Russia's health disinformation campaign against U.S. has been going on for 10 years NYT

'The difference now is the speed with which it spreads, and the denigration of the institutions that we rely on to understand the truth. I think we're in dangerous territory.'

Don't miss the New York Times investigation detailing Russia's decade-long health disinformation campaign against the United States and other Western democracies, using social media and news outlets to sow confusion and hurt institutions.

Vladimir Putin's years-long campaign to spread misinformation on public health issues included urging Americans to see vaccines as dangerous.William J. Broad / New York Times:

The Russian president has waged his long campaign by means of open media, secretive trolls and shadowy blogs that regularly cast American health officials as patronizing frauds. Of late, new stealth and sophistication have made his handiwork harder to see, track and fight.

Even so, the State Department recently accused Russia of using thousands of social media accounts to spread coronavirus misinformation including a conspiracy theory that the United States engineered the deadly pandemic.

The Kremlins audience for open disinformation is surprisingly large. The YouTube videos of RT, Russias global television network, average one million views per day, the highest among news outlets, according to a U.S. intelligence report. Since the founding of the Russian network in 2005, its videos have received more than four billion views, analysts recently concluded.

Read more:Putins Long War Against American Science

For Vladimir Putin, spreading disinformation about coronavirus fits into a long pattern of sowing doubt about science outside of his country. Interesting story by @WilliamJBroad.