer inoculations.<\/p>\n The pandemic disinformation campaign \u201cwas designed to weaken the public health institutions in the three countries we studied and weaken medical development, undermine trust in the public health responses, and disrupt delivery of medical care and vaccines,\u201d says Irwin, who works in the sociology department<\/a> in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences<\/a>. \u201cIt was designed to increase these countries\u2019 reliance on Russia, including supplies of vaccines.\u201d<\/p>\n And that was easy to do for several reasons, the report says.<\/p>\n First, many older medical professionals in Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Georgia were trained decades ago in the Soviet Union and today rely on Russian-produced medical journals for information, seldom, if ever, receiving significant continuing education beyond their initial Soviet schooling.<\/p>\n Second, in Ukraine specifically, then-newly-elected President Volodymyr Zelenskyy had dismissed several health ministers, citing charges of corruption which led to distrust in medical institutions.<\/p>\n And third, the mainstream media in the three countries isn\u2019t as developed as in the Western world and isn\u2019t accustomed to questioning authority, so it oftentimes regurgitates whatever information is fed to its reporters by official sources.<\/p>\n Nevertheless, Irwin adds, \u201cThe people of Eastern Europe and Central Asia are savvy enough to know that if they get Russian-based media content and it\u2019s in the Russian language then maybe it\u2019s not trustworthy or maybe it has aspects that can be found to be politically or economically leaning to the Russian point of view.\u201d<\/p>\n To sidestep skepticism, Russia employed social media influencers who appeared credible to citizens of Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Georgia but who were working in Russia and translating their messages into the home languages of the three smaller countries, the report says. Their messages were dispensed on common social media platforms such as Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and Telegram, on which three channels \u201cLegitimny,\u201d \u201cRezident,\u201d and \u201cTemniy Rytsar,\u201d or Dark Knight, surreptitiously promoted Russian views.<\/p>\n \u201cOur study shows Russians with disregard for the lives of Ukrainians in the recent past, so any observer would say this utter disregard continues today,\u201d Irwin says. \u201cI can\u2019t speak for their level of achievement with cyberwarfare but based on what I know from this study, Russia sought to damage the health care systems in the three neighboring countries that we studied. They mastered a technique that we\u2019re labeling weaponization of social media<\/a> \u2013 weaponization, that means it\u2019s aggressive and it\u2019s directed at anyone they choose.\u201d<\/p>\n He continues, \u201cIn the same way we should have understood the signals that led to the attack on Pearl Harbor or troop movements in the Middle East, we have to understand the signals that are sent through the cyber world. We have to know what\u2019s attacking us when we\u2019re not seeing it.\u201d<\/p>\n Lately, Russia has promoted the idea that biological weapons labs in Ukraine<\/a> that were decommissioned and repurposed after the breakup of the Soviet Union are now disguised as civilian scientific laboratories for the U.S. to do its own work on biological weapons. The U.S. and Pentagon have denied the claim<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cThey\u2019ve been pushing this idea for years<\/a> that these labs produce weapons of mass destruction or diseases that can be unleashed as a threat to Russia,\u201d Irwin says. \u201cIt\u2019s a continuation of disinformation that we\u2019re hearing about.\u201d<\/p>\n The Critical Mass<\/a> report was sponsored by the U.S. State Department;<\/a>\u00a0an important fact, Irwin says, because it shows the U.S. isn\u2019t looking the other way.<\/p>\n \u201cGlobalization is threatened by bad actors who resort not just to direct attacks but who reorder our societal bonds to each other or our global bonds to the world at large,\u201d Irwin says. \u201cThis project really serves as a canary in the coal mine of the ill effects such disinformation can truly bring to the world.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" ‘Weaponizing’ social media has become common as the Internet turns into a battleground <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":160,"featured_media":183284,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_crdt_document":"","wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_series":0,"wds_primary_attribution":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2226,2431,2235],"tags":[],"magazine-issues":[],"coauthors":[2368],"class_list":["post-183248","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-clas","category-sociology","category-today-homepage"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-04-29 05:29:10","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/183248","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/160"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=183248"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/183248\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":183345,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/183248\/revisions\/183345"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media\/183284"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=183248"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=183248"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=183248"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/magazine-issues?post=183248"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=183248"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}