weekly newsletter from openDemocracy
From 5G to ‘anti-vaxxers’, disinformation has been rife during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Particularly in countries where media literacy is low, false information can cause great harm. That’s why our global team has been monitoring coronavirus disinformation campaigns – and exposing those behind them.
When we discovered an Armenian website with a big social media profile telling people to refuse any potential COVID-19 vaccine, we started digging for answers.
Guess who was funding the NGO behind the website? The US government. Yes, that’s right: US taxpayers were paying for disinformation.
Less than a week after we broke the story, the US suspended the funding and announced it was “tightening up procedures”.
In other words, journalism makes a difference.
We’ve also been keeping a close eye on what governments have been doing – particularly with all the data they’re collecting on us during the crisis.
In March, England’s National Health Service announced it had signed ‘unprecedented’ deals to share citizens’ personal health with private tech firms.
We wanted to know what was in the deals. But the government delayed and obscufated, saying they needed to weigh up “commercial interests”.
We didn’t back down. We teamed up with a group of lawyers that fight for digital justice and threatened to take the government court.
It worked. Not only did the government cave and release all the documents – under pressure, they also changed the terms of a key deal, to better protect the rights of citizens.
And we haven’t stopped digging. Just this week, we’ve uncovered that one of the firms, a CIA-backed spy firm called Palantir, lobbied British government ministers including Michael Gove, Matt Hancock and UK police chiefs before winning its key NHS contract.
That same company, which has links to Donald Trump, also tried to sell the UK government its ‘predictive policing’ spyware – which has been accused of creating ‘racist feedback loops’ in the US.
We’ve still got hundreds of pages of documents to analyse and many more leads to chase down. If you think this work is important and results like this, please consider supporting us today.
Thank you, and I’ll be writing to you again soon when we have more developments.
Mary Fitzgerald,
Editor-in-Chief
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