News Snapshot:
Baseless conspiracy theories about Covid-19 originating in a lab at Fort Detrick, a U.S. army research facility in Maryland, have proven stubbornly resilient. Researchers at the German Marshall Fund’s (GMF) Alliance for Securing Democracy program published a new report on Tuesday explaining how the success of this sort of online disinformation— aggressively pushed by Chinese state media —comes largely from Chinese state actors exploiting vulnerabilities in Western media ecosystems. The real-world effect of this infodemic undermines public health and creates serious challenges for democratic sustainability. Autocrats can direct state-sponsored outlets to repeatedly target high value search terms with preferential narratives....
